This also shows how mistaken have been the many who believed that the surge of shale hydrocarbon production in the United States, combined with the rise of China’s power, meant that the Middle East has lost its importance for Washington. Much of this kind of deluded commentary was poured over the Obama administration’s famous “pivot to Asia.” What such comments completely overlooked is that controlling the Gulf “oil spigot” is crucial for the US strategy toward China, about half of whose oil imports originate from the Gulf. The ongoing joint ventures between US AI majors and Arab Gulf states – leading to the construction there of highly energy-consuming data centers, taking advantage of those states’ abundance of money and cheap energy — add a major element to the region’s overall importance for the United States.

Last but not least in the specific case of the Trump administration, the considerable vested interests of the Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff families in the Arab Gulf states bring Washington’s interest in the MENA region in general and the Gulf in particular to a historical peak, which translated into Donald Trump militarily intervening there more than in any other part of the world.

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The crux of the matter is that, whereas Netanyahu and the whole Zionist power elite would see very favorably a collapse of the Iranian state, which would very well fit their long-standing project to fragment their regional environment, a collapse and fragmentation of the Iranian state, close to half of whose population are ethnic minorities, would be a disaster for US regional interests. This is because it would hugely destabilize the whole region, starting with Washington’s closest allies. The latter certainly supports the US goal in the onslaught against Iran, but, as certainly, they reject Israel’s goal — not to mention that despotic states as they all are, they can only resent Netanyahu’s hypocritical advocacy of “democracy” in Iran.