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Escalation and Reaction in the Middle East’s New Regional War
Since the war began on Saturday, February 28, everything has blurred together. Schools are closed. Routine has vanished. You try to balance obligations to work and family while, every few minutes or hours, dropping everything to run to the shelter. The distant booms overhead are a constant reminder that we are not stuck at home because of another pandemic. This is another war, part of a larger war that began on October 7, 2023.
After the first 48 hours or so, many Jerusalemites began venturing outside for some much-needed fresh air. Parents gathered in parks with their children, knowing that being together offered a brief reprieve from screens and breaking news. But everyone parents differently. When a preliminary missile warning sounded in the park, one girl told my five-year-old daughter, “Run, or you will die.”
Afterwards I wondered: is this really such a strange conversation? My daughter has spent half her life at war.
As we approach the end of the first week of this surprise – though hardly surprising – military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran, I want to offer a few unstructured reflections on what is happening and suggest places where you can learn more. There is no shortage of self-appointed experts offering confident predictions about where this is all headed. More than ever, I find myself repelled by the combination of certainty and self-righteousness that prevents people from asking questions or entertaining doubt about the future.
What I can offer instead are observations from my perspective, an Israeli-American who has spent half his life in both countries and a good chunk of it in dialogue with policymakers from around the region. I am sharing them as part of my personal effort to put words on screen and provide food for thought amidst a sea of emotional hot takes.
Bibi’s War to End All Wars?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already one of the most consequential political figures in Israeli history. By the time this chapter closes, he may also rank among the most consequential in American history. For four decades he has campaigned to convince the United States to confront terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa with military force.
Often, and in particular under Republican administrations, that argument found a receptive audience.
Few international leaders have been as effective at persuading Washington to consider military action. Netanyahu has long cast himself in the mold of Winston Churchill, who famously warned about the “unteachability of mankind” and the tendency of democratic societies to delay action until danger is already at the door.
For Netanyahu, the primary threat was always the Islamic Republic of Iran: a revolutionary regime moving steadily toward nuclear capability while financing, arming, and directing proxies across the region. For decades he warned that Iran’s ambitions extended far beyond Israel. In speech after speech – before the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and countless international forums – he urged Western leaders to act before it was too late.
Those speeches became so familiar to international audiences that at a certain point they fell on deaf ears. International action rarely matched the urgency Netanyahu projected.
But there is a greater tragedy within this story.
While Israel’s security establishment spent years focusing on Iran – successfully penetrating parts of Tehran’s political and military leadership and hacking into its national infrastructure – it underestimated a far more immediate threat closer to home. Hamas was often treated as a manageable problem rather than a strategic one. Successive Israeli governments, mostly under Netanyahu’s leadership, directly sustained Hamas through policies designed to divide Palestinian political factions and by delivering Qatari money to Gaza so that Hamas’ people could receive their salaries.
So the October 7th attack represented for Israel what Churchill described as a “jarring gong” – a realization that the threat it had deprioritized could inflict catastrophic damage and that it needed to embrace self-preservation at all costs. Netanyahu also felt those tremors, and has been in self-preservation mode ever since in a desperate effort to rewrite his legacy.
Newton’s third law holds that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. October 7th delivered a devastating blow to Israel. But Hamas’ surprise attack did more than ignite a war in Gaza; it also cleared the political and perhaps psychological obstacles that had long constrained Netanyahu’s broader confrontation with Iran and its regional proxies. Faced with the greatest security failure in Israel’s history, Netanyahu doubled down on his decades-long argument, and together with the United States is bombing Iran.
How you end a war is as if not more important than how the war is conducted. In this case, one of the biggest questions is the degree Israel and the United States are aligned with a common end goal and whether they will remain on the same page as the war continues. A week in, there are already signs that Jerusalem and Washington have different objectives, timetables, and end goals. According to Netanyahu, the war’s goal is not only about Iran’s nuclear and ballistic weapons programs, but to “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.” Trump has waffled back and forth between suggesting regime change to regime management (think Venezuela), both of which are difficult to achieve given the embedded nature of the Islamic Republic in Iranian society and institutions and the decision not to put boots on the ground. Equally concerning is the raw data, clearly presented by Alexander B. Downes in 2011 that “more than 40 percent of states targeted for regime change have a civil war within ten years.”
So while regime change and regime management may be the preferred options, the likely end result may be regime collapse, chaos, and more regional unrest, none of which deliver freedom to the Iranian people.
To understand how this war may unfold, however, we also need to look beyond Israel – to Washington, to the wider Middle East, and to the narratives shaping how societies interpret the conflict itself.
The American Pivot
For more than a decade, US strategy has been shaped by a gradual pivot toward Asia. Starting with the Obama administration and continuing through Biden and Trump, American policymakers increasingly viewed China as the primary long-term challenge to America’s era of global dominance. As a result, Washington sought to reduce its direct military commitments around the world, especially in the Middle East, and encouraged regional partners to assume greater responsibility for their own security. Although the US never fully disengaged from the region, the pivot towards Asia shrank Washington’s appetite for large-scale interventions.
