Defanging Iran Has Created Opportunity for Mideast Peace  | The American Spectator

For nearly half a century, the Middle East has been defined by a single overarching reality: the Iranian threat. Since 1979, the ayatollahs’ growing influence, nuclear program, and destabilizing activities have shaped regional dynamics more than perhaps any other factor. An entire generation has grown up accepting periodic clashes and proxy conflicts as the natural order, with Iran’s tentacles reaching Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza, always threatening Israel and pragmatic Arab nations alike.
This vision of normalization could entail Arab League countries treating Israel like they would any other country in the world, rather than as a pariah state.
The Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, along with Iran’s strengthening nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, starkly demonstrated how acute this danger had become. Some members of the Iran-led axis believed their dream of annihilating Israel and dominating the Middle East was about to come true. None of them was prepared for the extent to which their own dominoes would get knocked to the ground one after the other: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, and most recently, Iran’s own nuclear capabilities and air defenses.
These changes have fundamentally altered the strategic landscape, bringing the Middle East to an unprecedented inflection point. What seemed all but impossible yesterday — full normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including Syria and Lebanon — now appears within reach.
These developments may also produce a fundamental shift in what the roadmap to normalization could look like. Up to now, the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, have been the template for normalization, modeling a process that kicked off with formal agreements and diplomatic recognition between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. But the 12-day war with Iran has shown that the Abraham Accords order of operations — first a formal agreement and then cooperation — doesn’t have…