Is this the war to end Middle East wars?

Wednesday, 4 March 2026

A plume of smoke rises after a strike in the Iranian capital, Tehran, during the ongoing US-Israeli military action against the country on Monday (local time).

Dr Leon Goldsmith is an honorary senior lecturer at Otago University, specialising in the Middle East.

OPINION: On Saturday, February 28, the United States, under President Donald Trump, and Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, launched extensive airstrikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump posted on social media that the strikes would last, “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”.

While the insincerity and absurdity of this statement seem almost too much to bear, is there any possibility that he could be right? To test this claim, it is necessary to consider the modern political history of the region to assess whether this war constitutes a catastrophic escalation or the last major conflagration of a drawn-out destructive era in the Middle East.

First, let’s briefly review what is happening.

The weekend strikes on Iran and the subsequent retaliations coincided with the conclusion of the second round of negotiations in Geneva concerning Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, as well as its regional proxies.

Omani mediators, deeply involved in the talks, expressed their disappointment, noting that the negotiations had been progressing well before the attacks began.

Current events closely resemble those surrounding the “12-Day War” of June 2025. At that time, US negotiators were in Muscat attempting to secure a nuclear agreement with Iran, when Israel initiated Operation Rising Lion, targeting critical military and political sites within Iran. President Trump subsequently ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, escalating the conflict further.

An F/A-18E Super Hornet prepares to launch from the USS Abraham Lincoln in support of America’s “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran.

This current round of hostilities is likely to be more prolonged and deadlier than previous confrontations, with regime change in Tehran as a stated objective. Among the first casualties were Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the inner core of the regime.

Crucially, the current external blows against the Iranian regime follow closely on from massive anti-regime protests inside Iran in late December 2025 into January 2026 that saw determined and courageous defiance of the regime across all 31 of Iran’s provinces.

The protests were put down with lethal brutality with thousands believed to have been killed by Iranian security forces. It is important to note that Iranian protesters will face dire threats from an increasingly desperate regime when and if they take to the streets again, but they should not be left to their fate as protesters in Syria were in 2011-12.

Despite significant internal unrest and now suffering major losses to their senior leadership and defenses, Iranian forces managed to retaliate to the US-Israeli strikes via their substantial arsenal of missiles and drones. Although their response was less decisive than many anticipated, the surreal sight of crashing US aircraft, burning skyscrapers, oil refineries and tankers has shattered the illusion that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states were insulated from regional conflict.

The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut in Lebanon considered a Hezbollah stronghold, this week, after missiles were fired by Hezbollah fighters into Israel.

While the June 2025 war saw Iranian missiles ineffectively target Qatar, this time all GCC members have suffered some level of attack from Iranian salvoes. Even Oman, which had been actively mediating on Iran’s behalf, experienced a strike at the port of Duqm, although Iran’s foreign minister later issued an apology for this incident.

Although concerns about regional escalation have increased, the current situation highlights the Iranian regime’s isolation. Iran has no powerful friends left, apart from perhaps Russia and China who watch from the wings.

An already weakened Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon, prompting a fierce Israeli response. Lebanese President Joseph Auon strongly criticised Hezbollah’s attack, emphasising that Lebanon’s interests should take precedence over those of Iran, as he continued efforts to keep Lebanon out of the conflict. The Houthis in Yemen, typically aligned with Iran, have remained unusually quiet.

A photo from September 2025 showing Palestinians running as a building in Gaza collapses following an Israeli strike, during the conflict triggered by the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023.

So how did we arrive at this point, and is this the end or the beginning of the modern era of conflict in the Middle East?

Over the past two decades, the politics of the Middle East — particularly West Asia — have been shaped by two main blocs. The pro-Western “moderate” bloc, consisting chiefly of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Jordan and, often discreetly, Israel, faced off against the anti-Western “resistance bloc” led by Iran, Syria and the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Palestine.

A 2023 photo showing fighters from the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese militant group Hezbollah training in southern Lebanon.

International politics in the region operated within this paradigm, with various degrees of rivalry and conflict playing out primarily in proxy arenas such as Iraq, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine, Syria and Yemen. However, these confrontations rarely disrupted the fragile regional balance between the two blocs or threatened the dominance of powerful autocratic rulers at home.

In fact, the perpetuation of managed conflict across the region served to buttress the power bases of rulers by diverting their populations from legitimacy deficits, economic mismanagement, corruption and poor governance. While this has been the case in many Middle East states, it has been particularly crucial to the Iranian regime over recent decades.

Towards this end, Iran instilled and exploited political divisions in Lebanon via Hezbollah since the 1980s, helped ensure the US could not stabilise Iraq after 2003, was paramount sponsor of Assad’s destruction of Syria in 2011-24, and has contributed to Yemen’s decade of misery since 2015.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the central foreign policy tool of Iran. It is no coincidence that it was at the peak of Israeli-Palestinian optimism for peace in the early 1990s that Iran began to sponsor Hamas. And it is highly likely that Iran along with Hamas sought to derail the Abraham Accords’ Arab-Israeli normalisations via the carefully premeditated massacres and kidnappings out of Gaza on October 7, 2023.

This is not to say that the moderate bloc, Israel and the US have not been guilty of prosecuting wars, grievous injustices and instability, but rather that it has been the dynamics of regional rivalry that have kept conflict simmering and spoiled almost every opportunity to promote stability.

In this sense, the convergence of massive unrest inside Iran and the joint US-Israeli attacks that began this week may represent a decisive turning point, potentially exploding the long-standing regional order of permanent conflict.

If the Islamic Republic falls – and this is far from certain – the Middle East “Cold War” will essentially be over and a Saudi, Emirati and Israeli-led order buttressed by US military might will reign supreme across the entire region. This would not be a democratic or pluralist Middle East – but it would not be a region at war.

Donald Trump will no doubt look to take full credit.