The Middle East and Elusive Peace: A Fragile Ceasefire, An Unfinished War

For more than a decade, Syria was the epicenter of death and destruction in the Middle East. Assad repeatedly tried to justify his war against the Syrian people with false claims that he was fighting American backed terrorists, even though the US was reluctant to provide adequate military support for the Syrian revolutionaries to successfully facilitate his overthrow. Ultimately, it was Syrian militants who marched through the country to Damascus who forced Assad to flee the country. Since his departure the Syrian people have been struggling to rebuild all that, he destroyed. But the Middle East now finds itself with a new epicenter of death and destruction which, ironically, is the -dir-ect result of American military intervention.

The Expanding Theater of Regional War
Since its outbreak nearly two and a half months ago, the world has witnessed the most intense bombardment in modern asymmetric warfare between nations with no shared geographical borders: the United States and Israel against Iran. Both air and missile forces were heavily deployed, with the Gulf Arab states bearing a significant share of the collateral fallout due to their geostrategic position as hosts of American military installations—despite having no stake´-or-involvement in the conflict.
This confrontation has evoked grim memories of Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, echoing a scale of material and psychological devastation unprecedented since World War II. However, the dynamics of this war against Iran raise critical questions regarding the strategic dividends of these military operations and their long-term impact on the core grievances dividing the three warring parties. While the joint Israeli-American airstrikes decimated military and civilian infrastructure, leaving behind widespread destruction, thousands of civilian casualties, and claiming the lives of the Islamic Republic’s top leadership, they fell short of achieving their immediate strategic objectives. Instead, the conflict triggered unprecedented regional and international realities that did not exist prior to February 28th: namely, the blockading of the Strait of Hormuz, severe disruptions to global maritime trade, and a sharp inflationary spike across global crude oil -benchmark-s.
In addition, there is the entrenchment of instability, the constant threat of launching new operations, and the resumption of war at any moment, according to Trump’s repeated statements, meaning that the region remains in a state of no peace!

War and International Law
Undoubtedly, this military campaign -dir-ectly violated international law and undermined global security-;- by international metrics, it constitutes a full-fledged act of aggression. Indeed, a consensus of politicians, jurists, and human rights advocates have categorized the war as a breach of international legal norms. Within the United States, a prominent faction emerged among public opinion leaders—particularly within the Republican base that re-elected President Trump—objecting to the intervention. They argued the war compromised American strategic interests, degraded its international standing, and deviated from the core "America First" doctrine intended to -restore- domestic cohesion and national capability.
This domestic opposition was further mirrored by the naturally adversarial stance of the Democratic Party, leading to a wave of resignations and dismissals of high-ranking military and political officials within the Trump administration who opposed the "war council" in the White House.
Critics increasingly attribute their dissent to what they term Israeli "manipulation and deception," aimed at entangling Washington in an extraneous conflict tailored exclusively to Israeli objectives. They point out that Prime Minister Netanyahu successfully persuaded President Trump to greenlight the campaign at a critical juncture, just hours before a breakthrough in US-Iranian diplomatic tracks was imminent, effectively derailing negotiations over Tehran s nuclear program. The resulting escalation culminated in the targeted assassination of the Islamic Republic s Supreme Leader. Following protracted legislative debates and mounting threats of impeachment, Trump ultimately secured congressional authorization to sustain military operations until core "objectives" were met.

International Alignment and Geopolitical Rifts
In response to these developments, a vast coalition of nations adopted a posture of non-alignment, refusing to participate, join the coalition,´-or-offer logistical support. The European -union-’s institutional stance stands out as a prime example, mirroring the collective policy of its member states and broader NATO allies. Their position rests on three strategic pillars:
First: The US-Israeli military campaign undermines global peace and threatens international stability.
Second: The war lacks any grounding in international law´-or-authorization under the UN Charter, rendering it illegal.
Third: Transatlantic states have no strategic interest in entering an uncoordinated conflict where they were not consulted, as participation serves neither European nor wider regional interests.
This fundamental dissent laid the groundwork for a broader international coalition of rejection, drawing in Canada, Australia, and Japan. Consequently, Washington s ambition to frame its anti-Iran campaign as a mandate of the "international community" against an actively negotiating state was effectively thwarted.
These diplomatic rebuffs deeply angered President Trump, given Washington s traditional leadership of NATO and its expansive base infrastructure across Europe. The friction reignited a foundational structural flaw within the alliance: Washington’s unyielding view that European security remains contingent upon dominant American hegemony. This geopolitical schism widened significantly following Trump’s assertive maneuvers regarding Greenland, which triggered profound alarm bells across European capitals regarding the predictability of their primary security ally.

