The Levant's Compass

CENTCOM's account of the war on Iran is impressive. The blanks it leaves are the ones that will matter. On 14 May 2026, the Commander of US Central Command stood before the Senate Armed Services Committee and described a war that, in his words, "rolled back 40 years of Iranian military investment" in 38 days. Admiral Charles Bradford Cooper II's account of Operation Epic Fury is impressive by any measure: 85 percent of Iran's ballistic-missile, drone, and naval-defence industrial base damaged or destroyed, 82 percent of its air-defence systems disabled, over 90 percent of its naval-mine stockpile eliminated, 161 vessels sunk across 16 classes, 1,450 strikes on weapons facilities and 2,000 more on command-and-control nodes. "Iran can no longer project power across the region," he concluded. Tactically, the claim is defensible. Strategically, it is a story with notable omissions. The testimony delivers an autopsy of Iran's conventional defeat with admirable precision, but says far less about the asymmetric toolkit that powered Tehran's regional expansion across four decades, and even less about how Washington intends to neutralise Iran's destabilising influence in the Middle East. In his statement, Cooper concedes that "we should expect Iran will try to reconstitute what it can, as fast as it can." History justifies the warning. After the June 2025 "12-day war," American and Israeli sources had already estimated that half of Iran's surface-to-surface missile arsenal and two-thirds of its launchers had been destroyed, alongside critical damage to Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. By February 2026, Iran was once again capable of wave attacks, meaning that much of what was counted as "destroyed" in 2025 had been either concealed beforehand or rebuilt in under nine months. Iran's missile self-sufficiency rests on shifting production, not just stockpiles, onto hidden infrastructure. The 85-percent figure does not tell us how much refers to irreplaceable capacity versus dual-use facilities that can be reconstituted. Israeli military assessments suggest Iran could return to its pre-war missile-production rate within twelve to twenty-four months once the bombing stops. The Asymmetric Playbook, Intact If conventional damage is reversible, Iran's asymmetric playbook is barely touched. Cooper asserts that "the supply chain from Tehran to the proxies has been broken," then immediately acknowledges that Iran "retains nuisance capability through harassment, low-end drone and rocket attacks, and residual proxy support." Hezbollah is the test case. Earlier this year, Israeli assessments put the organisation at roughly 15 percent of its pre-war stockpile of around 150,000 projectiles. It still resumed direct fire on northern Israel on 2 March 2026, two days after the combined US–Israeli strikes on Iran. As of December 2025, the US-chaired Cessation of Hostilities Supervisory Committee, also known as "the Mechanism", had judged that around 85 percent of disarmament tasks south of the Litani river were complete. Events since 2 March suggest re-armament is outpacing disarmament. Hezbollah redeployed several hundred elite operatives into the area within days, while anti-tank missiles, MANPADS, and rocket launchers had been pre-positioned in civilian infrastructure for exactly this contingency. Add to that Hezbollah's growing use of first-person-view drones, small, low-flying, radar-evading, assembled from commercial parts for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars apiece. These modern warfare gems can disable tanks, strike fortified positions, and target individual soldiers or civilians from anywhere within a few kilometres. Eliminating them entirely is practically impossible. A "degraded" Hezbollah retains the capacity for continuous, low-cost attrition and a security threat to Northern Israel. The same logic applies to Iran itself. Since March 2026, Tehran has launched missiles and drones against hydrocarbon infrastructure across the Gulf Cooperation Council and at commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Preventing this would require a sustained, integrated campaign of military and economic coercion led by Washington with regional and extra-regional partners, a configuration hardly achievable today. Strikingly, the policy framing has narrowed to match the military reality check. Until 2025, US officials identified three Iranian threats: nuclear, ballistic, and proxy forces. The current Administration's ask of Tehran has been narrowed to the nuclear programme and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that became a flashpoint as a consequence of the war, not its cause. CENTCOM quietly preserves the older triad in its testimony. The divergence between the negotiating agenda in Islamabad and the military commander's threat picture is itself a worrying contradiction. CENTCOM's three stated priorities — defending the homeland, deterring Iran, preserving advantage versus China — are organised around burden-shifting, through tools such as Foreign Military Sales reform, the Middle East Air Defense (MEAD) network and partner-led counter-drone work. The statement does not signal appetite for a follow-on war. It signals a posture designed to absorb a long, low-intensity confrontation. The triggers for re-escalation are identifiable (nuclear breakout, attack on US forces, interference with shipping) but none touches Iran's destabilising regional behaviour, a silence that effectively grants Tehran continued latitude through its proxies. This means that the burden of confronting Iran's nuisance capacity, by default, falls on Israel. An essentially identical doctrine is now applied by Israel in Gaza, southern Syria, and southern Lebanon. It sways from the failed Israeli-governed buffer zones of 1985–2000, but retains kill-zones in bordering countries, permanent freedom of military action across the region, in addition to indefinite "mowing the grass" airstrikes against deeper targets in Iran or its proxy hosts. Containment as Default Horizon CENTCOM's other large assumption is that MEAD, operationalised during Epic Fury, marks the beginning of a durable integrated multilateral regional security architecture rather than a one-off wartime initiative. In the CENTCOM statement, the performance metrics of the existing MEAD were genuinely historic with more than 6,000 attack drones and 1,500 ballistic missiles intercepted. According to Cooper, this would be "the largest integrated air-defense umbrella ever fielded on earth." Yet every previous regional security framework has collapsed for the same structural reasons, none of which have been resolved, such as intra-GCC rivalries, divergent foreign-policy orientations, and recalibration of threat perceptions following diplomatic openings with Tehran. Compounding this is an erosion of confidence in American willingness to absorb risk on partners' behalf. The 1990–91 benchmark — a 35-state coalition and half a million troops within months of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait — is no longer the reference point in Gulf capitals. They look instead at the muted US response to the 2019 strikes on Saudi Aramco, the abandonment of Kurdish partners, the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, and CENTCOM's own admission that "most countries have declined to participate in helping to reopen the Strait of Hormuz." The result is a hedging strategy the testimony does not acknowledge. Several GCC states have built parallel comprehensive partnerships with Beijing to acquire Chinese ballistic missiles, armed drones, and communications infrastructure, which impose concrete interoperability and intelligence-sharing limits on MEAD itself. The US and Israel have shown they can dismantle much of Iran's conventional military apparatus with remarkable speed and coordination. The very success of that operation exposes the limits of force against an adversary whose power has never depended on parity of technology or firepower, but on deceit, deniability, and the ability to translate limited capabilities into persistent political and psychological pressure. A containment-plus-burden-shifting posture signals a transition from problem-solving to risk management. That implies a phase of chronic instability in which adversaries are not defeated but continuously managed, and deterrence operates permanently below the threshold of decisive confrontation. Technology can align sensors and interceptors, but it cannot reconcile divergent threat perceptions, hedging instincts, or declining confidence in external guarantees, even when the convener is the United States. The core residual challenge of how to confront the resilient, low-cost, decentralised forms of power that still underpin Iran's destabilising strategy is precisely the one the CENTCOM statement does not address.

