ORIGINS & CAUSES
- What were the root causes of the Iran-Israel conflict, and how did the US get drawn in?
The conflict’s deepest roots go back to a single transformative moment: Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The new regime did not merely dislike Israel — it wrote hostility toward it into its founding ideology, framing Israel as the “Little Satan” and an instrument of American imperialism in the region. What followed over the next four decades was a methodical Iranian effort to turn that ideological enmity into strategic reality: a nuclear programme advancing toward weapons capability, a large and growing ballistic missile arsenal, and the “Axis of Resistance” — a network of proxy forces positioned to threaten Israel from multiple directions simultaneously. For Israel, this combination eventually crossed the threshold from threat to existential danger.
The United States did not enter this conflict in a single decisive moment. Still, it drew in gradually — first as Israel’s primary partner in air defence, then as the guarantor of global non-proliferation norms that Iran was visibly eroding, and finally as a direct combatant when the Trump administration judged that Iran’s military weakening after the 2025 campaign had opened a window for military action.
- How did the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack reshape the broader confrontation?
October 7 set off a chain of events whose full strategic consequences Tehran almost certainly did not anticipate. The immediate result was the Gaza war — but what mattered more in the longer run was what Israel did in the wars that followed. Through 2024, Israel systematically degraded Hamas. More consequentially, between September and November 2024, it decapitated Hezbollah’s entire senior leadership in Lebanon — a blow that reverberated far beyond Lebanon itself. With Hezbollah broken, the Assad regime in Syria lost a critical pillar of support and collapsed in December 2024. By early 2025, the proxy buffer Iran had spent three decades carefully constructing — the forward deterrence that was supposed to keep any direct conflict away from Iranian territory — had been stripped away, component by component. Iran found itself exposed, facing Israel and the United States without the defensive depth its strategy had always assumed. October 7 was, in retrospect, proved to be a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions for Tehran.
- How did Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” strategy contribute to the escalation?
The Axis of Resistance was Iran’s answer to a fundamental strategic problem: how does a state threaten a powerful adversary without inviting direct retaliation on its own territory? The answer was proxy warfare — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias scattered across Iraq, each providing Iran with deniable reach and the ability to keep Israel under constant pressure from multiple fronts. After October 7, these forces launched coordinated barrages designed to overwhelm Israeli responses and demonstrate the axis’s power. Instead, they invited precisely the attrition campaign Israel had been preparing for — and one by one, the pillars of the network were destroyed. By the time direct Iran-Israel exchanges began in 2025, the axis had been reduced to survival mode: capable of rhetorical solidarity and occasional harassment strikes, but unable to mount the kind of coordinated strategic response that might have deterred Israeli action. Iran’s forward deterrence had been hollowed out. It was left to face its most powerful adversaries essentially alone.
PRIMARY GOALS & REGIME CHANGE
- What are the primary goals of the US and Israeli operation?
Operation Epic Fury (USA) / Roaring Lion (Israel), launched on 28 February 2026, was built around four core US military objectives: dismantling Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and the industrial infrastructure that produces it; annihilating Iran’s navy and closing off its ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz; permanently denying Iran a nuclear weapons capability; and degrading the IRGC command structure along with the proxy networks it funds and directs. Israel’s stated ambitions went further. Netanyahu framed the campaign not merely as the neutralisation of specific military capabilities but as the elimination of the “existential threat” posed by the Ayatollah regime — working down through Iran’s entire defence industrial chain, from the large IRGC-linked missile assembly plants to the smaller component suppliers that feed them. Trump, in his characteristic register, publicly framed the operation as delivering “freedom for the people of Iran” and ending the activities of the “number one state sponsor of terror.”
- Is “regime change” an official objective?
Not in so many words. Pentagon briefings have been careful to frame the campaign in terms of discrete military objectives — missiles, the navy, nuclear sites, proxy networks — rather than the fate of the Iranian government. But the gap between the stated military objectives and the unstated political ones is not hard to read. Trump and senior officials have spoken of toppling the clerical regime and called on Iranians to “seize their destiny.” The deliberate targeting and assassination of Supreme Leader Khamenei on the opening night of operations is not the kind of act a government undertakes when its goals are purely military. Analysts have consistently treated it as a calculated step toward regime collapse. Israel, by most serious assessments, holds regime change as a strategic objective — an expansion of the goals it set in the June 2025 Twelve-Day War. The real endgame, as analysts have described it, is what they call “strategic disarmament”: the permanent elimination of Iran’s ability to project power through missiles, nuclear latency, and proxy networks. Whether the regime itself survives that process in some diminished form or collapses entirely appears to be a secondary concern.
IRANIAN LEADERSHIP POST-KHAMENEI
- Who is leading Iran following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei?
