On February 28, 2026 the United States and Israel launched a massive military campaign against Iran. The operation was codenamed Epic Fury by the US administration led by Donald Trump and Roaring Lion by the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump has repeatedly used the word “war” to describe the operation. However, his administration maintains this is not a war but rather “major combat operations.” This conflict has already deeply affected both Iran and its regional environment and could potentially shape the Middle East for a generation. It is very likely that the confrontation with Iran will have a crucial impact on the US midterm elections in November. A prolonged war in Iran would probably define the second Trump presidency and shape American politics and foreign policy even beyond the end of Trump’s mandate – just like the 2003 Iraq War defined the presidency and legacy of George W. Bush. It seems reasonable to expect the conflict with Iran to have a crucial impact on the 2026 Israeli election as well. Along with the tragic conflict in Gaza, the war against Iran might as well determine the legacy Benjamin Netanyahu leaves in Israel. Considering the magnitude of this conflict, it is fundamental to examine its origins, current shape, and potential evolution, in order to develop a more informed understanding of the trends and challenges that are shaping the geopolitics of the Middle East.
Choosing War
Only historians with access to the official record will be able to provide detailed and comprehensive accounts of the decision-making process that led to the launch of the US and Israeli operations. That said, it seems at least possible to provide a picture of the trends that have led to the decision to launch the attacks. Based on available data and official statements, it appears that the dynamic that precipitated the conflict was very similar to the one that led to the “Twelve-Day War” of June-July 2025, with the Netanyahu government – as well as some of Trump’s advisors – pushing for military action and successfully persuading Trump to join the attacks.
President Trump maintained that Iran had been waging a campaign against the US for “47 years” – i.e. since the 1979 Iranian Revolution that led to the establishment of the current Ayatollah regime. Members of his administration claimed that the US attack was defensive and somewhat pre-emptive. As a matter of fact, however, Iran did not represent an imminent threat to the US – or even to Israel – and it is much more convincing to argue that this is a “war of choice.” The Tehran regime had been severely weakened in the summer 2025 by a previous series of Israeli and US attacks. By the time Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion was launched, Iranian representatives were negotiating with Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Geneva. The Omani Foreign Minister that was acting as a mediator between the Americans and the Iranians had declared on February 26 that negotiations were making “significant progress.”
The US-Israeli operation, moreover, is not consistent with international law. The UN Charter specifies that the use of force is legitimate only in self-defense against an aggression (article 51) or if explicitly authorized by the UN Security Council according to the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter. Neither of these conditions existed on February 28, since Iran had not attacked the US or Israel and nothing indicated that it was about to do so.
It can be argued that, besides the long standing confrontation between the Israel and the US on one side and Iran and its “Axis of Resistance” of regional proxies on the other, a key short term precipitating factor was the perception that the Iranian regime was on the verge of collapse due to a major wave of internal protests. Regime change is not an official goal of the US-Israeli campaign but both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have called the Iranian people to take “their destiny into their own hands,” or “take over your government.” The final, decisive input in the launch of the operation appears to have been the Netanyahu government’s uncompromising determination to attack. As explained by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the trigger of Operation Epic Fury was the knowledge that Israel was going to attack Iran and the expectation that the Iranian regime would retaliate not just against Israel but also by hitting American targets in the region.
The Air Campaign
As remarked by President Trump on February 28, the operation has 4 main goals: the first two are the destruction of Iran’s missiles and missile industry as well as the annihilation of the Iranian navy. The President also vowed to “ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs.” Finally, the US wants to “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.” Trump, however, also encouraged the Iranian population to rise up against the Tehran regime. Six days into the operation, moreover, Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and the selection of “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s).”
Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion started with a massive air campaign. Reports suggested that 900 strikes were carried out in the first 12 hours of operations. Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in an Israeli strike in Tehran on the first day of operations. By March 9 it was estimated that combined US and Israeli strikes had killed 1,759 people. 168 people, including dozens of seven- to twelve-year-old girls, were killed in a daylight strike that hit a school in Minab, in southern Iran.
