The Third Gulf War And The World It Is Already Remaking – Analysis

March 26, 2026 
By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

A war that began with an assassination is reshaping energy markets, security architectures, and global geopolitics in ways that will not simply reverse when the shooting stops.

On the morning of February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes against Iran in operations codenamed “Epic Fury” and “The Roaring Lion.” The war got bombastic names: “Operation Epic Fury” (United States) and “Operation The Roaring Lion” (Israel). The Times of Israel The opening salvo was spectacular and deliberate: the most dramatic aspect was the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, an event which elicited celebrations among some Iranians but dark and angry responses among regime loyalists. University of Oxford Within hours, Iran retaliated, launching missiles at American bases in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Bahrain. Additional missiles landed in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Kuwait City, and Riyadh. Iran also fired missiles at Israel, though these were largely intercepted by US naval forces and local air defense systems. University of Oxford

Four weeks later, the war has not ended. A ceasefire remains elusive. But even before the guns fall silent, the Third Gulf War — the name has already stuck among analysts, distinct from both the 1991 liberation of Kuwait and the 2003 invasion of Iraq — has produced effects so vast and so structural that they are already irreversible in their outlines. Energy systems have been shattered. A regional security architecture built over decades has collapsed. A food crisis is threatening to tip into famine. And the geopolitical map of the Greater Middle East is being redrawn not in diplomatic chambers but in the rubble of refineries and the wreckage of missile interceptor magazines. What follows is an attempt to reckon, domain by domain, with what this war is already doing to the world.

The Energy Shock That Broke All the Models

The most immediate, quantifiable, and globally consequential aftereffect of the Third Gulf War is energy. The US-Israeli war on Iran has already sent the price of benchmark Brent crude soaring to nearly $120 per barrel, close to its highest point of $147 recorded in July 2008. Al Jazeera But price alone understates the severity of what has happened. The 2026 US–Iran war has resulted in a physical chokepoint, taking offline part of the supply of oil and gas due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Tanker traffic disruptions have forced Gulf producers to curtail output as they have run out of storage capacity. Al Jazeera

The Strait of Hormuz — that narrow seam of water between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, barely 33 kilometers wide at its narrowest — carries roughly 20 percent of global oil and gas daily. The war has effectively erased the 20 million barrels of petroleum that used to traverse the waterway each day, according to a report released by the International Energy Agency. Now, only “a trickle” is passing through, the IEA said, and the implications for global oil markets are historic. Fortune

The human geography of this disruption is staggering. The oil production of Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates collectively dropped by a reported 6.7 million barrels per day by March 10, and by at least 10 million barrels per day as of March 12. It is the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Wikipedia The IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol put it in historical context at the National Press Club in Canberra: the fallout from the Iran war is equivalent to the two major oil crises of the 1970s and the 2022 gas crisis combined. CNBC That is not hyperbole from a bureaucrat seeking attention. It is a sober accounting of what physics and geography have conspired to produce.

The damage to infrastructure compounds the chokepoint problem in ways that will outlast any ceasefire. On March 18, Israeli drone strikes targeted facilities at Iran’s Asaluyeh complex, damaging four plants that treat gas from the offshore South Pars field. Tehran vowed to retaliate by hitting five key energy targets in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Hours later, Iranian missiles caused “extensive damage” to Ras Laffan, the heart of Qatar’s energy sector. Separate suspected Iranian aerial attacks caused damage to oil refineries in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and led to the closure of gas facilities in the UAE. The Conversation

Ras Laffan is not just Qatar’s gas hub; it is responsible for approximately one-fifth of global liquefied natural gas supply. Its damage is not merely a Gulf problem. Europe, which had turned to LNG imports instead of Russian pipeline gas after the invasion of Ukraine, has been left needing to replenish low gas stockpiles while major exporter Qatar is offline. World Economic Forum At the 2026 Nuclear Energy Summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the crisis as a reminder of the vulnerabilities created by relying on other regions for oil and gas, calling for more investment in nuclear energy alongside renewables.

Even beyond the physical destruction of facilities, the operational consequences of shut-ins will persist. “Shut-ins don’t just happen and then you turn a switch and everything’s back together. You have to get production back online, and that can be pretty time-consuming,” Richard Nephew of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy noted. Fortune Corrosion, structural wear, and the logistics of restart mean that even a prompt ceasefire and reopening of Hormuz would not immediately normalize supply. Unlike sanctions-driven disruptions, a sustained blocking of the Strait of Hormuz obstructs not only trade routes but the very ability of producers to export, pushing markets beyond adjustment mechanisms into forced demand destruction and structural reconfiguration. Al Jazeera

The tools that managed the 2022 Russia-Ukraine energy shock — rerouting, sanctions workarounds, diversification — simply do not apply here. There is no alternate route when the strait is mined and contested. The shock is physical, not financial.

Food, Water, and the Anatomy of a Humanitarian Crisis

Oil prices are legible to markets. Food and water shortages are legible to human bodies. The Third Gulf War has generated both in parallel.

The maritime blockade triggered a concurrent “grocery supply emergency” across GCC states, which rely on the Strait for over 80% of their caloric intake. By mid-March, 70% of the region’s food imports were disrupted, forcing retailers to airlift staples, resulting in a 40–120% spike in consumer prices. Wikipedia Gulf states have quietly built up strategic food reserves over recent years, but none were dimensioned for a siege of indefinite duration.

