# The Abraham Accords as Energy Architecture: A New Middle Eastern Order
The Abraham Accords are most often read as a diplomatic achievement, a normalization between Israel and several Arab states that interrupted a long habit of mutual refusal. Read through the lens of the book Pipelines, however, they appear in a different light. They are not primarily a peace treaty. They are an energy architecture. They describe, in the cautious grammar of diplomatic communiqués, a consolidation of the Arabian Peninsula corridor against the Levante corridor, and they formalize an informal triangle between Jerusalem, Riyadh and Washington whose deepest function is to keep Iranian gas outside European markets. To understand why the Accords matter beyond the ceremonial register of a signing ceremony, one has to return to the distinction that organizes the book: the pipeline is an object, the corridor is a structure, and structures are what decide the conditions under which civilizations exist.
## From Peace Treaty to Corridor Consolidation
Every treaty carries two texts. There is the explicit text that is read aloud, and there is the structural text that is legible only to those who can see the geography and the finance behind the words. In the case of the Abraham Accords, the explicit text speaks of normalization, tourism, mutual recognition and economic cooperation. The structural text speaks of something more consequential. It binds the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and, through a series of adjacent understandings, the wider Gulf architecture into a single security and energy order with Israel on one flank and the United States as the guarantor in the background.
Dr. Raphael Nagel (LL.M.) argues in Pipelines that energy geopolitics is fundamentally a question of corridor structures, not of individual lines of steel. A corridor, in his terminology, is the stable combination of physical geography, political and institutional alliances, financial architecture and security underwriting that makes certain energy flows possible and forecloses others. Seen from this angle, the Accords are a corridor-consolidating act. They thicken the institutional and security dimensions of the Arabian Peninsula corridor. They do not touch a single valve, yet they alter the probabilities of every future valve.
The timing reinforces the reading. The Accords crystallized in a period when the Levante corridor had been politically sealed by the Syrian civil war, when Iranian gas exports had collapsed toward zero, and when European dependence on Russian pipeline gas was still presented as a matter of commercial rationality. In that interval, the Arabian Peninsula corridor did not merely survive. It was institutionalized with a partner, Israel, that had until then stood formally outside its frame.
## The Informal Triangle: Jerusalem, Riyadh, Washington
The book identifies an informal triangle of corridor opponents whose interests converge on the blockage of the Levante route. Washington maintains a systemic interest in the sanctions regime that isolates Iran from European capital and technology. Riyadh has an interest both in preventing the economic strengthening of its regional rival and in protecting Qatari and Saudi hydrocarbons from a new pipeline competitor on the European market. Jerusalem has an existential interest in ensuring that an Iran enriched by European gas revenues does not translate those revenues into regional projection through Hezbollah, Hamas and the nuclear file.
The Abraham Accords give this triangle an institutional skin. They do not name Iran as the adversary in their preambles, but the structural logic is unmistakable. By linking Israeli technological and security capabilities to Emirati and Bahraini financial and logistical capacities, and by keeping Washington as the reinsurer of last resort, the Accords create a regional bloc whose collective interest is the stability of the Arabian Peninsula corridor and the indefinite postponement of the Levante corridor.
This is why the Accords travel in the same diplomatic convoy as discussions over Saudi normalization, over regional air defense integration, over Red Sea security and over investment frameworks that knit Israeli and Gulf sovereign capital together. None of these adjacent files is ornamental. Each reinforces a dimension that Dr. Raphael Nagel (LL.M.) identifies as constitutive of a corridor: the institutional, the financial, the security architecture.
## Israeli-Emirati Pipeline Plans and the EastMed Question
Among the most revealing consequences of the Accords were the discussions around moving Emirati oil through Israeli territory, using the historical Eilat to Ashkelon axis as a continental shortcut that avoids the Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez bottleneck. Whatever the environmental and commercial controversies that have surrounded these plans, their structural meaning is clear. They propose to use Israel as a land bridge for hydrocarbons originating on the Arabian Peninsula, giving the Peninsula corridor a Mediterranean outlet that is not Syrian, not Lebanese and not Iranian.
The EastMed gas dynamic operates on a parallel logic. Offshore fields in the Eastern Mediterranean, the frameworks that link Israel, Cyprus, Greece and, with varying intensity, Egypt, and the infrastructure discussions around liquefaction and subsea pipelines, together sketch a Levantine export geometry in which the molecules flow from Israeli and Egyptian waters rather than from Iranian fields routed through Syria. The two Levantine seascapes, the Iranian one that remains blocked and the Israeli-Egyptian one that is being slowly activated, are not merely different projects. They are rival answers to the same geographic question of how the Eastern Mediterranean connects to European demand.
Pipelines insists that the decisive variable is not who owns a given field but who controls the corridor structure through which fields reach markets. The Accords entrench a structure in which the Eastern Mediterranean is accessible to European buyers only through actors that are embedded in the Arabian-Israeli-American security architecture. The South Pars reserves remain immense, as the book documents. Their path to Europe remains closed.
