Pompeo didn’t take the bait in that setting; he barely mentioned Iran at all. But the administration’s focus on Iran was clear in other venues—for instance, in Pompeo’s appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where he noted destabilizing Iranian activities throughout the region and remarked, “You can’t achieve peace and stability in the Middle East without confronting Iran. It’s just not possible.”

Vice President Pence went further in his own speech, criticizing European allies of the United States for their efforts to do business with Iran despite the reimposition of American nuclear-related sanctions on the regime. And he referred explicitly to the growing rift between America and its European allies, declaring that such efforts “will only strengthen Iran, weaken the EU, and create still more distance between Europe and America.”

“I don’t see any real benefit to this,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution. “It doesn’t speak well of the administration’s organizational capacity that after a lot of high-profile attention to this conference, there wasn’t a lot of there there.”

But if the Iran issue divides traditional allies, it unites traditional adversaries. What were perhaps the summit’s most significant moments of unity came from improbable places, namely between the Israelis and the Arabs. Netanyahu noted as much in an unfortunately phrased tweet on Wednesday, where he cited Israel and Arab countries’ “common interest of war with Iran”—before reissuing the tweet with a softer “combating Iran.”

Read: A Trump doctrine for the Middle East

It was something significantly short of Middle East peace, but still significant. It wasn’t the unveiling of Jared Kushner’s much-hyped peace plan; there was no photo op with Netanyahu and the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs. There was, however, Netanyahu attending a session with Arab officials and meeting with the Omani foreign minister; there was the Bahraini foreign minister’s declaration to The Times of Israel that his country would “eventually” establish ties with Israel; there was even a former senior Saudi official giving an interview to an Israeli television station, albeit one in which he criticized what he called Netanyahu’s “hubristic attitude.” The official, Prince Turki bin Faisal, who once served as the kingdom’s head of intelligence, also noted, “We don’t need Mr. Netanyahu to tell us the dangers Iran poses.”

But the rapprochement will go only so far, said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. The Arab states are worried about Iran, he said, but Netanyahu’s “war” gaffe didn’t help anybody. The Arabs “do not need a war. That they don’t need, and they know it.” And there are serious limits on how much they’re willing to cooperate formally with Israel absent progress on the Palestinian issue, he said. Prince Turki said as much in his interview: “From the Israeli point of view, Mr. Netanyahu would like us to have a relationship, and then we can fix the Palestinian issue. From the Saudi point of view, it’s the other way around.”