The Ukraine war has occasioned a reboot of Cold War thinking in the U.S., with familiar tropes about a global battle for freedom and foreign policy elites returning to the comfortable grooves of geopolitical rivalry. For the Middle East, the conflict displaces (and perhaps winds down) the two-decades-long “war on terror”—already reframed by the Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021—but may herald a period of even greater instability. On the one hand, the impact on global energy markets has buoyed the Gulf. On the other hand, food insecurity now threatens already precarious states from Egypt and Tunisia to Lebanon and Yemen. Meanwhile, the already complicated multilateral negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program have been stalled. The war has also exposed significant rifts between the U.S. and regional partners that have declined to take sides in the conflict. Interrogating whether Russia’s invasion signals the arrival of a truly “post-American” era in the region, I will discuss the potential impact of the Ukraine conflict on (re-) distributions of power in the MENA and consider whether a more multipolar order (and the decline of U.S. influence) portends greater conflict or new opportunities to resolve long-standing grievances in the region between rulers and ruled.