The Middle East has entered a far more dangerous phase. On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched a large joint military campaign against Iran, striking leadership compounds, missile forces, air defences and military infrastructure across the country. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed, alongside several senior military and security officials, while Iran has retaliated with missile and drone attacks against Israel and American-linked facilities across the Gulf. The scale is already much larger than the twelve-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025: this is not simply another Israeli preventive strike with limited American assistance, but direct American participation in a broad campaign against the Iranian state. What makes the timing particularly disturbing is that Washington and Tehran had been conducting indirect nuclear negotiations through Oman during February, and Omani mediation had reported significant progress only days before the attack. The central question therefore extends beyond whether Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes can be degraded. If military force is used while diplomacy is still producing possible compromises, states observing the conflict may conclude that negotiation does not protect them from attack and that only stronger deterrence does.
Khamenei’s death creates an immediate leadership crisis, but removing a leader and transforming a political system are very different objectives. The Islamic Republic has existed since 1979 and contains institutions extending far beyond one individual: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, clerical networks, ministries, security agencies, foundations and provincial administrations all possess interests in the continuation of the state. American and Israeli officials have openly described weakening or destabilising the regime as part of the operation, while Trump has portrayed Khamenei’s death as an opportunity for Iranians to reclaim their country. Yet political legitimacy cannot simply be created by destroying the institutions currently exercising power. If the regime collapses without an accepted succession mechanism, Iran could move towards democratic transition, military rule, elite reconstruction of the Islamic Republic or severe internal fragmentation. The removal of an authoritarian order creates political possibility; it does not determine which political order fills the vacuum.
This distinction should be obvious after Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, but great military powers repeatedly underestimate it because the first phase of intervention is much easier to measure. Aircraft can destroy a missile battery and intelligence services can identify commanders. Success can be photographed through satellite imagery. Constructing legitimate political authority is fundamentally different because legitimacy cannot be imposed physically. It requires enough citizens and institutions to accept common rules even when they dislike particular outcomes. Max Weber’s distinction between power and legitimate authority becomes extremely useful here: military force can produce compliance, but stable government requires some reason for people to obey beyond the permanent expectation of coercion. America and Israel possess extraordinary ability to destroy Iranian state capacity. They do not possess an equivalent ability to decide what Iranians consider legitimate afterwards.
Iran’s retaliation also demonstrates why military superiority does not give Washington complete control over escalation. Iranian missiles have targeted Israel and facilities across several Gulf states, with attacks or interceptions reported in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and elsewhere. Iran has also threatened maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important energy chokepoints in the world. Iran cannot defeat the United States conventionally, but deterrence does not require equality. A weaker state needs enough survivable capability to impose costs that the stronger state cannot ignore. Tehran’s missiles, drones and geographic position provide precisely that form of asymmetric power.
The Strait of Hormuz illustrates how geography can partially compensate for military weakness. Iran cannot match American aircraft carriers, but it sits beside a route through which roughly one-fifth of global petroleum liquids have historically passed. Disrupting shipping would damage Iran’s own economy and alienate Asian customers, making a complete closure costly for Tehran. Yet even the credible possibility of disruption can increase oil prices, shipping insurance and transportation costs. This gives Iran a form of systemic leverage: it can impose part of the cost of its conflict with America on countries that had no role in starting it. India’s exposure is obvious. As a major oil importer, India can experience higher inflation and a weaker trade balance because of military decisions made thousands of kilometres away.
The nuclear implications may be even more consequential. Only days before the strikes, indirect negotiations had reportedly made progress, with Oman saying Iran had agreed in principle to reduce its existing stockpiles of nuclear material substantially. If Tehran’s future leadership concludes that negotiating concessions did not reduce the probability of attack, advocates of an Iranian nuclear deterrent will gain a powerful argument. North Korea possesses nuclear weapons and is treated extremely cautiously by external powers. Iran remained below the weapons threshold and has now been attacked repeatedly. The crude strategic lesson available to other vulnerable states is uncomfortable: international law may condemn nuclear proliferation, but nuclear weapons appear extremely effective at raising the cost of regime-changing intervention.
