It is no coincidence that just over a month after Israel and the United Arab Emirates declared that they would normalise relations and Israel and Bahrain did the same, Iraq has announced that it has signed a contract with Jordan to connect the electric power grids of the two countries. By extension, this will provide a direct link between Jordan and Iraq’s key regional sponsor, Iran, which recently signed a two-year deal with Iraq to supply it with electricity, the longest such deal signed between the two countries. The last piece of this game-changing regional networking operation is that just before the announcement of the Iraq-Jordan network deal, Jordan also announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia to lay out the framework of joint cooperation to connect the electric power grids of these two countries. To begin at the source of this new regional […]