The 2026 war did not settle the questions it was meant to resolve. It unsettled the assumptions on which the regional order had rested. The argument of this analysis is straightforward: the Middle East has already changed shape, even as the wider global order has yet to catch up.
The question being asked in every chancellery and newsroom is whether the Middle East can return to what it was before the 2026 war. It cannot. A single, compressed conflict has rearranged the perceptions on which the regional order depended, and perception, not territory, is the currency in which order is held. Between the Israeli and American strikes of 28 February, which killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and a large part of Iran’s command structure, and the Pakistan-mediated ceasefire on April 7th, more than five weeks of fighting reached across the entire Gulf. Missiles and drones struck every Gulf state in some measure, the Strait of Hormuz was choked, and fuel shortages rippled into Asia and the wider economy.
What makes this war a turning point is not its scale, which was contained, but its speed and its targets. Decision timelines compressed to hours, escalation ran horizontally across the region rather than vertically toward a single front, and the assets struck were precisely those that the postwar order had treated as untouchable: an adversary’s supreme leadership on one side, the protective architecture of an American alliance system on the other. When both of those were shown to be vulnerable in the same month, the assumptions underwriting the region changed with them.
Uncertainty itself has become Iranian leverage. A campaign intended to close the nuclear file has instead made that file less transparent and Iran’s negotiating hand, paradoxically, stronger.
The honest test of any war is whether it secured its stated aim. Measured against the objective that justified the campaign, preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, the results are at best ambiguous and at worst counterproductive. The International Atomic Energy Agency assesses that Iran’s stockpile of roughly 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, accumulated before the strikes, has not been eliminated. Director General Rafael Grossi has stated that the material is most likely intact in the tunnel complex at Isfahan, with no satellite indication that it was moved, while inspectors have had no access since the conflict began. The US Congressional Research Service reaches the same cautious conclusion: the effect of the strikes on Iran’s enrichment capacity is simply unclear.
This is the central irony of the operation. The strikes destroyed buildings and centrifuges but left the fissile material, the accumulated knowledge, and the latent capacity in Iranian hands, while removing the inspectors who could verify anything. Though Tehran once offered to dilute its Uranium as a concession, it now bargains at the table with it as a chip. Uncertainty itself has become Iranian leverage. A campaign intended to close the nuclear file has instead made that file less transparent and Iran’s negotiating hand, paradoxically, stronger.
For the Trump administration this produces an inescapable domestic question: what did the United States gain? The conflict has settled into brinkmanship over Hormuz and a naval blockade rather than a decisive outcome, and the negotiations now under way are unlikely to yield terms that read as an American victory. Whatever the eventual settlement, it will be measured against the cost in expended interceptors, repositioned carriers, disrupted trade, and exposed allies. There is no clean exit from a war whose principal achievement was to demonstrate the limits of force against a determined and dispersed adversary. The Trump administration claimed that it accomplished a major degradation of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and military capabilities. The White House described the operation as having “obliterated key Iranian capabilities needed to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon,” while
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the strikes significantly set back Iran’s nuclear program. However, there is no clear evidence that the US achieved broader strategic objectives such as regime change, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, ending Iranian regional influence, or securing a decisive political victory. Critics in Congress have called the war “costly” and argued it failed to meet its objectives, while reports indicate Washington remains engaged in difficult negotiations and regional security challenges.
The implications do not stop at the region’s edge. The war drew Western air-defense assets and expertise into the Gulf at the very moment they were stretched elsewhere, a reminder that the United States cannot simultaneously underwrite security in the Gulf, deter Russia in Europe, and pivot to the Indo-Pacific without strain. The Middle East Council on Global Affairs describes a Gulf now placed at the center of a contested new world order rather than at the periphery of an American one. Every middle power watching, from the Indo-Pacific to Europe, has registered both the cost of dependence on a single guarantor and the resilience available to a state willing to absorb a first strike. These are the extra-regional currents that will carry the war’s consequences far beyond the Gulf.
Whether the bases attracted the missiles or merely failed to stop them, the perception of exposure is now fixed, and perception is what drives the hedging that follows.
The deepest casualty of the war was not in Iran at all. It was the credibility of the American security guarantee in the Gulf. For three decades the bargain was simple: the Gulf monarchies hosted American forces and bought American hardware, and in return they received protection. The war broke the second half of that bargain in full view. Gulf states watched as hundreds of billions of dollars of Patriot, THAAD, and F-15 systems offered little protection against Iranian missiles, and they perceived that Washington had prioritized the defense of Tel Aviv over Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Manama.
The Atlantic Council captured the mood of the Gulf States in four words: “They have been exposed.” The logic of deterrence explains why this matters so much. As Thomas Schelling argued, an extended deterrent has no physical existence; its entire value lies in the belief of friend and foe alike that it will be honored. Once that belief is shaken, the guarantee is degraded even if no formal commitment has changed. This is why the question now circulating among regional capitals, posed sharply in a Responsible Statecraft analysis by Sahar Khan, is no longer rhetorical: what is the logic of hosting bases that could not defend the states that host them and that may invite the very fire they are meant to deter?