As these lines are written, neither the intensive air campaign nor the killing of Khamenei have led to the collapse of the Tehran regime or the achievement of the objectives stated by President Trump. In fact, the regime demonstrated significant resilience. Iranian forces have retaliated with strikes against US military assets in the region as well as targets in Israel. Iran also articulated an effective “horizontal escalation,” with attacks on the territories of the Persian Gulf states and other targets that have substantially raised the political and economic costs of the US-Israeli campaign. As these lines are written, Iran’s retaliation has killed more than 40 people, including thirteen US soldiers. The political vacuum created by the killing of Khamenei was quickly filled by the appointment of his son, Mojtaba, to the position of “Supreme Leader.” This first step in the escalation has nonetheless been significantly painful and dangerous. Israeli strikes have included attacks on 30 fuel depots – an operation that caused tremendous damage in Tehran. In a very dangerous escalatory step, a water desalination plant on Qeshm Island, in Iran, was hit, and one day later another one was damaged in Bahrein.
An additional signal of the risk of escalation is the destruction by US forces of several Iranian mine laying vessels in the strait of Hormuz. The conflict has had a deeply negative impact on global stock markets. In addition, the disruption of naval traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has led to a major spike in oil prices that is impacting gas prices in the United States and is expected to further depress the global economy. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “[t]he war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” This dire warning has persuaded the governments of the member states of the IEA to release 400 million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves. So far, the drastic reduction of traffic through the strait has been the result of the rising costs of operating in an area of conflict. However, if Iran laid significant quantities of mines in the waters of the area, reopening the strait would require a complex and extensive series of operations involving both mine-sweeping and the destruction of Iranian radar, air defenses, and missile installations. On March 13, US forces hit military targets on Kharg Island, a key hub through which the vast majority of Iran’s oil exports finds its way to the global energy market. The destruction of the island’s energy infrastructure would have devastating effects on the Iranian economy and would almost surely induce retaliation in kind by the Tehran regime against the oil infrastructure of the Gulf states or US companies operating in the region.
The US-Israeli operation has also already led to the opening of a second front in southern Lebanon. Following the attacks on Iran, Hezbollah – a Lebanese militia and political movement that represents one of the most important regional proxies of the Tehran regime – carried out rocket and drone attacks against targets in northern Israel. Israel responded by bombing targets in Lebanon and then by launching ground incursions in the south of the country. As a result of this conflict, nearly 700,000 people, including 200,000 children, are currently displaced in Lebanon.
The staggering economic costs of waging the war have already made the headlines. The estimated cost of an Iranian Shahed drone – the main weapon used by the Tehran regime to retaliate against US naval assets, Israel, and the Gulf states – is around $35,000, while the cost of a single Patriot missile often used to shoot down Iranian drones and missiles varies within a range of $2-4 million. Israel’s Arrow interceptors cost around $3 million, while each missile used by the Iron Dome system costs $40,000 to 50,000. Estimates at the time of the June 2025 war suggested that Iran had somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 ballistic missiles. Current numbers are hard to estimate but it appears that by February 28 Iran had a substantial stock of missiles and thousands of drones.
The Daunting Prospect of A Ground Invasion
As previously observed in the pages of this blog, the study of both past and recent conflicts in which strategic airpower was a major, or even predominant, component indicates that even intensive, prolonged, and effective strategic air campaigns are very unlikely to achieve complete military victory or regime change. The complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear program and the overthrow of the Tehran regime by military means would require a ground invasion and the occupation of the country for as long as it is necessary to create a new regime that is more in line with the preferences of the US and Israeli governments. The historical record strongly suggests, however, that such an operation would turn into a bloody and expensive military quagmire.
In 2003, the US invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. The invasion was successful but the collapse of Saddam’s regime soon created a situation of political chaos and civil war that forced the US to engage in a stabilization and nation-building effort, with tremendous human and economic costs. The American occupation lasted 8 years and cost nearly 3 trillion dollars as well as the life of more than 4,500 American soldiers. At its peak in 2007, the US had more than 170,000 soldiers deployed in the country. Despite such a massive effort, regime change and occupation failed to create a stable and reliable Iraq government. In 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan, overthrew the Taliban regime, and led a multinational nation-building effort that lasted around 20 years. Between 2010 and 2011 the US deployment in the country reached 100,000 soldiers. That intervention too, however, failed to create a stable and friendly government. The Taliban took back the country in the summer of 2021. Regime change operations attempted by Israel have generated equally inconclusive and counterproductive results. In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon and tried to install a friendly government. That government quickly and violently collapsed, and then Israeli forces occupied the southern part of the country until 2000. By the time Israel left, Hezbollah had become a major military force, a crucial player in Lebanese politics, and a key regional asset for Iran.