The water crisis is even more acute, because it has no easy international substitute. The crisis shifted toward fears about a humanitarian catastrophe following Iranian strikes on desalination plants — the source of 99% of drinking water in Kuwait and Qatar. Wikipedia These are not marginal utilities. In Kuwait and Qatar, there is no groundwater to fall back on, no river to tap. The desalination plant is the faucet. When it goes dark, people go thirsty within days, not weeks.

The global food system is implicated far beyond the Gulf’s borders. The Strait of Hormuz is not just a shipping lane for oil tankers; it is a critical artery of the global food system. Key food staples — including wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, sugar, and animal feed — travel through the Strait on their way to Gulf countries, and farmers around the world depend on the fertilizers and fuel that flow out of it. Project Syndicate The Fertilizer Institute stated that nearly 50% of global urea and sulfur exports, as well as 20% of global LNG — a key feedstock for nitrogen fertilizers — transit through the strait. Wikipedia When fertilizers stop flowing, the damage to next year’s harvests is not speculative. It is arithmetic.

A prolonged closure could disrupt agriculture worldwide and place more than 100 million people at risk of a humanitarian catastrophe, analysts warned. Project Syndicate Afghanistan is already bearing these costs disproportionately: much of Afghanistan’s limited trade with the world goes through Iran’s Chabahar port, and Iran is also a major conduit for humanitarian aid into Afghanistan. Crisis Group With the conflict disrupting Iranian transit infrastructure, one of the world’s most aid-dependent populations faces additional strangulation.

The Collapse of the Gulf Security Architecture

The Third Gulf War has not simply damaged the Gulf states. It has shattered the political logic on which their security rested for half a century.

For several decades, the region’s security architecture has rested essentially upon the guarantee provided by the United States to protect the monarchies of the Arab Peninsula. Today this strategy has largely failed and seems already called into question by these countries’ ruling elites. The Gulf rulers, who had linked their security to the promise of Western protection by welcoming on their soil many military bases, discover today that those installations mainly served to support Israel’s military operations. Orient XXI

The resentment is concrete and documented. In the UAE, an open letter to President Trump from businessman Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor questioned Washington about the reasons that led it to transforming the whole region into a battlefield when the Gulf States had warned of the chaotic consequences of such a war. Orient XXI The Gulf rulers see the stocks of munitions required for their own anti-missile defense gradually diminishing, while Israel’s needs seem to be given priority. Orient XXI In effect, the Gulf states’ own air defense systems are being depleted in a war they did not choose, against an adversary who now targets them precisely because of the American bases they host.

The security guarantee, it turns out, was a trap. The bases that were supposed to deter aggression became the targeting coordinates for Iranian missiles. The weapons that were supposed to protect Gulf populations were being quietly redirected to protect Israeli military operations. The monarchies are reckoning with this reality in real time, and the calculations they are making — about future basing arrangements, about the reliability of American security umbrellas, about the wisdom of strategic autonomy — will define Gulf foreign policy for a generation.

The logic of an “Arab NATO” — a formalized GCC collective defense structure — has gained currency in several Gulf capitals as a hedge against American unpredictability. The Gulf Kingdoms, with the possible exception of the UAE, might consolidate their military forces under the GCC, placing their regional integration group on the path to becoming an “Arab NATO” over time. South24 Center This is not merely a theoretical exercise. The war has created the political conditions for a structural reform that peacetime diplomacy never could.

Iran’s Internal Crisis and the Regime Question

No analysis of the Third Gulf War’s lasting consequences can avoid the question of what happens to Iran itself. The Islamic Republic entered the conflict already structurally weakened. Thousands of Iranians poured onto the streets in protest against collapsing public services, corruption, and years of oppression University of Oxford in the period following earlier 2025 strikes. Now, with the Supreme Leader killed and the regime’s military architecture systematically dismantled, the internal dynamics are volatile and unpredictable.

The 2026 Iran War has effected the effective dismantling of Iran’s Axis of Resistance — the network of non-state armed actors that Tehran had cultivated across the Levant, the Persian Gulf littoral, and South Asia to project power and raise the costs of any strike on Iranian territory. Eurasia Review By late 2024, Hezbollah’s leadership had been decapitated. Hamas was functionally dismantled militarily. Syria’s Assad had fallen in December 2024, severing the land corridor through which Iran supplied arms to Lebanon. The Houthis remained operational but supply-constrained. Iran entered this war with its strategic depth already excavated.

Three broad scenarios for Iran’s post-conflict trajectory circulate among analysts. In the first, the Islamic Republic survives in attenuated form: militarily degraded, territorially intact, economically ruined, but politically still in the hands of regime loyalists. In the second, a US-facilitated transition — a “Venezuelan scenario” — yields a compliant successor government. In the third, the country fractures along ethnic and regional lines: Kurdish, Azeri, Arab, and Baloch pressures, exploited by neighboring powers, produce something closer to a Balkanization. Any significant Kurdish uprising could prompt a Turkish military intervention, while a significant Azeri uprising in the north could prompt the same by Azerbaijan. Pakistan could intervene in Sistan and Balochistan on the pretext of fighting cross-border Baloch separatists. South24 Center

The nuclear question remains unresolved and constitutes perhaps the most dangerous long-term legacy of the conflict. The IAEA said that it did not have the access it needed to ensure that the Iranian nuclear program was exclusively peaceful, but that there was no evidence of a structured nuclear weapons program at the time of the strikes. Wikipedia The US and Israel launched a war, in part, to prevent Iranian nuclear proliferation. Whether they have succeeded, stalled, or paradoxically accelerated the proliferation logic — by demonstrating to every regional power the strategic value of a nuclear deterrent — is a question history will answer, but perhaps not soon.
Geopolitical Realignment: The Multipolar Moment

The Third Gulf War did not create the multipolar world, but it has dramatically accelerated its crystallization. The United States has demonstrated overwhelming kinetic superiority — its ability to destroy Iranian military infrastructure is not in question. What the war has simultaneously revealed is the cost of that superiority: in munitions, in alliance credibility, in the economic damage inflicted on partners and adversaries alike.

