The Iran War Has Changed the World Forever

Many of the immediate consequences of the Israeli-American war with Iran are already clear. The further emergence of drones and missiles as dominant weapons of war; the danger to the global economy from the threats to vital chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb; and the inadequacy of U.S. weapons procurement, among other issues, have garnered widespread and entirely merited attention.

Yet as important enough as those developments are, the Iran conflict could also have far wider and longer-term implications—changes that could be truly transformative for the Middle East region and the rest of the world. Decades from now, we might look back on this conflict as a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped what had been bedrock principles of modern geopolitics.

While it would have been better to have discerned these potential break points before the war, there may still be time to take action to try to steer them in favorable directions. As always, the first requirement is to recognize the possible seismic changes that may already be underway.

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Gulf States Shifting to Offense—and More War

There has been no shortage of commentary on the new technologies of combat highlighted by the Iran war, with the United States having been mostly focused on defensive systems. Americans have both marveled at the superb performance of Western interceptors and hyperventilated over their dwindling stockpiles of them. However, the Persian Gulf states—and likely many other threatened middle and smaller powers—have taken another lesson from the conflict: The best defense is a good offense.

U.S., Israeli, European, and South Korean interceptor munitions have performed brilliantly, shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Coupled with the ability of Western fighter aircraft to shoot down drones and cruise missiles—and to suppress the launches of ballistic missiles—Iran has done far less damage to its targets than would otherwise have been the case. In short, air and missile defenses have performed extremely well so far. That’s not nothing.

The problem is that it has not proved to be anything close to enough. Because drones; cruise missiles; and even, to a considerable extent, ballistic missiles are so much cheaper, easier to produce, store, hide, and launch than most of the interceptors that the United States and its allies use against them, Iran has been able to keep making more and launching them at targets across the Gulf, Jordan, and Israel. Even though the defenses are stopping roughly 90 percent of them, the 10 percent that are getting through are 100 percent too many.

Only the Israeli population is inured enough and its infrastructure hardened enough to prove undaunted by Iran’s counterstrikes. In stark contrast, the same levels of damage have proved catastrophic for the Gulf states. Energy companies, shipping companies, and insurance companies are all balking at the prospect of functioning with the residual threat of constant Iranian attacks, even if more than 90 percent are defeated. The 10 percent that have gotten through have done significant physical damage and far greater psychological damage. They called into question the current and planned future socioeconomic model of the Gulf states.

All of the modern Gulf economies were built in the expectation that their lands would be peaceful havens for commerce, hydrocarbon production, rest, and relaxation. Iran’s drone and missile attacks have shattered that, undermining the energy, manufacturing, trade, finance, investment, and tourism industries of the Gulf.

Who is going to want to invest, manufacture, or vacation in countries that are periodically subject to missile and drone attacks, even if nearly all of them are intercepted? Who wants to conduct business, import oil, invest money, trade goods, or take a vacation in a place where, a few times a week (or day), you hear explosions overhead, even if they are the sound of defensive systems successfully intercepting attacking munitions?

At some level, the Gulf governments understood this. However, what they assumed before the war was that the threat of massive retaliation by the United States (or Israel, after the Abraham Accords), would limit the size and scope of Iranian missile and drone attacks—enabling their defenses to defeat any small retaliations that Tehran thought necessary for honor’s sake.

They were counting on the restraint that Iran had consistently shown in the past, including as recently as the short June 2025 war, because Iran had always feared that a larger response would trigger a U.S. bid for regime change.

Of course, in this war, by trying—and failing—to achieve regime change and then taking it off the table altogether, the United States has turned that logic on its head. Iran now has the ability to threaten both the Gulf economies directly with missile and drone attacks and the global economy by throttling tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz without fear of a U.S. effort to overthrow its regime. Americans know that they can’t achieve regime change by air power alone and (so far) lack the political will to employ the ground forces that would be necessary to do it for certain. With the threat of regime change gone, it is Iran that has demonstrated that it can deter U.S. and Israeli attacks at least as effectively as the United States and Israel can limit Iranian attacks on the Gulf.

This state of affairs—in which the Gulf states now have such reservations about relying on the United States (or Israel) to deter Iranian attack—is intolerable. It is why they are all purchasing or contemplating acquiring fleets of drones and missiles of their own. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait are all purchasing Turkish drones, while the Saudis are working with U.S. corporations to begin to build thousands of their own. Likewise, the UAE is trying to acquire drones and drone manufacturing capabilities from Israel, China, and Ukraine. Qatar and Bahrain are in talks to do the same.

