Author’s note:
This essay is the opening piece in “the Iran system", a new series on the Iran war and the divergent systems it is forcing into alignment towards the new world order. Most coverage treats this as a conventional conflict—military escalation, diplomacy, and regional fallout. That framing misses what is actually happening.This series takes a different approach. It maps different underlying systems—military, economic, and political—that are being pressured simultaneously, and explains how this war fits into a broader restructuring of global order.
This is a first free piece focused on the Middle East theater: the three competing systems already in place, and the strategy now being used to force them into alignment. The essays that follow will be for paid subscribers and go deeper into each of these systems, and then expand outward to the global implications.
A War That Does Not Behave Like One
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated campaign of strikes on Iranian military infrastructure, including air-defense systems, naval assets, and logistics nodes tied to the Strait of Hormuz. Within days, oil markets reacted sharply, insurance premia on Gulf shipping widened, and European energy analysts began warning of renewed supply shocks.
By every conventional measure, this should have marked the beginning of a familiar escalation cycle.
Instead, something else happened.
Even as strikes continued, indirect communication channels reopened. Limited tanker movements resumed under constrained conditions. Regional actors who would typically fall into fixed alignments began hedging—signaling cooperation in one domain while resisting in another.
That combination—pressure and negotiation, escalation and partial release—is not typical of a war moving toward resolution.
It is typical of a system being forced to adjust.
The System Trump Inherited
When Donald Trump entered office in January 2017, the Middle East was not a blank slate. It was already structured by three overlapping systems that had taken shape over distinct phases: the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, the disruptions of the Arab Spring, and the consolidation period during the 2014–2017 war against ISIS.
The first was the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance.” This included Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad government in Syria, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq—formally legalized by the Iraqi parliament in 2016—and the Houthi movement in Yemen. What made this system durable was not just military capability, but institutional integration. These were not external proxies. They were embedded within state structures, controlling territory, budgets, and political authority.
The second was the Sunni field, often mischaracterized as a unified counterweight to Iran. In practice, it was fragmented. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates opposed Islamist political movements and sought a state-centered regional order. Turkey and Qatar, by contrast, backed networks linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, offering an alternative model of legitimacy rooted in populist Sunni politics. The rupture became explicit during the Qatar diplomatic crisis, when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a blockade on Qatar over precisely these differences.
The third was Israel. By the mid-2010s, Israel had achieved overwhelming military superiority and demonstrated repeated operational reach across Gaza, Syria, and beyond. But it remained structurally outside the region’s political order. It could deter and strike, but it did not sit inside the alliances or governance frameworks that shaped the broader system—at least not before the Abraham Accords.
These three systems coexisted. They overlapped, they competed, and at times they collided. But they were never forced into resolution against each other.
The Model That Sustained the Stalemate
For most of the post–Cold War period, U.S. policy operated on a model designed to manage, not resolve, these dynamics.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treated Iran’s nuclear program as a discrete technical problem, separate from its regional behavior. The Israeli–Palestinian issue was handled through iterative peace processes that rarely advanced beyond interim arrangements. Conflicts like Gaza followed a predictable cycle: escalation, ceasefire, reconstruction funded by international donors, and eventual relapse.
This approach produced a form of stability. But it was stability built on compartmentalization.
Iran expanded its regional network during the same years that nuclear diplomacy was most active. Militant groups became embedded in state systems. Governance in contested areas remained fragmented, allowing non-state actors to retain influence even after formal agreements.
The system did not resolve because it was not designed to resolve. It was designed to persist. It became a key example of the old Deep State model of global affairs that Trump fundamentally disagreed with and set about dismantling.
Trump’s Break: Forcing the System
On May 8, 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions on Iran. That decision marked a clear departure from the existing model.
Instead of treating Iran as a nuclear issue, the administration treated it as a system-wide challenge. The “maximum pressure” campaign targeted oil exports, banking networks, and shipping. In April 2019, the United States designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. On January 3, 2020, a U.S. drone strike killed Qassem Soleimani, the central architect of Iran’s regional network.
These actions were widely described as escalation.
They were also consistent.
They rejected the idea that the system could be managed in parts.
At the same time, Trump pursued a parallel strategy that addressed the other side of the equation.
In September 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel at the White House, followed by Morocco and Sudan. These agreements broke a long-standing assumption in Middle Eastern diplomacy: that Arab states would not normalize relations with Israel without first resolving the Palestinian issue.
Trump reversed that logic.
Alignment would come first. Political resolution would follow.
The incentives were explicit—arms deals, diplomatic recognition, access to U.S. technology—but the structure was new. Israel was no longer outside the system. It was being brought into it.
From Alignment to Enforcement
The Abraham Accords demonstrated that alignment could be created.
They did not ensure that it would hold.
