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As Riyadh’s new envoy Abdullah Al-Eifa prepares to take up his post in Damascus, President Bashar Al-Assad is enjoying the diplomatic payback for a sustained period of good behaviour over the past two years. The timing of the return of both the US and Saudi ambassadors, after four- and one-year hiatuses respectively, is no coincidence – foreign partners are once more seriously courting Syria. Riyadh and Damascus have decided to close a troubled chapter in Syria’s relations with the wider Arab world after Assad’s regime demonstrated good faith in its conduct during the Lebanese parliamentary elections of 7 June, which saw its proxies lose to the Saudi/US-backed 14 March coalition led by Saad Hariri.

There was huge appetite for information on Qatar’s prominence in regional (and arguably global) politics when GSN’s editorial director visited Casablanca in early February. Is this due to the huge financial muscle of Qatar’s gas reserves? Has the tiny emirate become the West’s favourite stalking-horse? Or does Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani have a peculiar post-modern Wahhabi agenda? After a tumultuous year for Arab politics, the same questions are being asked from Algiers to Ankara.

Turkey is coming to play a central role in strategic thinking in the Arab/Islamic world, as well as in the West and Eurasian zones. Regional trade is booming, Ankara’s relationship with Israel has become strained while Turkey has emerged as a key player in Iraqi Kurdistan; and as a nuclear Iran emerges, Turkey’s relations with the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states may well become central to regional strategies.

Iran’s relations with its Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) neighbours have entered a dangerous new phase in the febrile world of Arab politics that has followed the upsurge in popular protest and toppling of North African regimes. Amid claims of bellicose meddling in domestic affairs, it would not be over-dramatic to talk about the emergence of a new Arab-Iranian cold war, reflected in actions such as Kuwait’s 31 March announcement that it would expel an unspecified number of Iranian diplomats for alleged spying and the mid-March attacks on Saudi diplomatic missions in Tehran and Mashhad.

Given half a chance, Iranians will vote against the establishment – not just in disaffected urban areas, but in the countryside (where incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is widely believed to have the edge), and even within the ruling elite, whose members may swap from faction to faction while maintaining staunch support for Iran’s velayat-e faqih system of clerical rule. Ahmadinejad has made a global career by presenting himself as an underdog – a status that tends to attract Iranian voters (as the reformist Mohammad Khatami found when he beat conservative rivals in 1997). But he has other elite ‘underdogs’ to compete with.

The rumour mills are grinding again after Crown Prince Sultan Bin Abdelaziz left the Kingdom on 28 August for what the state Saudi Press Agency described as a “private holiday”. Sultan has returned to his palace in Morocco, where he spent much of his time in 2009 convalescing from treatment.

Iran scored a diplomatic coup as part of the ‘Trilateral Mechanism’, along with Russia and Turkey, that convened Syrian peace talks in Astana, Kazakhstan this month. The troika announced a mechanism to consolidate the uneasy ceasefire in a move that elevates the Islamic Republic to the top table of diplomacy in a conflict critical to Europe and the Middle East (see Politics). Tehran has achieved this while projecting its forces as a key military partner for President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime and its essential ally, Russia.

The breakdown of the deal between The Dow Chemical Company and Petrochemical Industries Company – in which the Kuwaiti state-owned PIC would take a 50% stake in the United States’ largest chemicals group for around $9bn in return for the Americans developing the emirate’s downstream value-added via the KDow joint venture – is unsurprising.

Saad Hariri’s extended sojourn in Riyadh, widely believed to be at King Salman Bin Abelaziz’s pleasure – or rather willed by his son Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) – has stirred concern far beyond Beirut, and discontent within Lebanese ranks, with deep unease at the way the Saudi passport-holding prime minister is being used a bargaining chip. Hariri’s shock resignation in the Saudi capital on 4 November, claiming an imminent assassination threat faced him back home, is now widely viewed to have been forced.

Anniversaries are by their nature retrospective. As Bahraini opposition MPs gathered for a seminar in Britain’s House of Lords on 12 February – one of many events marking the two years that have passed since the start of the small island’s uprising – the mood was one of remembrance, not expectation. Farida Ghulam, wife of jailed political leader Ebrahim Sharif and a senior Waad party member in her own right, recounted what had happened to her husband and the other high-profile political prisoners jailed with him.

When foreign ministers of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) met recently in Jeddah to discuss (among other issues) proposals for a Gulf Union, the outcome – in so far as there was one – was further delay.

It is not just through trade and financial controls that the United States and its allies are gradually encircling Iran in an effort to throttle the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. And the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states are playing a larger role in this process than seemed likely earlier this decade, when Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdelaziz led a move towards rapprochement with Tehran. Thus, according to GSN’s contacts in the

When devastating earthquakes hit Iran’s north-east on 11 August, questions were raised about the impact of sanctions on the rescue of survivors. “Helicopters had to suspend rescue operations during the night as Iran — under international sanctions over its nuclear programme — is barred from purchasing night-vision material,” the New York Times wrote on 12 August.

Switzerland, Iraq and, bizarrely, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Hollywood actor Sean Penn were among those credited with helping to secure the release of the US citizens who spent two years behind bars in Tehran on spying charges. But when Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer touched down in Muscat, Fattal said: “Our deepest gratitude goes toward his majesty Sultan Qaboos [Bin Said Al-Said] of Oman for obtaining our release.”

The creation of a “national military ethos” in the UAE, involving Ras Al-Khaimah (RAK) and other northern emirates, has been increasingly observed since GSN began analysing in 2015 the pattern of military deaths in Yemen and growth of nationalist symbolism around ‘martyrs’ of the Yemen conflict. It is a process that continues to gather momentum.