Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2026, pp. 11-13
Seven Views: Saying “No” to Another Endless War
By Rami G. Khouri
THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of the Israeli-American assault on Iran generated enormous amounts of news, propaganda and speculation. Politicians and pundits on all sides offered contradictory information and analyses that have obscured realities on the ground and overloaded the global public.
As the conflict entered its third week, careful observation can still identify new and critical dynamics that could shape its outcome, the future of the Middle East, and perhaps global confrontations and conditions. They are all new realities that feed into each other to create this destructive moment.
First, the scope of this war has expanded military clashes to more than a dozen states in the region while also entangling countries around the world who assist either side. The global array of states involved in this war is unprecedented. It shatters the assumption that countries can be safe if they stay out of the fighting. That was made clear when Iran decided to attack Gulf states, Iraq and Jordan for hosting U.S. military bases and Cyprus and Türkiye for hosting U.S. and British forces.
Second, the direct impact of the war has rattled most of the world through oil and gas shortages, shipping constraints, higher prices and the prospect of an economic recession. No country can insulate itself from the impacts of the war, whether at the level of the economy or basic family security in foodstuffs, medicines and household energy needs.
Third, the duration of the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran will determine its long-term impacts regionally and globally. The aggressors from Washington and Tel Aviv hoped for a quick and decisive victory. They assumed they could kill and topple the Iranian leadership within a few days but failed to achieve that after days of unrelenting attacks. Iran and its allies seek a lengthy war that bleeds the attackers’ military capabilities and political endurance and compels them to cease fire and stop trying to turn the entire Middle East into a flaccid collection of supplicants and vassals.
Fourth, the ideological underpinnings of the conflict are just as important as geopolitical realities. Israel and the U.S. are the torchbearers of the last Western settler-colonial campaign in the region, which enabled Zionism to dispossess the indigenous Palestinians and now attempt to assert hegemonic military and economic dominance over everyone else in the region. The Iranians and their allies want instead to check and reverse the colonial onslaught that has plagued virtually every Middle Eastern country since the 19th century and that remains militarily active today.
Fifth, the nature of this war demonstrates we have entered a new age of warfare. The U.S. and Israeli militaries use their superior air and satellite assets to destroy military, industrial and civilian facilities in a brutal aerial campaign. With vastly more limited resources and firepower, Iran and its allies have developed technological and logistical innovations that severely limit the impact of the air assault against them and allow them to continue fighting.
Iran’s use of sophisticated but relatively cheap technology has helped it penetrate U.S.-built air defenses worth millions of dollars. Its evasive drones and hypersonic missiles have allowed it to overload and weaken defense systems, such as the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, and hit many targets. There has been extensive damage even in Israel, which boasts the most advanced “Iron Dome” technology and is forced to heavily censor its own media and citizens to hide its weaknesses.
Sixth, Iran has learned important lessons from the last century of Western-Zionist assaults on any party that has tried to resist them. Tehran survived the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of other leaders in the first days of the war, transitioned its top leadership and continues to resist and fire back against foes. It has clearly recognized the importance of a decentralized system of warfare: planned leadership successions, durable command and control systems, dispersed weapons manufacturing and storage facilities, and hidden launch platforms for missiles, drones, maritime weapons and other critical assets.
Seventh, the full consequences of the war to date cannot be accurately assessed because complete damage information is not available in most cases. That will come later. But we can see that the attacks by all sides since the U.S.-Israeli opening assault have continued to ignore provisions of international law that should protect civilian areas, essential infrastructure and cultural sites in times of war. The sheer indiscriminate savagery of many of the attacks, especially against civilians, should come as no surprise, given the horrors of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza and Israel’s threats to turn parts of Iran and Lebanon into Gaza-like wastelands.
Finally, the war has demonstrated that Arab states’ reliance on the U.S. for protection has failed to keep them safe. Having spent trillions of dollars in the past half-century buying sophisticated weapons systems and hosting U.S. bases, many Arab capitals now see little or no return on this investment. They will all have to assess how they can overcome this big void in their capability and sovereignty and how they can recalibrate their defense strategies and diplomatic focus.
All of these dynamics are interlinked, and they all point in the same direction: Palestine. The war in Iran is yet another manifestation of the inherent regional and global instability that the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict has produced for more than 75 years.
Stability and peace will not be achieved until a just solution to the conflict is reached. Until then, Arabs, Iranians and Israelis will continue to live in conflict and fear while people across the world will suffer the rippling effects of the century-old battle between Zionism, Arabism and anticolonial resistance across the Global South—in the many realms that have been clarified in the past two weeks.
Author and analyst Rami G. Khouri is a Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. This article was first published in Al Jazeera and is reprinted with permission.
