The White House's messages to Iran and to the Saudis at this point seem eerily similar. The administration is signaling that it is willing to engage but unwilling to let either dictate the terms of engagement. The hard truth is that Middle Eastern countries don't have as much ability to influence U.S. behavior as they used to. The region is by no means irrelevant to world politics, but thanks to fracking, improved energy efficiency and new production (renewable and otherwise) around the world, Middle Eastern energy power isn't what it was. Even as oil prices fluctuate, they are likely to do so in a lower band than they would have absent new production. This means the relative economic importance of Middle Eastern countries will decline over time. The Saudis and Iranians have responded to these changes in different ways. For all its faults and sometimes brutal behavior, the new Saudi power configuration has steered the country toward a recalibration that Washington can live with. As the kingdom warms toward Israel, reforms its textbooks, and gradually lifts selected restrictions on women, the radical Wahhabism that long held the country together is no longer as influential as it once was. There is no intention to make Saudi Arabia either a democracy or a Western-style secular society, and the authorities are tightly policing the boundaries of permitted dissent even as those boundaries shift, but the new direction is significantly better than the old. Tehran is on another path. Seizing the opportunities that chaos offers in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, Iran has moved effectively to expand its regional profile even as it accelerates its nuclear program. American Iran doves hope this was largely a defensive response to Mr. Trump's maximum-pressure approach and that Tehran will become more tractable as Washington's hostility diminishes; we shall see. The multiethnic character of the country and the intimate linkages between the religious hierarchy and the state make it hard for Iran to de-emphasize radical religion and hard-line resistance to the West as the regime's basis for legitimacy—and the military success of Iranian proxies around the region makes it hard to abandon a policy that seems to bring gains. Hard-liners are likely to point to any new U.S. concessions as a sign that their policies are working. In these early months, the Biden administration seems to be trying to chart a course between those chosen by its two predecessors.