There is a genius peculiar to Middle Eastern politics, which is the improbable capacity to convert colossal military defeats into political victories, and there is a complementary genius peculiar to American politics, which is the uncanny capacity to convert colossal military victories into political defeats.
The war against Iran has become the best demonstration of both geniuses at once.
There is a genius peculiar to Middle Eastern politics, which is the improbable capacity to convert colossal military defeats into political victories.
The past week has supplied the demonstration in miniature. Three days of renewed exchanges have reduced the U.S.-Iran ceasefire to a fiction: American strikes on Iranian targets, each wave wider than the last, answered by fresh Iranian salvos against Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. The president responded by threatening to seize Kharg Island, the terminal through which nine-tenths of Iran’s oil exports pass, and to “assume total control” of its energy industry, before reversing, hours later, his threats. Maximum escalation and advertised irresolution, delivered in a single news cycle, while the partners absorb the return fire. How the United States arrived at this point requires going back to the war’s beginning.
By any military standard, the Islamic Republic suffered a catastrophe. Its supreme leader was killed, its nuclear and missile infrastructure was heavily degraded, and Hezbollah—the centerpiece of the proxy network Iran had spent four decades building and arming—has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. A state that had organized its entire strategic identity around resistance and forward defense watched both collapse under joint American and Israeli attacks it was not able to stop.
And yet Tehran has spent the months since converting that catastrophe into a politics of recovery. By closing the Strait of Hormuz and keeping it closed, it forced the world to acknowledge a capacity it had long been assured Iran would never dare to exercise, and it transformed itself from a sanctioned pariah on the edge of collapse into the gatekeeper of a waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes. By striking the territory of the Gulf states directly and absorbing in turn everything the United States and Israel could deliver, the Islamic Republic demonstrated that it could not be eliminated and must, in the end, be accommodated. The military defeat was near total. The political recovery is well underway.
The American side of the story runs in the opposite direction. The campaign against Iran was a military success of the first order, and it should have been the event that completed Israel’s integration into the Middle East, ushering in a historic transformation of world politics. Israel had just demonstrated, in the most concrete terms, that it was the indispensable power against the threat Arab states feared above all others. It had done for them what they had neither the will nor the ability to do for themselves, degrading the Iranian nuclear program and, in the series of campaigns that began after October 7 and culminated in the present war, dismantling the proxy network that had menaced the region for two decades. The logic of the Abraham Accords, which had always rested on the proposition that Israeli military power was an asset with which alignment was prudent, had never been more vividly validated. A new regional order anchored in an expanded set of accords, joining Saudi Arabia and perhaps others to the existing signatories, was the natural political arc that the military victory was supposed to make available.
That arc is now a remote fantasy, and the reason is the American failure to follow up on its initial action. Iran’s strikes on the Gulf states, a massive threat to their post-oil economic plans, have occurred while American forces were present in the region, and the American security guarantee was nominally in force, but the United States neither prevented nor answered them. When the president was asked recently about an Iranian drone and missile attack on Kuwait’s main airport, he shrugged it off as “not a big deal.”
Nor were these isolated. In the war’s opening weeks Iran struck all six Gulf monarchies, directly hitting energy infrastructure, civilian airports, and luxury districts, and the strikes have continued under the nominal ceasefire.
The Gulf states drew the obvious conclusion, which is that the American guarantee on which their security had rested does not hold under Iranian fire.
The Gulf states drew the obvious conclusion, which is that the American guarantee on which their security had rested does not hold under Iranian fire. This is not a marginal observation. Gulf monarchies had never regarded normalization with Israel as an end in itself; they had regarded it as a transaction with Washington, in which alignment with Israel was exchanged for American protection, advanced weapon systems, and, in the Saudi case, civilian nuclear cooperation. Israeli military and technological power was, to be sure, part of the appeal, but the qualitative edge that makes Israel valuable is itself underwritten by the American relationship, so the currency was American at every layer of the transaction, and the war marked that currency significantly down. An Arab state weighing the costs and benefits of joining the American and Israeli axis must now ask what the American security guarantee is worth, and the war has returned a discouraging answer.
