American grand strategy and regional order: from the JCPOA and the Abraham Accords to Iran-U.S. wars and ceasefires

Since the Obama administration, American Middle East policy has reflected a grand-strategic effort to reduce regional commitments, reallocating resources towards competition with China. Existing scholarship has treated the JCPOA, the Abraham Accords, and military confrontations with Iran as disconnected episodes driven by partisan shifts or regional crises. This article argues that they can be understood as instruments under one strategic objective: facilitating Middle East retrenchment while preserving a favourable regional order. Drawing on constructivism, securitization theory and alliance politics, the article examines how JCPOA, maximum pressure, the Abraham Accords, and the wars of 2025–2026 represented various attempts to achieve that strategic outcome. The article also demonstrates how the JCPOA partially desecuritized Iran’s nuclear program, prompting regional allies’ abandonment anxieties and shifting narrative salience toward non-nuclear vectors. The article proposes the concept of threat relocation, showing how the hierarchy of threat narratives shifted while the primary securitized object remained unchanged. It is also argued that the Iranian political debate interpreted these developments through bilateral lens, overlooking the broader grand strategic transformation. This analytical divergence helps explain both the intensity of regional opposition to the agreement and the strategic continuity across U.S. diplomatic, coercive, and military adaptations through 2026.