As of October 7, 2023, the United States and Israel believed that sustained diplomatic and military pressure on Iran would deter and degrade its fighting ability. In the process, they degraded something else entirely: Iran’s willingness to remain constrained. The missiles and drones now attacking across the Gulf show that Iran is no longer holding back.
For years, Iran operated under a doctrine of “strategic patience.” This was a deliberate and calculated form of restraint that guided how Tehran and its network of allies negotiated with Washington and Tel Aviv.
Instead of confrontation, Iran built and leveraged a deterrence network: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq were its allies around Israel and helped deter any major Israeli aggression.
The first serious fracture in Iran’s politics came in April 2024, when an Israeli attack destroyed the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killed senior Revolutionary Guard commanders. Tehran’s response was to launch Operation True Promise, a direct bombardment of drones and ballistic missiles fired into Israeli territory.
Throughout 2024 and even into 2025, Iran attempted to maintain a form of controlled restraint and carefully calibrated deterrence to avoid triggering an all-out war. But the environment was changing in such a way that this strategy was unsustainable. Israel’s systematic attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah leaders disrupted key nodes of Iran’s deterrence architecture. The fall of Al-Assad’s government in Syria threatened critical supply lines through Iran’s main land corridor to Hezbollah.
Following the 12-day war of 2025, Iran formally declared a new doctrine of “unprecedented and active deterrence” in January 2026.
When the United States and Israel launched coordinated attacks on February 28, 2026, during ongoing negotiations, they confirmed to Iranian leaders that restraint offered no protection and likely would not in the future.
In addition to attacking Iran, Israel has attacked Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria. Iran’s reaction so far has been a demonstration of its new doctrine: Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Cyprus have been hit by Iran in a matter of days.
All of these countries have played different roles in the region. Qatar, for example, has maintained its own mediation strategy and has not only hosted a US base but also Hamas offices; the most sophisticated demonstration of balancing regional tensions. The fact that it has been dragged into the latest escalation is a direct indictment of the failure of governments with power and influence – particularly the United States – to meaningfully resolve the crisis in Gaza in recent years.
Perhaps the most significant development in the current escalation is Iran’s strong attack on the United Arab Emirates. The United Arab Emirates has pursued a foreign policy defined by a strategy of fragmentation. This has meant working with Israel and other partners to break down the unified political and military opposition across the region into smaller, disconnected elements that can be more easily contained and managed.
That strategy was always based on the assumption that the UAE’s own stability was insulated from its actions. As rockets rain down on Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the illusion of that separation is no longer possible.
Iran’s allies in the region have not fully mobilized and, despite their severe attrition, have retained an organizational depth that would likely allow them to sustain low-level armed resistance, similar to that which wore down US forces in Iraq.
As major actors engage in a cycle of open military confrontation, simmering internal crises are rapidly being unleashed across the Middle East. There are reports that the US administration is encouraging Kurdish forces to form a ground offensive against Iran. In Bahrain, fresh protests against the monarchy have broken out and Saudi forces have been deployed to the island kingdom to suppress the opposition. Protesters in Baghdad attempted to storm the Green Zone, the seat of parliament.
Palestine remains the clearest expression of the regional order that Israel and the United States have sought to impose, with the active support of the United Arab Emirates: isolated enclaves, subject to permanent low-grade military pressure in the West Bank and large-scale destruction in Gaza. The capacity for meaningful self-government has been systematically dismantled as Israel’s territorial expansion continues. This is the template.
The chapter of calibrated and managed conflict has been forcibly closed by the cumulative weight of Israeli decisions. Every attack by the United States and Israel against Iran and Iranian-aligned leaders, every negotiation held before military operations, and every refusal to treat Palestinian political agency as a genuine variable in any regional agreement were decisions made by governments that believed that security could be achieved through a combination of fragmentation and force.
When US Secretary of State Rubio addressed the Munich Security Conference, the nostalgia for an era of undisputed Western primacy was unmistakable. But that era is precisely what produced the conditions that now explode across the region. Israel’s colonial expansion continues. The fragmentation model is spreading to Lebanon, Syria and even the Horn of Africa, and regime change has been unleashed in Iran to facilitate this project. And the pent-up resistance, whether from state or non-state actors, is no longer limited by the patience that once made it manageable.
The stability of the region will depend on whether a global coalition can be built after taking into account a basic contradiction: a rules-based order cannot coexist indefinitely with territorial expansion, collective punishment and selective accountability.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