Over the past three weeks, Lebanon’s negotiating position has shifted quietly but significantly. Direct Lebanon-Israel talks are underway in Washington. These talks are capped by a 10-day ceasefire that began April 16 and was extended by three weeks on April 23 at Lebanon’s own request. The regional and domestic context has changed, but Lebanon’s government has not yet adapted apparently. Outside Lebanon and in the GCC more specifically, there is growing recognition that seeking Hezbollah’s disarmament and a full peace treaty with Israel is no longer realistic. Prominent regional actors assume that pursuing such outcomes now would likely rupture Lebanon internally, reviving sectarian confrontation that they are trying to avoid. Egypt and Saudi Arabia persistent advisory to Lebanon to adopt a fundamentally more cautious approach is underpinned by the outcome of the April 8 th ceasefire between the United States and Iran, which was concluded without Iran making meaningful concessions on its nuclear program, its ballistic missile arsenal, or its support for proxy forces. While Iran did suffer severe damage in its conventional military infrastructure as a result of the joint U.S.-Israeli military action, it retained a meaningful stock of enriched uranium that stops short of a weapon but is close enough to constitute persistent leverage. It kept a residual ballistic missile arsenal, reduced but not eliminated. Critically, its network of regional proxies, of which Hezbollah is the most prominent, is weakened but still functional. More importantly, Iran demonstrated during the crisis that it holds a card it had not previously played on this scale, which is the ability to threaten or partially restrict passage through the Strait of Hormuz. What Iran chose not to use is equally significant. The Houthis in Yemen retain independent strike capacity. Furthermore, Iran’s ability to conduct grey-zone operations through its disruptive networks inside the Gulf or even Western countries remains a card held in reserve. Taken together, this residual asymmetric arsenal means that Iran entered the post-ceasefire period not as a defeated power ready to surrender, but as one with meaningful cards still to play, albeit wounded and battered. For the GCC states, this reality informs every future strategic calculation. A total victory over Iran is no longer on the table. Engaging Tehran, accepting some of its red lines, offering economic normalization, and mitigating rather than dismantling its influence become the rational alternative, and possibly the only one short of an open confrontation in which the GCC has considerably more to lose than a battered Iran. In this context, the regional pressure on Beirut to accommodate rather than confront Iran’s interests, including its stake in Hezbollah’s survival as a political and military force, will only intensify. Every concession the GCC makes to Iran in exchange for regional stability is a concession that narrows Lebanon’s own room for manoeuvre. The assumption that Iran was sufficiently weakened to allow a decisive push for Hezbollah’s disarmament has been overtaken by events. In such a context, Riyadh may seek to offer a “Lebanese package” as part of its broader diplomatic engagement with Tehran. A Lebanon in the flames of a civil war would make that package impossible to deliver while putting Saudi de-escalation efforts at direct risk. The Syrian dimension adds further urgency. Having invested substantially in the post-Assad transition, Saudi Arabia cannot afford instability crossing eastward from Lebanon, which becomes very likely in the event of sectarian violence triggered by a push to normalize relations with Israel. Israel has made its position unambiguous. It will neither withdraw, nor relinquish its ability to strike inside Lebanon until Hezbollah disarms. Under these rigid requirements, Hezbollah has condemned the talks as a humiliation and declared it will not abide by any agreement reached without a full withdrawal of Israeli forces and a facilitated, generously funded return of displaced families to all locations in Southern Lebanon affected by current Israeli operations. The structural deadlock this creates is not entirely new. Before October 7, 2023, Lebanese politics rested on a regional balance of power defined by the GCC's reluctance to avoid direct confrontation, which allowed Iran to maintain its influence and left Lebanon with little choice but to accommodate an armed Hezbollah as a permanent feature of its political landscape. The question now is whether a meaningful deal can be constructed that honestly accommodates this reality. The Israeli security strip inside Lebanese territory along the border, the Lebanese army’s role south of the Litani, and the rules of engagement for UNIFIL, are all real and unresolved complicating factors ahead of any deal. The Saudi Egyptian advice to President Aoun is to secure the minimum level of domestic buy-in needed to prevent an internal rupture by downgrading the previously expected peace treaty to a deal, limited in scope, that Hezbollah and its constituencies would not perceive as an existential threat. Without such a consensus, any agreement risks being either unimplementable or a catalyst for civil conflict. Deals that tick the box of national consensus would be more of enhanced versions of previous deals (UNSCR 1701 or the 1949 armistice), possibly entailing a clearer and enforceable mandate for UNIFIL, a staged re-deployment of the Lebanese army south of the Litani tied to measurable milestones, and a phased mechanism for Israeli withdrawal linked to those same milestones. The key question, though, is whether Israel is willing, after all that has happened since October 2023, to return to the status quo ante. A full peace treaty with Israel and the disarmament of Hezbollah are unattainable under the present circumstances. What remains possible is most likely a security arrangement that reduces the risk of renewed war, gives the Lebanese army a genuine role in the south, and creates conditions for the Lebanese state to progressively reassert institutional authority in areas where it has long been absent. Full sovereignty is not a destination that today’s deal can reach, but it is one that a well-constructed arrangement can keep within sight.

