At a moment marked by war, regional fragmentation, and mounting uncertainty across the Middle East, the Program on Arab Reform and Development (ARD) at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a wide-ranging conversation between historian and Middle East scholar Joel Beinin and Hesham Sallam, CDDRL Senior Research Scholar and ARD Associate Director.

The discussion explored how the region’s current crises fit within longer historical trajectories, and what they may signal for the future of political order, state power, and social movements in the Arab world.

Throughout the conversation, Beinin situated contemporary wars and political ruptures within broader histories of authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and the erosion of regional political cohesion. The discussion ranged from the legacies of the post-9/11 era to the fragmentation of the Arab regional order, the failures of democratization, and the global rise of the far right.

Here are five major takeaways from the discussion:

1. The current moment is not simply another regional crisis — it reflects the fragmentation of the Arab order itself.

One of the central themes of the discussion was that today’s regional turmoil differs fundamentally from earlier periods of instability. Beinin argued that while the Arab world has long experienced cycles of war, authoritarianism, and external intervention, the current period is distinctive because the very idea of a coherent “Arab world” has weakened dramatically.

As Beinin put it, “A quarter of a century ago, you could still talk about the Arab world with a certain sense of unity… and today, increasingly, it doesn’t.” He stressed that this fragmentation is not merely geopolitical but also political and ideological. Regional powers now pursue sharply divergent agendas, while many traditional centers of Arab political and cultural influence have declined.

Egypt occupied a central place in this analysis. Beinin argued that Egypt, historically viewed as a political and cultural anchor of the Arab world, can no longer plausibly play a regional leadership role. He described the Egyptian regime as deeply constrained by debt crises, Gulf dependency, and intensifying authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) increasingly shape regional politics, albeit without the broader political legitimacy or cultural influence once associated with Cairo.

The result, according to Beinin, is a region characterized less by shared political trajectories than by fragmentation, competing alignments, and increasingly localized struggles for survival and authority.

2. The legacies of the post-9/11 era continue to shape U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

Early in the conversation, Sallam read aloud a passage from President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, warning that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Sallam then revealed that the quotation was not from President Donald Trump, but from Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

The exchange set up one of the discussion’s recurring themes: the persistence of interventionist frameworks in American political discourse on the Middle East.

Beinin argued that much of contemporary U.S. rhetoric surrounding Iran reproduces assumptions and narratives that shaped the run-up to the Iraq War. “None of it was true when they said it about Iraq,” he remarked, “and none of it is true when they’re saying it about Iran.”

More broadly, he suggested that the post-9/11 political climate fundamentally reshaped how the United States discussed the region. Reflecting on the years after the September 11 attacks, Beinin described g a political atmosphere in which attempts to contextualize regional dynamics were frequently dismissed as apologetics for extremism.

The conversation repeatedly returned to the dangers of reducing regional politics to moral binaries or civilizational narratives. Instead, Beinin emphasized the importance of historically grounded analysis attentive to state interests, political economy, and international power relations.

3. The authoritarian restoration after the Arab uprisings has become deeper and more punitive.

Another major takeaway concerned the aftermath of the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 and the broader trajectory of authoritarianism in the region.

Beinin argued that states such as Egypt and Tunisia have emerged from the post-uprising period with harsher and more consolidated forms of authoritarian rule than existed prior to 2011. “Any kind of political, civil, even to some degree cultural resistance has been stamped out,” he said, citing the expansion of surveillance, imprisonment, and repression.

Yet the discussion also rejected the simplistic notion that the Arab uprisings were meaningless failures. Beinin pointed to later protest waves in Sudan and Algeria during 2019–2020 as evidence that activists and civil movements had absorbed important lessons from the earlier uprisings.

In Sudan in particular, he argued, protest movements understood that “the army is not on the side of the people,” reflecting a deeper awareness of how military institutions could derail revolutionary transitions. At the same time, Beinin stressed that regional interventions by Gulf powers played a major role in undermining these movements. He described how competing regional actors backed rival military factions, contributing to fragmentation and ultimately overwhelming civilian political forces.

The broader implication was that authoritarian resilience in the Arab world cannot be understood solely through domestic dynamics. Regional rivalries, external funding networks, and transnational counterrevolutionary alliances all play a central role in shaping political outcomes.

4. The Middle East’s crises are increasingly tied to a broader global rightward shift.

While much of the conversation focused specifically on the Arab world, Beinin consistently situated regional developments within broader international trends.

He argued that the current moment reflects not only regional disarray but also the rise of increasingly exclusionary and authoritarian political currents globally. Beinin pointed to “a hard lurch to the right” in multiple countries, including Israel, India, and parts of Europe.

This international dimension, he suggested, has profound implications for the Middle East. The rise of nationalist and authoritarian politics globally has helped normalize more extreme forms of militarism, ethnonationalism, and state violence. It has also weakened many of the international norms and institutions that once constrained state behavior, however imperfectly.

The discussion of Israel occupied a particularly important place here. Beinin linked Israel’s rightward shift to broader transformations in global politics. At several points, the conversation underscored how the wars in Gaza and Lebanon cannot be understood in isolation from these wider ideological and geopolitical currents.

Rather than treating the Middle East as uniquely unstable or exceptional, Beinin repeatedly encouraged the audience to see the region as deeply connected to broader crises of democracy, inequality, nationalism, and authoritarianism unfolding globally.