It is worth stating the strongest counterargument fairly. The Middle East Institute contends that the bases did not draw Iranian Fire; rather, the Gulf states were struck because of their centrality in the world energy economy and their embedding in an American system, and Iran would have targeted them regardless. That may be true as a matter of cause. But it does not change the lesson the Gulf itself has absorbed. Whether the bases attracted the missiles or merely failed to stop them, the perception of exposure is now fixed, and perception is what drives the hedging that follows.
If the war damaged American credibility, it enhanced something on the Iranian side that is harder to measure and harder to bomb. Iran absorbed the decapitation of its supreme leadership and the destruction of much of its military infrastructure, and the state did not collapse. It retained enough command coherence to respond, to close Hormuz, and to keep control of escalation in its own hands. The endurance of Iranian society and of the Iranian state under a Western and Israeli first strike has altered global perceptions of who can take such a blow and remain standing at the negotiating table.
This is not an argument about the merits of the Iranian government, on which views legitimately differ. It is an argument about the strategic signal the war sent. A state that can be struck at its very apex and still impose costs on the global economy, still control a vital chokepoint, and still bargain over its surviving stockpile has demonstrated a form of resilience that other middle powers will study closely. The lesson others draw is that survivability and the capacity to inflict pain matter more than parity of force, and that conclusion travels well beyond the Gulf.
Into the vacuum of trust left by the war steps Beijing. The Gulf states are not abandoning Washington, but they are visibly diversifying, and China is the principal beneficiary. Chinese drones, missiles, and surveillance systems are attractive precisely because they come without political strings, and Beijing’s offer spans the full range from commercial infrastructure and ports to advanced military technology. Analysts now describe a deliberate Chinese strategy of encircling and outwaiting the American base network through economic and security integration rather than direct confrontation. The Carnegie Endowment believes that among the three different possibilities, the Gulf States could acquire air defenses from China. Russia will find some space too, anchored in energy and in its existing nuclear cooperation with Iran, but it is China, with confidence visibly raised by the war, that has the breadth of offer to reshape the region’s external dependencies.
Intellectual honesty requires marking the ceiling on this shift. As Asia Times observes, Chinese systems do not yet match the integrated air defense the United States can field, and the procurement gap cannot be bridged quickly. The Gulf is pursuing strategic autonomy and a multipolar insurance policy, not a wholesale defection from Washington to Beijing. But the direction of travel is now set, and direction, sustained over years, is how orders change. The point is not that China has replaced America in the Gulf. It is that the monopoly America once held has ended, and it will not be restored.
The clearest sign that Washington is reaching for an outdated map is its renewed push on the Abraham Accords. Even now, the President is pressing Arab and Muslim leaders to normalize relations with Israel as part of any settlement, having telephoned the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain to that end. Yet the template was designed for a region that no longer exists. Saudi Arabia continues to insist that there can be no normalization without a credible path to Palestinian statehood, and Saudi public opinion, already hostile before the Gaza war, has hardened further.
The strongest defense of the Accords, advanced in a recent National Interest assessment, is that the framework held under the hardest test: no signatory walked away, and Israel even deployed air defenses in support of an Arab partner. That is correct, and it should be acknowledged. But survival is not expansion, and continuity is not vindication. The animating logic of normalization was that alignment with Israel and the United States would buy security against Iran. The war discredited exactly that proposition. A framework premised on the reliability of the American umbrella is a difficult product to sell in the precise season when that umbrella was seen to leak. Trump’s position on the Accords does not match the situation the war has produced, and the current environment does not support it.
The 2026 war produced no victor in the conventional sense. It produced no clean strategic gain for the United States or Israel, and it left Iran battered but standing, holding its enriched material, its chokepoint, and a strengthened bargaining position. What it did produce, unambiguously, was a strategic loser in the form of the credibility of American primacy as previously exercised. Any outcome of the negotiations now under way is likely to read as more favorable to Tehran than to Washington or Tel Aviv, because the war has already shifted the underlying balance that the talks merely formalize.
The wider global order will take time to register all of this. Great-power transitions are slow, and the language of treaties and summits lags the facts on the ground. But the Middle East itself has already transformed. The exposure of the security guarantee, the questioning of the bases, the resilience that reset perceptions of Iran, and the opening for China are not forecasts; they are the present tense of the region. The transformation of the global order may take years. The transformation of the Middle East has already happened.
For policymakers, the priority that follows is escalation management in a region where decision timelines have compressed, where guarantees are doubted, and where more suppliers now compete for influence. An order built on a single guarantor and a single template has ended. The work of the coming decade will be to understand, and to help shape, whatever replaces it.
Dr. Tahir Mahmood Azad is currently a research scholar at the Department of Politics & International Relations, the University of Reading, UK. He previously served as an Affiliate Researcher at King’s College London and held fellowships at Sandia National Laboratories (USA), the University of Bristol, the University of Georgia USA, the Graduate Institute Geneva, ISDP Stockholm, and PRIF Germany. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leicester and holds a PhD in Strategic & Nuclear Studies from National Defence University (NDU), Pakistan. Azad also worked as a Research Fellow and Programme Coordinator at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI), Pakistan. His research focuses on nuclear politics, missile proliferation, China’s military modernisation, politics & security in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East regions, and South Asian strategic affairs.
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