Ali Khamenei was killed on 28 February 2026 in the opening strikes of Operation Epic Fury — the first sitting Supreme Leader to be assassinated in the history of the Islamic Republic. The immediate aftermath saw an interim three-person leadership council assume power: President Masoud Pezeshkian, Guardian Council member Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, and Judiciary head Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i. The Assembly of Experts convened from 3 to 8 March and on 9 March unanimously elected Mojtaba Khamenei — the slain leader’s son — as his successor. He is 56 years old, deeply embedded in the IRGC, and regarded by those who know the Iranian system as a hardliner in his father’s mould, with no apparent inclination toward the kind of accommodation with the West that a less ideologically committed successor might have offered. The IRGC, meanwhile, holds de facto dominant power over security and decision-making in the vacuum the assassination created. Both Trump and Israel have already declared the appointment unacceptable. Israel has gone further — it has described Mojtaba Khamenei as a potential future target.
GLOBAL ENERGY MARKETS
- How will the war affect global energy markets?
The short answer is: badly, and possibly for a long time. Analysts have described the energy disruption as the worst shock to global markets since the 1970s oil crisis. The immediate trigger was Iran’s partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supplies and a significant share of LNG shipments pass every day. Within days of the closure, Brent crude surged from around $70 to over $110 per barrel, crossing $100 on 8 March 2026 for the first time in four years. European natural gas prices nearly doubled. Asian LNG costs spiked sharply. Tanker rates across the board soared as shipping companies rerouted or halted transits. Israeli strikes on Iran’s South Pars gas field and IRGC threats against Gulf oil infrastructure added a further layer of anxiety to already strained markets. The vulnerability is not evenly distributed. Around 80% of Asia’s oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Countries like Vietnam, Pakistan, and Indonesia hold emergency oil reserves estimated at less than 20 days — a dangerously thin buffer if the closure is prolonged. The International Energy Agency responded by releasing 400 million barrels from strategic reserves worldwide, a significant intervention that nonetheless covers only approximately four days of normal global demand.
RUSSIA AND CHINA
8. What are Russia’s and China’s positions?
Both countries have condemned the strikes in strong diplomatic language while doing very little that would concretely change the situation on the ground — a posture that has revealed, more clearly than any diplomatic formulation, how conditional their partnerships with Iran actually are.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov called the strikes “a deliberate, premeditated, and unprovoked act of armed aggression.” Putin expressed personal condolences over Khamenei’s death and called for an immediate ceasefire and return to diplomacy. Behind this public stance, however, Moscow has offered Tehran no direct military assistance. The reason is straightforward: Russia’s military is fully committed to Ukraine, and it has no interest in a confrontation with the United States over Iran. Russia’s bilateral strategic partnership treaty with Iran pointedly lacks a mutual-defence clause — a detail that matters enormously now. What Russia has reportedly done, behind the scenes, is share sensitive intelligence with Iran, including the precise locations of US warships and aircraft in the region — an allegation Putin publicly denied when Trump confronted him with it. Russia is also, it should be noted, a beneficiary of the conflict: elevated oil prices driven by Strait of Hormuz disruption directly ease the financial pressure of Western sanctions on Moscow.
China’s public position has been one of unambiguous condemnation. Beijing called the killing of Khamenei “a grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty” that “tramples on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter” and demanded an immediate halt to military operations. In practice, China’s support for Iran has been limited to diplomatic messaging, the supply of missile spare parts, and reported discussions on anti-ship missile systems — nothing that approaches direct military involvement. China abstained from a UN Security Council resolution condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf states, a studied ambiguity that reflects its desire to maintain working relationships with Gulf energy exporters even while criticising the US-Israeli campaign. Beijing’s longer game appears to be positioning itself as the indispensable post-conflict mediator and regional stabiliser. This power was not a party to the destruction and can therefore broker what comes after.
IMPACT ON REGIONAL ALLIES
9. What has been the impact on regional allies and the balance of power?
Iran’s decision to widen its retaliation beyond Israel has produced a strategic result it almost certainly did not intend. By striking across nine countries — hitting US military installations and civilian infrastructure in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE — Iran exposed Gulf states to direct attack at a scale they had not previously experienced. The effect has been paradoxical: governments that had carefully maintained public neutrality or quiet distance from the conflict have been pushed, covertly but unmistakably, toward the US-Israeli security umbrella. Intelligence-sharing with Israel is deepening. Security cooperation is expanding. Israeli defence exports to Gulf countries are growing. All of this is happening beneath the surface of public statements that continue to call for restraint and de-escalation. Iran’s proxy network, meanwhile, has been largely absent from the 2026 fighting — weakened by prior Israeli degradation, struggling to reconstitute, and capable of offering little more than solidarity gestures. The cumulative effect has been a significant and durable shift in the regional balance of power: Iran militarily diminished, its forward deterrence dismantled, and its neighbours moving — quietly but unmistakably — in the opposite direction.
(More to follow)
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