While it could prove that a balance of terror will impose a wary peace on drone- and missile-armed adversaries on both sides of the Gulf, just as the Cold War did for the United States and Soviet Union, that outcome is much less likely in this instance. As Bernard Brodie famously said back in 1946, what made a nuclear balance so effective at keeping the pace was the unmistakable power of nuclear weapons. No one could misunderstand what would happen if even a single nuclear weapon—let alone several dozen—were detonated in their country. When both the Gulf states and Iran possess thousands of conventional drones and missiles, that certainty of incalculable damage will be absent.

Instead, the arsenals will probably serve as a spur to further warfare. Iran will see the Gulf states attempting to build offensive strike forces of their own and will want to demonstrate that these will not be enough to deter Iranian attacks. The hard-line fanatics now in charge in Tehran will want to ensure that the conservative Gulf monarchs believe that Iran can take far more punishment than they can, and so Iran will look for opportunities to strike the Gulf to prove it.

In turn, the Gulf states will feel the need to retaliate to establish that they won’t be bullied and can give as good as they get. And the United States may well choose to keep out for fear that coming to the defense of the Gulf states will cause Iran to shut down the Strait of Hormuz again. All of this portends multiple missile and drone exchanges as each side seeks to bolster its capabilities, find weaknesses in the other side to exploit, and demonstrate its resolve.

As bad as this is likely to be, there is one more unfortunate development to consider. Once the Gulf states acquire the capacity to project power beyond their borders—something that none of them has had for roughly a century—they are likely to start using it and using it to do things that the United States won’t necessarily like.

This, too, has been the history of the Gulf. In the 1970s, when the United States armed the Iranian shah in hope that he would relieve some of Washington’s defense burden in the region, he began using his new military to do all kinds of things that the United States did not like, from backing the Kurds against Saddam Hussein to seizing Gulf islands from the UAE. Likewise, over the past decade, at American urging, the UAE has developed modest power projection capabilities of its own, which it has been using to pursue its interests in Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa, often in opposition to U.S. policies.

The Gulf is acquiring offensive military capabilities for the first time in modern history. We can call it burden-sharing, and perhaps it will mean that the United States will no longer have to defend them and their invaluable energy exports. But it seems far more likely to provoke greater conflict in the region, and to convince other states in other parts of the world that they should and can do the same.

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China Beginning to Project Power

For roughly the past four decades, China has been the ultimate free rider in the Middle East. Beijing has relied on Washington to keep the region stable by dealing with its endless security problems—from interstate wars to intrastate wars—and allow China to concentrate on enriching itself through favorable trade, investment, and infrastructure construction.

In their defense, the Chinese haven’t been subtle or bashful about it. I once had the Chinese vice minister for foreign affairs berate me for the United States’ failure to keep the peace of the region on China’s behalf. He literally shouted at me that China did not understand the Middle East, with its religion and “craziness,” and so it was Washington’s responsibility to keep things quiet—a responsibility that he felt Americans were failing at. I wasn’t even in the U.S. government at the time.

Moreover, the Chinese certainly weren’t the first, even if they may have been the most blatant. For almost a century, the United States played China to Britain’s United States. Beginning in the 19th century, American merchants plied the waters of the Gulf in search of lucre, deliberately disdainful of local politics and conflict, leaving all of that to the British until London withdrew its forces from the region in the early 1970s. Even then, the United States did not fully take on the role of regional hegemon until the 1990s, after the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait convinced Washington that the region would not remain stable on its own.

So, like the United States—and even to a lesser extent, Britain—before it, China has been allowed to ignore the constant problems of the Gulf by leaving them to someone else. However, the events of the past decade, more so the past three years, and even more so the past six months, have been calling the viability of this arrangement into question.

Whereas before Oct. 7, 2023, China was the talk of the Gulf, almost immediately after the horrific Hamas attack, it fell from the conversation almost entirely. What all of the countries of the region realized was that China had no capacity to project power into the Middle East. And in a time of war, its vast economic involvement in the region counted for little, if anything. China could not defend its regional friends against attack. China could not threaten regional enemies. U.S. military operations such as Rough Rider, Midnight Hammer, and now Epic Fury were entirely beyond Chinese capabilities.

About the most that the Chinese have been able to do is to encourage their Pakistani allies to act as intermediaries between Tehran and Washington, but even months later, this has not ended the conflict, and there is no sign that Chinese interests are being considered in the negotiations.

And therein lies the rub. China has very considerable interests in the Middle East. China is the biggest oil importer in the world, and it relies on the Gulf for up to 50 percent of its imports. Chinese trade with the Gulf states has been growing at a torrid pace, now accounting for more than $500 billion annually, and it is expected to reach $800 billion by 2030. The Gulf region is also a critical market and transshipment point for Chinese goods flowing onward to Europe, western Asia, and Africa.

