By Amb. Dr. Mohamed Qubaty
For more than a decade, the Middle East has lived under a paradox that is rarely acknowledged explicitly: the more the international community fears escalation, the longer destabilizing actors survive. What was once presented as prudence and restraint has gradually evolved into a strategic pattern of hesitation, in which avoiding confrontation becomes an end in itself rather than a means to restore order.
This logic has produced not stability, but a form of managed instability—one in which threats are contained but never resolved, and crises are administered rather than closed.
Inverted Deterrence: When the Threateners Become the Deterred
Instead of Iran and its proxies being deterred by superior military and political power, they have effectively learned how to deter their adversaries. By threatening regional spillover—whether through the Strait of Hormuz, attacks on U.S. bases, or the activation of proxy fronts from Lebanon to Yemen—Tehran has imposed a psychological ceiling on Western action. The cost of response is consistently framed as higher than the cost of inaction. Escalation is treated as the ultimate risk, while erosion is normalized as an acceptable condition. Over time, this has inverted the traditional logic of deterrence: those who challenge the system shape its boundaries, while those tasked with defending it operate within shrinking margins of action. This is not deterrence in the classical sense. It is a strategic environment in which the most disruptive actor enjoys the greatest leverage.
From Crisis Management to Strategic Paralysis
Western policy, particularly American policy, has increasingly favored tactical containment over strategic closure. Sanctions are imposed without a credible endgame. Limited strikes are conducted without political follow-through. Military power is displayed, but carefully insulated from any decisive escalation. This contradiction is visible even in Washington’s most muscular postures. Despite the visible accumulation of U.S. naval and air assets in the region under the Trump administration, strategic messaging toward Iran has remained deliberately ambiguous—signaling deterrence through force deployment while simultaneously avoiding clear political commitments to confrontation. The result is a familiar pattern: maximum signaling, minimum strategic clarity. The guiding assumption is that escalation is always worse than erosion, even if erosion gradually reshapes the regional balance of power in favor of revisionist actors. Crisis management has replaced crisis resolution, and restraint has become a doctrine rather than a tool. This produces what might be called strategic paralysis: an environment where all actors recognize the threat, possess the capacity to address it, but systematically choose to defer decisive action out of fear of unpredictable consequences.
Hodeidah and the UNMHA Precedent: The Cost of Freezing Conflict
This pattern was first institutionalized in Yemen, long before the Red Sea became a global security headline. The Stockholm Agreement of 2018 and the freezing of the Hodeidah front represented a defining moment. What was presented as a humanitarian necessity effectively transformed a battlefield into a suspended political space, where the Houthis retained control over a strategic port while enjoying de facto international protection from military pressure. The recent decision by the UN Security Council to terminate the mandate of the United Nations Mission to Support the Hodeidah Agreement (UNMHA) after six years on the ground is more than an administrative development. It is an implicit institutional admission that the model of “freezing the conflict” has reached its limits. UNMHA monitored and reported—but it did not alter the balance of power. Its presence gradually turned into a form of international validation of a static reality that favored the Houthis militarily and economically.
Saudi Arabia and the Burden of Rationality
Saudi Arabia’s position within this environment is increasingly misunderstood. Riyadh has consistently prioritized regional stability over confrontation, believing—rationally—that development, investment, and long-term security require de-escalation. In a region exhausted by wars, this approach reflects sober strategic calculation. Yet rationality in an irrational environment carries its own risks. Saudi diplomacy is cautious and restrained in the media. It avoids public theatrics and prefers quiet negotiation to declaratory politics, which creates a communication vacuum in the public sphere. That vacuum has recently been filled by contradictory narratives in parts of the American media—first portraying Saudi Arabia as shielding Iran from pressure, and then accusing it of pushing Washington toward war.
The New Doctrine of Fear
Meanwhile, Iran continues to benefit from the very logic that claims to restrain it. Every time escalation is avoided out of fear, Tehran’s regional leverage expands. Every time proxies are “contained” rather than dismantled, they gain political and strategic legitimacy. The Houthis are a textbook case. What began as a localized insurgency has been transformed—largely through international hesitation—into a regional pressure tool with global maritime implications. The same trajectory can be observed with Hezbollah in Lebanon and various Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq and Syria. The deeper danger is not that a major regional war might erupt, but that the international system is normalizing a new deterrence doctrine: the more aggressively an actor threatens systemic disruption, the less likely it is to face decisive opposition. This is not deterrence. It is strategic surrender disguised as caution. If fear continues to shape policy more than strategy, the Middle East will not move toward stability—it will move toward a permanently negotiated disorder, in which non-state actors dictate the boundaries of international action, and states are left to manage the consequences of threats they are no longer allowed to eliminate.