5. Historical perspective remains essential in moments of upheaval.

Perhaps the most important theme running through the conversation was methodological rather than purely political: the insistence on historical perspective in moments of crisis.

At the outset of the event, Sallam emphasized that the purpose of the discussion was “not to chase after the headlines,” but rather to “take the long view” and place contemporary developments “in conversation with scholarly research and debates.”

Throughout the conversation, Beinin repeatedly cautioned against analyses driven solely by immediate events, media cycles, or simplistic geopolitical narratives. Instead, he urged audiences to understand contemporary wars and political transformations as products of longer histories involving colonial legacies, state formation, authoritarian restructuring, social movements, and international intervention.

The discussion ultimately offered no easy optimism about the region’s future. Yet it also rejected fatalistic portrayals of the Arab world as uniquely doomed to instability. Instead, the conversation highlighted the importance of historical memory, critical scholarship, and political analysis capable of connecting contemporary crises to deeper structural processes.

A full recording of the conversation can be viewed below:

In a seminar hosted by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Matthew Levitt, who directs the Washington Institute's Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, discussed the Middle East's changing strategic landscape through the lens of the 2026 Iran conflict. While Israel and the United States have achieved significant tactical successes against Hezbollah and the Houthis, Levitt argued, the countries have struggled in progressing the victories to long-term resolutions. He said state actors alone do not drive the region's conflict, but rather that proxy networks and aggressive public relations narratives hinder efforts towards stability.

Levitt then discussed the larger geopolitical effects of the conflict, including the shrinking chances for traditional peace agreements and increasingly negative international views of Israel after the October 7 attacks. He suggested that real changes in Israel’s global position would need political shifts and more transparency at home, while also noting the deep domestic doubts about solutions like a two-state framework. The discussion included the role of outside powers — especially China — in influencing regional dynamics through economic ties to Iran. He also touched on the likelihood that U.S.-Israel relations will increasingly shift from direct aid to joint investments in technology and defense.

On February 25, 2026, as part of the Israel Insights webinar series hosted by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, former Mossad counterterrorism chief Oded Ailam—now a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs—discussed the evolving dynamics of the Israel–Hamas conflict and its regional and global implications.

Ailam argued that although Hezbollah is currently weakened financially and constrained domestically in Lebanon, it may increasingly employ overseas attacks against Israeli, American, and Jewish targets to demonstrate loyalty to Iran. He said that Hamas's dependence on Iran, however, diminishes as Turkish and Qatari support for Hamas grows, forming a new axis of political, financial, and military backing. According to Ailam, Hamas is unlikely to relinquish its weapons or influence in Gaza and will instead work to retain control behind the scenes even under a potential technocratic governing structure, casting doubt on the viability of proposed diplomatic frameworks.

Finally, addressing concerns about global radicalization and dormant terrorist networks in Western countries, Ailam outlined how state-backed ideological and financial influence spreads extremism and argued for stronger Western responses and long-term deradicalization efforts.

As Americans were waking up on the morning of February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel had already begun wide-spread, coordinated attacks against Iran which struck military, naval, and nuclear infrastructure. Many of the country’s senior leaders were killed, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and Mohammad Pakpour, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

As developments in the conflict unfold at a rapid pace, scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) shared their analysis of the war through media interviews, essays, and event panels. Here are several of their key insights into what is happening, and what to expect as the war begins to reverberate around the world.
 

A Democratic Iran is Desirable, but Achieving That is Difficult

In President Trump’s initial remarks announcing the military action, he called on the Iranian public to “to seize this moment, to be brave, be bold, be heroic, and take back your country.”

FSI Senior Fellow Michael McFaul supports the impulse for a democratic Iran, both for the improvement it would bring to the civil rights and liberties of Iranians, and for the advancement of U.S. national interests.

“If Iran is a democracy, they’ll become one of our closest allies in the region. We won’t have to worry about nuclear weapons and support for terrorism. That long-term strategic objective should have always been our goal,” he told Katie Couric in an interview.

Getting there, however, is easier said than done. Writing on his Substack, McFaul emphasizes:

“The fall of tyrants must always be celebrated. But the end of dictatorships rarely leads smoothly to the emergence of democracies. They take a lot of work to achieve success, often with protected engagement from international mediators and supporters. U.S. military intervention is rarely an effective instrument for fostering democratic regime change.”

But there are avenues the U.S. could pursue if it is serious about supporting democracy in Iran, stresses McFaul. Sanctions, steering oil profits into escrow funds earmarked for use by a future democratic movement, and raising the profile of Iranian human rights leaders and other significant ex-pats could all go a long way in bolstering a democratic transition, he says.

“Unfortunately, I don’t see a lot of evidence that we’re focused on that right now,” says McFaul.

Expect Internal Instability in Iran

Just because Khamenei has been killed does not mean the regime is imminently about to crumble, cautions Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI.

“Unlike the snatching of Maduro or the attack on the Fordow enrichment facility, this is going to lead to a lot of internal instability. I think this is generally true if you take out the senior leadership,” Fukuyama explains to Yascha Mounk of Persuasion.

“You still have a very well-organized and very well-armed IRGC that has a real interest in the outcome of this because their lives are on the line,” Fukuyama continues. “I think that what you’re going to get is a lot of internal conflict. You could get into conflict within the regime. Different parts of the regime seek to assert dominance over the whole thing and then between the population and the regime. That is going to be extremely difficult to control.”