A week after the United States and Israel attacked Iran and killed its leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the war has spread across the Middle East and beyond to the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and the Indian Ocean. Air transport, shipping and supplies of oil and gas have been disrupted as foreigners scramble to get out of Gulf cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha that have been hit by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.
Nobody can predict how or when the war will end, not least because nobody, including Donald Trump, can say for certain why it began. And although the US and Israel are operating together, their interests are not the same, and their war aims may not align either.
“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world,” Trump said in his social media video announcing the war.
Iran has always denied that it wants to develop nuclear weapons but insists on its right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. In 2015, Iran signed a deal with the US and several other world powers that placed significant restrictions on its nuclear programme in return for the easing of economic sanctions.
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Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 and last June, the US and Israel bombed Iran for 12 days, targeting its nuclear infrastructure. In Geneva last week, Washington and Tehran were in negotiations about the future of Iran’s nuclear programme.
The day before the attack on Iran, Oman’s minister for foreign affairs Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, who was the mediator in the talks, said he believed a deal was within reach. He said the talks had made an important breakthrough that could ensure that Iran could never develop a nuclear weapon.
“The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb,” he told CBS News.
“It really makes the enrichment argument less relevant, because now we are talking about zero stockpiling. And that is very, very important, because if you cannot stockpile material that is enriched then there is no way you can actually create a bomb, whether you enrich or don’t enrich. And I think this is really something that has been missed a lot by the media, and I want to clarify that from the standpoint of a mediator.”
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In the days after the attack on Iran, the Trump administration advanced different reasons for launching it, with the president sometimes suggesting he wanted regime change but at other times saying the opposite. Secretary of state Marco Rubio said the US attacked because Israel was planning to do so and Iran would inevitably retaliate against American assets, but Trump later contradicted that account.
The Gulf states initially tried to stay out of the war, signalling their neutrality by making clear that they would not allow the US to use their territory or airspace to launch attacks on Iran. But within hours of the first strikes on Tehran, Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones at what it said were US military assets in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as well as striking Israel.
Most of the Gulf states have long shared Israel’s perception of Iran as a threat to stability in the region and they all shelter under the US security umbrella. But they have seen the threat from Iran as diminished in recent years and China in 2023 brokered a restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Tehran.
The potential cost of a prolonged war to the Gulf states is enormous, starting with disruption to the flow of oil and gas out of the region. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow gateway to the Gulf through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, has effectively stopped.
Fuel storage capacity on land is limited and when it fills up, major oil-producing countries will have to cut production. More costly still would be damage to energy infrastructure, including ports, which could take weeks or months to repair.
Over the past few decades, Gulf states like the UAE and Qatar have built huge airports and invested in airlines like Emirates and Qatar Airways that have captured a large share of the air traffic linking Europe, Asia and Africa. The closure of these hubs and attacks on luxury hotels and apartment buildings in places like Dubai could cause as much economic damage as the disruption to energy flows.
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Despite the assassination of much of its military and civilian leadership, Iran has shown resilience and although it has fired fewer rockets as the week went on, its targets have expanded. When British prime minister Keir Starmer said that Britain would, after all, allow the US to use some of its bases to attack Iran, Tehran responded with a strike on the Royal Air Force base in Akrotiri in Cyprus.
Iran on Thursday denied that it was responsible for a drone attack in the autonomous Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan, claiming that it was an Israeli false flag attack. Tehran also denied that it fired a missile that was intercepted by Nato air defences as it flew towards Turkey.
Starmer initially refused to allow the US to use British bases because it would be in breach of international law and he criticised the operation in the House of Commons as poorly planned and conceived. But under pressure from Gulf states with which Britain has important economic and defence relationships, he concluded that Iran’s retaliatory attacks offered the necessary legal justification for use of the bases.
Germany’s Friedrich Merz said that international law was not relevant because the parties involved would not respect it, adding that “now is not the moment to lecture partners and allies”. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen appeared to endorse regime change in Iran when she called for a “credible transition”, a position not shared by the EU’s member states.
Spain’s Pedro Sánchez found himself in Trump’s crosshairs when he denied the US permission to use bases in his country to attack Iran. In a statement condemning the attack on Iran, he called for de-escalation and a return to negotiations.
“Today more than ever, it is essential to remember that one can be against a hateful regime, as is the case with the Iranian regime, as is the whole of Spanish society, and at the same time be against an unjustified, dangerous military intervention outside of international law. That one must be against a war initiated without the authorisation of the United States Congress or the United Nations Security Council and, as I have said before, one that violates international law,” Sanchez said.