Conflicting Regional Doctrines
The theater of operations reflects a violent collision of competing regional projects and geostrategic rivalry between Israel and Iran. Both powers are vying to impose political, security, and military hegemony over a Middle Eastern sphere extending from Tehran through Iraq to the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan). Each actor seeks to neutralize the structural leverage´-or-existence of the other to subordinate the region to its respective sphere of influence. This friction has defined regional dynamics since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, manifesting in an in-dir-ect confrontation managed through Tehran s "Axis of Resistance" strategy.
Concurrently, Israel continues its policy of regional military containment, settlement expansion in occupied territories, and non-compliance with United Nations frameworks for conflict resolution. It persistently rejects political settlements predicated on a withdrawal to the 1967 borders as outlined in UN Resolutions 242 and 338. Israel utilizes these frameworks to anchor its regional dominance and shape the Middle East s security, political, and economic architecture. This structural clash plays out via -dir-ect military interventions—as observed in Lebanon and Syria—and through proxy warfare, an intensifying arms race, and a persistent drive for strategic equilibrium, which -dir-ectly explains Iran s pursuit of advanced ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities.

The Ascendancy of Hardline Factions
The "security dilemma" serves as the primary strategic rationale for both sides, perpetuating a relentless cycle of zero-sum containment that fuels conflicts and blocks any diplomatic breakthroughs´-or-institutional security settlements in the region.
Within this framework, it is crucial to note that systemic conflicts are deeply exacerbated by the foundational strategies of these "states, entities, and powers" that actively empower dogmatic, hardline war leaders. In Israel, the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin—who was actively engaged in the Middle East peace process—marked a critical structural pivot for the region. It precipitated the ascendancy of the ultra-nationalist right, the steady decline and ultimate collapse of the peace framework, and the effective insulation of the state under hardline leadership. These factions have prosecuted devastating campaigns against Palestinian and Lebanese populations, committing acts categorized by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as "war crimes." Today, Benjamin Netanyahu stands as the Israeli Prime Minister wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
In Iran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei maintained a 36-year dictatorial grip over domestic governance. On the regional stage, he initially projected the Islamic Republic’s power by anchoring support for "liberation movements" in Palestine. However, his doctrine quickly crystallized into bolstering heavily militarized non-state organizations and systematically intervening in the internal affairs of neighboring Middle Eastern states. This expanded into -dir-ect military and security interventions to prop up autocratic regimes against the Arab Spring across Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, alongside the strategic co-optation of governance mechanisms in Iraq. These proxies were continuously mobilized to undermine regional stability under the foundational mandate of exporting the Iranian Revolution.
This Iranian era did not disintegrate with the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026. Instead, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) emerged as the primary institutional custodian managing state power, -dir-ectly consolidating its domestic hegemony. With the selection of his successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, hardline factions further tightened their grip on the apparatus of state and the critical levers of military confrontation against Washington and Tel Aviv.
This entrenched extremism sustains its momentum, expands, and draws oxygen from influential populist forces, facilitated by the presence of a parallel populist, hardline administration in the White House. The Trump administration remains locked in a persistent quest to project absolute power and subjugate its adversaries—not merely via military means, but through political and media warfare that bypasses the traditional rules and ethics of engagement, even while acknowledging that wars of aggression remain fundamentally immoral and incapable of resolving complex political crises.

