The Abraham Accords are not dead - but they are going into hibernation with no alarm clock set. That was the shared verdict of historian Niall Ferguson and former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, who argued that the Iran war has frozen the single most ambitious diplomatic initiative in the Middle East for years to come.

As "Hvylya" reports, both analysts addressed the question on the Conversations with Coleman podcast, offering converging but distinct diagnoses of what went wrong.

Ferguson offered a nuanced picture. The war has united the Middle East against Iran as never before - "more than a dozen countries have been affected," he said - but that unity stops well short of military cooperation with Israel. "I don't think that the Emiratis or the Saudis are ready to go there." The tentative Saudi-Iranian detente is dead, he argued, which is a net positive. But the path back to the normalization talks that were underway before October 7, 2023 is long. "It's not dead, but it's going to be resting for quite some time."

Haass identified deeper structural obstacles. The current Israeli government is "much more united politically in its opposition to Iran than it is on anything to do with Palestinians," he said, adding that he does not see any significant moves on Gaza or the West Bank before Israeli elections. On the Saudi side, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman "just doesn't have the running room, doesn't have the popular political support." Haass pushed back on the assumption that authoritarian leaders operate without constraints: "We like to think that authoritarians have a free hand. The answer is they don't."

Both analysts pointed to a compounding problem: Gulf countries are angry at Washington for launching the campaign without consulting them. "A lot of the Gulf countries are none too pleased that we took this action without deep consultation with them," Haass said. Repairing those relationships will consume diplomatic bandwidth that might otherwise go toward normalization.

The result, Haass concluded, is that Iran will dominate the regional agenda for the foreseeable future. "Both sides will talk about circumstances having to evolve, but I simply don't see them evolving."

Also read: Foreign Affairs: Beijing "Not Opposed" to Regime Change in Iran - What China Really Wants/