How US-Israeli war gave Iran all the cards in the Middle East
As each day passes, the posts on Truth Social become more unhinged. Panic is welling in US President Donald Trump’s belly. His unprovoked attack on Iran is turning into his worst nightmare.
The man who promised to liberate Iranians with the words that their government would be “yours to take” is now threatening to bomb the same people to whose aid he ostensibly came, “back to the Stone Age”. A final spurt to this war would target Iran’s civilian infrastructure.
The president who gathered thousands of marines in an effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force now has to watch powerlessly as Iran decides which tankers to attack and which to let through, while the US fleet keeps a safe distance. The going rate of the Hormuz toll is up to $2m paid in Chinese yuan.
Four weeks ago, Israeli army chief Eyal Zamir claimed that Israel had destroyed 80 percent of Iran’s air defence systems and achieved “almost complete air superiority”.
And yet we now see US warplanes being hit with regularity. If anything, Iran’s air defences appear to be improving in the sixth week of the war.
Worst of all, from Trump’s point of view, the Islamic Republic is still standing tall, after an aerial bombardment measured in terms of 13,000 strikes.
Iran is not following the script. It was supposed to have caved in weeks ago.
The Baathist parties in Iraq and Syria, and the Jamahiriya (state of the masses) in Libya, collapsed within hours of their respective leaders - Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Muammar Gaddafi - being captured, killed or fleeing.
These dictatorships were so fragile because they were constructed around the personalities of their leaders. In Syria, barely a shot was fired during Assad’s December 2024 ousting.
Astonishing resilience
Not so for Iran. Even with the infiltration of the Mossad and the CIA, and a campaign of assassinations as accurate as the ones that wiped out the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas several times, the command and control of the Iranian regime is still intact.
No rival political or ethnic group can claim ascendance, let alone autonomy, in any part of Iran - least of all the Iranian Kurds, who denied a report that they supplied US arms to protesters during the demonstrations in January.
The Islamic Republic’s institutionalised structure turns out to be more bomb- and assassination-proof than any other political model the Middle East has known. Far from the low-hanging fruit that Mossad chief David Barnea imagined it to be earlier this year, Iran has proved to be astonishingly resilient.
The sheer outrage at Trump's attempts to smash their land with a cudgel appears to be the stronger of the two forces
This does not mean that parts of the country have forgotten what happened in January. There is an intense debate in the Iranian diaspora about whether to damn the Revolutionary Guard Corps for having opened fire on the crowds with Dushkas, Soviet-era heavy machine guns, or to pump the air with joy every time a missile lands on Tel Aviv.
But the sheer outrage at Trump’s attempts to smash their land with a cudgel appears to be the stronger of the two forces. It’s fair to say that inside Iran, support for the revolution has been rejuvenated by the heroics of a new generation of Iranian fighters.
Their hourly acts of resistance are infectious. Iran’s steadfastness is inspiring Arab nations that had already been positive or neutral towards the Islamic Republic. But a strange competition is taking place in those countries that had been hostile to Iran amid its sectarian interventions in the region: it is about who should do more for Palestine.
It is no accident of timing that Syria last week saw nationwide protests against the death penalty law passed in the Israeli Knesset against Palestinians convicted of “terrorism”.
Demonstrations erupted last Friday in Damascus and spread across Syria to Daraa, Quneitra, Aleppo, Latakia, Homs and Idlib. The campus of the University of Aleppo was filled with thousands of students raising Syrian and Palestinian flags, and shouting: “With our souls, with our blood, we will redeem you, Palestine.”
Growing anger
Just remember what happened in Aleppo, Daraa, Homs, and Idlib during the Syrian civil war, and who the rebel militias were fighting against: Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guard on the ground, and Russia from the air.
The recent demonstrations reflected growing anger at Israel’s occupation of southern Syria, but the timing was inspired by Iran’s stand against Israeli jets, which use southern Syria as an air corridor.
In Quneitra, resistance to the Israeli occupation is growing. Some protesters moved towards front-line areas, prompting Israeli forces to fire flares. Also on Friday, Israeli forces shelled a vehicle in the Quneitra countryside, killing the occupants.