## Keeping Iran Outside European Markets
Sanctions, as Pipelines notes, are not self-executing. They require a financial system that transmits them, a security architecture that underwrites them and a diplomatic consensus that legitimizes them. The fine on BNP Paribas, cited in the book as a disciplinary moment for the entire international financial community, is the shadow that falls on every board considering Iranian exposure. The Abraham Accords reinforce this shadow indirectly. By aligning Gulf financial centers with Israeli and American regulatory expectations, they narrow the corridors through which Iranian revenues could ever reach European counterparties.
The effect is structural rather than declarative. No clause of the Accords forbids a European utility from contracting Iranian gas. What the Accords do is raise the political, reputational and regulatory cost of such a contract to a level at which no board will approve it. This is the form of structural power that Susan Strange described and that Dr. Nagel takes up in his theoretical chapters: the ability to set the rules within which others must act, without ever needing to issue a direct prohibition.
The consequence for Europe is that its diversification horizon is shaped before European ministers have even opened the question. LNG from Qatar, LNG from the United States, offshore gas from the Eastern Mediterranean basin, and pipeline flows from the Arabian Peninsula corridor are inside the frame. Iranian pipeline gas through a reconstructed Syrian transit is outside it. The Accords did not invent this asymmetry, but they reinforced it and gave it a regional institutional body.
## Europe in the Shadow of a Regional Order
The European reading of the Abraham Accords has largely been ceremonial. European capitals welcomed the normalization, invoked the language of stability and moved on. Pipelines suggests that this reading underestimates the degree to which a regional order in the Middle East is simultaneously a European energy order. The corridor structures of the Gulf and the Levant are the upstream of European supply. What is decided in Abu Dhabi, Jerusalem, Riyadh and Washington is eventually paid for in Berlin, Paris and Rome, in the form of prices, of dependencies and of strategic room for maneuver.
The winter of 2022 and 2023, which the book treats as a near-miss with civilizational disruption, illustrated how thin the European margin has become. In such a landscape, the existence of a latent but sealed Levante corridor is not a neutral fact. It is a foregone option, a non-chosen branch of the European energy future. The Accords, by deepening the alternative order, push this foregone option further from the horizon. They also tie European interests more firmly to the stability of the Arabian-Israeli architecture, because any disruption to that architecture now has immediate energy implications.
This is the paradox of European posture. The continent benefits, in the short term, from the stability that the Accords project. In the medium term, the continent pays for the diversification that the Accords foreclose. The book does not issue a political verdict on this trade-off. It insists only that the trade-off be seen clearly, rather than disguised as a matter of peace processes and ceremonial diplomacy.
## Reading the Accords as Civilizational Politics
Energy, Dr. Raphael Nagel (LL.M.) writes, is not a commodity but the physical basis of civilization. Treaties that reorganize energy corridors are therefore not ordinary treaties. They are civilizational acts, because they decide the conditions under which societies can sustain themselves. The Abraham Accords deserve to be read in this register. They are not a footnote in a peace process. They are a line drawn across the map of possible futures, separating the futures in which the Levante corridor reopens from the futures in which it remains sealed.
Once this is understood, the debates about the Accords acquire a different weight. Questions about Israeli-Emirati cooperation, about Saudi normalization, about the future of the Eastern Mediterranean gas architecture, and about the treatment of Iran in the international financial system are not separate files. They are chapters of the same corridor politics. Each move in one chapter changes the probabilities in the others. The informal triangle between Jerusalem, Riyadh and Washington is the name Pipelines gives to the coordination of these moves.
What the book calls the geopolitical grammar of energy corridors is visible in the Accords with unusual clarity. Geography sets the stage. Institutions decide which routes are legitimate. Finance decides which routes can be built. Security decides which routes can be defended. The Abraham Accords speak in all four registers at once, which is why they are heavier than their diplomatic text suggests, and why the quiet consolidation they enact may outlast the attention cycles that celebrated their signing.
To describe the Abraham Accords as an energy architecture is not to diminish their diplomatic significance. It is to place that significance where it belongs, within the longue durée of corridor politics that Pipelines takes as its subject. Treaties of normalization that coincide with the quiet sealing of a rival corridor are not accidents of calendar. They are instruments by which a preferred energy order is made durable. The Accords do not need to mention Iran, South Pars or the Levante corridor to act upon them. The silence is part of the architecture. For European readers in particular, the lesson is sober. The shape of the Middle Eastern order that was consolidated in the Accords will help determine whether the continent faces the next decade with a single axis of supply or with genuine structural depth. The answer to that question will not be found in the communiqués. It will be found in the corridors, in the finance that underwrites them and in the security arrangements that defend them. Dr. Raphael Nagel (LL.M.) wrote Pipelines as an invitation to read these layers together. The Abraham Accords are one of the texts in which they can be read most clearly, provided one is willing to look past the ceremony and into the geography, the institutions, the capital and the guarantees that compose the real order of Middle Eastern energy.
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