Thanks to the @WSJ for publishing my latest: “What Victory Looks Like in Iran” wsj.com/opinion/what-v… @AtlanticCouncil @ACMideast

The terrorist attack against Karak will be met with the harshest retaliation. Those who delude themselves into thinking that they can divide Jordanians with their bullets have no chance in the face of our unity. All Jordanians, from north to south, are partners in land and fate, and nothing stands between them. Our deepest condolences to the families of the martyrs and we wish a speedy recovery to those injured.

Every Jordanian life is precious, and we will strike with an iron fist against those who dare to threaten our nation

Thanks to @CNBC and @KellyCNBC for having me on earlier today to chat about the latest dynamics in the Middle East, including the potential for the war to escalate again in the coming weeks. cnbc.com/video/2026/10/…

There's a debate raging among Middle East experts on how to think about the future of the region, with one prominent view being that it's splitting into two blocs. Today, the @AtlanticCouncil published my alternative hypothesis in a new piece, entitled: "The new Middle East is modular: what the two bloc thesis of the region misses". I welcome hearing your thoughts, as well!
atlanticcouncil.org/content-series… @ACMideast

I’m so incredibly saddened to hear about @AzizAlghashian’s passing. He was a great analyst and wonderful friend. My deepest condolences to his family.

While Kuwaiti leaders do not expect their ties with Washington to break, they are preparing for a new normal, writes @ACMideast’s @jpanikoff.

Read more ⤵️
atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/dis…

Thrilled to have the opportunity to join the @CNASdc Brussels Sprouts podcast hosted by my friend and former USG colleague @AKendallTaylor and @jteurope. And to get to engage on such an important topic alongside @RUSI_org's @MTSavill. You can find the episode here:
cnas.org/publications/p…
@AtlanticCouncil

October 7th marks the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. On this day, everyone should be able to recognize the pain of the Israelis who lived through it and grieve alongside them, without bringing up the Israeli government or Prime Minister Netanyahu’s actions that followed. That’s true whether you strongly supported those actions, were horrified by them, or land somewhere in between. Otherwise, what you’re engaging in is a moral relativism that diminishes Israeli lives and the trauma a whole country is still living with.

If you’re doing that, then your priority isn’t honoring everyone’s humanity or the sacredness of innocent lives on both sides of the painful divide between Israelis and Palestinians. The suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is real and deserves to be mourned too, but not as a rebuttal to Israeli grief.

Today, Israelis deserve to be seen. Their pain deserves to be acknowledged on its own terms, without anyone rushing to “balance” it by pointing to the government’s strategic and moral choices, often with far more emphasis than the grief itself.

I've spent the last week in the Gulf, first in the UAE (Abu Dhabi and Dubai) and then in Kuwait. As I head back to DC this evening, here's a bit of what I heard, learned, confirmed, and changed my view on:

Heard: Lumping the Gulf states together is almost always a mistake that policy, but it keeps happening. Many of us who work on the region will view this as obvious. But I was taken aback by how intensely, and how often, I heard frustration that policymakers (not just American ones), media, and academics, strategize about the region as a whole rather than as individual states with their own requirements and preferences. This point cuts against the notion of a more integrated Gulf. As I heard a few times, the Gulf countries aren't looking for the GCC to function like ASEAN, let alone the EU -- they're okay with a looser and sometimes non-cohesive intra-GCC relationship.

Learned: While many in the West debate base, best, and worst case scenarios for the impasse that is the Iran war, I hadn't fully appreciated the extent to which Gulf states have already accepted the situation as their new normal. The West remains focused on Iranian leverage over the Strait. Gulf allies, unsurprisingly, are more focused on the fact that Iran has permanently shattered the taboo of attacking them directly (including civilian targets), and indirectly through Iraqi militias and the Houthis. That won't go away whenever/if the conflict is resolved in the coming months or years. It's already altering how states in the region think about investment, security, technology, commercial, and geopolitical roles.

Confirmed: Frustration remains high that the U.S. didn't consult before President Trump took action, leaving the Gulf states to pay the consequences. But frustration with Europe is growing too. Individual European countries are heralded for their in-country military support during the war, and both the UAE and Kuwait are looking to Europe to diversify procurement of systems. But Europe's unwillingness to put the UK-French-led maritime force into the region — even to ensure its own energy and commodity flows — has raised concerns that, like the U.S., Europe's shifting political winds will limit how far partnerships can expand and grow between the regions.