The economic architecture of the conflict exposes a fundamental contradiction. The US has imposed enormous costs on many of the same economies it relies on as trading and strategic partners. The damage to allied economies will complicate the coalition politics that will likely be needed for post-conflict stabilization, not to mention addressing future crises elsewhere. World Economic Forum

China’s position is particularly instructive. Beijing finds itself simultaneously threatened and potentially advantaged by the conflict. Beijing was unable to shield Tehran from either the 2025 or 2026 US-Israel attacks, exposing the limits of its cautious approach to regional security. While avoiding direct intervention, Beijing mobilized to protect its nationals by arranging the evacuation of more than 3,000 Chinese citizens from Iran. Middle East Council on Global Affairs The disruption of Gulf energy supplies, on which China depends for roughly half its crude imports, is economically painful. Yet the relocation of US military assets from East Asia to frontline service in West Asia temporarily alters the balance of power in China’s geopolitical perimeter Geopolitical Monitor — a strategic windfall that Beijing has noted without acknowledgment.

Russia’s calculus is similarly double-edged. In partial compliance with an emerging bilateral defense partnership, the Russians have apparently assisted the Iranians with intelligence on US targets, but Moscow does not support bellicosity toward Israel or the GCC states. Geopolitical Monitor Higher oil prices benefit Russia’s battered energy revenues. The diversion of US military attention from Europe and the Pacific relieves pressure on multiple fronts. Russia did not ignite this war, but it is not unhappy it burns.

Europe, meanwhile, has been reduced to something approaching irrelevance. Whatever posture they take, Washington’s European allies are consigned to a largely reactive role, with limited clout they can use to help bring the war to an end. Former French ambassador Pierre Vimont put it bluntly: “Brussels has slipped into a starkly paralyzed role as a mere commentator on the geopolitical upheaval on its southern flank.” Crisis Group

The Legal and Normative Rupture

Beyond the material consequences, the Third Gulf War carries a normative legacy that may prove equally durable. Critics of the war, including legal and international relations experts, have described the attacks as illegal under US law, an act of imperialism, and a violation of Iran’s sovereignty under international law. Wikipedia The assassination of a sitting head of state — Khamenei — raises questions under international humanitarian law about the lawful targeting of political leadership. Iran’s strikes on Gulf desalination plants and civilian airports raised equivalent questions from the other direction.

The UN Security Council’s response was revealing in its selectivity: the Council passed a resolution condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf states, a formulation that implicitly accepted the US-Israeli campaign as the legal baseline — a normative determination with significant long-term consequences for the permissibility of preemptive strikes against nuclear programs. Eurasia Review In other words, the Security Council, under American pressure, has effectively blessed the principle that a state may strike another’s nuclear facilities preemptively, without Security Council authorization. This precedent will not remain in the Gulf. It will travel.

The Structural Acceleration

Wars of this scale do not merely destroy; they accelerate. The 1973 oil embargo accelerated France’s nuclear energy program. The 1979 Iranian Revolution drove Japan’s push for energy efficiency. The current crisis, which simultaneously exposes Asia’s dependence on oil and LNG imports and the fragility of fertilizer supply chains, may prove to be a powerful accelerant for diversification, redundancy, and stockpiling. But structural adjustment takes years. In the interim, the damage is accruing. World Economic Forum

Asia’s energy-importing economies — Japan, South Korea, India, the countries of Southeast Asia — have received the starkest possible reminder that their industrial civilizations rest on a narrow maritime corridor that can be closed by a single belligerent. Japan relies on the region for about 95% of its crude oil and 11% of its LNG imports, roughly 70% and 6% respectively shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. World Economic Forum The political will to accelerate domestic energy transition, nuclear expansion, and strategic stockpiling that has been intermittently present in these capitals for decades will now be sharply concentrated.

The Gulf states themselves face a forced reckoning with the fragility of their economic models. Their sovereign wealth funds, their diversification programs, their tourism industries, the aviation hubs that connected the world through Dubai and Doha — all have been interrupted or degraded by a war they were told, by the ally hosting his forces on their soil, was not their concern. The reconstruction of credibility, not just infrastructure, will take years.

Conclusion: An Unfinished Reckoning

The Third Gulf War is not over. As of today, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. Energy infrastructure across nine countries is damaged. Desalination plants have been struck. A regional security architecture built over fifty years has been discredited in four weeks. The Islamic Republic of Iran, its Supreme Leader dead and its military materiel systematically destroyed, faces an uncertain political future whose contours no one can reliably predict. And the global economy — already stressed by tariffs, inflation, and the lingering derangements of the pandemic years — has absorbed an oil shock that the IEA’s own director calls the worst in history.

As the aftermath of the First Gulf War brought about an international peace conference in Madrid in October 1991, which put in motion the peace processes of the 1990s, the aftermath of the Third Gulf War should bring about the convening of another international peace conference — this time, perhaps, in Riyadh. The Times of Israel Whether the political will for such a gathering exists, whether Washington is interested in the architecture of peace rather than merely the achievement of military objectives, remains to be seen.