On 16 April 2026, a ten-day cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon entered into force. It was, by any measure, the weakest agreement Lebanon had ever accepted. Where the UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of 2006 imposed binding and symmetrical obligations on all parties, and the November 2024 ceasefire created a robust monitoring mechanism and precise implementation timelines, the April 2026 instrument imposed an immediate, total, and unconditional obligation to disarm Hezbollah while giving Israel explicit pre-emptive self-defence rights it had never formally possessed before. Something had clearly gone wrong, not in the drafting rooms of Washington or Paris, but in the decades of strategic paralysis in Beirut. The Binding Letter of Resolution 1701 Resolution 1701 was, on paper, a serious instrument. Adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on 11 August 2006 to end the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, it set out clear and unconditional obligations for all parties. Israel was required to immediately halt offensive operations, withdraw from southern Lebanon in parallel with Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) deployment, respect the UN-demarcated Blue Line at all times, and hand over remaining landmine maps. Lebanon was required to deploy its army to the south, exercise full sovereignty over its entire territory, prevent unauthorized arms flows, and, most consequentially, pursue the disarmament of armed non-state actors. Hezbollah, which was not a formal signatory but whose leader Hassan Nasrallah publicly pledged to honor the ceasefire, was required to cease all attacks against Israel, withdraw from the area south of the Litani River, and submit to the authority of the Lebanese government. The Art of Non-Implementation What followed was a near-comprehensive failure of implementation, though not an equal one. Israel halted its major operations and eventually withdrew most of its ground forces, but continued airspace violations for years and provided only partial mine map disclosure. The Lebanese government deployed the LAF to the south in a limited capacity but never once seriously pursued Hezbollah's disarmament, deferring it through political dialogue, sectarian sensitivity, and quiet calculation that the cost of confrontation outweighed the cost of inaction. Hezbollah, the group that had publicly committed to the ceasefire, spent the next eighteen years building an arsenal eventually estimated at 150,000 rockets and missiles, constructing tunnels into Israel, and establishing what amounted to a parallel state in southern Lebanon, all in direct violation of a binding Security Council resolution. The Shebaa Fiction To counter Israel's justification of self-defence, Lebanon and Hezbollah invoked the unresolved Shebaa Farms dispute, a small strip of territory whose status remained cartographically ambiguous, as grounds for tolerating Hezbollah's armed posture as a "national resistance." This argument had a fatal flaw. Syria privately acknowledged in 2011 that the territory was Syrian rather than Lebanese, meaning the central political premise of Hezbollah's armed existence in southern Lebanon rested on a claim that even Damascus did not support. None of this had legal validity under the text of the resolution, which contained no escape clause permitting non-compliance on political grounds. A Second Chance, Better Drafted After Hezbollah opened a "support front" after the Hamas attacks of 7 October, and the war escalated into Israel's full ground invasion of southern Lebanon in autumn 2024, the international community convened again. The result was the November 2024 cessation of hostilities, mediated by the US and France. This time, the drafters tried to close the loopholes. The language shifted from the aspirational to the mandatory. Lebanon was no longer merely asked to work toward Hezbollah's disarmament. It was required to "prevent" Hezbollah operations as a binding outcome. A sixty-day implementation timeline was set for the coordinated Israeli withdrawal and LAF deployment to the south. A US-chaired monitoring mechanism was established to verify compliance. The word "parallel" appeared explicitly — neither side's obligations were to be treated as sequential. Cautious Progress, Familiar Shadows The initial results were cautiously encouraging. By April 2025, Hezbollah had transferred control of approximately 190 of its 265 military positions south of the Litani to the LAF. Lebanese and US military officials reported the seizure of thousands of rockets and hundreds of missiles. For the first time since 1990, the president of the republic pledged to enforce a state monopoly on arms, and the government formally criminalized Hezbollah's military activities. These measures represented tangible — but still limited — progress. History Repeating, Faster Nonetheless, the same failures reemerged. UNIFIL documented more than 7,500 Israeli airspace violations and nearly 2,500 ground violations through October 2025. Israel retained troops at five positions in Lebanon well beyond the sixty-day deadline, publicly stating its intention to hold them indefinitely. The LAF was not formally tasked with confiscating Hezbollah's weapons until nearly a year after the agreement. Lebanon repeatedly conditioned its own disarmament efforts on Israel first withdrawing completely, a conditionality with no basis in the agreement's text. Hezbollah quietly rebuilt its arsenal. And on 2 March 2026, the group fired projectiles into northern Israel, citing the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei and continued Israeli occupation, justifications with no legal weight under any of the agreements it had effectively committed to comply with. The Price of Accumulated Failure The April 2026 agreement was agreed upon in this context of repeated failures. Its architecture is a reflection of Lebanon's accumulated leverage deficit. Israel's obligations are narrower than at any point since 2006, essentially a ten-day abstention from offensive operations, framed explicitly as a "gesture of goodwill," rather than a binding legal commitment. More significantly, Israel's self-defense right has been formally expanded to cover not only ongoing and imminent attacks but also "planned" ones. This means that Israel retains the explicit right to conduct pre-emptive strikes on the basis of intelligence assessments, without waiting for a strike to materialize. This was not a concession Israel extracted through aggressive diplomacy. It was the logical endpoint of a process in which every prior agreement had been violated, and every compliance deadline had been missed. Ceded, Not Seized Lebanon's obligations in 2026 are