Changed my view: The language they use may be different, but both the UAE and Kuwait are looking past the idea of hedging and strategic autonomy. They see balancing between the U.S. and China as a construct the west relies on to make sense of a region that has moved beyond that binary. The prevailing sentiment is that it isn't the responsibility of regional states to balance between Beijing and DC, and they're not trying to. They'll choose, sector by sector, whatever best serves their national interests. Many of us have heard that line and seen it play out these last years. What's different is that they're now doing it outside what they view as a dated Western framework. @AtlanticCouncil @ACMideast

It was a privilege to have the opportunity to spend some time this evening with my friend @Abdulaziz_anjri, the founder and CEO of Reconnaissance Research here in Kuwait City. His extraordinary and gracious hospitality provided an opportunity to begin discussions on as a range of issues related to the region and beyond that I look greatly forward to continuing over the coming days.

Thanks to @dan_murphy and @CNBC for having me on this morning to talk about the latest on the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, war with Iran, and what comes next in the region.
cnbc.com/video/2026/09/…

Sanctions don't topple a regime on their own. They strip away what a regime needs to survive a shock. This is the difference between announcing sanctions and actually using the groundwork they lay:

🇦🇪 Mar 31: UAE arrests dozens of IRGC-linked money changers in Dubai and revokes hina tells its state banks to stop new loans to refineries sanctioned for buying Iranian crude
🇦🇪 Aug 18: UAE halts all trade, commercial exchange and financial transactions with Iran, the day two Iranian missiles are fired toward the Emirates
🇦🇪 Late Aug: UAE's financial regulator starts examination of Banque Misr UAE following sanctions
🇬🇧 Sept 8: UK lays legislation tightening Iran financial sanctions
🇩🇪 Sept 10: Frankfurt court opens insolvency of Bank Sepah Frankfurt, ending a branch open since 1978
🇹🇷 Sept 16: Turkey's banking regulator seizes Golden Global Bank after sanctions, ending the bank as an independent institution
🇴🇲 Sept 17: Oman cancels Mahan Air's Tehran-Muscat route
🇹🇷 Sept 19: Turkey revokes Bank Mellat's license, closing its three branches after 44 years
🇹🇷 Sept 21: Turkey bars Mahan Air, and Turkish Airlines, AJet and Pegasus pull every Iran flight through at least March 2027
🇬🇪 Sept 21: Georgia bans all Iranian carriers
🇦🇿 Sept 22: Azerbaijan suspends all Iranian airline flights
🇦🇪 Sept 22: UAE clears National Bank of Egypt takeover of Banque Misr UAE, ending it as an independent entity
🇦🇪 Sept 23: UAE's central bank halts Bank Melli branches in the country from all transactions with Iran
🇮🇶 Sept 23: Iraq halts Iranian flights at Baghdad
🇬🇧 Sept 23: UK applies presumption of denial to all five Iranian banks in London and lets their operating licence expire Oct 22
🇦🇪 Sept 24: UAE cancels every Iranian airline flight into the country
🇨🇳 Sept 24: Pezeshkian confirms to Fox News that China complies with US sanctions and Iran's oil money is stuck in yuan, unusable in the crisis
🇮🇶 Sept 25: Erbil, Sulaimaniya and Najaf follow Baghdad, closing all four Iraqi airports that served Iran

These aren't just headlines. Every item hits something the regime cannot function without: cash to pay salaries and proxies, trustees who hold its assets abroad, supply lines to rebuild weapons, and critically, the loyalty of the non-true believers. Those are the people who show up only because they think the regime will last and the paycheck will keep coming. Every item on this list tells them they may be betting on the wrong horse.

Now that he won’t stop talking, the folks who told us Hasan Piker is a serious voice who should be listened to ought to let us know which of these positions we’re supposed to take seriously:

1. That “pound for pound,” America is worse than al-Qaeda - a ridiculous statement on a normal day, but particularly vile the same week we’re reflecting on the loss of 3,000 Americans on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

2. That Communist China’s repressive regime is the “model” for America.

3. That Mao was “a great man of history” while the collapse of the Soviet Union was "one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century."

The great thing about America is that everyone is entitled to their opinions and free to express them, however dumb or immoral. That includes ‘Comrade’ Piker. The rest of us are just as free - obligated even - to call out this vile, hateful speech that only divides America.

axios.com/2026/09/17/has…

As oil price rise again and tensions with Iran (and the Houthis) increase, I was happy to join @KellyCNBC Evans this afternoon to talk about the current state of play. Here's a part of our conversation. @AtlanticCouncil @ACMideast
cnbc.com/video/2026/09/…

Incredibly grateful to all my friends and colleagues in the AC network who contributed to this phenomenal retrospective on the state of terrorism 25 years after 9/11. @AtlanticCouncil atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/the…

I appreciated the opportunity to spend a few days in Berlin this past week meeting with senior officials from across the German government on the Middle East -- and of course Ukraine. A few themes came through clearly:

1) Ukraine is still Berlin's foreign policy priority, but tchet up its intensity on the conflict and Russia. Expect Berlin to take an even harder line on Russia now that it's confirmed Moscow was behind last month's drone attacks on Leipzig airport. The focus on Ukraine has been easier to sustain lately given that the conflict with Iran has flared and faded without resulting into a full-blown war as it was in the spring. If a broader war in the Middle East reemerges, it may challenge Berlin's bandwidth to play a meaningful role across both conflicts.