The same logic governs how the Gulf states are preparing for what has become the central fact of the postwar regional economy: the de facto recognition of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz. The Arab states are hedging and diversifying their security relationships away from exclusive dependence on a guarantee that failed its test, expanding their accommodations with powers—China above all, but also Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt—that claim, questionably, to offer what Washington no longer reliably will.
The claims are mostly inflated. Beijing is positioning itself to broker a Gulf-Iran security on its own terms while refusing any responsibility for the strait itself, opportunistically negotiating transit permits for tankers trading oil in yuan; Riyadh has converted its defense relationship with Islamabad into a formal strategic mutual defense agreement; Turkey is eyeing drone sales to various Arab states; Cairo is sending jets to the Gulf. None of this replaces the American umbrella. All of it reduces the price Washington can charge for one. Gulf states are preparing for a region in which Iran’s grip on the strait is a standing condition rather than an aberration to be reversed, and in which the United States is one partner among several rather than the sole underwriter of their security.
This is why the war has worsened rather than improved the prospects for expanding the Accords. The United States failed to protect its partners and their economies in a war of its own choosing and in doing so devalued the one thing it had to offer in exchange for normalization. Saudi Arabia’s refusal to normalize relations with Israel or openly join the war is a judgment about reliability and timing. Riyadh concluded that to normalize now, while the American security guarantee stands devalued and the shape of the postwar order remains undefined, would mean surrendering its freedom of maneuver at the very moment that freedom is most valuable, in exchange for a commitment the war has called into question.
There is an ideological residue layered over this mostly realist calculation. The propaganda construct of a “Greater Israel,” the old pan-Arabist and Islamist conceit of a Jewish state bent on violent territorial expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates, migrated into more respectable Arab strategic discussion, where it portrays the series of defensive campaigns against identifiable threats Israel took since the massacres of October 7 as a hegemonic territorial project seeking to remake the regional order, and it issues in the equation of Israel with Iran as twin non-Arab revisionist powers contending to dominate the region.
The United States has once again shown that it can win whatever battle it chooses and convert victory into less than nothing.
The equation is, clearly, false, for it dissolves the difference between the power that built the proxies of terror and the power that destroyed them, and yet many Arab states insist on it because it performs an important strategic function. By holding Israel and Iran within a single category, as rival non-Arab powers each pursuing its own primacy at Arab expense, the construct furnishes the Arab states with the doctrinal ground for an autonomous and equidistant position from which they can hedge between the two. To concede that Israel had acted as the effective guarantor of Arab security against Iran would collapse that equidistance and press the Arab states toward subordination within the American and Israeli camp, whereas to maintain that both powers are threats of the same order preserves their freedom of maneuver and their standing to bargain with each. The construct is, in this sense, the ideological instrument of a hedging strategy, and the fact that it also serves Tehran, by normalizing the Islamic Republic’s regional standing and denying Israel the alignment its military performance had earned, is a cost the Arab states are content to bear for the autonomy it secures them.
The war, thus far, has produced the inverse of what American interests needed in the Middle East. Iran has come out of it militarily broken but politically recovering, its nuclear program in ruins, yet its claim to a permanent place as a regional power stronger than at any time since the revolution. The Gulf states have learned the lesson Washington could least afford to teach them—that the American security guarantee is, at best, a fair-weather instrument—and they are rearranging their affairs accordingly. Israel stands militarily supreme and more isolated than before, its enemies degraded, and its integration into the region receding even as its dominance over it grows. The United States has once again shown that it can win whatever battle it chooses and convert victory into less than nothing. That is the true result of the war that Washington seems to be ending in the manner that has become its signature.
Published originally on June 12, 2026.
