The war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran on February 28, 2026, got bombastic names: “Operation Epic Fury” (United States), and “Operation The Roaring Lion” (Israel). It has actually become a broad war, including a dozen of Middle Eastern countries (Bahrein, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates), and even Cyprus and Azerbaijan. Thus, I prefer to call it the Third Gulf War, a truly regional war with unintended consequences that we cannot assess at this stage, though I am reluctant to refer to is as a prelude to “World War Three.”

We learn that Russia has provided Iran with military intelligence regarding the location of US forces in the region; and that China is supplying Iran chemicals to fuel its ballistic missiles, though until now China also enjoyed the spectacle of the United States depleting precious munitions against Iran. The closure of the Straits of Hormuz has damaged China’s economy, and not just the oil-exporting Gulf states. The United States remains the main protagonist and the dominant actor in this war.  Ultimately, it was President Trump who decided when the war began, and he will eventually decide when it will end, even unilaterally. As a peace scholar, I always remind my students that we know how and when wars start, but we never know exactly how and when wars will end. As a matter of fact, generals and politicians tend always to focus upon the beginning of wars (i.e., see the “preemptive strike” and the successful “surgical operation” that killed Ali Khamenei and about forty Iranian senior military commanders, officials, and politicians in the morning of February 28th, 2026), though they do not plan the details or have much of an idea about how the war will end, or how long it will last.

We will not be able to answer the important question “When and how the Third Gulf War will end?” without referring first to the previous question: “What are the goals of the United States and Israel in waging this war?” As for President Trump, who has granted interviews on a daily basis since the beginning of the war, there is a broad and elastic spectrum of war goals, including: 1) To liberate the Iranian people from the Iranian theocratic dictatorship, helping them to set themselves free; 2) To bring about the collapse of the regime and ultimately a regime change, or at least “to create the conditions that would enable a regime change” by the Iranian citizens in the aftermath of the war; 3) to destroy the Iranian navy (it was more or less accomplished); 4) to destroy the military capabilities of Iran to launch ballistic missiles (work in progress); 5) to destroy the nuclear military program and capabilities of Iran (we thought that the United States and Israel fulfilled that goal already on June 24, 2025, it seems that we were wrong: where are the 450 kg of enriched uranium, under the ruins of the Isfahan nuclear research center?); and 6) to deny the Iranian regime to “export” terrorism and use its “axis of resistance” and proxies (work in progress). In contrast to President Trump, PM Netanyahu has not convened even a single press conference to address the questions of the concerned Israeli citizens, one-third of which cannot run to the protected spaces since they do not have any. PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Katz emphasize these days the extent of the existential threat that Iran has posed not just to Israel, but even to the United States and the entire world, as well as their expectations regarding an eventual regime change in Iran, in the aftermath of the war.

Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian general and philosopher who fought against Napoleon, wrote in his important book On War (1832) that, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat launched a limited war against Israel to shock it and to bring about a political-diplomatic process, leading to the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for peace and diplomatic relations. In the First Gulf War, the late US President George Bush Sr. started a limited war against Iraq under the leadership of Saddam Hussein in January 1991, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and was reluctant to withdraw from Kuwait peacefully. In contrast to these two cases, in the Second Gulf War, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, under the pretext that Saddam Hussein developed “weapons of mass destruction,” though the real objective was to bring the regime down and to impose democracy in Iraq by force. While the weapons of mass destruction were never found, this war brought about a years-long presence of US forces in Iraq, to a bloody civil war, to the rise of ISIS, and to an increasing influence of Iran upon Iraq. The United States also invaded Afghanistan in 2001, within the context of the “War on Terror” and as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet, the United States left Afghanistan only in August 2021, with the Taliban still ruling that failed state. It was precisely the reluctance from these two wars that brought Donald Trump to the US political scene in the first place, and to his electoral victories in November 2016 and again in November 2024 as a President who is supposed to end conflicts throughout the world and bring peace, and not to start new wars in the Middle East.

The United States and Israel share common and overlapping interests in this war, though the interests are not identical. The Iranian nuclear issue, which apparently it was not resolved on June 2025 with the end of the previous war with Iran, is an issue with fateful and global implications, regarding the United States and the international community as a whole, and not just vis-à-vis Israel and its neighbors.  The imperfect agreement signed back in 2015 to closely monitor the Iranian nuclear program was actually violated unilaterally by the United States in 2018, and since 2019 on Iran gradually violated it as well, making significant and threatening steps in the direction of developing nuclear military capabilities. Ultimately, the know-how cannot be erased, except if we have a memory-erasing mechanisms like in the movie Men in Black. Hence, after the war, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) will still have a crucial role to play in monitoring what is left from the Iranian nuclear program (if anything is left) in any possible agreement. The ballistic missiles’ issue poses a significant, if not existential threat to the Israeli home front and to the Arab Gulf States, not to the United States. As for regime change, I think that it is a subject too large for Israel’s measures, and even to the United States itself. Nobody will decry the fall of the heinous ayatollahs’ regime in Iran, the question is whether that war goal is real or feasible.