framed in notably stricter language than in 2024. Where the previous agreements required Lebanon to "prevent" Hezbollah operations as a mandatory outcome, or to gradually disarm non-state actors, the 2026 text invokes Lebanon's "exclusive" responsibility to defend its territory, with no monitoring mechanism or timeline for weapons confiscation. In a single instrument, the entire architecture of international oversight that had been painstakingly assembled since 2006 has been dissolved in favor of direct bilateral negotiations that Lebanon is entering from a position of structural weakness. The pattern across all three agreements is not difficult to identify. Each successive framework has imposed stricter disarmament demands on Lebanon and Hezbollah, while simultaneously formalizing and expanding Israel's recognized latitude for military action. This is not a coincidence. Where a state fails to establish exclusive control over its territory, tolerates a non-state actor maintaining an independent military arsenal, and allows its borders to serve as conduits for weapons transfers in violation of its own international commitments, the legal and political space available to a neighboring state invoking self-defense inevitably expands. Israel's operational latitude in 2026 was not seized unilaterally. It was ceded incrementally, through decades of Lebanese inaction. This does not excuse Israel's continued occupation of Lebanese territory beyond agreed timelines, the killing of hundreds of civilians since November 2024, or repeated strikes on civilian infrastructure. These are serious violations that carry legal liability, an advantage that any government would have sought to leverage had it fulfilled its own obligations. In practice, however, the overall trajectory of negotiations between Israel and Lebanon remains predictable. The political and legal conditions that render Israeli military action defensible, both domestically and internationally, were largely shaped by what Lebanon and Hezbollah failed to do over more than two decades. The trajectory from Resolution 1701 in 2006 to the ten-day gesture of April 2026 is not one of great-power manipulation or diplomatic betrayal. Rather, it reflects the choices of a state that permitted a parallel military authority to operate within its borders, attempted to outmaneuver the international community, and gradually discovered — agreement by agreement — that international patience had been exhausted. As a result, Lebanon enters direct negotiations with Israel in April 2026 as a sovereign state that has formally acknowledged it cannot guarantee control over its own territory. This is an exceptionally difficult position from which to reach a fair deal.

The first part of this analysis established that neither the United States nor Iran emerged from six weeks of war with a strategic victory. This second part examines what that non-outcome means for the actors who must now live with its consequences: Israel, Lebanon, Türkiye, the Gulf states, and the broader Western alliance. What follows is an overview of the contradictions and dangerous calculations now shaping the region's next chapter. Israel: The Permanent Disruption Doctrine The Israeli prime minister entered the Iran campaign as its chief architect and advocate. He exits it under pressure from both directions simultaneously. On one side are military and political hardliners who wanted to continue operations despite the American ultimatum to stand down, and who believe that the ceasefire, like the Yemen deal before it, has left Israel more exposed, not less. On the other side is a reinvigorated opposition that has always described Netanyahu's strategy of permanent escalation without a political horizon as a formula for endless war rather than lasting safety. Underlying these political pressures is a security doctrine that has undergone a fundamental shift since October 7th. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks, Israel shifted from deterrence to prevention, assuming that pre-emptive military action, rather than the credible threat of retaliation, represents the only reliable guarantor of Israeli security. Gaza was the first full-scale application of this doctrine, and its results exposed a core limitation. Overwhelming force can destroy infrastructure and eliminate leadership, but it cannot produce sustained political control, nor can it prevent gradual reconstitution. Hamas has survived as a political actor. Israel maintains uncontested military dominance over the Strip but does not govern it, which means that while the immediate threat to surrounding settlements has been neutralised, the conditions for Hamas's eventual rebuilding have not been. The adapted doctrine now combines demilitarised buffer zones with sustained efforts to keep hostile actors consumed by internal strife. The goal is not to govern these territories but to prevent any coherent military threat from reconstituting within them. It is a doctrine of permanent disruption rather than decisive, one-off victory. Recent surveys indicate that only around 22% of Israelis believe their country or the US has won this war, while just 32% express satisfaction with the overall outcome. At the same time, 79% continue to support ongoing military operations in Lebanon. Israel's 2026 legislative elections are likely to sharpen these tensions rather than resolve them. Political leaders will face pressure from constituencies demanding security guarantees, not abstract strategic benchmarks. That pressure is likely to sustain continued military operations in Lebanon until Hezbollah is fully disarmed, complemented by heavy diplomatic pressure on the Lebanese government, sustained targeted strikes, and demilitarised buffer zones designed to prevent Hezbollah from returning to its pre-2023 military posture. A word on territorial expansion is warranted here. Israel's stated military objective is the establishment of security buffers in the form of forward-positioned perimeters designed to push threats farther from existing borders. Therefore, Israel can’t possibly look into extending sovereignty over new territory. Permanently annexing southern Lebanese land would place Israeli civilians closer to Hezbollah's remaining capacity, not farther from it, which is the precise opposite of what the prevention doctrine requires. The historical record supports this reading. Israel withdrew from Sinai in the 1980’s, from southern Lebanon in 2000, and from Gaza in 2005. The single exception is the Golan Heights, formally annexed and subsequently recognised by the US under Trump's first term following sustained lobbying by pro-Israel groups in Washington. As for the broader 'Greater Israel' project, it has never coalesced around a