What is already certain is that the world of February 27, 2026 — the world before “Epic Fury” — will not return. The energy systems are cracked. The security guarantees are discredited. The normative architecture governing when states may attack other states has been rewritten by force. The Gulf’s decades-long transformation from petrostate backwater to global hub has been interrupted, perhaps permanently redirected. And a Middle East in which Iran’s Axis of Resistance structured conflict across the Levant, the Gulf, and South Asia for forty years has been dismantled — not replaced by stability, but replaced by a vacancy whose filling will be bloody and contested.

Wars have aftereffects. This one is still making them.

You can follow Professor Mohamed Chtatouon X : @Ayurinu

Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.

The Accession Debate: History As A Weapon – OpEd

History, in Balochistan, is not the background to the conflict. It is the argument sustaining it.

Pakistan's Muhammad Ali Jinnah with Ahmad Yar Khan, the Khan of Kalat. 

Photo Credit: Author unknown, Wikipedia Commons (image cropped and remastered with Grok)


March 26, 2026

By Ashu Mann


On March 27, 1948, in Kalat, Ahmad Yar Khan, the Khan of Kalat, signed an instrument of accession bringing the Khanate of Kalat into Pakistan. Pakistani authorities have held that signing as the constitutionally final resolution of Balochistan’s incorporation into the state ever since. The Khan wrote in his own memoirs that Pakistani troops were already positioned near Kalat when he put pen to paper. His brother, Prince Abdul Karim, launched an armed rebellion within weeks and was arrested and imprisoned. Seventy-seven years later, both sides still cite the events of those months as proof that their reading of them is the correct one.

Pakistan’s legal argument is straightforward. The Khan signed the instrument. The document is valid. The accession is constitutionally settled. The Baloch nationalist argument draws from the same period and reaches the opposite conclusion: the signature was extracted under military pressure, and an agreement made under those conditions carries no legitimate authority.

The pre-accession record does not resolve the dispute cleanly. In August 1947, Pakistan and Kalat concluded a Standstill Agreement that acknowledged Kalat as an independent state. A separate document from the same period described both entities as sovereign and equal. Baloch nationalists cite both as evidence of a prior commitment to independence that the 1948 accession reversed. Pakistani officials argue that the March 1948 instrument supersedes those earlier agreements and constitutes the legally operative fact.

British archival records from the negotiating period, publicly accessible, show the Khan resisted accession through most of the preceding months. They also show Pakistani forces deployed near Kalat before the accession document was signed. They do not establish whether the signature was given freely or under compulsion. No independent body has ever been constituted to make that determination.

That absence has a measurable political cost. Armed Baloch nationalist movements have used the accession’s contested origins as their central mobilizing argument across five insurgency cycles. The argument retains force precisely because its documentary basis has never been subjected to authoritative, neutral examination. Pakistan’s official position classifies any public challenge to the 1948 accession as separatism rather than historical inquiry, foreclosing the kind of examination that might produce a shared factual baseline.


Contested accession disputes elsewhere have followed two trajectories, and which one they took depended largely on whether any party engaged the legitimacy question directly.

Tibet’s political status has been disputed between China and the Tibetan government-in-exile since 1959. Both sides cite documents from the early 1950s. No independent adjudication has been conducted. No political settlement has been reached across seven decades.

Kashmir presents the same pattern. Maharaja Hari Singh signed the instrument of accession to India in October 1947 under disputed circumstances, with armed incursion already underway. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the territory. The accession’s legitimacy has never been reviewed by an independent authority, and the dispute is now in its eighth decade.

Northern Ireland followed a different course. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement did not require the British government to concede that its historical conduct in Ireland was wrong in every particular. It required acknowledging that Irish nationalist political grievances had legitimate historical roots. That acknowledgment opened political negotiations that had no prior foundation. The agreement has held for more than 25 years.

The distinction is not about which side’s historical account is accurate. It is about whether a state is willing to acknowledge that a grievance exists and that its origins are genuinely contestable. Pakistan has not made that acknowledgment on Balochistan. The legal position, maintained without variance since 1948, is that the accession was valid and the matter is closed.

Armed groups in Balochistan recruit from a population that has heard, across three and four generations, that the foundational act establishing Pakistan’s presence in their province was illegitimate. The documentary basis for that argument has never been examined by a neutral party.

A political settlement negotiated on that foundation carries a liability no subsequent agreement can fully address. The party claiming the settlement lacks legitimacy will have the same documents to point to that it has always had. History, in Balochistan, is not the background to the conflict. It is the argument sustaining it.


Ashu Mann

Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD from Amity University, Noida, in Defence and Strategic Studies. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.

Is Trump’s Iran War the US Version of the Suez Crisis?

The crisis saw Britain’s aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire headed for extinction. Trump may have similarly hastened US decline.


Iranian military personnel take part in an exercise titled “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz,” launched by the Naval Forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is being carried out in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz on February 16, 2026.
(Photo by Press Office of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Alfred W. Mccoy
Mar 17, 2026

TomDispatch


In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Among the “antique legends” most helpful in understanding the likely outcome of the current US intervention in Iran is the Suez Crisis of 1956, which I describe in my new book Cold War on Five Continents. After Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, a joint British-French armada of six aircraft carriers destroyed Egypt’s air force, while Israeli troops smashed Egyptian tanks in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula. Within less than a week of war, Nasser had lost his strategic forces and Egypt seemed helpless before the overwhelming might of that massive imperial juggernaut.

