Follow our flagship MBN news sites in Arabic and English for the latest updates. If you prefer to read the Agenda in Arabic, click here. And if the MBN Agenda was forwarded to you, please subscribe.
In this week’s MBN Agenda: Washington is already looking beyond the Iran war just as election season begins to empty out the capital. Israeli and U.S. voters will go to the polls just a week apart this fall, but the Trump administration isn’t waiting. Officials instead are busily sketching a postwar Middle East strategy before the political landscape has had time to shift – or, for that matter, the war has ended.
Elsewhere, Mike Huckabee takes U.S. diplomacy directly to Palestinian Americans facing settler violence, Iran floats a new “restricted zone” in the Gulf, Washington looks to Venezuelan oil as a long-term hedge against Hormuz shocks, and Beijing pitches Middle Eastern governments a different model of partnership.
Yehia Qasim, Hani Al-Farash and Ghassan Taqi contributed to this week’s Agenda.
Washington Signals
Autumnal Winds
Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer in Washington. In any midterm year, that usually means the start of the final campaign sprint.
This year, though, the transition is proving remarkably abrupt.
The House, for one, is now expected to spend just one more week in session before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. It returns for votes next Monday, after Republican leaders last week scrapped the final two weeks that lawmakers had been scheduled to work before heading home to campaign.
“I think everybody’s so focused on the election at this point that we’ll just have to wait till the election’s over,” Republican Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama told Roll Call when asked about the slew of pending legislation left unfinished.
Many Republicans are this week instead turning their attention to Dallas, where the GOP is holding a rare two-day midterm convention. President Donald Trump will try to make his case to American voters on Wednesday night.
In the background, the midterms are also shaping Trump’s war planning.
White House officials are reportedly already considering what the Middle East should look like after the Iran war — even though the six-month conflict appears far from over. Axios reported Friday that U.S. officials are now drafting a strategy to guide policy through the second-half of Trump’s presidential term.
The ideas under discussion pull together several strands of U.S. policy from the past summer: building a regional alignment to contain Iran; advancing U.S.-backed security arrangements in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria; and expanding Trump’s long-sought normalization between Israel and the Arab states.
“The idea is to tie a whole lot of things in the region together,” a person briefed on the discussions told Axios, describing the overall objective as coming up with a strategy for “how you create a regional alignment after the war.”
But Israel’s own elections complicate that planning.
Israel holds its all-important Knesset elections on Oct. 27, with the Trump administration hoping to work with whatever government emerges on its new regional agenda. That’s just a week prior to the midterms, where Republicans are battling against a growing tide of economic dismay and war fatigue.
It all makes for an unusual fall in Washington: Congress is winding down just as the White House is starting to think beyond a war that isn’t even over.
In all likelihood, any new Middle East strategy will have to wait on the new political landscape that emerges from the elections in Israel and America. By winter, there might be a clearer sense of what that landscape looks like.
Quote of the day
They just have a crazy election, and that makes them a little irrational in certain regards.
— Jared Kushner, the U.S. special envoy and Trump’s son-in-law, speaking on Sunday about Israel’s approach to Gaza ahead of the Oct. 27 elections.
Gaza Watch
Huckabee Visits Palestinian Americans Hit by Settler Violence
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee meets a resident of Turmus Ayya, a Palestinian town near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that is home to many American citizens, September 5, 2026. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, made an unusual visit over the weekend to Turmus Ayya, a West Bank town where roughly 80% of residents hold U.S. citizenship and families have faced repeated attacks by Israeli settlers. Huckabee met Palestinian Americans whose homes and property have been targeted, as well as relatives of U.S. citizens killed in the violence.
The longtime supporter of Israeli settlements used unusually forceful and critical language, calling the attacks intended to frighten Palestinians from their homes “terrorism by any definition.” He also said the U.S. Embassy would press Israeli authorities for accountability, telling residents: “You are Americans, and you carry an American passport, and you are our responsibility.”
Washington has so far relied largely on diplomatic pressure, but Huckabee’s unusual intervention pointed to a difficult question for the Trump administration: How far will it go when the Palestinians facing attacks are U.S. citizens?
Gulf Watch
Iran Threatens New ‘Restricted Zone’ in Gulf
Ships and boats in the Strait of Hormuz, Musandam, Oman, May 1, 2026. REUTERS/Stringer
Tehran is trying to reassert control over shipping after recent setbacks in the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian government now says that ships entering a self-declared “restricted zone” stretching from the U.S. blockade line toward the Gulf could be placed on an Iranian sanctions list, with Iranian officials also promising details of a new shipping corridor jointly managed with Oman.
How Iran would actually enforce those rules is far less clear. Analysts told MBN that Tehran has few ships available to police such a zone and would likely have to rely on drones or other systems that could themselves become U.S. war targets. One American official dismissed the threat, saying commercial traffic should continue now that the Navy has cleared mines from the Strait.
Iran may be hoping for a psychological effect. Former U.S. diplomat James Jeffrey told MBN the aim was likely intended “to frighten shipowners and insurance companies” from letting ships access Hormuz.
White House Watch
Trump Turns to Venezuela as Hormuz Hedge
The Nave Photon, carrying crude oil from Venezuela, is docked at Port Freeport in Freeport, Texas, U.S., January 15, 2026. REUTERS/Antranik Tavitian
The Trump administration is looking to Venezuela as a long-term insurance policy against future oil shocks from the Strait of Hormuz. Under a new deal, Washington will take a 35% equity stake in a venture controlling 17 Venezuelan oilfields, and gain preferential access to their production, with a senior U.S. official telling reporters last week that the arrangement is “first and foremost about geopolitics.”
The logic is straightforward: Iran has shown it can disrupt a waterway that carried more than 20 million barrels of petroleum a day before the war, while the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to its lowest level in decades. Washington also sees the deal as a way to further push Chinese and Russian influence out of one of the world’s largest oil-producing countries.
But Venezuela is no quick fix for Hormuz. Years of underinvestment have left production at about 1.1 million barrels a day, and analysts say the barrels large enough to move U.S. gasoline prices could still be five to 15 years away.
China Watch
Beijing Offers a Different Middle East Role
Chinese President Xi Jinping with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo on Sept. 1. AFP / Khaled Desouki.
During a rare visit to Cairo, Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined a four-point vision calling for less outside interference in the Middle East, concrete progress on the future of Palestine and deeper regional economic cooperation.
Analysts told MBN that Xi’s proposal was not exactly meant to promote a new overall architecture for the region, or to supplant that of the United States. Instead, Beijing hopes to offer investment, trade and diplomacy with fewer conditions than what America does, while avoiding the military bases or defense guarantees that still underpin Washington’s role across the region.
For now, that may be enough for China’s purposes. Rather than displacing Washington, Beijing is hoping it can gain influence by giving governments more room to balance between the powers, thereby protecting its own interests.