Revolt at Israel’s hegemony is also simmering in Jordan, whose king is ardently pro-western and anti-Iranian. Unlike his father, Hussein, who knew when and how to play “the Lion of Jordan”, King Abdullah II’s early education in Britain and the US has surfaced at all the wrong moments in his country’s history.
Israel’s decision to close Al-Aqsa Mosque, over which Jordan holds the international role of custodian, has sparked fury in the kingdom - and yet the official response was a wave of arrests, and an interior ministry ban on all protest events for Palestine. To secure this ban, security forces and gendarmerie were deployed around mosques in the kingdom.
Fans of a Jordanian basketball team recently chanted: “Al-Aqsa is in my heart, to it we will go. We will pray in your squares. We’ll drink from your waters.”
Theirs is no idle boast. As Jordanian journalist Ali Younes posted on social media: “In Jordan the vast majority of the population supports Iran against Israel and the US in this war, albeit not publicly for fear of arrest. And this is rather evident for those who know the country as well as according [to] several current and former government officials.”
The importance of Jordan to this debate cannot be overstated. After Egypt, Jordan became the second country in the Arab world to recognise Israel in 1994.
Egyptian analyst Mamoun Fandy makes a powerful point in contrasting the rhetoric of Trump and Israel on the Abraham Accords and regional peace, with the reality of the hatred both nations are inspiring.
“Israel is back to square one as the enemy of the Arabs, even in countries that signed peace treaties like Egypt, Jordan, and even I would argue within the Emirates, whether it is Bahrain or the UAE, that Israel now is full square within the category of the enemy of the Arabs.
“So the idea that you are making peace is imaginary, a hallucination, a pipe dream … If you go on social media or on television supporting Israel or even the Abraham Accords, you will be lynched publicly.”
Preplanned strategy
This hatred is not just born out of the last two years of unremitting attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, the humiliation felt by the Arab streets, and the public rage over Britain and Europe maintaining Israel’s supply of aircraft parts, oil and impunity from international law.
It’s also a reaction to the threat Israel now poses to anyone living near it: Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Egyptians.
This is not an unintended consequence of the decision by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran. Rather, it is the result of Iran’s preplanned strategy - one that it announced loudly and frequently after it was attacked last year.
Iranian diplomats told everyone who would listen that the next time it was attacked, Iran would make the whole world feel the consequences.
In this, they have been true to their word. Whereas the genocide in Gaza elicited a wave of moral indignation and protest across the world, it did not affect most people’s lives.
Closing the Strait of Hormuz and forcing the Gulf states to halt oil and gas production has affected every oil and gas user in the world, and will continue to roil global markets for months to come. The price of diesel in Europe has gone up 30 percent since Iran was attacked.
Trump’s attack has gifted Iran a weapon of mass destruction far more effective and immediate than either uranium enrichment or ballistic missiles.
The received wisdom about the Strait of Hormuz before the war was that Iran needed it to export its oil as much as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar did. This has proved to be a fatal misjudgement.
Whatever happens next, Iran is unlikely to trade its newfound lever for a mere ceasefire, which Netanyahu could break at any moment to assassinate another scientist. This much was apparent in the allergic reaction in Iran to two peace proposals that crashed and burned over the past week.
'Talking nonsense'
Pakistan’s plan called for an immediate ceasefire in return for the reopening of Hormuz, with a broader agreement being finalised in 15-20 days.
Meanwhile, Iran’s former foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said that Iran should offer to place limits on its uranium enrichment programme and reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for a lifting of international sanctions. The reaction Zarif got at home was less than friendly. Principlists called him a traitor and threatened to execute him.
Saeed Hadadian, who was close to the late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said on Friday night: “You are talking nonsense and have no right to issue a prescription for the Islamic Republic … you have three days to repent and retract your comments.”
Zarif was the architect of the Iran nuclear deal made with former US President Barack Obama - a deal that Iran respected, but the US did not. International sanctions continued and indeed intensified. Today, Zarif is not best placed to persuade his political opponents, that Iran should make the same mistake twice.