But by the time Anglo-French forces came storming ashore at the north end of the Suez Canal, Nasser had executed a geopolitical masterstroke by sinking dozens of rusting ships filled with rocks at the canal’s northern entrance. In doing so, he automatically cut off Europe’s lifeline to its oil fields in the Persian Gulf. By the time British forces retreated in defeat from Suez, Britain had been sanctioned at the United Nations, its currency was at the brink of collapse, its aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire was heading for extinction.

Historians now refer to the phenomenon of a dying empire launching a desperate military intervention to recover its fading imperial glory as “micro-militarism.” And coming in the wake of imperial Washington’s receding influence over the broad Eurasian land mass, the recent US military assault on Iran is starting to look like an American version of just such micro-militarism.

Washington’s fading influence across Eurasia will undoubtedly prove catalytic for the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to move far beyond the old order of US global hegemony.

Even if history never truly repeats itself, right now it seems all too appropriate to wonder whether the current US intervention in Iran might indeed be America’s version of the Suez Crisis. And should Washington’s attempt at regime change in Tehran somehow “succeed,” don’t for a second think that the result will be a successfully stable new government that will be able to serve its people well.
70 Years of Regime Change

Let’s return to the historical record to uncover the likely consequences of regime change in Iran. Over the past 70 years, Washington has made repeated attempts at regime change across the span of five continents—initially via CIA covert action during the 44 years of the Cold War and, in the decades since the end of that global conflict, through conventional military operations. Although the methods have changed, the results—plunging the affected societies into decades of searing social conflict and incessant political instability—have been sadly similar. This pattern can be seen in a few of the CIA’s most famous covert interventions during the Cold War.

In 1953, Iran’s new parliament decided to nationalize the British imperial oil concession there to fund social services for its emerging democracy. In response, a joint CIA-MI6 coup ousted the reformist prime minister and installed the son of the long-deposed former Shah in power. Unfortunately for the Iranian people, he proved to be a strikingly inept leader who transformed his country’s oil wealth into mass poverty—thereby precipitating Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

By 1954, Guatemala was implementing an historic land reform program that was investing its mostly Mayan Indigenous population with the requisites for full citizenship. Unfortunately, a CIA-sponsored invasion installed a brutal military dictatorship, plunging the country into 30 years of civil war that left 200,000 people dead in a population of only 5 million.

External intervention, whether covert or open, seems to invariably be the equivalent of hitting an antique pocket watch with a hammer and then trying to squeeze all its gears and springs back into place.

Similarly, in 1960, the Congo had emerged from a century of brutal Belgian colonial rule by electing a charismatic leader, Patrice Lumumba. But the CIA soon ousted him from power, replacing him with Joseph Mobutu, a military dictator whose 30 years of kleptocracy precipitated violence that led to the deaths of more than 5 million people in the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and continues to take a toll to this day.

In more recent decades, there have been similarly dismal outcomes from Washington’s attempts at regime change via conventional military operations. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks, US forces toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Over the next 20 years, Washington spent $2.3 trillion—and no, that “trillion” is not a misprint!—in a failed nation-building effort that was swept away when the resurgent Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, in August 2021, plunging the country into a mix of harsh patriarchy and mass privation.

In 2003, Washington invaded Iraq in search of nonexistent nuclear weapons and sank into the quagmire of a 15-year war that led to the slaughter of a million people and left behind an autocratic government that became little more than an Iranian client state. And in 2011, the US led a NATO air campaign that toppled Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s radical regime in Libya, precipitating seven years of civil war and ultimately leaving that country divided between two antagonistic failed states.

When Washington’s attempts at regime change fail, as they did in Cuba in 1961 and in Venezuela last year, that failure often leaves autocratic regimes even more entrenched, with their control over the country’s secret police strengthened and an ever-tighter death grip on the country’s economy.

Why, you might wonder, do such US interventions invariably seem to produce such dismal results? For societies struggling to achieve a fragile social stability amid volatile political change, external intervention, whether covert or open, seems to invariably be the equivalent of hitting an antique pocket watch with a hammer and then trying to squeeze all its gears and springs back into place.
The Iran War’s Geopolitical Consequences

By exploring the geopolitical implications of Washington’s latest intervention in Iran, it’s possible to imagine how President Donald Trump’s war of choice might well become Washington’s very own version of the Suez crisis.

Just as Egypt snatched a diplomatic victory from the jaws of military defeat in 1956 by shutting the Suez Canal, so Iran has now closed off the Middle East’s other critical choke point by firing its Shahed drones at five freighters in the Straits of Hormuz (through which 20% of global crude oil and natural gas regularly passes) and at petroleum refineries on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s drone strikes have blocked more than 90% of tanker departures from the Persian Gulf and shut down the massive Qatari refineries that produce 20% of the world supply of liquafied natural gas, sending natural gas prices soaring by 50% in much of the world and by 91% in Asia—with the price of gasoline in the US heading for $4 a gallon and the cost of oil likely to reach a staggering $150 per barrel in the near future. Moreover, through the conversion of natural gas to fertilizer, the Persian Gulf is the source for nearly half the world’s agricultural nutrients, with prices soaring by 37% for urea fertilizer in markets like Egypt and threatening both spring planting in the Northern Hemisphere and food security in the Global South.