The Strategic Dilemma of the Gulf Arab States
The Gulf Arab states find themselves in a precarious geopolitical bottleneck—caught between two fires—as casualties of an extraneous conflict they neither engineered, support, nor desire. Having actively leveraged their diplomatic capital to avert a regional explosion by backing a return to negotiations, their stabilizing efforts were ultimately subverted when Israel persuaded Trump to greenlight the February 28th strikes. Consequently, the Gulf states were thrust -dir-ectly into the crosshairs of Iranian retaliation due to their status as hosts of American military installations. This marked a literal execution of Tehran’s long-standing deterrence doctrines to strike American assets and interests across the region whenever attacked. However, while facing operational friction in -dir-ectly penetrating hardened American bases and Israeli targets, Iran unleashed dense firepower against the Gulf s critical civilian infrastructure and oil production facilities.
Amid the absence of a unified Arab´-or-Gulf baseline strategy to navigate this multi-layered crisis, the core posture of the Gulf states manifested in a deliberate refusal to be drawn into the active theater of war, despite sustaining -dir-ect Iranian strikes. This calculated restraint was a highly prudent strategic choice, designed to mitigate permanent animosity with Tehran and preserve the tenets of good neighborliness, notwithstanding Iran’s highly provocative regional policies.
In this diplomatic theater, the positions of Riyadh, Doha, and Kuwait stood out as unequivocal and principled. Conversely, Abu Dhabi and Manama adopted a more nuanced alignment relative to the US-Israeli axis, while Muscat steadfastly maintained its historical backchannel role as an interlocutor and facilitator of peaceful negotiation tracks between Washington and Tehran.
This overarching Gulf alignment is dictated by a comprehensive view of the regional conflict. There is an acute understanding that a catastrophic collapse of Iranian state authority, both domestically and internationally, would generate a massive geopolitical vacuum in the Middle East that Israel alone would seek to exploit. This calculation is particularly vital given that Iran’s regional leverage has already contracted significantly following the collapse of the Assad regime, its forced strategic withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon, and the structural degradation of the Houthi movement in Yemen. This rollback of Iranian regional influence remains a pivotal baseline for reshaping future GCC-Iran relations.
Hence, the strategic prudence of Saudi Arabia’s posture becomes evident in its calculated refusal to be drawn into the conflict, opting instead to constitute a neutral third axis that sustains pivotal relations with both Washington and Tehran, notwithstanding Iranian acts of aggression and the -dir-ect casualties incurred therefrom. Furthermore, this positioning precludes any geopolitical latitude for Israeli expansionism and hegemony over the region, thereby averting systemic transformations that jeopardize the security and stability of the Middle East as a whole. This is particularly salient given Tel Aviv’s intensive endeavors to capitalize on the waning Iranian influence in order to consolidate the controversial Abraham Accords framework within the region.


Strategic Shifts and the Dynamics of Coercive Diplomacy
The war has triggered sweeping structural shifts in both strategic objectives and ultimate outcomes, manifesting most prominently through two critical dimensions:1. Negotiation Under the Shadow of Force (Coercive Diplomacy):The diplomatic track was predicated on the US President’s doctrine of achieving through negotiations what "maximum firepower" failed to deliver—namely, the capitulation of the Iranian regime and the total neutralization of its military capabilities, particularly its strategic ballistic missile program. Nevertheless, diplomatic channels remained operational across multiple fluid tracks. These initiatives shifted through Omani and Turkish mediation before centering on Pakistan, which played a pivotal backchannel role in persuading the warring parties to adopt a framework of incremental objectives and reciprocal, feasible concessions aimed at a comprehensive settlement to definitively terminate the US-Iranian conflict.
However, Washington’s design to utilize the talks as a mechanism for absolute Iranian compliance—tantamount to an enforced surrender—failed to yield the dividends that military operations could not secure. Instead, the diplomatic runway afforded Tehran significant tactical maneuvering room and vital time to achieve two core imperatives: re-establishing domestic political command and control within Iran, and structurally fortifying the IRGC and the regular armed forces. This operational pause similarly benefited both the United States and Israel, as the American strategic airlift of advanced munitions and hardware to Israel continued unabated to replenish weapon stockpiles. Crucially, however, the primary achievement remains the fragile cessation of active military operations, despite persistent tactical violations and the constant threat of a return to hostilities.2. The Blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the Counter-Blockade:
This maritime escalation stands as one of the most critical structural outcomes of the war. The crisis erupted as a -dir-ect consequence of Iran imposing unilateral transit tariffs and demanding prior naval authorization for commercial shipping and energy tankers traversing the strait—a framework flatly rejected by Washington. Following a breakdown in talks, the United States enforced a strict counter-blockade. This tit-for-tat escalation deepened the maritime crisis, severely disrupted global commerce, and choked energy flows through a critical chokepoint that satisfies over 25% of global energy demand.
Washington views the enforcement of this naval blockade as a highly effective, low-casualty alternative to sustained kinetic operations. It conserves precision-guided munitions, which have faced severe inventory depletion in recent months, while serving as a primary lever of economic and political coercion against a war-ravaged state whose civilian and industrial infrastructure is heavily fractured. From the American perspective, this economic strangulation is designed to ultimately compel Iranian submission to US mandates.
Despite these pressures, the negotiations remain fraught with friction, and the rigid conditions imposed by each side continue to block a diplomatic breakthrough toward a final settlement. A primary obstacle remains the US administration’s insistence on consulting Prime Minister Netanyahu, who resolutely rejects any framework that does not mandate the absolute dismantlement of Iran s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. In our assessment, such a total capitulation will not materialize in the near term-;- Iran will not abandon its enriched uranium stockpiles´-or-dismantle its nuclear program as Israel demands. However, the specific negotiations regarding the Strait of Hormuz are likely to witness a near-term breakthrough and settlement, driven largely by domestic pressure from American voters who demand an end to the war and a halt to its harsh economic repercussions on daily life within the United States and across the globe.

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