So, the great question here is whether the carnage wrought by three years of warfare across the region, punctuated by the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran this year, all of which threaten Chinese interests, will prompt Beijing to reconsider its powerlessness and willingness to rely on others to secure its vital interests in the Middle East. Will Beijing choose to make a determined effort to build a capability to project power into the Gulf so that it can demand compliance with Chinese needs, from both the locals and extraregional actors such as the United States?

If Beijing chooses that pathway—and the aircraft carriers that it is now deploying have always seemed far more useful in the Indian Ocean and North Arabian Sea than in the South China Sea—it will be a major change in the military balance and security relationships of the Middle East.

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Israel Embracing Constant Borderland Warfare

Before the Iran war, in late 2024, I traveled to Israel with a small group of American military experts for extensive conversations with senior serving and former Israeli military officers.

As part of these discussions, the Israelis laid out the new defense doctrine that they were developing in response to the shock and horror of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. They intended to occupy buffer zones along their borders in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza and then conduct constant military operations against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic State, and other Arab extremist groups (or states) beyond those buffer zones to ensure that none of them were ever able to develop the infrastructure or field forces to mount a major attack on Israel ever again. It is exactly what Israel has been pursuing ever since.

At the time, I observed that what the Israelis were proposing was something akin to the defense doctrine of the Roman Empire. The Romans also frequently established buffer zones—with friendly tribes or denuded territory—just across their borders and then conducted constant military operations against the barbarian tribes beyond to punish them, weaken them, and prevent them from mounting major military operations against the Roman territories themselves. It was a doctrine of constant warfare beyond the empire’s frontiers to ensure peace within them.

I pointed out that prosecuting that doctrine would require a very different Israel from the one that existed before Oct. 7. The superb military analyst Aaron MacLean, host of the School of War podcast, was also part of that U.S. team, and he put a fine point on it: He wondered aloud whether the “start-up nation” culture could be consistent with a military doctrine of Roman frontiers.

For Israel, adopting the Roman frontiers approach will require a reversion to something like its original defense doctrine—and the national culture that supported it. From its founding in 1948 (and arguably before then) on up to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Israel’s defense doctrine emphasized preemptive or even preventive offensive operations to eliminate potential military threats before they could be employed and fight battles on the enemy’s territory, far from Israel’s own vulnerable population centers.

It required a population both trained and committed to long-term reserve military service, to enable a small country to maintain a large enough field force to defeat its more populous adversaries. It required a people ready to make constant individual sacrifices—including the supreme sacrifice—for the good of the nation. A defense doctrine of Roman frontiers will require the same.

But slowly after 1973, as it became ever clearer that neither the Arab armies nor the anti-Israeli terrorist groups no longer posed an existential threat to the state, Israeli culture changed. As one of the most insightful studies of the changing relationship of the Israeli people to their armed forces put it, they shifted from a culture of self-sacrifice to one of self-actualization. This shift gained further steam as Israel’s economy began to boom in the early 2000s, to the point where ever more young Israelis disdained service in the armed forces, let alone a military career, and it became harder and harder to get the older generations to take their reserve duty seriously.

To hear Israelis talk, Oct. 7 changed all that. They insist that they are again ready to return to the total self-sacrifice for the sake of national security that made the original defense doctrine possible. The Roman frontiers approach represents the 21st century version of that strategy. But it remains an open question whether that spirit will persist for decades—and if it does, whether it will suck the energy and creativity from Israel’s private sector that made the “start-up nation” such a wonder.

In addition to the potential demands on Israeli society and culture required to enable it, the shift to Roman frontiers poses other dilemmas for Israel. In particular, the economic boom that came from the country’s internet entrepreneurship required a high degree of connectivity with the rest of the developed world. However, the security policies associated with Roman frontiers in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere have steadily eroded goodwill toward Israel in many of those same states. A number have considered or even imposed (relatively circumscribed) sanctions on Israel in response. The harder that Israel hews to this defense doctrine, the more that these same ties may come under strain.

Nowhere is this stress more important to Israel than in the United States, where shocking numbers on both the far left and far right have turned against the U.S.-Israel special relationship. Here as well, the aggressive military operations required of the Roman frontiers approach have alienated many otherwise sympathetic Americans and provided the perfect excuse for the anti-Zionists (and antisemites) on both political extremes to demand an outright abrogation of the alliance. If these trends continue, Israelis may soon face a fundamental choice between their cherished relationship with the United States and their new approach to their own security.

