IRAN SH0CKED THE WORLD AGAIN!

This was, by any honest account, a war that only two governments actively sought. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken openly for decades about the existential threat he believes the Iranian government poses to Israel. President Trump has made the permanent elimination of Iranian nuclear capabilities a clear objective.

But while the two leaders share a core strategic goal, questions have multiplied about whether either gave serious thought to what a post-strike Middle East would actually look like, or whether the instability that a prolonged conflict generates was a factor in their planning.

For Washington’s Gulf allies — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others — the conflict has arrived as a profound and unwelcome shock. These governments view Iran with wariness and a degree of genuine fear, but they have also invested considerable effort in finding workable arrangements for coexisting in the same region. They understand, perhaps more acutely than governments in Washington or Jerusalem, what Iranian-generated instability across the broader region actually costs in practice.

Oman had believed itself to be close to brokering a diplomatic agreement between the United States and Iran on the nuclear question. In the hours immediately before the strikes began, Oman’s foreign minister went on American television and said a deal was within reach. It was not enough.

Among America’s more distant allies, few have faced a more uncomfortable position than the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has worked to maintain a balance between expressing solidarity with Washington and avoiding direct involvement in a conflict that Britain neither initiated nor endorsed. The decision over whether to deploy warships to the region has exposed, in a publicly visible way, the significantly diminished scale of Britain’s naval capacity compared to its historical standing.

Further afield, Russia finds itself in an ambiguous position. Moscow may have preferred Iran’s military infrastructure to remain intact, but the disruption to global oil markets has produced a windfall in energy revenues that provides meaningful relief for an economy under sustained pressure from the costs of its war in Ukraine.

China, as the world’s largest importer of Iranian oil, faces a more straightforwardly difficult situation. Beijing must now find alternative sources of crude at higher prices. The conflict has also demonstrated the limits of Chinese diplomatic influence — its “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” with Iran did not give Beijing the leverage to prevent an attack on a country it had formally aligned with.

A Familiar Trap