“This is the viewpoint of a set of countries that know very well that they’re incredibly fragile,” Bilal Saab, a political risk analyst and Defense Department adviser from the first Trump administration, told TMD. “They’re incredibly vulnerable, and they don’t want to be on the receiving end of large salvos of missile attacks and drone attacks.”
U.S. and Israeli officials contend that Middle Eastern states now have less reason to worry. On Thursday, Adm. Brad Cooper, chief of U.S. Central Command, said that Iranian ballistic missile launches had declined by 90 percent since the start of the war. Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, also claimed Thursday that 80 percent of Iranian air defenses and 60 percent of its missile launchers had been destroyed.
But Saab warned that the slackening strikes likely represent a conscious shift in strategy for Iran, not just the success of U.S. and Israeli operations. “They’re going to be more deliberate about attacking the energy infrastructure across the Gulf to exact a high enough political and economic price,” he said.
It’s unlikely that any Arab countries will take offensive action against Iran, Saab said. But last week, it appeared that the U.S. and Israel were preparing to empower non-state groups to do so: namely, Iranian Kurds based in Iraq. Kurds, a stateless Middle Eastern ethnic group, are one of the largest minority groups in Iran, making up roughly 10 percent of the population. U.S. and Israeli forces have concentrated strikes on government targets in heavily Kurdish areas of western Iran in recent days, and the CIA has reportedly been arming and training Iranian Kurdish rebels.
But by Saturday, President Donald Trump had ruled out a potential Kurdish incursion. “We don’t want to make the war any more complex than it already is,” he told reporters. Enflaming ethnic divisions in Iran also risks empowering its regime, Ömer Özkizilcik, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Syria project, told TMD. “Supporting the Kurds would be a huge gift,” he said, noting that other Iranian ethnic groups—like the majority Persians and Azeris—are committed to the idea of a unified Iranian state and abhor the notion of fragmentation. Iranian Kurds themselves, Özkizilcik argued, are also split along linguistic and religious lines, making a “coherent and coordinated response” unlikely.
Arming Kurds also risks provoking their staunchest foe, NATO member Turkey, which has battled Kurdish militant groups for decades and tends to view Kurdish autonomy as a threat. Turkish officials have already leaked plans to establish buffer zones on the Iranian side of their border with the Islamic Republic in the event of a refugee wave. Özkizilcik noted that during the Syrian civil war, Turkey pursued a similar strategy, using the buffer zones as a way to contain armed Kurdish groups.
Meanwhile, Europe has sent military forces to the region. Greece, Britain, Spain, Italy, France, and the Netherlands deployed naval and air assets to Cyprus, an EU member nation, after an Iranian drone struck a British base there last week.
But European leaders have taken several different tacks in responding to the U.S. military action. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has forbidden the U.S. from using bases in the country to launch attacks against Iran, declaring on Spanish television that Spain would not “be complicit in something that is bad for the world—and that is also contrary to our values and interests—simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.”
In response, Trump threatened to embargo all trade with Spain, although such a move would likely threaten trading relationships with the rest of the EU. “Any threat against [a] member state is by definition [a] threat against the EU,” EU internal market commissioner Stéphane Séjourné said last week. There’s been no further news on whether the U.S. intends to follow through on its embargo threat, although Spain swiftly denied a White House claim that it had agreed to allow its bases to be used by the U.S. military.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was originally hesitant to allow the U.S. to use some U.K. overseas bases, also came in for Trumpian criticism. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump said last week. But by Friday, Starmer had agreed to allow the U.S. to launch strikes from the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean and to fly long-range bombers from a base in Gloucestershire.
The HMS Prince of Wales, a Royal Navy aircraft carrier, is being prepared for a possible deployment to the region, according to a statement from the British Ministry of Defense. Trump dismissed the move. “That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer—But we will remember,” he wrote on Truth Social. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
Other European countries have mostly refrained from loudly criticizing the U.S. decision to attack Iran, perhaps seeking to avoid the president’s ire. French President Emmanuel Macron has cast himself as the chief defender of Europe’s interests in the region. Attacks on Iran were “outside of international law,” he declared in a television address last week. “But those who butcher their own people will not be wept over by history. They will not be missed,” he added.
Outside of the joint European deployment to Cyprus, France also announced an increase in military aid to the government of Lebanon, with Macron calling for the Iranian-backed Hezbollah to stop firing on Israel and for Israeli forces to avoid “any ground intervention or large-scale operation on Lebanese territory.” The French president also visited Cyprus on Monday, meeting with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. France’s naval flagship, the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, will lead a task force of 10 other ships on a deployment to the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz. “What we want to do is to ensure freedom of navigation and maritime security,” Macron said, although he offered no specifics on whether European ships would actually attempt to reopen the Strait.
Whether Europe wants to, or actually can, flex its muscles is an open question, however. “At the moment [the French deployment] is symbolic as much as anything else,” Anand Menon, a professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College, London, told TMD. “It’s very clear that Macron sees an electoral advantage in appearing tough on this sort of stuff.”
“If you look at a map, Europe should have a far greater influence in the Middle East than it does,” Menon said, noting that the continent is far more exposed to refugee waves and more reliant on oil and gas imports than the U.S. “It staggering to me how little Europeans are being talked to or consulted or even involved in some of these decisions,” he said. Reportedly, European governments were barely warned of the scale and timing of the U.S. attacks, even while America’s military used its extensive network of bases on the continent.
If European nations are watching the war with dismay, other countries are looking for silver linings. Russia and China, often portrayed as part of a loose anti-U.S. bloc with Iran, have both mostly avoided significant interventions in the conflict. Russian President Vladimir Putin (with no sense of irony) condemned the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.” But Russia has done little to aid Iran other than providing its military with intelligence that could potentially aid in targeting U.S. forces.
But Putin stands to reap multiple benefits if the Iran war drags on for much longer. Russia’s economy, battered by economic sanctions and the cost of its war against Ukraine, would receive a boost from a sustained spike in the price of oil and gas caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. With regards to Ukraine, Russian forces could also gain an advantage over the Ukrainian military if U.S. air defense stocks are depleted by Iranian attacks, restricting future shipments to Ukraine and its European supporters.
China, for its part, has called for an “immediate cessation” of hostilities. But the People’s Republic, which ratified a strategic partnership with Iran five years ago and imports more Iranian oil than any other country, has refrained from any sort of intervention. “It’s an inconvenience, but it’s one they can afford,” Jonathan A. Czin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former China analyst for the CIA, told TMD. China has options to import more oil from Russia, he said, and isn’t any more or less exposed to rising energy prices than other Asian countries.
Like Russia, China might also benefit from a drawn-out U.S. involvement in the Middle East. “Beijing would be happy for the United States to be bogged down in Iran for weeks, months, even longer potentially, because every ounce of energy spent on Iran or Latin America is one not spent on China,” David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told TMD.
The war is just more than a week old, and its end may be imminent—or not. On Monday, Trump called the war “very complete,” but just hours later told Republican lawmakers that the White House was determined to press forward until Iran was “totally and decisively defeated” and “more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all.”
But even a brief conflict could have lasting global effects. On Monday, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas spoke of a “new world order characterised by competition and coercive power politics, featuring military powers who aim to establish and secure spheres of influence.” It appears that around the world, other countries think that the war is already a turning point.
