Author’s note:
This essay is the third in The Iran System, a series on the Iran war and the systems it is forcing into alignment toward a new world order. The previous essays introduced the three systems shaping the Middle East and examined the first of them—the Shia axis—as a machine built slowly, embedded deeply, and managed into durability by the old order.
This essay turns to the second system: the Sunni axis. Or rather, the thing usually mislabeled as one. Because the key to understanding the last few months is not just that Trump was trying to build a new regional order. It is that he came closer than most people realize to assembling the Sunni side of it—and then ran into the older fault lines that have kept that field from ever settling into a coherent order at all.
1. The Sunni field, an axis that never truly aligns
Iran was under sustained pressure. The Abraham Accords had already broken the old Arab boycott. Gaza, after the devastation of the post–October 7 war, had moved into a monitored settlement framework.
The proposed “Board of Peace” was meant to go further—converting temporary alignment into enforceable order by tying reconstruction, governance, and security into a single structure.
And yet, instead of hardening, the Sunni side of the regional map began slipping again. That is the puzzle.
We saw in the previous essay that the Shia axis is a machine; resistance is what it was built to do. The real question is why the camp supposedly aligned against it still cannot turn itself into a settled order—why it hesitates, fragments, and renegotiates itself precisely when it appears closest to consolidation.
The answer is that there never was a true Sunni axis in the first place. There was a Sunni field with enduring fault lines.
2. The Enduring Fault Lines
What is commonly described as a Sunni bloc is not a parallel structure to the Shia axis. It lacks a central doctrine, a unified command, and an institutional backbone. It is instead a contested space, shaped by competing visions of authority, legitimacy, and regional order.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt represent one pole: sovereignty, state order, and a rejection of political Islam as a governing force. Turkey and Qatar represent another: networks, Islamist legitimacy, and a willingness to use political Islam as an instrument of influence. Jordan and the smaller Gulf monarchies move between these poles, aligning when necessary but preserving flexibility wherever possible.
This is not a coalition but a rivalry over who gets to define the system.
The first clear fracture point came in June 2017. The Qatar blockade did not simply reflect a diplomatic dispute; it exposed the underlying fault line within the Sunni world. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt moved to isolate Doha over its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, its relationship with Turkey, and its willingness to maintain channels with Iran. What had previously been managed disagreement became explicit division. The Sunni field, at that moment, showed itself not as a bloc, but as a system split between competing models of order.
That fracture never disappeared. It was managed, deferred, and occasionally suppressed by larger strategic pressures. But it was never resolved.
That is the structure Trump inherited and applied the “art of the deal” to dismantle. It almost worked.
3. How Trump Almost Brought It Together
Trump’s first regional move did not attempt to resolve these fault lines directly. It bypassed them.
The Abraham Accords of September 2020 marked the beginning of alignment—at least on the surface. It reversed a long-standing sequencing assumption in Middle East diplomacy. For decades, Arab-Israeli alignment had been conditioned on prior political resolution, especially on the Palestinian question. Trump inverted that logic. Alignment would come first. Resolution, if it came at all, would follow. The UAE and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel, followed by Morocco and Sudan, creating a new axis of cooperation that cut across previous divisions.
