On July 17, Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, posted on X that President Trump’s “new paradigm of Middle East nation states connectivity alliances…is charting a transformative corridor across Mesopotamia, the Levant, Türkiye, and the Gulf—rendering the Strait of Hormuz far less consequential very soon.” At the center of this vision were new energy and infrastructure projects, which Barrack styled an “on-ramp to clarity and opportunity from what once looked like chaos.”
Three days earlier, Barrack had put the underlying business logic even more plainly , touting new energy and trade infrastructure while declaring that “a more prosperous Iraq means a more stable region—and exclusive opportunities for American business.” Stability, according to this vision, is an outcome of profitable infrastructure and energy investment reserved for a cadre of foreign investors. In July, that vision already began to take form, as Washington helped broker major energy deals between Iraqi and American firms and backed plans to revive the long-defunct Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline to the Mediterranean. This was part of a broader push for alternative energy routes amid the war with Iran and disruption of shipping through the straits of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb.
But Barrack’s “new paradigm” gets two things wrong: it isn’t new, and it won’t produce what he promises. The region’s economic geography has already been shifting for decades, and, as the region’s recent history shows, profitable investment doesn’t reliably produce widespread prosperity.
The pre-existing regional order Barrack is implicitly contrasting his supposedly new order with rested on a different geography. Gulf energy flowed largely through maritime routes into the Arabian Sea, while Washington maintained a network of regional security partnerships, highlighted by Turkey and Israel, whose close strategic ties from the 1990s onward were accompanied by growing economic integration. The emerging map that the United States has brokered looks markedly different, envisioning overland connectivity from the Gulf and Iraq through Syria and Turkey to the Mediterranean, reducing dependence on Hormuz. Israel—a centerpiece of Washington’s recent efforts to reshape the regional order—is conspicuously absent.
Turkish trade data show that this paradigm long predates the Trump administration. Comparing Turkey’s trade with Israel to its trade with several other regional partners—Iraq, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Syria—shows how the relative weight of these relationships has shifted since 1990. Measured as each country’s share of Turkey’s total trade, with imports and exports combined, Israel’s importance rose sharply through the 1990s and peaked from 2000 to 2002. At that point, Israeli-bound exports briefly rivaled or exceeded those to any other regional market. Israel’s overall share of Turkish trade then essentially stopped growing in significance for two decades before the Turkish embargo implemented in 2024.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s share of Turkish trade surged after the mid-2000s, more than doubling Israel’s; the UAE became a large, if volatile, trading partner; and Israel settled into an unremarkable position among several regional relationships rather than the standout it had briefly been. By the 2024 embargo, Israel had already been losing the distinctive place it had in Turkey’s regional trade for two decades. Much of what Barrack calls a ‘new paradigm,’ then, has actually been taking shape for decades.
Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Syria as a share of Turkey’s total trade (imports plus exports), 1990–2026. Source: IMF Direction of Trade Statistics.
The broader trajectory of Turkey’s regional trade points to something more diffuse than the new architecture Barrack describes. The trade data show diversification into a complex regional network, not consolidation into a clear bloc or physical corridor: Iraq, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Syria each relate to Turkey differently and on different timelines. Saudi Arabia’s importance to Turkey has actually declined from a 1990s peak; Qatar remains a close political partner but an economically minor one; Syria’s trajectory was interrupted for a decade by civil war and is only now reopening. This is the profile of a region rearranging itself along several unrelated axes at once, not a bloc assembling itself around a single energy corridor—and it was doing so long before Washington started talking about paradigm shifts.
Barrack’s second assumption—that profitable investment and connectivity will themselves produce political stability—is equally questionable. Iraq’s recent history illustrates why. The sharp oscillations in Iraq’s trade with Turkey partly reflect just how exposed their growing economic relationship has been to war, political instability, and disputes over energy and sovereignty. The Kurdistan Regional Government nevertheless attracted tens of billions of dollars in foreign oil investment after opening its energy sector to international companies in the 2000s. Yet investment did not resolve the underlying dispute over control of Iraq’s hydrocarbons and their revenues. If anything, the stakes grew alongside the sector: a 2022 Washington Institute analysis noted that tensions between Baghdad and Erbil “worsened significantly once the KRG opened the door to foreign equity.” The conflict eventually drew Turkey into international arbitration and shut the Iraq–Turkey oil pipeline in 2023.
A more realistic U.S. policy would focus on specific problems where American diplomacy can be useful, such as preventing Turkish-Israeli friction from spilling into Syria and limiting conflicts surrounding new regional infrastructure. This is a more modest task than the one Barrack describes, and one built on a more honest premise: that no amount of American investment can substitute for political settlements that the region’s own states have to reach themselves.
For Washington, the outlook for the future should be one of restraint. The pre-existing security and economic order had serious flaws, particularly from the perspective of those living within it. But that does not mean that Washington should set about designing a new one—especially when the region has already been changing in ways largely beyond U.S. control.
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Washington Didn’t Remake the Middle East
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.