![\"Strait](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/PTI03-24-2026-000228B-0_1774387756592_1774387776562_1774847226994.jpg\" "\\"Strait")
Strait of Hormuz (MEA)<\/p>\nAs the crisis in West Asia continues, it is difficult to confidently assess its direction, let alone the end-state. As conflicts go, no two military conflicts are ever alike.<\/p>\n
Strait of Hormuz (MEA)<\/p>\n
US and Israeli hostility towards Iran certainly has a long history; their strategic convergence on the latter\u2019s nuclear and missile programmes has strengthened following the tilting of the regional power equilibrium in Iran\u2019s favour after the collapse of the US\u2019s Iraq project but up to a point. It was made out by the US President and the Israeli Prime Minister (PM) as a low-cost operation, given Iran\u2019s internal economic hardships and the wide public dissatisfaction against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei\u2019s decades-old regime and significant military capacity degradation by Israeli and US joint attacks last year.<\/p>\n
The current phase began with Israeli and US joint attacks on February 28 following the visit of the PM to Washington (February 11). Ostensible reason was the failure of the last round of indirect talks between US and Iran (February 27) with the President\u2019s \u201cunhappiness\u201d with the outcome but which were described as highly productive by their mediator, the Omani foreign minister: He rushed to Washington to brief US leaders including the vice president and the media and later described, in desperation, the impending military operations as being \u201cnot America\u2019s war\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the first strikes, Israel killed Ali Khamenei and other top leaders – including those considered amenable to negotiate – in an intelligence-based operation while the US strikes reportedly were aimed at Iranian nuclear and military installations. The successive rounds were aimed at military installations and leadership targets expanding to civilian infrastructure. Iranian counter strikes (drones and missiles) were aimed at Israeli targets, US military bases in the Gulf region followed by drone strikes on Israel by a re-activated Hezbollah leadership and another one on the British base in Cyprus. These escalating tit-for-tat attacks have spread to Lebanon (Hezbollah targets and Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon), Shia military groups\u2019 attacks on US targets in Iraq, and Iranian attacks on Gulf countries, including their civilian and military targets and on vessels in the Persian Gulf not authorised by Iran forcing countries to negotiate their passage with it.<\/p>\n
Further serious escalation has taken the form of reciprocal attacks on oil facilities (Israel on the Iranian South Pars reserves and Iran on Qatar\u2019s LNG facilities) which have touched a raw nerve with the US for the global and domestic oil\/gas price spike. The US is \u201cun-sanctioning\u201d the sale of Iranian oil and of the Russian oil for the global markets as its Gulf operations are not popular with the US public and the Administration gets caught in the over-heating politics in its midterm election year. The Administration is also approaching the Congress for additional supporting funding of $ 200 billion and increasing troops\u2019 strength. Applying his characteristic soft and hard approach, US President has spoken of \u201cwinding down\u201d military operations whilst putting Iran on notice to open the Strait of Hormuz by February 23 midnight or face devastation of its power generating infrastructure. Iran leadership, in response, has threatened to close it unveiling its intermediate ballistic missile capability by firing these at Diego Garcia; it demonstrated the same capability by striking the Israeli cities of Dimona (near its nuclear reactor \u201cin retaliation\u201d for an attack on Natanz reactor) and Arad in Israel causing significant damage to property and injuries.<\/p>\n
Keeping the Strait of Hormuz open is a critical US military dilemma (concern about Gulf stability) and the irreversible degradation of Iran\u2019s military capability as inevitably simultaneous pursuits are chimerical as regards their finality and the entailed costs in men and material; thus, pursuit of the Venezuela model (finding a compliant leader within the existing regime) risks sliding into the Gaza model (destruction of the target regime\u2019s leadership). There was no Israel factor in the former and the US factor was not as strong in the latter. The ramifications for regional stability were not so grave in either case.<\/p>\n