Ireland’s response has received less attention but Minister for Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee’s statement to Dáil Éireann on Thursday included an unequivocal condemnation of the US action as illegal.
“My position, and the position of the Government, is clear. The current military operations by the United States and Israel have no mandate or authorisation from the United Nations. Nor has any attempt been made to seek such an authorisation. Ireland’s position on the use of force outside such a context is well-established and known. Ireland’s position is equally clear that all states must abide by international law and the principles of the UN Charter,” McEntee said.
“The UN system, however imperfect, is an essential security asset for small states including Ireland. If the UN fails, and if the security council is unable to act, it is because member states do not empower it to do so.”
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The war carries several risks for Europe, including the possibility of being drawn into it if European military and economic assets in the region come under attack. It could also affect the supply to Ukraine of defensive weapons such as Patriot missiles, which are now in demand in the Gulf, and a rise in oil prices will give the Russian economy a boost.
Iran’s minister for foreign affairs Abbas Araghchi said on Thursday that Russia and China “are supporting us politically, and otherwise”. But there is little evidence that Tehran’s friends in Moscow and Beijing have offered anything more than diplomatic and rhetorical support.
China is the most important market for Iranian oil, but Beijing has other relationships in the region that are either equally or more important, notably with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This is why China has urged Iran to consider the “reasonable concerns” of its neighbours who have become targets in Tehran’s retaliation against the US. Beijing’s interest lies in an early end to the conflict.
Trump ended the 12-day war against Iran last June by declaring a ceasefire, which was never formalised but both the Iranians and the Israelis accepted. Neither side in the current conflict appears to be capable of achieving a conventional military victory so this one is also likely to end eventually in an informal ceasefire.
When the war ends will depend on American political resolve and although Trump could declare victory within days, it is more likely that the campaign will continue for a number of weeks, perhaps until Passover at the beginning of April, as the Israeli military has suggested. During that time, the US and Israel will work their way through a set of targets designed to destroy Iran’s capacity to launch missiles and to defend itself against attack but also to render the Islamic Republic incapable of governing the country.
As the Gulf states watch their stocks of defensive munitions diminishing, they will be incentivised to seek a de-escalation of the conflict. Iran’s attacks on those countries are designed to impose an economic cost not only on them but on the US by unnerving markets and potentially choking off foreign investment from the Gulf that is increasingly important for the American economy.
If the Islamic Republic survives, any peace that follows an informal ceasefire is likely to be fragile and is unlikely to see a resolution of the core issues between Iran, the US and Israel. Iran could, as former US diplomat Richard Haass suggested this week, demand concessions such as sanctions relief before agreeing to halt hostilities.
Although Trump may favour an outcome similar to the replacement of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro with his more pliant vice-president Delcy Rodríguez, such a scenario is unlikely in Iran. The most likely alternative to the survival of the Islamic Republic is the collapse of the state, which could see Iran descend into civil war and factional violence.
Israel would welcome such a disintegration, which is in keeping with its policy throughout the region of preferring weak and fragmented neighbours. This policy has set Israel in opposition to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who view strong unitary states in countries such as Syria as essential to regional stability.
Before the latest war, Turkey was already in the process of supplanting Iran as the most powerful non-Arab actor in the region after the defanging by Israel of Iran’s proxies in Hamas and Hizbullah. Turkey conducts a complex, multilayered foreign policy under a doctrine former minister for foreign affairs Ahmet Davutoglu called “strategic depth”.
This has seen Turkey become an indispensable, strategically situated Nato ally for the US, a migration buffer for the EU, an energy corridor for Russia, a link between Asia and Europe for China and a defence and investment partner for the Gulf states. Ankara’s rapprochement with Egypt and Saudi Arabia in recent years has enhanced its influence and Turkey is the most important strategic partner for the new government in Syria.
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Israel has been encouraging Iran’s Kurdish minority to take up arms against the Islamic Republic, a move that threatens a fragile peace Turkey has made with its own Kurdish minority. Turkey also fears a wave of migration from Iran if the situation there deteriorates and has drawn up contingency plans to deal with it.
Such a wave of migration, particularly in the event of state collapse in Iran, will not stop in Iran but is likely to move on through Greece and Italy to the rest of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people arriving in Europe would strain already overstretched asylum systems and fuel the anti-immigrant sentiment that has fuelled the rise of far-right parties across the Continent.