single agreed map even within Israel's hard-right constituencies. Were territorial maximalism genuinely driving Israeli policy, the withdrawals from Gaza and southern Lebanon, both of which appear in at least some versions of the Greater Israel map, would be inexplicable. Lebanon: Between Vanished Hope and Suspended Catastrophe Inside Lebanon, the picture that was cautiously optimistic a year ago has darkened considerably. The Nawaf Salam government that took office in early 2025 was genuinely promising, being the first Lebanese government in three decades to remove the famous 'People, Army, and Resistance' formula from its ministerial statement, stripping Hezbollah of its official political cover. The Lebanese Army began deploying south of the Litani River for the first time in decades. Hezbollah, severely weakened by the 2023–24 war with Israel and the killing of its senior leadership, appeared, for a moment, to be genuinely contained. However, the party's performance since it decided to join the war on March 2nd clearly demonstrates that it had been constantly reconstituting and adapting, shifting toward a more dispersed, guerrilla-style posture. More importantly, it is now seeking to leverage the US reversal on Iran to rebuild domestic legitimacy, using the current moment to forestall any return to pre-war arrangements or to the military-political conditions that had previously stripped it of formal governmental cover. The group is actively assessing ways to sideline and weaken its political opponents, initially through legal and parliamentary means, and if those avenues prove insufficient, through assassinations and targeted killings of the kind Lebanon endured between 2005 and 2013. Lebanon's consociational system, rooted in rigid sectarian power-sharing, renders decisive action against any single actor exceptionally difficult. Into this tense context comes a displacement crisis involving more than a million uprooted people, the majority from communities aligned with or dependent on Hezbollah. Israel is determined to prevent the return of these villagers to Southern Lebanon before Hezbollah is fully disarmed. Potential donor governments continue to condition support on disarmament benchmarks that Hezbollah refuses to meet. More specifically, Gulf governments are reluctant to finance a state coopted by Hezbollah; that is, if we assume that the economic aftermath of the war in their own countries will still allow them to donate generously as they did before. The result, already visible, is a protracted displacement crisis in a country lurching toward the same suspended catastrophe as Gaza: too broken to recover, too armed to be governed, too divided to find a way forward on its own. Türkiye: An Indispensable Power in a Regional Vacuum A weakened Iran does not automatically stabilise the region. It creates a vacuum. Before the Iran war began, Ankara was already the dominant external actor in post-Assad Syria. Iran's degradation has accelerated Türkiye's centrality to whatever regional order emerges in Syria, in Iraq, and most importantly in shaping Muslim political opinion. This growing strength is placing Türkiye on a more direct collision course with Israel. Israeli officials have been increasingly explicit about viewing Türkiye as an emerging strategic threat, especially in Syria, where Türkiye holds more cards than any other actor. Why Turkey will be a key regional powerbroker after the Iran war is no longer a question, it is a reality. The Gulf: Triple Pressure on a Weakened Social Contract The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have absorbed the most immediate economic shock from this war. The GCC's social contract, the implicit promise of quasi-unlimited prosperity in exchange for political loyalty to ruling dynasties, depends on a stable, wealthy, interconnected regional economy, and is now under stress. The GCC faces three simultaneous challenges, each of which would be demanding on its own. First, it needs to restore confidence in the economic model it has built since the 1970’s, which depends on predictable oil exports, safe transit routes, and foreign investment that is sensitive to regional instability. Second, it must decide how to handle an Iran that is wounded but not broken, and that will, under almost any ceasefire scenario, retain the capacity to threaten Gulf infrastructure again. Accommodation risks emboldening Tehran; confrontation risks another round of economic devastation. Third, and perhaps most urgently, the Gulf states need to kick-start an express economic recovery programme. The Absent West: A Lasting Strategic Error Throughout this crisis, the most striking feature of European and broader Western policy has been its absence. While the US was fighting a regime that did not spare any Western interest, European governments were mostly watching from the sidelines, using the Iran crisis as an opportunity to settle political accounts with the Trump administration rather than engage with the strategic reality that Iran's threat is not limited to US interests. This will be remembered as a profound strategic error. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump's methods, the underlying reality remains that an emboldened Iran is emerging out of this conflict alongside a Gulf whose economic foundations are under sustained pressure. By choosing not to join, or at minimum not to support, the US-led effort to weaken Iran, reluctant Western actors have effectively fostered a more dangerous balance of power, one in which Iran's leverage grows, deterrence erodes, and the cost of eventual confrontation becomes far higher. The Grey Zone as a Strategic Horizon Iran's remaining asymmetric capabilities will not sit idle while diplomatic negotiations proceed. Short of a satisfactory deal for President Trump, both the US and Israel have strong strategic incentives to maintain an active pattern of targeted operations. Nonetheless, all three parties — and the GCC — cannot afford a return to full-scale war as it was in March and early April 2026. The purpose of the emerging grey-zone strategy is to disrupt Iranian nuclear and ballistic rearmament, degrade surviving proxy infrastructure, and signal through action that the cost of reconstitution will remain high. Grey-zone operations (precision strikes, cyber disruption, intelligence operations) have proven more durable in their effects than spectacular military campaigns, precisely because they deny adversaries the stable environment they need to rebuild. Strategic restraint premised on the hope that negotiations will resolve structural issues would, on current evidence, simply offer Iran and its proxies the breathing space they need to reload. The pattern has repeated itself too many times