More material aspect is the criticality of the smaller Gulf States in the global strategic equilibrium where innumerable stakeholders, including China, Russia, Europe, India and Japan are immeasurably invested; even as Russia and China are momentarily benefited due to the easing of their proximate strategic environment, their larger concerns about global politico-economic and energy stability are not far off in their minds as the Gulf conflict assumes an attritional character paralleling the Gaza situation where the territory is split in two halves with no foreseeable, immediate political settlement \u2013 but with a lot more external actors transmuting it into a protracted conflict. US-Israel\u2019s joint bombing of Iran\u2019s Bandar Anzali port on the Caspian Sea on February 28 itself indicates the former\u2019s concern about a Russian \u2013 and, possibly Chinese \u2013 supply line and undenied reports of Russian targeting intelligence against US regional military dispositions (a tit-for-tat for Ukraine). The other stakeholders, deeply concerned about the respective domestic impacts in energy sector and the wider economy, are just about reacting to this rapidly gathering prospect but also worried about their military being seen as aligning with the US-Israeli objectives for action for navigation security; Iranian leadership sees an opportunity in this dilemma by offering \u201cprotection\u201d on a country-to-country basis. Given their inadequate air defence capabilities despite defence relationship with the US, the Gulf countries\u2019 anxiety about their economic and political stability is heightened by Iranian strikes where their threats of retaliatory strikes on Iran risk the same outcome they are understandably desperate to avoid; as the Arab Spring demonstrated, there are significant Shia communities in these countries with a potential for cascading domestic turmoil as this conflict drags on; closer to the subcontinent, there are Baluchi communities straddling Iran-Pakistan border.<\/p>\n
The post-Ali Khamenei Iranian leadership, despite the heavy Mossad penetration, feels that it can drag this conflict on to exploit the strategic fault lines between US and Israel and between other stakeholders, including the Gulf States. The election of his son, a choice of the Revolutionary Guards, reflects that; so also, the statements by the Iranian foreign minister that Iran does not favour a ceasefire but an end-state settlement, including a \u201cprotocol\u201d for the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n
A messy outcome of this conflict would make a bad outcome even worse. The Israeli assassination of Ali Larijani, an important Iranian negotiator with foreign countries including US and a bridge between the regime\u2019s hardliners and moderates who also attempted to bring in a moderate as the successor to the deceased leader, is indicative of a significant divergence of objectives with the US and parallels its earlier assassination of Ismael Haniyeh (July 2024) who was a Hamas indirect negotiator with US representing its approach towards Hamas aiming its complete destruction to ensure the impossibility of any governance capability whatsoever. Another possible outcome of the unfolding Gulf conflict is to leave Israel as the only country in the region with a WMD and missile capability; its likely ramification was somewhat evident when Saudi Arabia and Pakistan wrapped up (September 17, 2025) a wide-spectrum defence agreement just after the Israeli attack on Qatar (September 9. 2025). Perhaps early speculation but it is worth pondering whether such interventions might set a new global trend \u2013 does the Pakistani attack in Kabul and Kandahar represent its green shoots when the conflict between Pakistani Armed Forces and the TTP is so hugely asymmetric?<\/p>\n
India faces a delicate, if rapidly challenging, situation necessitating communication channels with all the regional protagonists to handle a highly fluid situation. It is trying to leverage the respective equities in all these relationships testing the limits of mutual dependencies to protect its large expatriate communities and navigation safety for its shipping.<\/p>\n
This article is authored by Yogendra Kumar, former ambassador, New Delhi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the crisis in West Asia continues, it is difficult to confidently assess its direction, let alone the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42342,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[17973,102,17972,101,7795,3909],"class_list":{"0":"post-42341","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-strait-of-hormuz","8":"tag-gulf-conflict","9":"tag-hormuz","10":"tag-iranian-nuclear","11":"tag-strait-of-hormuz","12":"tag-us-israel-relations","13":"tag-west-asia"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116316564624320864","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}