Iran may be only days away from amassing enough enriched uranium to fashion a nuclear weapon. That is the warning now emanating from Washington. The message is stark: Tehran’s window to comply with American demands is narrowing. Beyond it lies the prospect of force.
The tone is familiar. We have heard it before.
In 2003, the administration of George W Bush invoked weapons of mass destruction to justify invading Iraq, and though the intelligence collapsed, the war did not. The result was a prolonged conflict that reshaped the Middle East in ways few predicted and that Washington never mastered.
Today, under Donald Trump, the alarms are sounding again, this time over Iran’s nuclear threshold. For decades, Israel has issued similar warnings. Now, amid military deployments and brittle diplomacy, prevention appears less likely than confrontation.
But a war with Iran would not resemble Iraq, and it would be more complex, more costly, and potentially far more destabilising.
Start with the most uncomfortable question: what is the price of victory? The Pentagon can strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, air defences, and missile depots. It can degrade capabilities and delay timelines. But destruction is not strategy. Bombing can pulverise infrastructure, but it cannot erase scientific knowledge, industrial capacity, or national will.
If the objective is to permanently halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions, airpower alone will not suffice. If the objective drifts towards regime destabilisation, the scale multiplies dramatically. Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq and home to more than 90 million people. Its security architecture has been forged in decades of confrontation with Washington.
Mission creep would not be incidental; it would be gravitational.
Worse, preventive war carries its own paradoxes. A strike might postpone Iran’s nuclear timeline, but it would likely bury the nuclear programme deeper and extinguish what little transparency remains.
Those who casually compare Iran to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s Iraq misread the terrain. Iran is not isolated, and it can field layered deterrence. Moreover, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is not merely a military institution; it is an economic conglomerate, an intelligence service, and a political power centre embedded within the state’s architecture.
Its doctrine is asymmetric by design. Rather than confront American conventional superiority head-on, Tehran would fragment the battlefield using ballistic missiles, drones, cyber operations, and regional proxy networks in the event of attack. The conflict would also not remain confined to Iranian airspace but would likely spill into Iraq and Yemen and threaten vital maritime corridors.
The assumption that the Iranian regime is brittle and primed to collapse under external shock is also strategically naive. The regime commands a durable base among religious and social conservatives who uphold the system of clerical guardianship.
Many liberals and nationalists who reject the regime’s ideology also reject regime change delivered by foreign bombs and instead seek reform or transformation on Iranian terms. For conservatives and reformists alike, the country’s nuclear programme carries the symbolism of sovereignty, and ballistic missiles represent insurance in a hostile region.
Layered atop these internal dynamics is great-power rivalry. Since 2003, the world has changed. Russia and China are not now peripheral actors; they are strategic competitors intent on constraining American leverage, and Tehran has moved closer to both.
Moscow has deepened its military cooperation with Tehran, including through advanced air-defence capabilities. Beijing has expanded its technological and economic ties, providing systems designed to complicate Western surveillance and strike advantages while encouraging alternatives to US-controlled infrastructure such as GPS.
Europe presents another constraint. Governments across the continent have signalled their reluctance to support offensive operations against Iran, urging diplomacy in line with the position of UN Secretary General António Guterres. The United Kingdom has also refused to allow the US to use its airbases to mount strikes against Iran.
In the US itself the constraints are equally severe, and scepticism towards foreign interventions cuts across parties. US President Donald Trump has publicly claimed that any military clash with Iran would be easily won and that Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine fully agrees with him.
However, according to insiders, Caine has privately delivered a far more cautious assessment, warning that even a limited strike against Iran would carry serious risks, including American casualties, depleted weapons stockpiles, and the potential for escalation into a far more complex conflict than publicly suggested.
Yet, Trump’s fundamental obstacle is the region’s attitude towards a war with Iran. The Middle East itself bears little resemblance to the strategic landscape of early 2003, and confidence in American leadership has eroded, particularly in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.
Israel’s military campaign against Gaza since 7 October 2023, its actions in Southern Lebanon and southern Syria, its consolidation of control over substantial portions of the Occupied West Bank, and its expanding footprint along the Red Sea corridor have recalibrated regional threat perceptions. For many Arab and Muslim governments, Israel, not Iran, has become the more immediate strategic concern.
That inversion is consequential. It helps explain why Washington’s efforts to assemble regional logistical or financial support for a confrontation with Iran have failed. Governments that might once have cooperated quietly now calculate that the political and strategic costs are too high.
The rhetoric reinforces those perceptions. When US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee remarked in an interview recently that it “would be fine if [Israel] took it all,” invoking biblical interpretations of territorial claims, more than a dozen Arab governments condemned the statement as inflammatory and inconsistent with international law.
Moreover, comments by Senator Lindsey Graham suggesting support for regime change in Iran without American responsibility for the aftermath revived memories of post-invasion Iraq.
“The day after the region falls will be complicated… [but] it’s not my job to construct a new Iran,” Graham said.
Across the Middle East, this was read as a willingness to dismantle a state without a viable blueprint for what succeeds it. Thus, there is no appetite for underwriting another war. Nor is there enthusiasm for facilitating Israel’s long-standing objective of structurally weakening Iran, only to pivot to a subsequent adversary.
That potential “next” adversary was alluded to by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in remarks reported by The Times of Israel. He outlined a vision of a regional “hexagon” of alliances spanning and encircling the Middle East, aimed not only at what he termed the radical Shiite axis but also at an “emerging radical Sunni axis.”
Yet, the contours of this alleged Sunni alignment remain indistinct. Israel’s relations with several major Sunni states have been strained by its recent conduct in the region, and Netanyahu’s remarks sounded like an implicit warning to the major Sunni states, countries now working to coordinate their positions and shield their interests from aggressive Israeli policies across the region.
“There is a profound transformation reshaping the Middle East, and America appears not yet to recognise its magnitude. Over the past two years, it has become increasingly clear that the greatest threat to the region’s stability no longer emanates from Tehran, but from the hegemonic ambitions of Israel itself,” said an Arab diplomat based in London to Al-Ahram Weekly.
“The proposition that Arab states would willingly submit to Israeli dominance in exchange for the promise of an American security umbrella has proven to be fundamentally flawed.”
Taken together, these dynamics point to a sobering conclusion. A joint US-Israeli military strike on Iran would be one of the most hazardous foreign-policy gambles undertaken since the invasion of Iraq and one executed in a more multipolar world, amid sharper great-power rivalry, and within a region reconsidering its vision of national security arrangements and which entity poses an existential threat.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 February, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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