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Iran Realizing Its Potential for Hegemony

Still another great question that only the future can answer is whether a war meant to retard Iranian hegemony in the Middle East has instead enabled it. The United States and Israel attacked Iran in hope of overthrowing its odious regime and, if that failed, cutting it down to size by eliminating the means that it employs to project power across the region.

Of course, the initial strikes did kill much of Iran’s top leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, but that did not lead to the downfall of the regime—at least not yet—and in the short term has left Washington to face a worse version of it.

In killing Khamenei, Israel and the United States removed a monstrous leader, but one who was conservative, cautious, and extremely wary of U.S. military power. He has been succeeded by a leadership that is far more hard-line, aggressive, belligerent, and risk-tolerant.

Indeed, as best we understand it, Khamenei consistently limited Iran’s conventional military actions against the United States and Israel because he feared that escalation would beget escalation and eventually trigger a determined U.S. effort to kill him and overturn his regime. He repeatedly prevented Iran’s hard-liners from indulging their preference for more violent attacks on Israel and American interests. These same hard-liners are now in charge in Tehran and unsurprisingly waging a far more aggressive campaign against the United States, unconstrained by Khamenei’s worries.

As for Iranian military power, the war has almost certainly set back the country’s ballistic missile and drone production program for months, possibly longer, although the Iranians are not only rebuilding but also improving the quality of their systems with Russian and Chinese help. The war may also have further set back Tehran’s nuclear program, although that is even harder to tell. And it did eliminate some Iranian power projection capabilities—its navy and air force—although these were not particularly important elements of either Iran’s threat or its defense. Yet rather than diminish the country’s ability to use force to influence regional and global affairs, the war could end up enhancing it.

Tehran seems to have embraced a pair of policies that existed only in theory beforehand. First, Iran now knows that it can attenuate or even choke off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz without triggering a massive, globally backed, U.S.-led military campaign to reopen it and overthrow the Iranian regime. That was the fear that had kept Iran from doing so since 1979. (It is worth noting that, contrary to common misperceptions, Iran never actually tried to shut down the strait during the Iran-Iraq War. It had far greater capabilities to try to do so, but it used only a tiny portion of them to harass maritime traffic, mostly in the Persian Gulf to drive up the price of oil to increase the value of its exports and convince the United States and the Gulf states to end their support for Iraq.) Second, Iran learned that it can lob thousands of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones at the United States’ Gulf allies with outsized impact compared to the actual damage inflicted.

Moreover, we should remember that many of those now in charge in Tehran opposed the 2015 nuclear deal because they wanted war, not negotiations, with the United States, and they wanted a nuclear arsenal to prevent the United States either from attacking them or preventing them from attacking other countries. By placing them firmly in charge, at least for now, the war has probably made a new nuclear deal with Iran an even steeper climb than it was beforehand. It may well have convinced a group that already wanted nuclear weapons that such an arsenal is the only way to prevent still more U.S. and/or Israeli attacks.

Finally, the war has so far tightened cooperation between Iran, Russia, and China. That pseudo-alliance had frayed considerably during the June 2025 conflict because neither Moscow nor Beijing did much to help Tehran, leading many Iranian hard-liners to question the extent of the “alliance.”

However, this time around, both Russia and China have furnished Iran with considerable material and informational assistance—providing air defenses, missile and drone components, targeting data, and other forms of help in rebuilding and improving Iran’s arsenal. Consequently, Iran could emerge from the war with a more meaningful partnership with Russia and China than it had when the war began.

It is for all of these reasons that the war must end with the United States having demonstrated to the Iranians that they cannot interrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or take potshots at the Gulf states with impunity. If it ends in such a way that the Iranians can resume either, let alone both, then the war will have rendered Iran far more influential than it was beforehand, regardless of the damage to its missile, drone, air, and naval forces.

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History’s most dramatic changes are always clearest in the rearview mirror. The great trick of policymaking is to recognize them in the present—or anticipate them in the future. It’s also the hardest thing to do.

Nothing is ever crystal clear in the moment, and denial is one of the most powerful factors in human psychology, individual and collective. There are always countervailing trends. People who do not want to believe that trends will continue will insist that they won’t, and they will grasp at the inevitable evidence to do so. Recognizing the signal in the noise is always hardest when it would be the easiest to respond to the signal.

None of us can say for certain that any of the possible changes that I’ve sketched out above will come to fruition. But their seeds are already there in the course of the United States’ ongoing war with Iran. It’s not too soon to recognize them and to start to consider how Washington might act to avert the worst and prepare for whatever it cannot prevent.