'Iran appears to be thinking about the strait not as a tool to end the war, but as a fixture for the aftermath'
- Analysts Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti
If the Strait of Hormuz has no military solution, that means it can open only with Iran’s consent. In that case, the international community has a choice: either negotiate with Iran collectively, or be dealt with one by one.
Either way, Iran, after a war as devastating as this one, will not surrender its chokehold over its Gulf neighbours - and by extension the global price of diesel and gas - without substantial, continual and verifiable financial returns.
As analysts Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti wrote in Responsible Statecraft: “The president appears to assume that Tehran is using the strait as a bargaining chip in exchange for a ceasefire or even sanctions relief. But that assumption may be mistaken. Iran appears to be thinking about the strait not as a tool to end the war, but as a fixture for the aftermath.”
Iran’s earnings from the fees it gets from the strait could ultimately exceed its oil revenue. This will be hard to accept, especially in the Gulf itself - but these nations face a postwar reality of negotiating a place in the emerging order, or watching it take shape without them, Eslami and Malakouti argue.
Iran’s latest counter-offer, which Trump dismissed, was for a toll of $2m per tanker shared with Oman. For this reason, the reluctance of any Gulf state to follow the cavalry charge by the UAE and Bahrain into Iranian guns is real.
Massive Gulf losses
Although these states tried their hardest to stop Trump from attacking Iran, and even though their own industries, airfields and hotels have come under continual attack from Iran’s drones and missiles, everyone knows who their neighbour will be when Trump walks away, declaring victory, as they all know he will.
The Gulf states can only come to one conclusion when all this is finished. They have received the worst possible return on the trillion-dollar investment they made in Trump and his family.
Their oil and gas industries have been ruined by war. They have US military bases on their soil that provide them no protection. They have lost billions in trade and tourism.
And if all this was not bad enough, Trump is set to walk away, claiming the job of crushing Iran has been done.
The postwar wish to look eastwards to China for a different and more predictable partner must be compelling.
If Trump walks away from Iran, he will leave it in a more powerful strategic position than it was when his forces first gathered in February.
Trump was Netanyahu’s dream come true. Netanyahu had spent his entire political career campaigning for an attack on Iran - and yet the fulfilment of this man’s life ambition has united Arabs and Iranians, rich and poor, Sunni and Shia, as never before.
Seeing the Gulf in ruins will provide only a temporary satisfaction for Netanyahu’s bloodlust. His attentions will soon turn northwards towards Turkey, and the first item on his expansionist agenda will be to occupy the lands of southern Syria that lie between the Israeli border and the Druze enclave.
Failing formula
Netanyahu does not yet know it, but his vision of a Greater Israel that controls southern Lebanon and southern Syria crashed in Iran. Greater Israel is not a fact on the ground that any Arab can live with. And a much-diminished Israel could soon find it lacks the resources to “mow the lawn” in all the neighbourhoods its forces occupy.
Israel’s historic reliance on a network of compliant Arab dictators to hold back the masses will not necessarily be a formula that works for that much longer.
It would only take one more Arab dictatorship to fall for the political complexion of the entire region to change.
Leaving Iran in ruins may not be the wisest thing Trump and Netanyahu could do in their moment of military elation
As one of the key figures of the Egyptian revolution in 2011, Mohammed ElBaradei, told me, the Arab Spring is not dead. It’s dormant, but the conditions of poverty, powerlessness, injustice, and corruption are more obvious today than they were when Hosni Mubarak was toppled.
If the Arab Spring broke out again, there would be no Saudi Arabia or UAE strong or powerful enough to fund and organise its crushing, as they did in 2013. The northern and eastern borders of Israel would be wide open to Islamic fighters pouring in from all over the Islamic world, from Syria, to Yemen, to Sudan.
So leaving Iran in ruins may not be the wisest thing Trump and Netanyahu could do in their moment of military elation. Their victory would surely be short-lived.
If a region in flames confirms anyone’s political predictions, it is surely those of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who launched the 7 October 2023 attack against Israel - and who gambled, correctly it now seems, that the century-old conflict would never be the same again.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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