By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

Washington’s long war in the Middle East has finally produced the one outcome US strategists always feared: a region where America bleeds money and credibility, Israel absorbs unprecedented blows, and Gulf monarchies discover that outsourcing their security to Washington has made them front-line targets, not protected clients. The aura of US–Israeli invincibility is cracking under the pressure of Iranian counterstrategy, fraying alliances, and a sharply changing Western public mood.​

Washington’s latest war in the Gulf has thus produced a paradox: the very Gulf monarchies that banked on US protection now find themselves exposed to Iranian retaliation, while the US and Israel discover that overwhelming firepower cannot secure political victory. The more the campaign drags on, the clearer it becomes that Iran does not need to “win” in a conventional sense; it only needs to make the war unwinnable and prohibitively costly for its adversaries. Iran is doing this in style.

Gulf security turned inside out

For decades, Gulf rulers treated alignment with Washington as an insurance policy. Hosting US bases, buying US weapons and integrating into American defence architectures were sold domestically as the price of protection against Iran. Today, that logic has been turned on its head. US bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE and Iraq sit squarely within range of Iranian missiles and drones, and each new round of US or Israeli strikes on Iranian targets turns those facilities into magnets for retaliation. Tehran has exploited this dependence with deliberate messaging. By framing its counterattacks as punishment for complicity, Iran signals that any state offering territory, airspace or logistical support to US operations will be treated as part of the battlefield.

It is a strategy designed not only to impose military costs but also to destabilise the internal legitimacy of Gulf governments, making them appear to be extensions of US power rather than sovereign actors. The result is that Gulf states now pay a direct security and economic price for decisions made in Washington and Tel Aviv. This dynamic is most visible around critical infrastructure: oil facilities, ports and coastal cities. Iranian strikes and threats against energy assets have rattled markets and populations alike, reinforcing the sense that hosting foreign forces has made these states less secure, not more. Gulf rulers, long accustomed to outsourcing hard security, now find that they cannot easily disentangle themselves from a conflict they did not initiate but were central to enabling.

An Israelfirst war

The war has also stripped away any lingering ambiguity about American priorities. In practice, the current campaign is shaped first and foremost around Israel’s security concerns: degrading Iranian missile and drone capabilities, protecting Israeli cities from salvos, and signalling that Tehran will pay a heavy price for any direct or proxy attacks on Israel. Gulf facilities, radars and air corridors are part of this architecture, but they are supporting actors, not central beneficiaries. The notion that Washington is fighting for a stable regional order looks ever more hollow when measured against who is actually bearing the material risks.At the same time, Israel’s own aura of military invincibility has taken a beating and now confront a reality in which each escalation yields diminishing returns, while the country’s dependence on American diplomatic and military cover is more visible than ever.

Iran’s strategy: deny victory, raise the price

Iran’s leaders know they cannot defeat the US and Israel outright. Their goal instead is to make any campaign against them long, uncertain and economically painful. That means exploiting vulnerabilities in three domains: global energy flows, alliance cohesion and domestic politics inside adversary states. By targeting shipping and threatening chokepoints near the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has managed to paralyse a waterway through which a large share of the world’s oil passes. Tanker traffic has slowed, major shipping companies have rerouted or suspended sailings and oil prices have surged. This weaponisation of geography turns the war into a global economic problem, spreading the pain to governments and consumers far from the battlefield and undercutting Western claims that the conflict can be “contained.”

Militarily, Iran has chosen to accept tactical damage in exchange for strategic messaging. It absorbs airstrikes on infrastructure yet continues to fire enough missiles and drones to show that its offensive capabilities cannot be neatly neutralised. Each wave of retaliation reminds regional states and global markets that Iran still has the capacity to impose costs. That is the essence of a denial strategy: not to triumph on the battlefield but to prevent the other side from achieving its war aims at an acceptable price.

Tehran’s network of allies and partner militias adds another layer of pressure. Attacks on US linked targets, Gulf assets and shipping can be calibrated to maintain constant, lowlevel instability. This forces Washington and its partners to expend resources on defence and crisis management while never being sure where the next blow will fall. Over time, such a pattern erodes patience and makes offramps more attractive, especially when measurable gains remain elusive.

Trump’s war and the search for an exit

Against this backdrop, President Trump has discovered that his promises of a short, decisive campaign against Iran have collided with reality. The war has not delivered regime change, nor has it definitively neutralised Iran’s missile capabilities or forced Tehran into strategic retreat. Instead, the conflict has produced rising oil prices, disrupted trade and growing unease among allies and domestic constituencies.

