Next week, President Biden will hold a virtual summit with the leaders of the UAE, India, and Israel—the first such meeting of its kind. Mohammed Soliman sees in this gathering the seeds of a pro-Western alliance that would bring together the Abraham Accords countries with India and serve as a bulwark against Iran, China, and even Russia.

The Abraham Accords . . . coincided with India’s rise as a player in West Asia. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, New Delhi deepened its political and strategic relations with the UAE and Israel, creating a wider “Indo-Abrahamic” regional bloc. . . . Washington’s objectives [in fostering the creation of this bloc] are clear: 1) doing more with less in the Middle East, and 2) preventing Moscow and Beijing from filling the strategic and security vacuum that results from a potential U.S. departure from the region. The Indo-Abrahamic bloc fulfills these two strategic objectives for Washington.

As Washington seeks to rebalance away from the region to the Indo-Pacific to contain China’s hegemonic ambitions, it needs a regional security architecture to fill the strategic vacuum. Washington’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific meant a complete overhaul of the mental map of the Middle East as a region, leading to the emergence of “West Asia” as a geopolitical construct.

Pakistan, a historic U.S. ally, has turned to China as its dominant economic and political partner. Russia is transforming its bilateral relations with Pakistan, while India, a historic Russian ally, is drifting further to the West. Iran—which has a historically complex relationship with Russia as both ally and adversary—is deepening its economic ties with Beijing through a proposed 25-year strategic partnership and increased oil sales.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].