Saudi Arabia did not formally join the framework. Turkey and Qatar continued to support alternative networks. Israel began expanding its own strategic partnerships beyond the Arab world, including into the Eastern Mediterranean and toward India.
Alignment existed.
But it remained partial.
The next phase of Trump’s approach sought to address that gap by changing how contested spaces were governed.
During the Gaza war following the October 7, 2023 attacks, the United States brokered a phased arrangement by January 2025 that tied hostage releases to Israeli withdrawals and humanitarian aid to monitoring mechanisms. Unlike previous ceasefires, this framework embedded conditionality directly into its structure.
That logic was extended in early 2026 through the creation of a U.S.-chaired reconstruction framework—referred to in policy discussions as a “Board of Peace”—bringing together Israel, Abraham Accords signatories, and cooperating states to oversee security benchmarks, reconstruction, and governance.
This was not a return to multilateral process. It was a shift toward enforcement.
If the Abraham Accords aligned actors, this model tied that alignment to operational outcomes.
Why Pressure Became Necessary
Even with this structure, the system did not automatically resolve.
Because the underlying networks remained intact.
Iran’s influence continued through embedded institutions. Sunni actors maintained competing strategies. Israel pursued its own evolving architecture.
Incentives can shape behavior.
They do not eliminate alternatives.
For that, pressure is required.
The Current War in Context
Iran occupies a central position in the regional system.
It sits along the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of global oil flows. It maintains networks across multiple active theaters. Its geography intersects with emerging trade corridors linking Asia, the Gulf, and Europe.
Pressure applied here does not remain localized.
It transmits across energy markets, alliance structures, and political calculations simultaneously.
The campaign that began on February 28, 2026 is best understood in that context.
It is not simply an attempt to degrade Iranian capabilities. It is an attempt to force reactions across all three systems at once. That is why escalation and negotiation are happening together. The objective is not a clean military endpoint. It is a forced realignment.
What This Means
At its core, this is not just a conflict between the United States and Iran.
It is a confrontation between two models of how the region—and by extension, the international system—is organized.
One model manages complexity through process and compartmentalization.
The other forces alignment through pressure and incentive restructuring.
The Middle East is one of the few places where these systems still intersect at full scale. That is why it matters.
What Comes Next
To understand what happens from here, you have to understand the systems being acted upon.
The Iranian-led network embedded across states.
The fragmented Sunni field competing over legitimacy.
The Israeli strategy shifting from deterrence to system design.
These are not background conditions. They are the terrain.
The essays that follow will examine each of them in detail—how they were built, how they function, and how they are being forced to change.
Great Article.
What is the alternative to “stalemate”?
What this essay gets right is its basic framing. It is more useful to see the Middle East as a set of overlapping systems than as a series of isolated crises, and your breakdown of an Iranian-led axis, a fragmented Sunni field, and Israel’s evolving place in the region is a strong way to explain why so many conflicts bleed into one another. I also think you are right that the Abraham Accords changed the diplomatic sequence by showing that some Arab states were willing to normalize with Israel without waiting for a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement. That was a real break from a long-standing assumption in regional diplomacy.
I also agree, at least partly, with the point that this moment does not look like a conventional war with a simple escalation ladder and a clean endpoint. The mix of military pressure and indirect diplomacy is real. Current reporting shows that the fighting has unfolded alongside ceasefire proposals and mediated contacts, which supports your argument that coercion and negotiation are happening at the same time rather than in sequence. Where I hesitate is in treating that pattern as evidence of a coherent strategic design. It could also reflect improvised crisis management, competing agendas among allies, and the fact that none of the actors involved has a clear or stable endgame yet.
Where I disagree more strongly is with the essay’s treatment of the pre-Trump order as essentially a system built to preserve stalemate, and with the implication that “maximum pressure” was a more serious path to resolution. That overstates the intentionality of the old approach and understates the costs of the new one. The JCPOA may have been narrow, but it did place limits on one of the most dangerous parts of the problem for a time. After the U.S. withdrew in 2018, Reuters notes that Iran began moving away from its commitments under the deal, and later reporting documented sharp increases in enrichment. That does not mean the earlier model was sufficient, but it does suggest that pressure alone did not produce a cleaner or safer outcome.
I also think the essay moves too quickly from “the old order is under stress” to “a new order is being forced into alignment.” The region still looks less aligned than unsettled. Saudi Arabia has continued to say it will not normalize ties with Israel without a Palestinian state, which undercuts the idea that the Palestinian issue has simply been bypassed for good. And current U.S. intelligence reporting says Iran’s leadership remains largely intact despite weeks of strikes, which makes it hard to argue that pressure has already produced decisive systemic realignment. So for me, this essay is strongest as a diagnostic framework and weaker as a claim that the outcome is already visible.