As Israeli jets and American bombers streaked across Iranian skies earlier this month, the world watched a familiar game plan unfold – one that had its origins in secret meetings, veiled ambitions and the relentless logic of regional dominance that has haunted the Middle East for generations.
The process began decades earlier, in the smoke of American air strikes on Iraq and the calculations of US policymakers determined to keep Israel unrivalled.
It was the late 1990s when a small, bipartisan delegation of senior US senators touched down in the United Arab Emirates. Their visit coincided with the American strikes, part of a legacy of US intervention in the Gulf that had left the region in a state of perpetual unease since the guns of Operation Desert Storm fell silent in Kuwait at the start of the decade.
One ranking Emirati official, exasperated by the endless cycle of violence, posed the question that had been whispered in the corridors of power throughout the Gulf: why didn’t Washington simply topple Saddam Hussein and be done with it?
A US senator, unmoved by the query, offered a response with chilling candour. The objective, he told the official, was not regime change, but rather to “reduce any regional state on a military and technological par with Israel to a pre-industrial society”. The official later shared that exchange with this reporter.
Such an agenda – once the preserve of neoconservative ideologues – soon became official US policy in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
Senior officials and scholars would later reminisce about how, in those feverish days, Pentagon planners had hastily drawn up blueprints for military interventions and regime change across five countries, all under the broad banner of a global “war on terror”.
Afghanistan was first in line. Iraq soon followed, invaded in 2003 on the now-discredited grounds that Saddam’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction – arsenals that, in truth, had been destroyed under the watchful eyes of UN inspectors over the previous decade.
The neoconservative plan hinted at in the UAE began to play out with tragic predictability: Libya, Syria and, most recently, Iran were caught in its undertow, fundamentally remaking the Middle East’s balance of power.
That blueprint now finds echoes in the 12-day Israeli air campaign against Iran, launched on June 13, and justified as a pre-emptive strike to prevent Tehran from weaponising its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. But as the bombs fell, the public rationale in Israel and Washington shifted: regime change in Tehran, and even the dismemberment of the Iranian state, became the new refrain.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump have both variously denied and given voice to such ambitions. But with the region’s recent history as a prologue, scepticism is rife.
The United States briefly joined the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last Sunday. Trump at the time dismissed intelligence assessments that Tehran had honoured its pledge not to build a nuclear weapon, also ignoring similar conclusions drawn by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
The US president similarly brushed aside intelligence reports seemingly contradicting his subsequent boasts that American B-2 stealth bombers had “obliterated” Iran’s three largest nuclear sites.
In Israel, the official narrative was equally fluid: as Trump on Tuesday declared a ceasefire with a social media post proclaiming “CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE”, Netanyahu took a victory lap, announcing that Iran’s nuclear programme had been sent “down the drain”. But Israeli military spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin sought to soften that claim the following day, saying it was still “too early” to assess the true results of the strikes.
On Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed in an interview with state media that the country’s nuclear sites had been badly compromised. “The losses have not been small, and our facilities have been seriously damaged”, he said.
The fog of war has left even seasoned Middle East experts uncertain about what will happen next.
The nuclear option?
A diplomatic breakthrough remains possible, with Iran perhaps agreeing to halt all uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief.
Bill Park, a senior lecturer in the defence studies department at King’s College London, speculated that Iran would either see clandestine militarisation of any surviving uranium stockpile as the only insurance against existential threats from the US-Israel alliance, or come to “appreciate” the serious opposition to its nuclear ambitions and abandon the quest altogether.
This latter point was echoed by international-relations expert Guy Burton, who told This Week in Asia that, for Iran’s leaders, “the strategic ambiguity of its civilian nuclear programme and ability to militarise it quickly if needs be must now be at an end”.
America’s “failure to rein Israel in and then join its strikes on Iran suggests that Washington was either kept in the dark by its Israeli ally or was never a good faith actor” in the first place, said the author of Rising Powers and the Arab–Israeli Conflict since 1947.
Tehran might now look to North Korea as a model and decide that “going nuclear as quickly as possible is the only way to ensure that it won’t be hit again, thereby putting the nail in the coffin of regional non-proliferation”, he said.
Should Iran embark on such a path, it would risk detection by Israel’s Mossad spy agency, which has been instrumental in the assassinations of numerous top Iranian military and nuclear figures during the recent conflict. Iran would also be exposed to future strikes, mirroring Iraq’s fate in the decade before the 2003 invasion.
On the other hand, Iran could choose to destabilise the region via what remains of its “axis of resistance” allies – or reconsider the cost of regional entanglements altogether, especially after Israel’s punishing campaign against Hezbollah and the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria late last year. Tehran might “seriously rethink what benefits accrue from meddling in the region’s affairs”, Park said.
Winners and losers
Most major regional actors now crave stability and security, according to Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. But he warned that a large number of smaller groups such as Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthi movement were invested “in continued destabilisation, or … will be pursuing projects that are perceived as destabilising by most other parties”.
The most vulnerable nations? Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen – the very countries that “Iran and its minions have been cannibalising in recent decades”, Ibish said.
“They have the most to gain and the most to lose,” he said. “If things go well for them, they could end up with much more secure and stable governments, and more functional and genuinely independent political systems.”
If not, “all or some of these countries will become the literal battlegrounds over which the next phase of violent conflict in the Middle East is likely to be contested”.
That the US and Israel “are working in tandem to redraw the strategic fault lines in the Middle East towards a new balance of power that weakens and isolates Iran” has been clear since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, according to Ahmed Aboudouh, an associate Middle East fellow at the Chatham House think tank in Britain.
Netanyahu “saw a chance to make his long-standing dream come true: using the vacuum created by the decimation of Iran as a major regional power to elevate Israel to the position of power broker or first among equals”, he told This Week in Asia.
Meanwhile, “the war showed China’s influence has limits” by exposing its apparent “inability to intervene to protect its investments and trade with the region”, said Aboudouh, who also heads the China studies programme at the Emirates Policy Centre in Abu Dhabi.
Beijing’s credibility as a potential alternative mediator to the US had also been damaged, he said, “since, time and again, it’s the US that steps in and puts an end to war or stops it from spiralling out of control”.
Ibish said the Middle East’s balance of power had been radically altered over the past two years – above all by the “catastrophic decline in Iranian power”, most notably after Assad’s fall in Syria. “The loss of Syria has effectively meant the destruction of Iran’s ability to project regional power,” he said.
Syria under Assad was “the only state-level ally Iran enjoyed”, Ibish said, with its so-called axis of resistance otherwise entirely made up of non-state actors, militia groups and ragtag gangs.
Time and again, it’s the US that steps in
Ahmed Aboudouh, Middle East analyst
Yet Israel’s new-found assertiveness had made it, in the eyes of many former adversaries, “not merely the most aggressive regional actor”, but also “the most dangerous disrupter of regional calm and order”, he said.
The Arab world “remains largely a spectator in its own drama”, Ibish told This Week in Asia.
Indeed, the “Gulf states are still bystanders, or worse, collateral damage, caught in the power struggles between Israel, Iran and the US”, according to Jean-Loup Samaan, a senior research fellow of strategic studies at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
Despite their public calls for de-escalation, “in reality, they will also be eager to ensure the US stays their primary security provider”, he said.
For the Gulf monarchies, long-term influence would “more likely hinge on economic strength”, said Burton, who has taught international relations at universities in the West Bank, Iraq and the UAE.
Their hydrocarbon wealth allowed the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, especially, to “purchase” influence far beyond their military reach, he said, pointing to their red-carpet treatment of Trump during his visit to the Gulf in May.
Israel, meanwhile, finds itself diplomatically isolated in the region, “limiting its economic influence beyond its military footprint”, despite being a tech and innovation hub.
But it is still poised to benefit from Iran’s weakness, as is Turkey, which has the second-largest military in Nato.
Having backed the winning side in Syria’s civil war and coaxed Kurdish rebels based in Iraq into ending their long insurgency, Ankara now “looks regionally stronger”, said analyst Park.
But Turkey’s improved strategic position was only relative to a diminished Iran and militarily dominant Israeli-US alliance, he said, meaning Ankara would be “overall disinclined to go too far out on a limb, except rhetorically”.
Ultimately, analysts say the region’s true fault line remains the same as it was in October 2023: the unresolved Palestinian issue.
Should Israel proceed with its widely anticipated annexation of Gaza and the West Bank, “it would likely be a disaster, with repercussions for many decades beyond”, Ibish warned.
The move would cause “intense dislocation” for millions of Palestinians and widespread disruption across the region, with “long and short-term backlashes”, he said. Several Arab states would likely sever ties with Israel. “Jordan almost certainly will, and Egypt might.” The UAE would be “desperately searching for some sort of an alternative approach”, while Bahrain would “continue to keep a low profile and try to do nothing at all if possible”.
In such a scenario, Ibish concluded, the pressure for a new, unified Arab front against Israel would become “very powerful, if not overwhelming”.