The extraordinary concentration of petroleum production, international shipping, and capital investment in the Persian Gulf makes the Straits of Hormuz not only a choke point for the flow of oil and natural gas but also for the movement of capital for the entire global economy. To begin with the basics, the Persian Gulf holds about 50% of the world’s proven oil reserves, estimated at 859 billion barrels or, at current prices, about $86 trillion.

Time is not on Washington’s side if this war drags on for more than a few weeks.

To give you an idea of the scale of capital concentration in the region’s infrastructure, the national oil companies of the Gulf Cooperation Council invested $125 billion in their production facilities in 2025 alone, with plans to continue at that rate for the foreseeable future. To keep the global oil tanker fleet of 7,500 vessels that largely serves the Persian Gulf afloat, it costs nearly $100 million for a single large “Suezmax” tanker—of which there are about 900 normally on the high seas, worth a combined $90 billion (with frequent replacements required by the corrosion of steel in harsh maritime conditions). Moreover, Dubai has the world’s busiest international airport at the center of a global network with 450,000 flights annually—now shut down by Iranian drone strikes.

Despite all the White House media hype about the terrible swift sword of America’s recent airstrikes, the 3,000 US-Israeli bombing runs against Iran (which is two-thirds the size of Western Europe) in the war’s first week pale before the 1,400,000 bombing sorties over Europe during World War II. The striking contrast between those numbers makes the current US air attacks on Iran seem, from a strategic perspective, like shooting at an elephant with a BB gun.

Moreover, the US has limited stocks of about 4,000 interceptor missiles, which cost up to $12 million each and can’t be rapidly mass-produced. By contrast, Iran has an almost limitless supply of some 80,000 Shahed drones, 10,000 of which it can produce each month for only $20,000 each. In effect, time is not on Washington’s side if this war drags on for more than a few weeks.

Indeed, in a recent interview, pressed about the possibility that Iran’s vast flotilla of slow, low-flying Shahed drones might soon exhaust the US supply of sophisticated interceptor missiles, Pentagon leader General Dan Caine was surprisingly evasive, saying only, “I don’t want to be talking about quantities.”
Whose Boots on the Ground?

While economic and military pressures build for a shorter war, Washington is trying to avoid sending troops ashore by mobilizing Iran’s ethnic minorities, who make up about 40% of that country’s population. As the Pentagon is silently but painfully aware, US ground forces would face formidable resistance from a million-strong Basij militia, 150,000 Revolutionary Guards (who are well-trained for asymmetric guerrilla warfare), and Iran’s 350,000 regular army troops.

With other ethnic groups (like the Azeris in the north) unwilling or (like the Baloch tribes in the southeast, far from the capital) unable to attack Tehran, Washington is desperate to play its Kurdish card, just as it has done for the past 50 years. With a population of 10 million astride the highland borders of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the Middle East without their own state. As such, they have long been forced to play the imperial Great Game, making them a surprisingly sensitive bellwether for larger changes in imperial influence.

Since the rise of Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy in 2016, major and medium powers along that entire Eurasian rimland have been actively disengaging from US influence.

Although President Trump made personal calls to the top leaders in Iraq’s Kurdistan region during the first week of the latest war, offering them “extensive US aircover” for an attack on Iran, and the US even has a military airbase at Erbil, Kurdistan’s capital, the Kurds are so far proving uncharacteristically cautious.

Indeed, Washington has a long history of using and abusing Kurdish fighters, dating back to the days of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who turned their betrayal into a diplomatic art form. After he ordered the CIA to stop aiding the Iraqi Kurdish resistance to Saddam Hussein in 1975, Kissinger told an aide, “Promise them anything, give them what they get, and f… them if they can’t take a joke.”

As Iraqi forces fought their way into Kurdistan, killing helpless Kurds by the hundreds, their legendary leader Mustafa Barzani, grandfather of the current head of Iraqi Kurdistan, pleaded with Kissinger, saying, “Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people.” Kissinger did not even dignify that desperate plea with a reply and instead told Congress, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

Last January, in an amazingly ill-timed decision, the Trump White House betrayed the Kurds one time too many, breaking Washington’s decade-long alliance with the Syrian Kurds by forcing them to give up 80% of their occupied territory. In southeastern Turkey, the radical Kurdish PKK Party has made a deal with Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan and is actually disarming, while Iraq’s Kurdistan region is staying out of the war by respecting a 2023 diplomatic entente with Tehran for a peaceful Iran-Iraq border. President Trump has called at least one leader of the Iranian Kurds, who constitute about 10% of Iran’s population, to encourage an armed uprising. But most Iranian Kurds seem more interested in regional autonomy than regime change.

As Trump’s calls upon the Kurds to attack and the Iranian people to rise up are met with an eloquent silence, Washington is likely to end this war with Iran’s Islamic regime only furthe

r entrenched, showing the world that America is not just a disruptive power, but a fading one that other nations can do without. Over the past 100-plus years, the Iranian people have mobilized six times in attempts to establish a real democracy. At this point, though, it seems as if any seventh attempt will come long after the current US naval armada has left the Arabian Sea.
From the Granular to the Geopolitical

If we move beyond this granular view of Iran’s ethnic politics to a broader geo-strategic perspective on the Iran war, Washington’s waning influence in the hills of Kurdistan seems to reflect its fading geopolitical influence across the vast Eurasian land mass, which remains today the epicenter of geopolitical power, as it has been for the past 500 years.

