After penning a series of articles on the current plight of the Muslim world and assigning so many pages to the subject in my book ‘The Changing Geo-political and Geo-strategic Dynamics: Challenges for Pakistan’ published last year, I felt a strong repulsion to go again through the anger and agony which one inevitably feels to recall the ever shrinking role of the OIC in the Muslim world and the Arab League and the GCC in the Arab affairs. All these organizations were rendered redundant at the global and the regional levels by the growing ambitions and the mutually harmful Arab rivalries and the ever deepening vulnerability of the wealthy Arab states to the machinations of the global power politics. Being bogged down in endless conspiracies to undermine each other, triggering coups, civil strife, sectarian proxy wars and bloody conflicts in their region, they were forced to outsource the security of their oil wealth and countries to the globally and regionally powerful states which, to a large extent, controlled their foreign and strategic policies. Nations shackled by fear, insecurity and over-indulgence in luxurious living cease to create men of dazzle and courage destined to change the direction of national history. The Muslim world, with very few exceptions, is muddling through such barren phase of history. Over a century or so, the Arabs have been living with foreign support from the Ottoman Caliphate to T.E Lawrence and the British and French Protectorate. The nascent kingdom of Saudi Arabia struck an alliance with the USA in 1945 conceding the American control over their oil exploration and trade. In tandem with the US policy, the Saudi monarchs were at loggerhead with the Arab nationalist states. The conflict remained aglow until Egypt veered to the Western stables after the death of Gamal Nasser and Iraq, Libya and Syria were reduced to pale shadows of their erstwhile stability and power. The most luckless country in the Arab world has been the impoverished Yemen ever subjected to the mutually disastrous Arab intrigues since decades. The Arab Spring would have culminated into functional democracies in some Arab countries like in Tunisia had the US-led Western states resisted their wealthy Arab allies to settle their old scores in Iraq, Libya and Syria. They were also complicit in the military coup d état against the elected President Muhammad Morsi in Egypt giving a carte blanche to the new Egyptian military leader for a crackdown against the Ikhwan-ul-Muslim in or Brotherhood. The Ikhwans are spread over almost all the Arab countries including Turkey. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain are over-obsessed with the Ikhwans. The wealthy Arab countries were scared by the ambivalent Middle East policy of President Barak Obama in his second term. The rhetoric of the candidate Donald Trump at his election trail blowing hot and cold about the intractability of the Middle Eastern conundrum and his threats to pull out of the messy region only added to the Arabs’ fear forcing them to look for other reliably powerful states for strategic partnership. We may recall the French President François Hollande and the British Prime Minister Theresa May were particularly invited to the GCC Summits before the US presidential elections. Prime Minister had forcefully reassured them for help against the Iranian hegemony. The Arabs, taking a cue from the US policy, are politically, economically and diplomatically investing in India as countervail to China in their region too. This cobweb of political, economic and strategic initiatives was bound to lead to rebalancing of relations among the countries of the region Faced with the escalating civil war in Yemen in 2015, they explored the possibility of Pakistan making military contributions against Houthis. We maintained our long-held neutrality in intra-Arab conflicts. The Arab brothers vented their anger by according a red carpet welcome to Narendra Modi at the heel of the visit of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. They had taken Pakistan for granted for strategic help after its contributions to the security of Saudi Arabia in 1979 and deployment of over 20,000 soldiers on Saudi borders in the 1990s. The fluid Arab Spring and the apparent US fatigue in the Middle East impelled wealthy GCC states including Saudi Arabia and UAE to deepen their covert security relations with Israel and turn their labour-export oriented relations with India into strategic partnership. The UAE quite recently has been following somewhat a robust foreign and security policy reaching out to powerful countries in the region and beyond in a quest to replace Saudi Arabia as the leader of the Arab world eyeing a role in the maritime control in the Arabian Sea. It seems tired of the hegemonic policy of Saudi Arabia in the GCC and the Arab League. The Saudi proposal to convert GCC into a Union of Arab States was scuttled by UAE in collaboration with Oman and Qatar.Now, it has quietly shifted its support from the embattled Al-Mansoor to Southern rebels in the Yemen civil war. For some time now, the UAE diatribe against Iran has been somewhat muted too. They may have realized that any war in the region resulting from the Saudi antipathy to Iran would be catastrophic particularly for Dubai being in the direct hit of the Iranian missiles. The UAE views the Iranian Bandar Abbas Seaport and Gwadar as rivals to Dubai Seaport, and CPEC as a likely hub for trade and economic connectivity from South to Central Asia and the Caucasian region. China has emerged as the most important economic and strategic player in the Middle East gradually obscuring the most feared hegemonic menace of Iran in the Arab world particularly after the establishment of a strategic outpost in Djibouti as part of its BRI. Gwadar is also suspiciously viewed as the second naval outpost of China. The Arabs, taking a cue from the US policy, are politically, economically and diplomatically investing in India as countervail to China in their region too. This cobweb of political, economic and strategic initiatives was bound to lead to rebalancing of relations among the countries of the region. When all this was taking place, our rulers were not looking beyond financial dole-outs or businesses, plazas, palaces and iqamas. Right move at right time is sine quo non for success in diplomacy. The writer was a member of the Foreign Service of Pakistan and he has authored two books