2) Frustration with the US runs deep. The Trump administration's decision to act in Iran without consulting allies is viewed by Berlin with derision. As a result, German leaders have little patience for the idea that it should now help reopen the Strait of Hormuz or fall in line behind Washington's "Economic D-Day demands." Which is a bit ironic given that Germany has been more forward-leaning than the US on sanctioning Iran the last few years.

3) The Middle East matters to Germany, but it isn't the priority. Berlin sees real opportunity with the Gulf states, particularly on trade and defense-tech investment — which is symbiotic for all: GCC countries want to diversify their suppliers, and German manufacturers like Rheinmetall are eager to sell. But over the next year, German attention will tilt even more toward Ukraine and building out common European security, especially as Washington starts to look like a less reliable partner.

4) The likely AfD win in Saxony-Anhalt today has German leaders rattled. There's a real debate about what it means: the start of a broader shift, or a protest vote the mainstream parties can still come back from before it bleeds into future federal elections. But on one point there's wide agreement — comparing the AfD to Italy's Brothers of Italy, UK's Reform, or even France's National Rally is a mistake. The AfD is more radical and less willing to compromise, which is a genuinely frightening prospect to many in the country given how intensely the memory of WWII and the Holocaust still shapes how it sees its role in the world. @AtlanticCouncil @ACMideast

Defenders — and some critics — of Hasan Piker just don’t get it. The issue isn’t (just) that he lumps all Jews together and holds us all accountable for the supposed evils of Israel. It’s that his nonstop drive to demonize the world’s sole Jewish state, along with those who support its survival, crosses the line — by miles — between criticism and Jew hatred of the ancient variety. 

Also, Mr. Piker, Zionism is in fact bound up with Judaism. It is not “false conflation.” Yes, some Jews are anti-Zionists. And yes, you have helped turned the Z-word into a slur such that large numbers of Jews, particularly younger ones, disown it partly out of misunderstanding. But when Jews are attacked for supporting Israel, they are being attacked for a core part of their Jewish identity. It is Jew hatred, it is unacceptable, and your rhetoric encourages it. Spare us all your taxonomy of good Jews and bad Jews.

Maximum pressure still needs staying power

Bessent’s press conference today left critical questions unanswered, including how much time countries will have to take meaningful steps to further isolate Iran economically, and what those actions are going to be. But what we know is that, in some ways, this policy harkens back to Trump’s first-term maximum pressure campaign.

Unlike then, such an effort could work, but it will take years of consistent US policy to isolate Iran, probably extending beyond the end of the Trump administration. The critical challenge is that, unlike a decade ago, the Gulf states are no longer leading the charge to isolate Iran. Convincing Gulf powers—especially Saudi Arabia, at a time when it is leaning into diplomacy and rapprochement with Iran—to economically isolate Iran will be a challenge, one that would take significant commitment and strategic planning by the United States. Washington does have leverage. For example, it’s worth remembering that all Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states except Kuwait peg their national currencies to the dollar. And the early pressure was almost certainly instrumental in the United Arab Emirates’ decision last week to cut financial ties with Iran—a meaningful step given how much Tehran has relied on Dubai for its financing.

But this effort requires global buy-in at a time when US standing with traditional allies is diminished, and getting US adversaries on board will be even harder. It is hard to envision this policy succeeding without China coming meaningfully on board, whether it agrees to pressure Iran voluntarily (which is unlikely) or it is cajoled through significant targeted sanctions against consequential entities. Gulf states, meanwhile, may move closer to Beijing as they face increasing US pressure.

The challenge for the administration is compounded by doubts in the region about whether Trump will be consistent about this policy. Their skepticism is warranted given that only months ago Trump signed a memorandum of understanding that would have largely done the opposite, releasing significant funds to Iran and bringing it further into the regional and global economy. If Trump reverts in the coming months to seeking a negotiated off-ramp from the current impasse with Iran, sanctions relief will be the minimum required by Tehran. That solution could bring détente and lower energy prices, but it would further undercut the administration’s credibility with allies across Europe, Asia, and beyond at a time when many of those states are already skeptical that the United States is a reliable security and political partner.

Bessent said that today’s announcement was a “warning shot.” Whether it will be followed by live fire, and the consequences that will result, remains to be seen.

- Jonathan Panikoff @jpanikoff is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.

I hate having to state the obvious, but sometimes we have to. Because as long as Israel refuses to identify the problem, it will never be able to seriously fight it. If we cannot say what something is, how can we develop the tools, policies, and determination needed to stop it?
jpost.com/opinion/articl…

Agree completely with everything my friend and colleague @DanielBShapiro says here.