So why is the US engaged in this war after Trump declared that the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed?
Ultimately, the answer may circle back to China. Beijing has supplied Tehran with military technology for decades and remains the largest consumer of Iranian oil. If this war succeeds in weakening or severing ties between China and Iran, it would place additional strain on Beijing while underscoring the limits of China’s global influence. While Netanyahu may have been able to convince Trump to engage because of the short term threat that Iran posed, the greater opportunity to remove another Chinese partner from the board might have been the driving motivation.
In spite of these potential rewards, American military engagement carries serious risks. A prolonged conflict could drain strategic military resources and expose elements of American military doctrine that would be valuable intelligence for its enemies. Successful military campaigns depend as much on supply chains as battlefield performance – on the ability to replenish weapons quickly, efficiently, and at scale. Already, there are growing questions about whether the United States retains that capacity. Both allies and rivals are paying close attention.
The political risks are equally serious for Trump and for Israel.
First, a protracted conflict could weaken the US economy and, by extension, the Republican hold on Congress. According to NBC polling, 52% of Americans already believe the United States “should not have taken military action against Iran,” and that number will likely increase as the war drags on.
Second, if the conflict fails to deliver clear results, public backlash may extend beyond Trump to Israel itself. American attitudes toward Israel have already shifted significantly since October 7, driven largely by negative perceptions of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza. If Israel is ultimately blamed for pulling Trump into another Middle Eastern quagmire (an argument already advanced by figures such as Tucker Carlson) it could mark a decisive turning point in the US-Israel relationship.
For what it’s worth, I do not believe Israel dragged Trump into this conflict. Trump is fully capable of making decisions on his own, and the advanced deployment of the US military to the region as Washington negotiated with Tehran suggests the administration was fully prepared for this possibility.
But narratives are often more powerful than facts. Netanyahu’s “super-Sparta” speech in September 2025 suggests he is prepared to absorb potential costs to the US-Israel relationship in pursuit of strategic objectives. At 76, Netanyahu does not have to worry about the long-term trajectory of that relationship. Others, however, do – and should be asking whether the war serves the long-term interests of both countries.
A Real Middle East Conflict
While Netanyahu and Trump remain the war’s protagonists, it would be inaccurate to describe this as a conflict only between Tehran, Washington, and Jerusalem. The Islamic Republic has made certain that this is a regional conflict by targeting 12 different states as of today, including attacks on national energy infrastructure, airports, and oil vessels in the Persian Gulf. Some of the statistics below are already out of date, but they demonstrate how decision makers in Tehran believe that expanding the battlefield, targeting the Gulf states, and disrupting the global energy market (and then the global economy) will eventually bring about an end to the war.
So far, the Gulf states have proven resilient in the face of Iranian aggression. It is possible that Iran’s decision will backfire and push Israel and the Gulf states closer together. However, given Israel’s polarizing actions in Gaza and its ongoing diplomatic challenges in the region, much will depend on how the war ends and how Israel’s role in the conflict is interpreted. It is imperative to hear out the Gulf states, whose geographic proximity to Iran gives them a far more immediate stake in the conflict and whose security calculations will ultimately shape whether this moment leads to deeper regional alignment or renewed distance.
The End of Days
October 7th initially produced a familiar rally-around-the-flag effect within Israeli society. In the months since the twelve-day war with Iran in June 2025, however, there has also been a noticeable increase in nationalist sentiment and religious language in public discourse. Conversations with neighbors and friends that once focused on deterrence, intelligence failures, and military strategy increasingly invoke the language of providence and miracles.
This response is not entirely surprising. The scale and pace of events over the past two and a half years have been historic, and people under prolonged stress often seek meaning that extends beyond conventional political analysis. For many Israelis, religious language offers a way to interpret events that otherwise feel beyond comprehension.
Yet interpreting contemporary political events through a religious lens carries strategic risks.
When contemporary political events are interpreted as manifestations of prophecy or destiny, analysis can shift away from the conventional tools of statecraft: choices, interests, incentives, and constraints. Policy debates can gradually move from questions of strategy to questions of faith. Iran offers a clear example of how religious ideology, once embedded in a political system, can shape strategic thinking and limit the range of acceptable policy options.
The danger becomes greater when both sides adopt this language. If an adversary already frames conflict in religious terms, mirroring that vocabulary risks reinforcing a worldview in which conflict is interpreted less as a contest of interests and more as the unfolding of historical or theological inevitabilities. Under such conditions, escalation can begin to feel unavoidable, compromise can be cast as betrayal, and restraint can be interpreted as weakness rather than prudence. This is an especially dangerous dynamic at a time when civilians across the region continue to pay the cost of war.
Even if this moment marks the end of a significant chapter in Israel’s history and in the history of the Middle East, it is not the End of Days. At most, it represents the closing of one chapter and the beginning of another. The more pressing question is what kind of future Israelis – and the region more broadly – hope to create, and whether the current course truly leads in that direction. Wars often clarify threats. They rarely promise peace.