Let us briefly examine the historical record of regime changes by the two countries that launched the war, the United States and Israel. The United States tried, and several times it succeeded in bringing about a forceful change or regime, also in the Middle East: the overthrow of the democratic regime of Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953, in a joint operation of the CIA and MI6, led to the enthroning of the Sha Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; as well as in Iraq and in Libya, leading to civil wars. In Latin America there is a long list of cases where the United States intervened and forcefully changed regimes, from Guatemala in 1954 to Chile in 1973. In most of the cases, the results were catastrophic. Israel has a shorter experience, though equally disappointing: In June 1982, following the invasion of Lebanon and the war against the PLO (The First Lebanon War, or “Operation Peace for Galilee”) there was an explicit goal of enthroning the Maronite Christian leader, Bashir Gemayel. He was indeed elected as President of Lebanon on August 23, 1982, though he was assassinated a few weeks after that. The invasion of Lebanon provoked the emergence of Hezbollah, and Israel withdrew unilaterally from Southern Lebanon only in May 2000.

Perhaps the best possible scenario from the standpoint of the United States (but not necessarily of Israel) will be to end the war with a “Venezuelan model”: to leave the regime in place, in a weakened and deterred status. Yet, the election of Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s Supreme Leader, an act of defiance against the United States and Israel, probably aborts this option. What is clear is that with its back against the wall, the Iranian regime is betting on an attrition war (they have the experience from the 1980-1988 war with Iraq), and they literally shoot in all directions. The United States and Israel should not be entrapped in a long war.

I suggest to all of us not to get euphoric, and to adopt a sober and prudent approach regarding the future of the war, which looks uncertain. We have to underline the strategic-political calculations, instead of the tactical-military ones, which usually are detached from a long-term and sober rational perspective. I will refer to two examples in this regard. First, the return of a full-fledge war with Hezbollah has to take into consideration that there is in Lebanon nowadays a government in place that seriously wishes to dismantle Hezbollah, and even to negotiate with Israel in political-diplomatic terms. It will be very foolish if Israel will establish again a “security zone” in Southern Lebanon, which will give Hezbollah the ultimate pretext to assert itself again as the “resistance” and the ultimate defender of Lebanese sovereignty against the Israeli invader.

Second, those among us who ask the excellent question “Why the Arab Gulf countries, being under attack by Iran in order to pressure them to bring about an end to the war, do not join the war?”, we should answer as follows: from their standpoint, not just Iran, but Israel as well is regarded as a wild actor with regional hegemonic designs, acting not always in rational terms (i.e., the September 9, 2025 attack against the Hamas negotiating team in Doha, Qatar). At the same time, and paradoxically, in a more positive tone, we should conclude that the war dynamics have created, due to Iranian actions, a kind of informal alliance of strategic interests between Israel and the Sunni Arab states against Iran. In the aftermath of the war, this de facto alliance might establish a new regional architecture in the region. Yet, this time the logic of the Abraham Accords will not suffice, so it will not be possible to ignore again the Arab Peace Initiative from March 2002, which is still relevant, and bypass the Palestinian issue. Hence, it will be necessary to implement the Twenty-Points Plan of President Trump regarding the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, including a long-term blueprint for a demilitarized independent Palestinian State alongside Israel.

Eran Etzion wrote recently about that logic, in lucid and clear terms. As the aftermath of the First Gulf War brought about an international peace conference in Madrid (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 in Ryad (Fall 2026?), which should put in motion the peace processes in the late part of the 2020s. In that peace conference we should return to the logic of peace and normalization with the Arab countries and to find a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the framework of a two-state solution. Today missiles are falling upon Israeli Jews and Palestinians without discrimination, Jihadist and Fundamentalist Islam lies in ruins, whether in its Shiite version (Iran and Hezbollah), or Sunni version (Hamas). Hence, the future, though uncertain, belongs to the forces of moderation in the region. Ultimately, stability in the region will be achieved only with the peaceful resolution of the Palestinian issue, bringing security and welfare to all the peoples in the region.  With Iran defeated or weakened by the end of this war, the pretexts of procrastination will end, so we will have to return and resolve the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian issue. That conflict will have to be resolved with political wisdom, creativity, and diplomatic audacity, only by peaceful means, without sending our extraordinary Air Force pilots on precise missions of targeting and prevention. We should search and reach peace and security with our Arab neighbors, both those far away like Saudi Arabia and the Maghreb countries, and those close to us, the Palestinians, the Syrians, and the Lebanese.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)