Since October 7, 2023, the United States and Israel have believed that continued diplomatic and military pressure on Iran will deter and reduce Iran’s combat capabilities. In the process, they completely degraded something else. This was Iran’s attempt to maintain restraint. The missiles and drones now attacking across the Gulf show that Iran is no longer holding back.
Iran has long operated on the principle of “strategic patience.” This was a deliberate and calculated form of restraint that led to how the Iranian government and its network of allies confronted Washington and Tel Aviv.
Rather than confronting Iran, it built and utilized a web of deterrence. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, Gaza’s Hamas, and Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces are allies surrounding Israel and have helped put the brakes on large-scale Israeli aggression.
The first serious crack in Iranian policy occurred in April 2024, when an Israeli attack destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killed a senior Revolutionary Guards commander. The Iranian government’s response was to launch Operation True Promise, which involved firing drones and ballistic missiles directly into Israeli territory.
Throughout 2024 and into 2025, Iran sought to maintain managed restraint and carefully calibrate deterrence to avoid the outbreak of all-out war. However, the environment was changing in a way that made this strategy unsustainable. Israel’s systematic targeting of Hamas and Hezbollah leadership has disrupted key nodes in Iran’s deterrence architecture. The fall of Syria’s al-Assad regime has threatened Hezbollah’s vital supply line through Iran’s main land route.
After a 12-day war in 2025, Iran formally declared a new doctrine of “active and unprecedented deterrence” in January 2026.
When the United States and Israel launched a coordinated attack on February 28, 2026, during ongoing negotiations, both countries assured the Iranian leadership that restraint did not and likely would not provide any protection.
In addition to attacking Iran, Israel also attacked Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria. Iran’s response so far has been a demonstration of its new doctrine. Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Cyprus were all attacked by Iran within days.
All of these countries have played different roles in the region. Qatar, for example, maintains its own mediation strategy and hosts Hamas offices as well as U.S. military bases. The most sophisticated expression of the balance of regional tensions. The fact that it has been drawn into the latest escalation is a direct indictment of the failure of powerful and influential governments, especially the United States, to meaningfully resolve the Gaza crisis over the past few years.
Perhaps the most important development in the current escalation is Iran’s harsh targeting of the United Arab Emirates. The UAE has pursued a foreign policy defined by a fragmentation strategy. This means working with Israel and other partners to break up unified political and military opposition across the region into smaller, disparate elements that can be more easily contained and managed.
That strategy has always been premised on the premise that the UAE’s own stability is insulated from its actions. With rockets raining down on Dubai and Abu Dhabi, that illusion of separation is no longer possible.
Iran’s allies in the region are not fully mobilized and, despite severe attrition, maintain an organizational depth that makes them likely to sustain low-level armed resistance, similar to what exhausted US forces in Iraq.
Dormant domestic crises are rapidly emerging across the Middle East as key actors become locked into a cycle of open military confrontation. There are reports that the US government is encouraging Kurdish forces to launch ground attacks against Iran. Fresh protests against the monarchy have erupted in Bahrain, with Saudi troops being sent to the island kingdom to crack down on dissent. Protesters in Baghdad tried to storm the Green Zone of the parliament building.
Palestine remains the clearest expression of the regional order that Israel and the United States seek to impose, with active support from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Isolated enclaves are under persistent low-grade military pressure in the West Bank and facing total destruction in Gaza. As Israel’s territorial expansion continues, its capacity for meaningful self-government has been systematically dismantled. This is the template.
The chapter of a coordinated and managed conflict was forced closed by the cumulative weight of Israel’s choices. The respective attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran and Iranian-allied leadership, the respective negotiations that preceded military operations, and the refusal to treat Palestinian political institutions as real variables in regional reconciliation were choices made by governments that believed that security could be achieved through a combination of fragmentation and force.
When U.S. Secretary of State Rubio addressed the Munich Security Conference, his nostalgia for a time when the West had an undisputed advantage was palpable. But it was those times that created the conditions that are now exploding across the region. The expansion of Israel’s settler colonies continues. The fragmentation model has been extended to Lebanon, Syria, and even the Horn of Africa, and regime change has been instituted in Iran to facilitate this project. And the accumulated resistance to it, whether by state or non-state actors, is no longer constrained by the tenacity that once made it manageable.
Stability in the region will be shaped by the ability to build a global coalition that takes into account fundamental contradictions. A rules-based order cannot coexist indefinitely with territorial expansion, collective punishment, and selective responsibility.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
