The Strange War Nobody Wants to Fight

Iran has now attacked or struck targets connected to: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and the United Kingdom

Israel and the United States, to be clear, are fighting back. They are the ones carrying out the strikes against Iran.

But look at the rest of the list.

Most of these countries are currently sitting in a purely defensive posture while missiles and drones rain down across the region.

Why?

What exactly are they afraid of? Iran is already launching missiles across half the Middle East. It is difficult to imagine how the situation gets meaningfully worse for them than it already is.

So what is the hesitation?

Are they worried about being seen as collaborating with Israel or the United States? Are domestic politics tying their hands? Are their leaders simply hoping that if they keep their heads down someone else will solve the problem for them?

Every statement we hear sounds the same. Calls for restraint and warnings about escalation.

Meanwhile the Islamic regime is taking a massive beating.

If the goal were truly to de-escalate the situation, the fastest way to achieve that would be to remove the regime that is launching missiles across the region in the first place.

Instead many of these governments appear perfectly content to sit back while Israel and the United States do the fighting for them.

In a sense this is not surprising. For decades most Gulf states structured their security around a very simple assumption. If a major regional war ever broke out, the United States would ultimately step in. Their militaries were built around that reality. They purchased enormous amounts of equipment, but the real strategic backbone of the system was the American security umbrella.

What we are seeing now is a version of the classic free rider problem. When a real conflict emerges, regional actors prefer that someone else absorb the escalation risk.

At the moment that someone else is Israel.

Israel’s situation is different. Israel cannot sit comfortably in a purely defensive posture because it has almost no strategic depth. It cannot simply absorb missile fire for months and hope the problem goes away. Its military doctrine has always been built around moving quickly from defense to offense and eliminating the source of the threat.

When ballistic missiles start flying, Israel does not have the luxury of waiting.

Many of the other countries on that list do.

There is also a political dimension that is impossible to ignore. Several of these governments quietly cooperate with Israel on security matters, especially when it comes to Iran. But their domestic populations remain deeply hostile to the idea of openly aligning with Israel. That creates a strange balancing act. Privately they may welcome Israel weakening Iran. Publicly they need to pretend they have nothing to do with it.

So they issue statements about de-escalation and hope nobody asks too many questions.

But there is a cost to this posture.

The Middle East is a region where governments spend enormous sums on their militaries. Fighter jets, missile defenses, expanding arsenals. Leaders puff out their chests and speak constantly about strength and deterrence.

Deterrence, however, is not just about owning weapons. It is about demonstrating that you are willing to use them.

A country can buy the most advanced fighter jets in the world, but if it never responds when its territory is attacked, people begin to draw conclusions.

And the conclusion many observers are drawing right now is that when push comes to shove, Israel appears to be the only country in the region willing to move from defense to offense and actually eliminate the threat.

That is not a flattering comparison for anyone else.

There is also a broader irony here. For most of the past seventy-five years many of the states now under Iranian missile threat were openly hostile to Israel. Yet today Israel is effectively acting as a frontline security actor for much of the region against Iran.

If you had told people in 1975 or even 1995 that Israel might one day be defending the broader region against a common enemy, they would have laughed.

History has a strange sense of humor.

Iran itself may also have miscalculated. For decades the Islamic Republic relied on proxies and gradual escalation. Militias, missile shipments, shadow warfare. The assumption seemed to be that its adversaries would always avoid direct confrontation.

Iran has now provoked a situation in which Israel and the United States are directly striking its military infrastructure, and that represents a serious failure of their strategy.

And if Israel continues to be the only regional power willing to take the offensive against Iran, something else may happen over time. The quiet alignment between Israel and several Gulf states could become more and more entrenched.

Not because of ideology but because of necessity.

I hope President Trump is taking note. Many of these same governments spent the last few years playing footsie with the Islamic regime, convincing themselves that accommodation would keep them out of trouble.

It did not.

It was a disastrous policy, and the consequences are now impossible to ignore.