The war that broke the old order

The war that some analysts have called the Third Gulf War – after the 1990–91 US war on Iraq and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq – has forced into the open what years of diplomatic argument could not: a serious questioning of American strategic overreach.

Operation Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli offensive launched on 28 February, was designed as a decisive blow.

Within hours, any such illusion evaporated. Iran launched thousands of ballistic missiles and drones across the Gulf, straining air defences from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, disrupting Dubai International Airport, and spiking oil futures as traders priced in the Strait of Hormuz blockade risk.

What Washington conceived as a decapitation strike became the opening move in a war it does not know how to end. As Murad Sadygzade of the Middle East Studies Centre at Moscow’s HSE University has put it, the US “has bitten off considerably more than it can chew”.

Iran’s game plan

This underlying logic was set out with particular clarity by political scientist Robert Pape in Foreign Affairs (March 2026). Iran’s response to Epic Fury, Pape argues, is not a disorganised act of revenge. It is a deliberate strategy of horizontal escalation – widening the geographic and political scale of the conflict rather than meeting American firepower head-on.

Iran cannot defeat the US or Israel in a conventional military contest. It does not need to. Its objective is to gain greater political leverage (Sadygzade, March 2026). By striking targets in at least nine countries hosting US forces, closing airports, killing foreign workers and threatening the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran has transformed a military contest into one of political endurance.

As Vietnam and Kosovo once demonstrated, the decisive arena was not the initial shock of airpower but the politics of an expanding conflict (Pape, “Why Escalation Favors Iran”, Foreign Affairs).

Looking from those historical perspectives, Washington’s approach masks self-interested expansionism as consensual leadership. In Vietnam, the US never lost a battle, but it still lost the war.

This is the structural trap Washington has sprung on itself. A decapitation strike creates powerful incentives for exactly the kind of escalation it seeks to prevent. When a regime survives the loss of its leader, it demonstrates resilience – and typically responds by widening the conflict.

A harder regime emerges

The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader, pushed through by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has hardened Tehran’s political centre of gravity rather than fractured it.

Western analyses that look for collapse through economic pain or elite defection fundamentally misread the Iranian state.

At its deepest level, the Islamic Republic draws on a civilisational resilience rooted in Shia political memory – the sanctification of endurance, the moral grammar of resistance and grief of martyrdom. This converts external assault into domestic consolidation rather than dissolution.

Gulf states question Washington

The geopolitical fallout is already reshaping the region in ways that extend far beyond the immediate theatre.

Gulf states that for years lived with the comfortable fiction that the American security umbrella was permanent and sufficient are now seriously rethinking self-defence, strategic redundancy and the possibility of abandonment.

Behind the scenes, resentment is mounting in Gulf Arab capitals at being drawn into a war they neither initiated nor endorsed (Reuters, 10 March).

Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics, writing in an analysis reported by Reuters in March, argues that the war has fundamentally shaken long-held assumptions about US dependency. These Gulf States are reassessing their security dependence on Washington.

Some Gulf states are even exploring engagement with Tehran on new regional security arrangements (Moscow-based American geopolitical analyst Andrew Korybko, Substack, March 2026). The logic is becoming harder to ignore: closeness to Washington carries its own risks, and American guarantees are conditional – subject to an escalation that others may be forced to endure and absorb.

It is this rupture that is opening the door to a fundamentally different regional architecture.

Russia has long proposed a collective security concept for the Gulf, and Moscow has positioned itself as a potential mediator – holding calls with both Tehran and Gulf leaders and, according to multiple reports, actively relaying messages between the parties.

The sequence Russia envisions (Korybko, Substack) proceeds in these stages:

• a ceasefire through mutual compromise
• the withdrawal of US military forces from the region
• the negotiation of a Gulf non-aggression pact, establishing deployment limits, codes of conduct, and crisis communication channels
• Iran’s accession to the Saudi-Pakistani mutual defence arrangement
• the eventual formalisation of a collective security bloc

One argument gaining traction is that a US military drawdown from the Gulf could ease tensions on multiple fronts simultaneously:

• Iran would no longer feel threatened by American forward-deployed forces
• Gulf states would themselves face less risk, as they would no longer be seen by Tehran as platforms for hosting those forces
• the US would be relieved of defending partners it deems insufficiently willing to share military burdens

A new order becoming possible

What gives this scenario credibility is the compound cost of the war itself.

Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, with oil prices surging past $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022. 

European governments have publicly distanced themselves from Washington.

American allies across the Gulf are quietly concluding that the security architecture of the past four decades has become a liability rather than an asset.

Pape’s strategic verdict is unsparing: the Trump administration now faces a choice between accepting limited political costs now or risking far greater ones later (Foreign Affairs).

The deeper issue is systemic. The international order that emerged after the Cold War is no longer coherent enough to absorb repeated shocks without changing shape. The Iran crisis illustrates this clearly.

Despite a national debt that has now crossed $39tn and vast military capabilities – with between 750 and 800 overseas bases – the US has found itself unable to subdue a large and resilient state without escalating to a level that remains unthinkable for all sides.

What Washington sought to foreclose through precision airpower, it may have inadvertently opened: a West Asian region that is beginning to organise its own security, on its own terms, under a regional architecture that Washington neither designed nor controls.

The road to that architecture remains contested, uncertain and deeply difficult. Trust between Iran and the Gulf states has collapsed during the war. Iran, too, faces its own post-war reckoning – between the language of resistance and the demands of governance.

Though the Third Gulf War has not resolved the region’s contradictions, many now acknowledge that the global landscape is changing fast. A new, multipolar geopolitical arrangement is becoming a functional reality rather than a theoretical scenario.

Writing for the Moscow-based think tank Valdai Discussion Club (March 2026), programme director Timofey Bordachev argued that such a new geopolitical order is no longer an imaginative escape. For the first time, he said, it is a realistic possibility.

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