Iran has almost double the population of Iraq (more than 91 million against 46 million), a territory that is almost four times bigger (1,648,195 km2/636,372 sq mi against 434,934 km2/167,929 sq mi), and the geography of a natural fortress – with mountain ranges that make and invasion and occupation of the country extremely challenging. An invasion of Iran would require a massive build up of US – and possibly Israeli – forces in at least one of the countries that share a border with Iran – Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In order to successfully gather this force and launch the invasion, the United States and Israel would have to obtain the consent of one or more of these countries’ governments and ensure that the invading force was not targeted by Iranian forces until the buildup was completed. Alternatively, the US and Israel could devise a Normandy-style amphibious landing. Such an option, however, would be even more difficult to plan and execute. It would still require a massive and unobstructed buildup in the region. In addition, such an operation would require the identification of suitable landing areas in Iran and then the successful establishment of a beachhead as well as a sustained and uninterrupted flow of thousands of soldiers per day.
Once in Iranian territory, any invading force would have to advance through the country’s rugged terrain, where mobile armored units would be of limited use and every mountain could be turned into a stronghold by the defenders. The Allied campaign in Italy during the Second World War offers a glimpse of the challenges related to fighting and advancing through mountainous terrain. The campaign involved around 500,000 Allied soldiers but it took almost one year of fighting to reach Rome, in the middle of the Italian Peninsula, and almost two years to liberate the entire country, at the cost of more than 300,000 casualties. Italy has an area of around 300,000 km2/115,000 sq mi – less than a fifth of Iran. As these lines are written, American forces are deployed in the Persian Gulf, south of Iran, while the country’s capital Tehran is located in the north of the country.
It appears that American and Israeli leaders have been considering the possibility of arming and supporting local groups – in particular Iraq’s Kurdish militias – in order to complement air operations with a ground component and possibly favor an insurrection against the Iranian regime. It seems that Netanyahu has been an active proponent of this option and that Trump himself has had contacts with the Kurdish leaders in Iraq. The US has relied on such a combination of airpower and local boots on the ground in the past. The most successful use of this formula was probably Operation Inherent Resolve, the campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq between 2014 and 2019. In that context, moreover, Kurdish militias proved to be particularly effective and reliable partners. It must be noted, however, that while Operation Inherent Resolve led to the severe degradation of ISIS, the threat was not completely eliminated and the intervention did little to favor more stable governance in the countries involved. Syria, in particular, remained in a state of bloody civil war until the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
Other examples in which the use of American and allied airpower was matched by ground operations carried out by local militias – such as the 2011 intervention in Libya – suggest that such an approach entails a very high risk of plunging the country into chaos and fragmentation. It is in fact quite reasonable to expect that using Kurdish militias to foment unrest in Iran would have similar centrifugal effects, with the risk of severe regional spillovers. Kurdish minorities are present in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. A Kurdish-led insurrection would probably raise the prospect of Kurdish autonomy or the creation of a Kurdish state. Even though the Kurds have been unfairly repressed and denied the right to self-determination, the attempt to advance such aspirations in the context of the current conflict in Iran could potentially call into question the borders of the other countries that have Kurdish minorities. Paradoxically, governments in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq may in turn adopt harsh repressive measures against their Kurdish populations. An insurrection could encourage separatist aspirations on the part of other Iranian minorities as well. At that point, the war would expand beyond regime change to include the whole reconfiguration of the geopolitics of the Middle East, with consequences that are impossible to predict or to manage even for a country as powerful as the United States.