to assume a different outcome this time. The scenario of a comprehensive diplomatic breakthrough that resolves the nuclear file, constrains Iran's proxy network, and produces a stable, enforceable new order would genuinely change the regional equation. But it is the least likely outcome on current evidence. It would require a level of sustained US political investment that Washington has consistently failed to deliver after military campaigns. It would require Iran's post-war leadership to make concessions that its predecessor explicitly refused. It would require a Hezbollah willing to disarm as a condition for Lebanon's recovery, something the group has already signalled it will not accept. Regional actors are more desperate and less predictable, and the trust required for a durable settlement has been eroded by decades of broken agreements and bad faith posturing on all sides. Conclusion The new phase of the Middle East's never-ending crisis is not defined by a clear victor or a clear loser. It is defined by uncertainty, in Israel, in the United States, throughout the Gulf, and in Lebanon; and by a general consensus among regional actors that the safest operating posture, for now, is to advance interests through low-intensity confrontation, back-channel pressure, and strategic ambiguity rather than open confrontation. The stakes are higher than ever and the actors more desperate than before.

The United States decision to launch a major military campaign against Iran was driven by a confluence of pressures. Hawkish figures in the national security establishment had long advocated for decisive action. Pro-Israel lobbying pressed hard for intervention, especially after the June 2025 strikes failed to produce lasting deterrence, and Israel itself had spent months pushing Washington toward a more maximalist posture. These factors created the political conditions for war. Yet the most strategically decisive driver was arguably a logic like the one applied in Venezuela. President Trump’s core objective is not simply to degrade Iran’s military capacity, but to reshape the architecture of global oil transactions — controlling not just who sells crude, but who buys it and under what terms. By sustaining and deepening sanctions pressure on Iranian oil exports, Washington seeks to constrain China’s access to subsidised or discounted crude at a moment when that access constitutes a meaningful input into Chinese industrial and military growth. Conventional Victory and Its Limits There is no question about what the US military achieved in March and April 2026. The opening strikes killed the Supreme Leader, eliminated senior military commanders, and destroyed key institutional compounds including the main defence research headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards. A large share of Iran’s air defence systems was degraded within the first 24 hours, handing US and Israeli aircraft effective control of Iranian airspace almost immediately. Most Iran’s ballistic missile launchers were destroyed within the first two weeks, and most of Iran’s mapped military-industrial sites were struck overall, reducing Iranian missile and drone attacks on Israel dramatically by the second week of the war. The main enrichment facilities were hit severely, first in June 2025 and again in 2026, while a significant number of Iranian warships were sunk. By any conventional military metric, the campaign was a remarkable success. Yet this picture of conventional military success requires nuancing. Iran’s strategic posture was never built primarily on its conventional forces. It rests on a mosaic defence approach — an interlocking network of asymmetric tools including drone swarms, proxy militias, naval harassment, and the latent threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz. The campaign neutralised Iran’s conventional military layer while leaving its asymmetric capabilities largely intact. Dismantling an adversary’s navy, ballistic missiles, and air defences is strategically significant — but insufficient when that adversary’s primary coercive instruments are drones, proxy networks, and the capacity to disrupt critical maritime chokepoints. Degrading the conventional without neutralising the asymmetric is, in effect, removing the rifle from your enemy’s hand while leaving the pistol loaded. An Ambiguous Ceasefire The limitations of what was achieved are already visible in the ceasefire’s contours. The agreement, never made public, has been widely characterised as ambiguous. Most critically, the nuclear file remains entirely unresolved, despite being the one issue on which the Trump administration and its critics converged. Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, while severely degraded, are not permanently disabled. Their reconstitution is a function of resources, not resolve, and any sanctions relief embedded in a ceasefire agreement would effectively restart the rearmament clock. The Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran-aligned factions in Iraq are already in rebuilding mode. For these actors, the ceasefire represents not a defeat but a tactical pause and an opportunity to reconstitute. Post-War Iran It would be equally misleading to frame Iran’s position as one of victory or resilience. The regime that survived this war is not the regime that entered it. More than fifty senior figures were killed. The military has been severely degraded. The nuclear programme has been set back by years. The economy, already under severe strain from decades of sanctions, has been pushed to the verge of structural collapse. Infrastructure damage is extensive, and the already fraying social contract between the regime and its citizens is under extraordinary new stress. The power structures within the regime are under internal strain as rival factions compete to define what post-war Iran looks like and who leads it. Iran may have dodged the worst outcome — a collapse of the regime — but the colossal challenges it now faces are a far cry from victory. The contrast between Iran’s stated positions and its behaviour in April 2026 is stark. Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei consistently declared there would be no negotiations with the US. In March 2026, Iranian officials consistently confirmed that any ceasefire would require full deterrence guarantees. Between 7 and 10 April, multiple Iranian officials publicly declared there would be no talks in Islamabad unless Israel first stopped its operations against Hezbollah. Not only did Israel not stop, but it launched one of its largest single operations against Hezbollah on April 8th. And yet the Iranian delegation flew to Islamabad and sat down at the table. No amount of deceitful victory rhetoric will change this reality. An American Constant The US has a well-documented pattern of failing to translate military dominance into political gain. In Lebanon in 1983, after the bombing that killed 241 servicemembers, the Reagan administration withdrew within months, leaving a vacuum that Hezbollah moved swiftly to fill. In 2003, the US overthrew Saddam Hussein with formidable military precision but no coherent plan for what would follow, producing a power vacuum that Iran-backed militias rushed to occupy and have never vacated. The 2011 premature withdrawal from Iraq eroded institutional capacity and state authority at a pivotal moment, compounding governance failures that ISIS was able to systematically exploit by 2014. In 2013, President Obama drew a public red line around chemical weapons in Syria, then declined to enforce it when Assad crossed it in Ghouta. American credibility collapsed, Russia intervened, and the Syrian war reshaped the regional balance in ways that still reverberate. In August 2021, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan handed the Taliban a victory at no cost and sent a signal across every theatre where the US had partners. In May 2025, Trump declared the Houthis had ‘capitulated’, while they insisted it was Washington that had backed down. The ceasefire of April looks like each of these episodes and shares the same pattern of an overwhelming force, incomplete political follow-through, and adversaries who adapt and fill the vacuum. Washington’s Structural Inability Washington’s structural inability to sustain strategic engagement after military action is not incidental. It is a product of the domestic political architecture that shapes every foreign policy decision. The US does not enter or exit wars through a unified national will. It does so through the collision of competing interests that are rarely reconcilable. Defence contractors and the military-industrial complex have institutional incentives that favour escalation cycles over resolution. Bipartisan polarisation ensures that any policy associated with one administration becomes a target for the other, regardless of its strategic merit. MAGA isolationists opposed the war from the outset; pro-Israel groups wanted it taken further; traditional foreign policy establishments on both left and right view the outcome as a strategic half-measure. No coherent coalition exists to sustain the political investment a durable settlement would require. With midterm elections approaching, inflationary pressure and higher oil prices are leaving the Administration and Republican Party exposed. The predictable result is the same pressure for premature disengagement that has, in every comparable episode, left the underlying strategic problem intact, and the next confrontation more expensive than the one before. Conclusion The war between the US and Iran did not produce a winner. It produced a region more fractured than before, a nuclear file more dangerous for being unresolved, and two adversaries who will return to confrontation – albeit in different forms – under conditions they have each made worse. The fog of non-victory is not a metaphor. It is the strategic reality that will define the next chapter addressed in Part Two of this analysis. Next article : The Fog of Non-Victory: The Region’s New Disorder

From the moment French troops departed Syria in April 1946, the young republic became arguably the most coup-prone country in the Arab world for nearly a quarter century. By 1970, Syria had lived through ten successful coups. On 13 November 1970, Hafez al-Assad carried out a palace coup and installed himself as strongman. For Assad, Lebanon was not simply a neighbor; it is Syria’s backyard and a tool for a stronger regional posture. After the civil war erupted in Beirut, Syria intervened militarily in 1976 — initially against the Palestine Liberation Organization and Lebanese leftist groups, and later in support of these same pro-Palestinian forces against the self-organized Christian groups rallied to defend themselves. From that intervention onward, Syrian intelligence and military apparatuses integrated themselves into the Lebanese political fabric, brokering power by alternately backing, betraying, or preying on local groups. The October 1973 war — launched jointly with Egypt against Israel — was a turning point that transformed Assad from a local player into an indispensable interlocutor for Washington. The war ended in stalemate, but it was how Assad handled the aftermath that revealed his strategic genius. Henry Kissinger, who spent nearly a month shuttling between Damascus and Jerusalem in May 1974, was reportedly "astonished and surprised" when Assad accepted the disengagement framework. The agreement, signed in Geneva on 31 May 1974, created a UN-monitored buffer zone along the Golan, and froze the Israeli-Syrian frontier for the next five decades. No other Arab-Israeli front remained as quiet for as long. That stability became Assad's paradigm: as long as the Golan remained frozen, Syria remained necessary. No peace could happen without Damascus; no war could safely start without its consent. One of Assad's greatest diplomatic achievements was perhaps his management of the Cold War. The Syrian Arab Army became one of the most comprehensively Soviet-equipped and Soviet-trained forces in the Arab region. Its doctrine, its weapons systems, its officer training all ran through Moscow. Yet Assad never gave the Soviets what they truly wanted: exclusive influence. He maintained a back channel to Washington, met American officials regularly, and refrained from joining any formal Soviet alliance framework. Assad turned this ambiguity into operational leverage. He fought U.S. allies in Lebanon when it suited him, undermined Egypt’s Arab leadership after Camp David, and simultaneously extracted Soviet military hardware at preferential rates. Damascus was too valuable for Washington to isolate and too independent for Moscow to control. That was the sweet spot Assad occupied for two decades. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Assad faced a defining choice. Syria joined –albeit symbolically- the U.S.