Trump’s aides insist the war will end when he determines the military objectives have been met, but that formula underscores the political, not strategic, nature of the endgame. With spiralling costs, a strained alliance network, and mounting domestic scepticism about fighting what many Americans see as Israel’s war, the president is now under pressure to find a way out that preserves his strongman image while tacitly acknowledging that the campaign against Iran has not met its core goals. One telling indicator has been energy policy. As the Strait of Hormuz crisis pushed oil prices higher and nervous traders priced in prolonged disruption, the administration eased some restrictions on Russian oil flows to stabilise supply. For a president who previously urged allies to curb purchases of Russian crude, the shift is striking. It signals a willingness to dilute earlier positions to contain economic fallout from a war of choice – a move that many observers interpret as a sign of strategic overreach.

In Washington, commentators and policy analysts have begun to speak openly about “moving the goalposts.” The initial rhetoric of crushing Iran’s military, undermining the regime and reordering the region has quietly given way to more modest formulations about degrading capabilities or “restoring deterrence.” Such vagueness is typical of leaders looking for a way to declare victory and leave, even when their original objectives remain unmet. As one specialist put it, US aims have “shifted from neutralising missiles, to regime change, to picking Iran’s next leader, to demanding unconditional surrender,” without achieving any of them, leaving the administration to move the goalposts to justify an eventual exit.

Domestically, Trump faces a public increasingly wary of openended foreign wars, especially those seen as primarily serving Israel’s security agenda rather than core US interests. Polling over the past two years showed declining sympathy for Israel’s military campaigns and growing demand for restraint. As US casualties mount, costs rise and progress remains hard to define, pressure for an exit – or at least a deescalation – will only intensify.

The war has also laid bare the limits of US leadership among its allies. Calls for a broad multinational naval presence to secure the Strait of Hormuz have been met with caution. After Iraq, Afghanistan and the prolonged Gaza crisis, many governments question the wisdom of following Washington into yet another conflict with no clear endstate and significant blowback. The Iran war has become a test case of whether the US can still marshal coalitions for highrisk ventures; so far, the answer appears to be “only partially.”

At the United Nations, early reactions have played into longstanding accusations of double standards. Iran’s attacks on Gulf and Israeli targets have been swiftly condemned, while the broader legality of the US–Israeli air campaign, and the years of pressure that preceded it, receive far more cautious treatment. For much of the Global South, this confirms the view that Western powers still write the rules and exempt themselves from them when convenient. That perception further weakens the moral authority underpinning US claims to global stewardship.

The end of invincibility

Taken together, these strands point toward a larger shift. The myth of US and Israeli military invincibility – already badly damaged by Gaza genocide and failed occupations – is now being challenged by a state adversary that has learned to survive under constant pressure and respond asymmetrically. Iran has shown that it can absorb punishment, retaliate in ways that matter, and exploit the political and economic vulnerabilities of its opponents.

For Gulf states, this is an uncomfortable awakening. Their strategy of buying security from Washington has left them dangerously exposed to the crossfire of a conflict they cannot control. For Israel, the war highlights that even vast technological and military advantages do not easily translate into lasting security when facing a determined, adaptive foe. For the United States, the campaign exposes a structural problem: immense capacity to destroy, but diminishing ability to translate destruction into sustainable political outcomes. None of this means that US or Israeli power is about to vanish. Both remain formidable military actors. But the era in which American force could reshape regions with limited pushback, cloaked in an aura of inevitability and exceptionalism, is fading. In its place is a messier world where adversaries can deny victory, allies hedge their bets, and publics question the costs of permanent war.

In the skies over the Gulf and the narrow waters of Hormuz, that transition is on full display. The longer the war against Iran continues without clear objectives or achievable endstates, the more obvious it becomes that the old order – built on unquestioned US primacy and Israeli military dominance, underwritten by Gulf money – is cracking. What replaces it is still uncertain, but one thing is clear: the old guarantees no longer hold, and those who cling to them risk paying the highest price.

A growing chorus in the Global South, and increasingly within Western societies themselves, now argues that the world must be saved from the twin dangers of US and Zionist exceptionalism and their associated military adventurism. This critique holds that the belief in a selfassigned right to police the globe, backed by an unaccountable Israeli security doctrine, has produced a cycle of illegal wars, collective punishment and permanent instability, from Iraq and Gaza to the current Iran confrontation. Breaking that cycle, they insist, requires building a rulesbased order that applies international law equally to all states, constraining unilateral interventions and placing genuine multilateral diplomacy above the narrow strategic obsessions of Washington and Tel Aviv.