The Politics of War
After barely two weeks of fighting, Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion has already reached an important crossroads. The current approach appears unlikely to bring about transformative political change in Iran, while the war is having negative economic and political implications for the Trump administration – as well as for the rest of the world and particularly for America’s closest allies. Opinion polls indicate that substantial majorities of Americans do not support the war, although Republican voters are still largely in favor. This lack of public opinion support at the beginning of a conflict is rather unprecedented. Americans appear to be in favor of taking action against Iran’s nuclear program but do not want US soldiers to die or be injured in the Middle East, and are particularly concerned about the prospect of a rise in oil prices due to the war. The Trump administration might decide to double down and persist in the pursuit of regime change. On March 10, US Secretary of Defense (often referred to as “Secretary of War”) Pete Hegseth announced that the United Sates was further intensifying the pace of strikes. As observed in these pages, however, such a policy would probably entail an extremely costly and open-ended American commitment and could even precipitate the entire Middle East into uncontrollable chaos. On March 9, President Trump told reporters that the objectives of the operation were “pretty well complete” and that the war would be over “very soon.” Such a statement suggests that Trump might prefer to wrap the operation up. Finding a way to deescalate the conflict, however, might prove very difficult.
Even if the war did end “very soon,” it is hard to imagine that such an intense but inconclusive military confrontation could automatically be followed by a swift return of geopolitical stability in the region. Twice in less than a year, Iranian leaders have agreed to negotiate with the United States, only to see their country attacked by Israel and the US itself. Rebuilding trust and restarting meaningful negotiations concerning Iran’s nuclear program has thus become extremely more difficult. The conflict has had a very negative impact on the Gulf states as well. These countries have invested enormous resources in building their relationship with the Trump administration. Despite that effort, they have been caught in the middle of the fight between Israel, the US, and Iran and might find themselves in a similar situation in the future. This experience will likely force them to reconsider their approaches towards both Washington and Tehran.
Finally, the war appears to be politically useful for Benjamin Netanyahu. A survey carried out by the Israel Democracy Institute indicates that Operation Roaring Lion is overwhelmingly popular among Israel’s Jewish population, with even higher numbers in relation to respondents that identify as right-wing. Only a very small minority of the country’s Arab citizens, however, have a favorable opinion on the intervention. The survey also suggests that a majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens would prefer the operation to continue until the Ayatollah regime is overthrown. In the fall, Israelis will vote in a national election and Netanyahu is a skillful but particularly controversial and divisive political figure. Until recently, polls suggested that his party and his government coalition were losing popularity among voters. The war against Iran might turn out to be a way for Netanyahu to keep his coalition together and boost his popularity. The Israeli Prime Minister might thus be tempted to use his influence with the Trump administration to prolong the war effort or to start yet another war before the Israeli election.
The Shape of Things to Come
This war is the result of trends that have been structuring the geopolitics of the Middle East for the last two years. Military confrontation and war may continue to shape the region in the future, unless a deliberate and sustained effort to end conflicts and restore stability is undertaken by the United States and its partners.
Donald Trump’s political success was partly due to his famous pledge to end America’s “forever wars.” In May 2025, during a speech in Riyadh, Trump expressed his contempt for the “nation builders” that “wrecked far more nations than they built.” His administration’s National Security Strategy – published last November – states that “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over,” and that the “key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest.”
The current pattern of conflict with Iran, however, contradicts the pragmatism of Trump’s statements and official policy and suggests a much more ideological agenda. At the same time, the Trump administration appears to be torn by the increasing divergence between America’s efforts to disentangle from the Middle East and the pressure coming from a Netanyahu government that retains influence in Washington but appears incapable or unwilling to look for a path to end the cycle of violence that has been set in motion by the tragic terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023 perpetrated by Hamas.
Last fall, the “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” had raised hopes that it would be possible to break the cycle of violence started in October 2023 and start working to reopen a peace process. The current conflict with Iran may once again undermine efforts to pacify and stabilize the Middle East and drag the US into an endless vicious circle of debilitating, inconclusive, and unmanageable conflicts – with dire consequences for the US, Israel, and America’s allies and regional partners. Finding a way out of this path of permanent confrontation is becoming more and more difficult as casualties mount and new escalatory thresholds are reached and passed. Now, more than ever, it is imperative for American – and Israeli – leaders to remind that “key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest.”
Diego Pagliarulo