For nearly 80 years, the United States has maintained its global hegemony by controlling the axial ends of Eurasia through its NATO alliance in Western Europe and four bilateral defense pacts along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia. But now, as Washington focuses more of its foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere, US influence is fading fast along the vast arc of Eurasia stretching from Poland, through the Middle East to Korea that scholars of geopolitics like Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman once dubbed the “rimland” or “the zone of conflict.” As Spykman put it succinctly once upon a time, “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

Just as Sir Anthony Eden is remembered ruefully today in the United Kingdom as the inept prime minister who destroyed the British Empire at Suez, so future historians may see Donald Trump as the president who degraded US international influence.

Since the rise of Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy in 2016, major and medium powers along that entire Eurasian rimland have been actively disengaging from US influence—including Europe (by rearming), Russia (by challenging the West in Ukraine), Turkey (by remaining neutral in the present war), Pakistan (by allying with China), India (by breaking with Washington’s Quad alliance), and Japan (by rearming to create an autonomous defense policy). That ongoing disengagement is manifest in the lack of support for the Iran intervention, even from once-close European and Asian allies—a striking contrast with the broad coalitions that joined US forces in the 1991 Gulf War and the occupation of Afghanistan in 2002. With Trump’s micro-militarism in Iran inadvertently but clearly exposing the limits of American power, Washington’s fading influence across Eurasia will undoubtedly prove catalytic for the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to move far beyond the old order of US global hegemony.

Just as Sir Anthony Eden is remembered ruefully today in the United Kingdom as the inept prime minister who destroyed the British Empire at Suez, so future historians may see Donald Trump as the president who degraded US international influence with, among other things, his micro-military misadventure in the Middle East. As empires rise and fall, such geopolitics clearly remains a constant factor in shaping their fate–a lesson I try to teach in Cold War on Five Continents.

In difficult times like these, when events seem both confused and confusing, Mark Twain’s “broken fragments of antique legends” can remind us of historical analogies like the collapse of the power and influence of Great Britain or of the Soviet Union that can help us understand how the past often whispers to the present—as it indeed seems to be doing these days in the Straits of Hormuz.

© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Alfred W. Mccoy
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is the author of "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power". Previous books include: "Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation" (University of Wisconsin, 2012), "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project)", "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State", and "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade".
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The War Nobody’s Watching: Pakistan’s Three-Front Conflict

by Pieter J. Friedrich | Mar 16, 2026 | 

On Feb. 22, 2026, a Pakistani airstrike hit the village of Girdi Kas in eastern Afghanistan. As one family lost 18 of its 23 members, Pakistan termed it a targeted counterterrorism operation against militant hideouts. Afghanistan, in contrast, said the strikes hit civilian homes and a religious school. The United Nations confirmed credible reports of civilian casualties, including women and children.

Five days later, Pakistan’s defense minister declared “open war” as Pakistani warplanes struck Kabul, Kandahar, and targets at the former American air base at Bagram, though the Taliban denied significant damage. Afghanistan retaliated with drone strikes and cross-border offensives. Both sides claimed to have killed hundreds.

“They have a great prime minister, a great general,” Trump declared, that same day. “Pakistan is doing terrifically well.”

The State Department backed Pakistan’s “right to defend itself against attacks from the Taliban, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group.” Three days later, the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, and the Pakistan-Afghanistan war vanished from the news.

Yet Pakistan is now fighting on three fronts.

To the northwest, an open war with Afghanistan. To the southwest, an escalating insurgency across the province of Balochistan, where separatist militants launched coordinated attacks across a dozen cities in January, killing nearly 200 people. To the east, an unresolved military standoff with India following their brief war last May – the heaviest engagement between the two nuclear powers since 1971.

Meanwhile, the United States is entangled on every side: backing Pakistan’s military against the Taliban while partnered strategically with the India that hosts the Taliban, that Pakistan accuses of fueling the Baloch insurgency, and that just went to war with Pakistan last year. Yet the U.S. is too busy bombing Iran to notice.

Pakistan shares a 1,600-mile border with Afghanistan to the northwest – a contested colonial-era line that splits the Pashtun population and that no Afghan government has ever recognized. Its southwestern province of Balochistan, the country’s largest and poorest, borders both Afghanistan and Iran and sits atop vast reserves of coal, gold, copper, and gas. To the east lies India, with the disputed territory of Kashmir the eternal sore point between them.

Three borders. Three conflicts.

The Afghan Front

The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) is a militant group distinct from the Afghan Taliban that governs Afghanistan. Operating from bases along the Afghan border, the TTP has waged an escalating campaign of bombings and armed attacks inside Pakistan.

In 2025, Pakistan suffered its most violent year in nearly a decade, with a 34 percent increase in terrorist attacks. In January 2026, a suicide bomber hit a Shia mosque in Islamabad, killing 36 worshippers. In February, TTP fighters attacked a military checkpoint in the border district of Bajaur, killing 11 soldiers and a child.

Pakistan demanded the Taliban government shut down the TTP. The Taliban denied harboring them.

The Feb. 22 airstrikes targeted seven alleged militant camps along the Afghan border, which Pakistan called “intelligence-based, selective operations.” Afghan officials reported 18 civilian dead in the first wave alone. On Feb. 26, Afghanistan launched retaliatory strikes against Pakistani military positions along the border. Pakistan responded by bombing Kabul.

“Our patience has now run out,” said Defense Minister Khawaja Asif. “Now it is open war between us.” As of early March, heavy shelling continued along the border and tens of thousands of civilians had been displaced.

Pakistan helped create the Taliban in the early 1990s – with fighters hardened by the CIA-funded war against the Soviets in the 1980s – supported them through their rise to power, and welcomed the American withdrawal that put them back in charge in 2021. What Pakistan did not anticipate was that the Taliban, once in power, would stop taking orders.

