Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli military offensive launched on February 28, the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East has been irrevocably altered. The opening salvos were designed as a masterstroke of modern precision warfare, intending to kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, alongside senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders. The operational logic was clear: deliver a decapitation strike so overwhelming that it would cripple Tehran’s command structure and fatally destabilise the regime. Beneath this military calculus lay a deeply entrenched political fantasy in Washington and Jerusalem: the belief that extreme external pressure would activate Iran’s internal ethnic and political fault lines, leading to the rapid balkanisation of the state.

Yet, as the smoke clears over a widening theatre of war, the balkanisation of Iran is proving to be a dangerous mirage. Far from collapsing inward, the Iranian state has absorbed the shock and responded with a highly calibrated strategy of horizontal escalation, transforming a localised regime-change operation into a sprawling, regional war of attrition.

The fatal flaw in the American and Israeli strategy was their concept of treating the Iranian state as a weak glass house. It was the belief of the planners that dismantling the head of the leadership would automatically divide the nation along ethnic and sectarian lines. Even the U.S. officials have considered the possibility of overtly fanning the flames of ethnic unrest in Kurdish regions of Iran to assist in targeting the Revolutionary Guard. This is a miscarriage of the Iranian statecraft workings and the cohesive nature of an existential threat. Rather than crippling the Iranian military, the death of top military brass and the Supreme Leader was instantly responded to with signs of business continuity and a strong command system. The regime did not disintegrate: it solidified.

Tehran has turned the table around, realising that it cannot compete with the U.S. air supremacy in a conventional, vertical escalation. Horizontal escalation enables a less strong opponent to change the calculus of a stronger opponent by expanding the geographic and political range of a conflict. Instead of responding solely to Israel, Iran has extended its deterrence to all the countries in the region, targeting or attacking at least nine countries, among them being Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Its ability to target close to large U.S. installations that require interceptors to fly over Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and provoke the air defence systems to respond at Al Dhafra in the UAE has made a perfectly clear message to be understood by Tehran. The war between Washington and Jerusalem will not be confined; it will extend.

It is a brilliant strategy of striking the Achilles heel of the U.S.-aligned regional order: the perception of stability. The Gulf states position themselves as safe financial, tourism, and logistics centres in the world. Whenever a famous hotel on the waterfront of Dubai burns due to drone debris, or air raid sirens disturb the peace of business capitals, the reputational and economic cost is staggering. Iran is compelling the leaders of the Gulf countries to choose between the silent security collaboration with Israel and the U.S. and the physical and economic security of their own nations at the moment.

One of the deadliest illusions in the hawkish policy circles was the ability to compare the campaign against Iran with the economic stranglehold against such countries as Venezuela. The U.S. may be successful in isolating Venezuela both geographically and economically to demand a change of regime, but Iran has a structural geopolitical advantage because isolation would choke the entire world economy. Iran dominates the Strait of Hormuz, which is a maritime link where about a fifth of global oil shipments pass through. Preliminary statistics have shown that shipping traffic across the strait has decreased by about 75 percent since the war broke out. Through its role in increasing insurance premiums and endangering exports of energy, Iran is directly selling the economic suffering of the war to Western consumers, and this makes people worried about the increasing inflation and adds domestic political pressure in the United States and Europe. You can isolate Venezuela; it is natural to balkanise the economy of the world.

History provides a vivid warning about the extent to which airpower can be used to achieve political disintegration. In 1965, the United States initiated Operation Rolling Thunder in the Vietnam War, assuming that massive American airpower would destroy Hanoi’s morale. Rather, North Vietnam employed horizontal escalation that led to the countrywide political upheaval of the Tet Offensive, which essentially changed the political course of the war and shook the U.S. domestic confidence. In the same case, in the 1999 Kosovo war, NATO strategists believed that an airstrike can break the Serbian administration in an easy manner by a short-term precision bombing campaign. In their turn, Belgrade reacted by dispatching 30,000 soldiers to Kosovo, and the result was a colossal influx of refugees that put a significant strain on the NATO alliance and compelled Washington to consider a colossal ground attack. In both cases, opponents had soaked up the initial wave of airpower and had determined political consequences through the spread of the war, leading to prolonged conflicts that required more extensive military involvement than initially anticipated.

The architects of Operation Epic Fury have fallen into the same historical trap. The early martial art of decapitation strikes is not a viable alternative to a long-term strategic plan. In acting as a maximalist with the result of placing Tehran in a position in which it has no off-ramps, Washington has effectively given the green light to the hard-liner factions of the Iranian state to wage a war of national survival.

This struggle has now entered its decisive stage, to which no sortie counts or intercept rates will be applied, but instead political stamina will be. The fractures will not manifest themselves in the borders of a Balkanised Iran but in the transatlantic alliance, as well as in the home political alliances in Washington. The Western European cities that are very sensitive to energy fluctuations might want to avoid being linked to the conflict, and this will make it harder to logistically transport the U.S. to the airspace. At the same time, an American populace that is already suspicious of entrapment in the Middle East will tend to become even more unfriendly to a grinding regional conflict of spiking energy prices and vague goals.

The Balkanisation of Iran was one of the whiteboard theories which collapsed on its head in contact with reality. The geographical, economically disruptive, and politically calculated retaliation of Iran has been effective in altering the dynamic of the war. Unless the United States is able to identify this emerging policy of horizontal escalation and realign its objectives, it will find itself sucked into long-term strategic mudslinging. The regime change dream not only backfired, but it is also the precursor to the era of instability never seen before in the region as the maths of attrition play much to the benefit of the defender.

© Eurasia Review