This does not mean Iran’s nuclear programme posed no legitimate security problem. Highly enriched uranium, incomplete transparency and the possibility of rapid weaponisation created serious risks for Israel and the wider non-proliferation regime. But preventive war contains a fundamental contradiction. Israel and America attack partly because they fear what Iran might eventually build; Iran then acquires stronger reasons to want exactly the capability the attack was designed to prevent. Physical infrastructure can be destroyed while the political demand for deterrence becomes stronger. The long-term success of the campaign therefore cannot be measured by how many enrichment facilities are damaged. It depends on whether whatever government emerges in Tehran becomes less interested in nuclear weapons rather than merely less capable of producing them temporarily.
The intervention also raises a difficult problem of international order. Khamenei presided over a deeply repressive political system, and Iranian security forces have repeatedly used violence against domestic protesters. None of that automatically gives foreign states an unlimited right to determine Iran’s government through military force. The principle of sovereignty exists partly because allowing powerful countries to decide when weaker governments are sufficiently objectionable to remove produces an international hierarchy rather than a system of formally equal states. The relevant philosophical test is again universalisability: would Washington accept China claiming that serious American human-rights abuses justified bombing Washington to produce political change? Obviously not. A rule cannot become legitimate merely because the state invoking it is confident its own moral judgement is correct.
There are circumstances in which external force can be justified to prevent imminent threats or mass atrocities, but the burden of proof should rise with the scale of intervention. Regime change is particularly demanding because the consequences extend far beyond destroying the original threat. Iran has more than ninety million people, substantial ethnic diversity, powerful security institutions and enormous energy infrastructure. Political collapse could affect Iraq, the Gulf, Pakistan, Afghanistan and global energy markets simultaneously. A strategy whose success depends on Iranians spontaneously constructing a stable successor government after foreign bombing is therefore not a strategy; it is an optimistic assumption about the behaviour of millions of people whose political preferences outsiders cannot control.
This is where the domestic protest movement discussed over the past two months becomes important. Many Iranians clearly oppose the Islamic Republic and have repeatedly demonstrated extraordinary courage against repression. But opposing one’s government does not imply supporting foreign bombardment of one’s country. National and regime identities are different. An Iranian can despise clerical rule while still believing political change should be determined by Iranians. Foreign attack can therefore produce contradictory effects: weaken the government’s coercive infrastructure while strengthening nationalism among citizens who otherwise oppose it. Revolutions become most legitimate when citizens believe they authored them themselves. Liberation delivered by another state’s air force can easily acquire the political character of occupation even when many people wanted the old government gone.
The Gulf states face an equally uncomfortable lesson. American military bases provide deterrence against Iran, but they also make host countries potential targets when Washington fights Iran directly. Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE therefore receive both protection and exposure from the same alliance infrastructure. This is the classic alliance entrapment problem. A smaller state hosts a stronger ally because the alliance increases security during normal periods, yet the ally’s independent decisions can draw the smaller state into conflicts it did not choose. Gulf governments consequently have strong incentives to maintain American security relationships while simultaneously preserving diplomatic channels with Tehran.
Trump has suggested that the campaign could end quickly or continue much longer depending on Iranian behaviour. That flexibility may be tactically useful, but wars become especially dangerous when the political endpoint remains ambiguous. Is success the destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme, elimination of its missile forces, a negotiated agreement, collapse of the Islamic Republic or installation of a different government? Each objective requires a different amount of force and creates a different termination condition. A war without a clearly bounded political objective can continue because every tactical success reveals another target whose destruction appears useful.
The most important question over the coming weeks is therefore not whether America and Israel can continue winning military engagements. Their conventional superiority makes that highly likely. The question is whether military superiority can be converted into a political equilibrium more stable than the one it destroys. If Iran emerges with a government willing to accept intrusive nuclear verification, reduce regional confrontation and receive sanctions relief in return, the campaign could eventually produce a more stable regional order. If Iran fragments, closes Hormuz, accelerates towards nuclear weapons or develops an even more nationalist authoritarian system, tactical success will have produced strategic failure.
This war therefore should be judged by a demanding standard. The purpose of power is not simply demonstrating that an adversary can be destroyed; it is creating conditions under which destroying the adversary again becomes unnecessary. The United States and Israel have demonstrated overwhelming capacity to reach Iran’s leadership. What they have not yet demonstrated is that they know what political order should replace the one they are now attempting to break, or why Iranians themselves would regard that order as legitimate.
