The Middle East continues to suffer from seemingly endless problems. Yet the region’s predicament is not a shortage of agreements, but a shortage of trust. Over the past several decades, the region has witnessed dozens of agreements and hundreds of rounds of negotiations, but most collapsed before the ink used to write them had even dried. The reason is that such agreements did not endure because of the strength of their written provisions, but because the parties failed to uphold them.For all the latest headlines follow our Google News channel online or via the app.Despite the many agreements signed and declarations of goodwill made across the region, two figures stand out for repeatedly failing to honor the commitments they signed: Benjamin Netanyahu and the late Ali Khamenei. The Iranian supreme leader was killed in the joint US-Israeli strike last February, but his successors appear to be continuing to employ the same approach and tactics.History offers clearer answers than political statements. When Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996, he inherited the Oslo Accords, which he had opposed from the outset, and quickly slowed their implementation. Former US President Bill Clinton then moved to revive the agreement following a period of stagnation, leading Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat to sign the Hebron Protocol in January 1997. Netanyahu, however, soon adopted a unilateral interpretation of the provision concerning “specified military locations,” allowing Israel to determine what constituted a military site and thereby avoid implementing the agreement.After 20 months of deadlock, Netanyahu and Arafat again stood together at the White House in October 1998 to sign the Wye River Memorandum under Clinton’s sponsorship. Yet from the agreement’s earliest days, a report by the US Congressional Research Service warned that it faced serious risks. The political process effectively came to an end in early 1999 after Netanyahu obstructed the memorandum’s implementation.In 2009, Netanyahu announced in his Bar-Ilan speech that he accepted, in principle, the establishment of a Palestinian state following pressure from the United States. He also agreed to freeze settlement construction. However, the freeze was riddled with loopholes. It excluded East Jerusalem and allowed construction to continue on projects that had already been approved, making it appear more like a commitment on paper than a genuine change in conduct on the ground. Today, the same pattern is being repeated in Gaza. Following the ceasefire and hostage-release agreements reached after the events of October 7, 2023, the settlement became little more than a temporary truce, leaving Gaza’s residents without any real prospect of resolving the crisis.On the Iranian side, Khamenei’s record regarding agreements is no less revealing. Since the establishment of the Iranian Revolution, Tehran has worked to destabilize the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, eventually leading to the severing of relations between Riyadh and Tehran. By the end of 1997, relations showed signs of improvement, accompanied by reciprocal visits, followed by the signing of a security agreement in 2001. Yet the agreement remained nothing more than ink on paper. After signing it, Iran hosted senior al-Qaeda figures, including Saif al-Adel, who led the organization during its terrorist campaign against Saudi Arabia beginning in 2003. Tehran also supported the Houthi group in Yemen, which has targeted Saudi Arabia since 2009, in addition to backing armed militias in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.Amid the unrest of 2011, Tehran moved quickly to provide armed groups with weapons and funding to target the security of several Arab countries, foremost among them Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. In January 2016, Saudi-Iranian relations were severed after Iranian protesters stormed and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran.Even the 2023 Beijing Agreement, which restored diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran, failed to halt this pattern. Following the US-Israeli attack on Tehran at the beginning of this year, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states were targeted by thousands of missiles and drones, despite not being parties to the war. This week, the Saudi Ministry of Defense announced that it had destroyed several drones launched from Iraqi territory by Iran-backed Iraqi militias. The drones targeted oil facilities in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, prompting Riyadh, in coordination with Washington, to carry out joint strikes against militia positions inside Iraq. This constitutes a legitimate exercise of the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.The irony is that Netanyahu himself has urged the international community not to trust any Iranian commitments. He argues that past experience requires strict oversight of any future agreement. This is a legitimate demand that cannot reasonably be challenged, because trust in international relations is built on an accumulated record of conduct, not on intentions.But the same principle must apply to everyone. If history is the standard by which trust is measured, then the record of any political leader must form part of the assessment of any agreement they sign. Building trust, therefore, cannot be achieved through political statements or the resumption of diplomatic relations alone. It requires a change in conduct on the ground, and that has yet to happen. The question remains whether Ali Khamenei’s successors will continue along the same path, or whether there will be a genuine change in behavior. The clearest reality in the Middle East today is not the absence of agreements, but the absence of trust in those who sign them.