"Hope? at Last" returns with a  twelve-month review of evidence against its projected scenarios to measure which structural calls held and where probability has shifted between the plausible futures. Written from inside the closure of Hormuz following the February 2026 war with Iran, the review asks whether the study's most hopeful path, a Gulf-led order bound by economic integration rather than political agreement, can hold under fire. The review describes an order sustained less by cooperation than by necessity, as Gulf states are pushed onto shared infrastructure that reroutes energy and trade around contested chokepoints, and as the region's middle powers carry the connective tissue between divided capitals. The study traces a security architecture where deterrence has become the organizing feature of the regional order rather than its restraint, and weighs where the year ahead could tilt the region back toward integration or further toward confrontation.