What If Israel was the Hegemonic Leader of the Middle East?

In the video above from CNBC, Dan Senor claims Israel is now the most important geopolitical power in the Middle East. The question in my mind is whether Israel as Regional Hegemon would be best for the people of the Middle East. In this post, I use the MEA_L20 and the IL_L20 models to test the conjecture.

Google AI reports the following:

And, goes on to give arguments for and against Israel as a Middle East Hegemon (see the Notes below).

Using variants of the IL_L20 Model with different inputs, the best model for the Middle East (MEA) was Business-as-Usual (BAU) Input from Israel.

COMMENT: Here is a case (and there are certainly many others) where the best outcome for a given population (the People of the Middle East and North Africa) is not going to happen, at least in the short-term.

And, the available steady-options seem equally out of reach. The absence of realistic Geopolitical Options leaves the Middle-East in turmoil for the foreseeable future.

Notes

State Space models of the Middle East in the R-programming language can be found here. Instructions for stabilizing each system are in the code. 

Chapuisat (2025) Hegemony or Normalization: Israel’s Future in the Middle East

Law and Liberty (2025) The Era of Israeli Hegemony?

Mirisch, J (2025) Israel: A Blind Spot for Steady Staters?

Blog Roll: Israel

Arguments Against Israeli Hegemony

• Lack of Legitimacy Israel is not accepted as a regional leader.
• Scale Limitations As a country, Israel is too small to dominate the Middle East.
• Dependency on the US Israel is seen as a US Proxy.
• Resistance and Counterbalancing Neighboring states would form aliances against Israeli dominance.

Arguments For Israeli Hegemony

• Military Superiority It would be a fragile, military balance of power.
• Alignment of Interests A safeguard against Radical Islam.
• The Abraham Accords established Diplomatic relations between Israel and other Middle-Eastern Countries.

Hegemonic Dominance AIC Statistics

Has the Rule-Based World Order, started after World War II, collapsed?

The Rule-based Order (RBO or the Liberal International Order, LIO) seems to be ending, the proximate cause being the Make America Great Again (MAGA) policies of the Trump II Administration. However, there are long-term structural changes in World System Geopolitics that are the underlying cause.

The RBO was embedded in a hierarchy of institutions (graphic above) that were imposed by the Allies after the Great Depression and  World War II (see the video at the beginning of this post). Needless to say, the Axis Powers were forced to agree to the imposed structure and were not happy about it. Also, because this was a International Liberal Order (ILO), illiberal, right-wing movements in all countries were also not happy and have been working since World War II to modify and even destroy the system. Commentators (see the video above) have been arguing that they are about to succeed. 

A more positive interpretation is that RBO Institutions were are product of the 20th Century and had a number of problems given 20th Century technologies. The primary problem is that the institutions are not democratic; citizens in member countries have not direct input on how the rules are written, enforced and evaluated. The democracy problem does not bother authoritarian regimes, but it encourage autocratic countries to undermine and attempt to destroy the system. Since the Trump II Administration is autocratic, it has attacked everyone of the RBO institutions (see the policy actions listed below).

My proposal for modernizing Federal Agencies in the US (here) could also be applied to the RBO institutions. It involves bringing government agencies into the 21st Century. The basic proposal is (1) Restate agency missions and make goals measurable, (2) Allow citizens to analyze in real time (on a cell phone app) how agency performance is meeting goals, (3) Require agencies to justify policy actions and link them to measurable goals and (4) allow citizens to vote (on the app, whenever they want) on agency performance.

DISCLAIMER: my proposal will not solve everything (or maybe anything) but it will allow me to construct models for evaluating the RBO. In future posts, I will construct measurement models for each institution based on how I understand their goals. Without data and results to support themselves, RBO institutions are quire defenseless against illiberal attacks. 

For the World Bank, the IMF an the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the data is there and ready to be used to evaluate RBO institutions and member countries. 

For an example of my approach to evaluating institutions, see the Blog Roll on the US Federal Reserve.

Notes

How has the Trump II Administration tried to undermine and destroy the RBO Institutions:

• Tariffs and attacks on the WTO
• Withdrawal from treaties: the Nuclear Arms Treat (attack on NATO), the Paris Environmental Accords (attack on the IPCC)
• Invasion of Venezuela (attack on World Security)
• Threatening to invade Greenland )threats to World Security and European integrity)
• Withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO)--later reversed.
• Criticism of European Allies and NATO
• Praise of authoritarian Leaders (Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, etc.)

ChatGPT Summary: