An Interim Leadership Council was constituted within days. Mojtaba Khamenei succeeded his father with the backing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Between 2024 and 2026, the Middle East moved from a prolonged shadow war into direct state-to-state conflict.
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched surprise and sneak attacks at nuclear facilities in Iran. The United States joined the assault on June 22, 2025, under the aegis of an operation codenamed Midnight Hammer to try and obliterate Iran’s nuclear facilities that were not decapitated by the Israeli strikes. Seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flew continuously for 18 hours from their base in Whiteman, Missouri, defended by F-35 and F-22 fighter aircraft to draw any incoming surface to air missile or anti-aircraft fire. These B-2 stealth bombers dropped bunker bursting bombs on Fordow and Natanz Iranian nuclear sites. The bombing inflicted significant damage.
Tehran retaliated by leveraging its ‘Axis of Resistance,’ a loosely knit network of armed groups and state actors in the Middle East. It is also colloquially referred to as the Shia Crescent that emerged in the wake of the ill-considered US invasion of Iraq. Its cohesion is at best recondite. While the Hezbollah in Lebanon coordinates closely with its Iranian patron, others, such as Yemen’s Houthis, are partners of convenience. What binds them are shared objectives, driving the American presence and influence out of the region, the elimination of the Israeli state, and support for the Palestinian resistance.
From Decapitation to Continuity: The US and Israel again on February 28, 2026, amid ongoing negotiations between the US and Iran in Geneva on the nuclear question launched an operation codenamed Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion, respectively, against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure with an underlying assumption that this round of regime decapitation strikes would topple the Iranian leadership.
This undergirded assumption was based upon the widespread protests against the Iranian regime that commenced on December 28, 2025, and continued through much of January and February 2026. The protests were brutally put down by the mullah regime in Tehran with over 30,000 young Iranians being mercilessly butchered by the indiscriminate use of heavy military grade weapons against unarmed protesters.
On March 1, 2026, a US-Israeli precision strike assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader who had reigned for thirty-seven years.
An Interim Leadership Council was constituted within days. Mojtaba Khamenei succeeded his father with the backing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Notwithstanding extensive disenchantment with the mullah regime and visible domestic polarisation, the Islamic Republic preserved functional command. It is this capacity to absorb unprecedented blows that is now reshaping the security architecture of the Middle East.
Bases as Liabilities: The Middle Eastern Security architecture rests on America’s forward military presence, which dates back to the Marine landing in Beirut in 1958. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, in total, the US has military facilities across at least 19 countries in the Middle East, eight of them are considered as permanent in countries including Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. The US military also uses large bases in Djibouti and Turkey, which are part of other regional commands but often contribute significantly to US operations in the Middle East.
Paradoxically, 18 out of these 19 military and basing arrangements are with the Islamic and Arab states and only one is with Israel. The latter however is the most significant. As the US and Israeli militaries stepped up their attacks again after a momentary ceasefire and the war enters its 149th day, Tehran launched strikes again across the Middle East, forcing Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar, along with Jordan and Syria, to take defensive action against incoming missiles and drones. Tehran’s actions in itself sketch out the contours of the region’s current security order. Iran insists that it is hitting US facilities because Washington has used its regional bases as launchpads for strikes on Iran. A logic that automatically converts host-state territory into a veritable battlefield.
On July 18, Kuwait’s ministry of electricity, water and renewable energy confirmed via X that an Iranian strike hit one of its power generation and water desalination stations, sparking a fire and knocking a large number of electricity generation units out of service.
The Gulf Cooperation Council’s secretary-general, Jasem al-Budaiwi, condemned Iran’s “treacherous” attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, warning that continued strikes on critical infrastructure risked dragging the region into deeper instability. The states anchoring US’s regional presence are now absorbing the blowback of a war fought from their soil and the security architecture built on it is bending under the strain.
Hormuz as Leverage: Iran’s second instrument is geography. The Strait of Hormuz carried about 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products daily in 2025, one- fifth of global consumption, about 93% of Qatar’s and 96% of the UAE’s LNG exports transit through the Strait, representing 19% of global LNG trade. Iran’s closure of the strait met by a US naval blockade of Iranian ports delivered an energy shock severe enough to force negotiation. The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, signed under Pakistani and Qatari mediation, opened a 60-day window for a comprehensive settlement and reopened the waterway. That memorandum of understanding failed to deliver and the Straits of Hormuz once again stand closed.
The transitory reopening, however, has confirmed Tehran’s grip on the Straits of Hormuz. Port Watch recorded only 513 transits in the first 18 days, about 28 ships a day. Myriad number of commercial vessels have been attacked since the ceasefire; the mined central channel lies unused, and traffic is funnelled through two corridors, one in Iranian waters and one in Omani waters under US oversight. The Gulf’s energy exporters find their lifeline resting on Iranian forbearance. Keeping aside the Law of the Sea, the world’s most important oil artery now operates partly on Iranian terms, and the security architecture built around it is bending to that reality.
A Region Recalibrating: For decades, regional security in the Middle East rested on the assumption that US bases deterred attack and that Gulf states could rely on US protection. The US-Israel war with Iran has tested both assumptions.
Ultimately, the current circumstances have permanently shattered the illusion that regional stability can be outsourced to an external patron forcing a profound recalibration of the Middle East’s balance of power. By exposing the critical vulnerabilities of the Mideast states, this conflict proved that passive neutrality without credible deterrence invites aggression rather than preventing it. To survive this new geopolitical reality, Mideast states must rapidly move toward partnership pluralism, invest in indigenous defence capabilities and convert sovereign wealth into strategic infrastructure to ensure the next security order is negotiated from a position of collective strength.