-led coalition to liberate Kuwait; a key decision that earned Assad a free hand in Lebanon as a reward from Washington and the Saudis. Syria's occupation of Lebanon would last another 15 years, the political umbrella for which was provided through a deal between Assad and the Saudis. Rafic Hariri, a self-made Saudi-connected billionaire became prime minister in 1992. Under this arrangement and almost until his assassination in 2005, Hariri controlled Lebanon's economy, reconstruction, and financial policy, while Syria controlled its military, security services and foreign policy. Upon his death in 2000, Hafez’s son Bashar inherited a finely calibrated domestic and regional portfolio he did not fully understand and could not preserve, let alone grow. Heavy international pressure, combined with a local popular backlash (aka the Cedar revolution) emerging in the aftermath of Hariri’s assassination in February 2005 drove a rapid Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, erasing three decades of influence in a matter of weeks. Within less than ten years of his presidency, Bashar Assad changed from being the favorite dictator of the international community to its black sheep. When the Arab uprisings reached Syria in March 2011, the regime's response — brutal, indiscriminate repression — triggered a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, displaced half the population, and reduced Syria's military capacity to a fraction of its former self. Post-Assad Syria, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, once commander of the al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, rests on a power structure shaped by the rebel alliance that prevailed—one that functions more as a hegemonic factional state than as a genuine pluralist democracy. Al-Sharaa has achieved remarkable international legitimacy in a short time. In just over one year, he met Trump at the White House, addressed the UN General Assembly, and secured the removal of some Western sanctions. Yet his domestic control remains fragile: sectarian violence in the western coast, de facto Kurdish autonomy in the northeast, Druze resistance in the south, and the persistence of jihadist factions hostile to his pragmatism all continue to constrain central authority. By 2024, the Syrian Arab Army was already a shadow of the force Hafez had built. Hezbollah fighters, Iraqi Shia militias, Russian forces, and Iranian advisors effectively replaced the Syrian army as the backbone of regime defense — meaning Syria's own military did not possess significant capabilities. Furthermore, right after the Assad regime fell, Israel moved with extraordinary speed to ensure that whatever came next would begin from near-zero military capacity by targeting airbases, air defense batteries, weapons production facilities, missile stockpiles, radar systems, and research centers in Damascus, Homs, Tartus, Latakia, and Palmyra. By the IDF's own account, the campaign destroyed approximately 80% of Syria's remaining strategic military assets. What Syria has left is a coalition of armed factions rather than a professional military. Most fighters come from former Islamist militias — effective in terrorism, guerrilla warfare and civil war tactics, but with little training in conventional state warfare: border control, territorial defense, logistics chains, joint operations. Equipment is disparate, largely obsolete, and sparse in medium and heavy weapons. There are no meaningful air or naval capabilities left. Without the foreign fighters — the jihadist volunteers from Central Asia, North Africa, and elsewhere who had swelled rebel ranks during the civil war — Syria's armed forces are numerically insufficient to patrol, let alone project power across, a country the size of Syria. Syria's economy compounds its military weakness. Despite the decision to lift some sanctions, the US and EU are still moving cautiously. Investment has not materialized at any meaningful scale. Public wages are desperately low, feeding endemic corruption. Infrastructure is shattered. There is no economic base for a major military build-up, let alone a foreign military adventure. In 2025, some voices in the region and beyond began suggesting that Syria could or should move military forces into Lebanon, framing it as a counter to Iranian influence. The suggestion reveals a fundamental misreading of what Syria currently is. However, what Washington formally asked for was a border security question, not an occupation mandate. The US request to the Syrian government was specific: prevent the land movement of Iranian assets — weapons, fighters, funds — from Iraq to Lebanon through Syrian territory. That is why Syrian reinforcements were dispatched to both the Iraqi and Lebanese frontiers, not the Lebanese border alone. The goal is interdiction, not invasion. An occupation requires sustained logistics, reliable command chains, territorial administration, and force protection. Occupying and administering Lebanese territory is an undertaking that has historically required a force of 35,000–40,000 disciplined soldiers with intelligence services, checkpoints, political proxies, regional and international endorsement. The new Syrian leadership has none of that. Israel's position is an additional hard constraint. Tel Aviv does not trust the current Damascus government — regarding al-Sharaa, as a jihadist in a suit and a Turkish puppet. More fundamentally, Israel is deeply opposed to Turkish influence expanding into Syrian territory, and it categorically opposes its extension into Lebanon. On the other hand, U.S. interests in Lebanon center on stabilizing the Lebanese army and constraining Hezbollah, not on opening another front of uncertainty with an untested Islamist military structure. On the Lebanese side of the border, the U.S. equipped and trained Lebanese Army and armed border communities in the north and east of Lebanon would impose a serious cost on any incursion by disparate and lightly equipped Syrian Islamist forces. For pro-Iranian actors and Hezbollah-affiliated networks, the spectre of a jihadist army marching on Beirut is not an analysis but a political lifeline. Since December 2024, both have absorbed devastating losses including the Syria corridor severed. By stoking alarm about Sunni extremists massing on Lebanon’s border, they aim to rebuild, notably among Shias and Christians, the communal solidarity — the sense of shared existential threat — that long sustained their mobilizing power. The trap is cynical: a Syrian military operation, were it ever to occur, would hand them precisely the raison d’être they seek, confirming that Hezbollah’s weapons remain Lebanon’s indispensable shield. The invasion narrative, in short, should be read for what it is — not a security assessment, but a measure of how much these actors urgently need an enemy to sustain their relevance. Syria's century-long story is about the gap between ambition and capacity. Hafez Assad was extraordinary precisely because he closed that gap — he leveraged Syria's geographic and political position to punch well above his country's weight for three decades. His son deepened that gap again, catastrophically. The new Syria, under al-Sharaa, is still in the process of deciding what kind of state it wants to be. Lebanon, for now, is not a prize within reach.