Israeli-Turkish Tensions, and the Consolidation of a Post-American Middle East
Willem Middlekoop: “As the author of The Big Reset, I have argued for more than a decade that the postwar American monetary and geopolitical order contained the seeds of its own exhaustion. That order rested on the dollar’s exorbitant privilege and the security architecture underwriting energy flows from the Persian Gulf, the petrodollar system of the mid-1970s. The past week has delivered interlocking confirmations of the transition: the signing of the Mecca Accord on 7 August 2026, a more than 7% weekly surge in gold to levels last seen in mid-June, the joint U.S.-Japan yen intervention, and the sharpening of Israeli-Turkish strategic rivalry. They mark the accelerating end of American hegemony in the Middle East and the progressive dismantling of the financial arrangements that once sustained it.”