The Balochistan Front

Turning to the southwest, Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province and its poorest, home to 15 million Baloch – an ethnic group distinct from Pakistan’s Punjabi majority, with their own language and a history of resistance to central rule stretching back to the country’s founding. They live on land rich in coal, gold, copper, and gas – revenue that flows to the federal government, not to them. China’s $62 billion investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor runs directly through the province, centered on the deep-water port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. Armed resistance to Pakistani rule has flared in cycles since 1948. The current phase, accelerating since 2019, is the most organized and most lethal to date.

On Jan. 30, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) launched coordinated attacks across more than a dozen districts. Militants hit schools, hospitals, banks, markets, military installations, police stations, and a high-security prison, freeing more than 30 inmates. The BLA says it killed 280 security personnel. Pakistan says it killed 216 militants and lost 22 soldiers and 36 civilians. The BLA views the Chinese projects running through its homeland as extraction without benefit – wealth siphoned off from Baloch land to enrich Islamabad and Beijing. It regularly targets Chinese workers and infrastructure as symbols of that arrangement.

The BLA has deployed female suicide bombers, hijacked passenger trains, stormed army and navy bases, and carried out attacks reaching Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi. Pakistan’s military response has been overwhelming force – airstrikes, mass arrests, enforced disappearances. After the January attacks, a military spokesman announced the army had “sent 216 terrorists to hell.”

Pakistan, meanwhile, claims that the BLA – and the Afghan Taliban – are operating as Indian proxies.

In 2025, the military renamed the organization “Fitna al-Hindustan” – literally, the chaos of India. Pakistan’s defense minister has accused India of “penetrating” the Taliban leadership. The arrest of Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former Indian naval officer detained in Balochistan in 2016, is a prime case cited as evidence of Indian intelligence operations in the province. In 2013, U.S. Special Representative James Dobbins acknowledged that Pakistan’s concerns about Indian involvement were “not groundless,” even as he called them “somewhat exaggerated.”

India flatly denies it all. The Baloch are caught in the middle regardless – between a Pakistani military that kills them and calls it counterterrorism, Indian intelligence that may be using them as pawns, and a Chinese mega-project that treats their land as a throughway. Nobody is fighting for the Baloch. Everyone is fighting over Balochistan.

The India Front

The third front is quieter but no less dangerous.

In May 2025, after militants killed 26 Hindu tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir – the disputed territory at the heart of the India-Pakistan conflict since 1948 – India launched missile strikes on Pakistan. Pakistan retaliated. After four days, a ceasefire brokered by Washington finally held.

Nothing was resolved. Kashmir remains the trigger while both sides are rearming. Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia in September 2025. Aggression against one will now be considered aggression against both. India, meanwhile, has been building a relationship with the Taliban that would have been unthinkable a decade ago – opening an embassy in Kabul and hosting Afghanistan’s foreign minister in New Delhi.

The Taliban was once Pakistan’s strategic asset – created, funded, and armed by Islamabad to secure a friendly government in Kabul and block Indian influence in Afghanistan. Now Pakistan accuses the Taliban of being India’s proxy against Pakistan. The defense minister has said the people “pulling the strings” in Kabul are “controlled by Delhi.” The alliance that Pakistan built for three decades now takes meetings in New Delhi.

Washington on Every Side

The U.S. is not watching this war. It is on every side of it.

Washington backs Pakistan against the Taliban. The State Department explicitly endorsed Pakistan’s “right to defend itself.” Trump praised General Asim Munir – the architect of the Afghan campaign – as one of “two of the people that I really respect a lot.” Before launching the June 2025 strikes on Iran, Trump invited Munir to the White House and secured Pakistan’s cooperation before opening his own front in the Middle East.

Washington partners with India. The strategic relationship has deepened through two Trump administrations. India is the cornerstone of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy against China. When India and Pakistan went to war in May 2025, Washington brokered the ceasefire, then walked away without resolving anything.

Washington designated the BLA, the Taliban, and the TTP as terrorists, giving Pakistan legal cover for military operations against all three while maintaining alliances with the governments accused of supporting them. The same State Department that endorsed Pakistan’s airstrikes on Afghan cities once stationed American troops in those same cities for twenty years.

Then, on Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel struck Iran. The Pakistan-Afghanistan war was just one week old and disappeared from the front pages overnight. Trump called Pakistan’s strikes on Afghanistan “outstanding.” Then the Iran war started and he forgot about Pakistan and Afghanistan entirely.

The People in the Middle

In Girdi Kas, a family of 23 became a family of 5 in a single night. Pakistan says the strike hit a militant camp. Afghanistan says it hit a home. The United Nations confirmed civilians were killed.

In Balochistan, 15 million people live on land that everyone wants and nobody asks them about. In Kashmir, the same. And now, as Pakistan’s military announces body counts, and India is accused of funding chaos, China continues building ports there.

And the family in Girdi Kas is still dead.

Pakistan’s military says it has “sent 216 terrorists to hell.” Trump says Pakistan is “doing terrifically well.” And Balochistan – along with the other two fronts Pakistan is fighting on – remains the war nobody is watching.

Pieter Friedrich is an investigative journalist covering ethnonationalism, transnational repression, and South Asian geopolitics. His work has appeared in The Caravan, Middle East Eye, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and has been cited by Harper’s Magazine, the Washington Post, and The Intercept. More at pieterfriedrich.com.