The late Fred Halliday once noticed that ‘there are two predictable, and nearly always mistaken, responses to any great international upheaval: one is to say that everything has changed; the other is to say that nothing has changed.’ The remark serves as a useful reminder in the current debate on the implications of the ‘Arab Uprisings’ for (the study of) Arab politics. Thus, while to some the Arab Uprisings have produced a completely ‘new Middle East’ making our previous theoretical assumptions obsolete, others question this ‘newness’ and see no need for rethinking existing theoretical/analytical approaches. Following Halliday’s point about how both of these reactions are ‘nearly always mistaken’, the purpose of this paper is to explore dimensions of both change and continuity in Arab regional politics and against this background discuss whether a specific analytical framework for regional politics in the preceding decade is still useful. More specifically, the paper revisits the notion about a ‘New Arab Cold War’ - originally presented in the context of the 2006-Summer-War - and relates this framework to the emerging regional configuration. Based on a distinction between changes at an immediate and a more fundamental level the paper identifies on the one hand a number of important shifts in regional dynamics, including the weakening/dissolution of the status-quo/’moderate’ camp and the muqawama/’radical’ camp; Hizballah’s loss of popular support regionally; a growing sectarian dimension to regional politics now reflected in speculations about a ‘Sunni Crescent’; the (initially) marginal role played by the Palestine-conflict and finally the rise to power of representatives of the formerly oppositional ‘societal Islamic Political Arabism’. The paper detects on the other hand some of the same – or similar - distinct features of regional politics visible before 2011, including a high degree of permeability reflected in a complex intertwinement between regional and domestic politics and the existence of Arabist/Islamist trans-national ideologies, which - like before – are most visible within the non-state/societal domain that still bears resemblances with an ‘Arab sound-chamber’. Following a brief comparison with some of the recent suggestions about returning to the ‘old’ Arab Cold War framework of 1950/60 as an analytical lens for grasping the present dynamics in regional politics, the paper suggests that the ‘New Arab Cold War’-framework should not be considered obsolete but might be in need of an ‘upgrade’ and the paper outlines how this can be done.