For advocates of war on Iran, the logic is simple: remove the ayatollahs, and a revolutionary power that has armed militias, gunned down protestors, and undermined fragile states will finally be gone. But the war is not producing that outcome.

Rather than collapsing under military strikes, the Islamic Republic is consolidating: replacing slain leaders, retaliating against Israel and America's Gulf Arab partners, and turning the Strait of Hormuz into a lethal chokepoint. Iran is retaliating by raising the costs of war for the United States and the world. Across the Middle East, the conflict is already feeding instability, deepening fault lines, exhausting economies, and narrowing prospects for reform.

To be sure, the fall of the Islamic Republic would be celebrated by countless Iranians who suffered greatly under its brutal rule, and by many citizens of the region’s failing states, who bore the brunt of Iranian interventions. Many American veterans will join them. For years after President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. military fought a shadow war against Iran and its proxies in Iraq and elsewhere.

I am one of those veterans. As an intelligence officer in Baghdad, I tracked the safe houses and supply routes of the most lethal of these groups. I lost colleagues to their rockets and roadside bombs. For me, and for others who served, it is natural to regard the end of the Iranian regime as a welcome reckoning. But the invasion of Iraq that brought us into conflict with the Islamic Republic was one of the greatest catastrophes in American foreign policy, and its risks are being repeated now.

Like the premise of the Iraq War, a core assumption behind President Donald Trump’s war on Iran—that Tehran is the principal source of the Middle East’s afflictions—is mistaken. Regime change in Iran, or weakening its malign capabilities, will not address the underlying causes of turmoil in the Middle East. Most of those drivers are homegrown, rooted in longstanding problems of governance inside Arab states: authoritarianism, corruption, and inequality, compounded in some cases by occupation. They are the product of internal failures, not the creation of any external enemy. 

The troubles within the Arab states

For years, the specter of a militant Iran helped obscure the profound dysfunctions within the Arab nations. Arab autocrats invoked the Iran menace at every opportunity, often grossly exaggerating it, to explain away domestic unrest and radicalism, deflect attention from their own shortcomings, and win greater support from the U.S. Iran’s interventions in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen have lent this narrative a veneer of credibility. But they hide a more uncomfortable truth: Iran exploited fractures that were already there.

In Iraq, the American invasion of 2003 didn’t merely topple a dictator; it dismantled state institutions, disbanded the army, and worsened Shia-Sunni tensions through a disastrous approach to post-war governance. The chaos that followed created the opening for Iran, which moved in, backing a spectrum of Shia militias—some rooted in exiled opposition networks Iran had quietly cultivated for years, others emerging in the post-2003 vacuum to fight occupation and claim power in the wreckage of a collapsed state.

In Yemen, the Houthis were not conjured by Iranian money or weapons. They emerged from decades of provincial neglect and sectarian marginalization in a state hollowed out by corruption and weak governance. Iranian support eventually amplified their military capabilities and extended their regional reach, but it did not create the conditions that made them a formidable political force. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s strength reflects the chronic weakness of the Lebanese state and the exclusion of the Shia, many of whom were radicalized by Israel’s 1982 invasion. A similar logic applies in Palestine, where decades of Israeli occupation, underwritten by American support, fueled an anger that Tehran was quick to harness.

The Arab revolutions of 2011 offered the clearest evidence that the region’s most pressing sources of instability originate within borders, not across them. Protesters who took to the streets in Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli, and Damascus were driven by indignity and injustice at home, not by foreign incitement, though embattled rulers tried to insist otherwise. The civil wars that followed were ignited by violent crackdowns by autocratic rulers of those states, even as outside powers, including Iran in Syria, quickly intervened to prolong the fighting and support their allies.

More than a decade later, the failures of governance that ignited those uprisings persist. In many cases, they have worsened. Youth unemployment across much of the Arab world still hovers around 25%, among the highest rates globally. Corruption remains entrenched while repression has deepened, aided by new technologies. Inequality is widening, public services are deteriorating, and military spending continues to swell. And the compounding pressures of climate change, the energy transition, and the disruptions of artificial intelligence are adding new pressures to already fragile societies.

Trump shocks a fragile order

The war against Iran will not ease any of these problems. Its widening effects are already exacerbating them and creating new tremors across the region—from rising fuel prices and choked trade routes to new waves of displacement—while halting, or reversing the modest progress of recent years. Prospects for meaningful political reform in the Middle East were already bleak. They are bleaker now. Conflict of this kind creates precisely the sort of chaos that authoritarians often use to tighten their grip. Already, regimes in Bahrain, Qatar and other Gulf states are invoking the emergency of war to justify a crackdown on freedom of expression, compressing what little political space remains. 

The economic picture is no more encouraging. Egypt, which had staked its recovery on regional stability, is now absorbing compounding shocks: declining Suez Canal revenues, rising energy costs, and a contraction in tourism. The wealthier Gulf states—long the region's financial lifeline—are turning inward, with diminishing resources flowing to the countries that depend on it. Already bloated military budgets will in all likelihood skyrocket, leaving poorer nations with even fewer resources to spend on health care, education and other services.

Unnerved by America's unpredictability as an ally, Gulf Arab states are weighing the military value of U.S. military bases—their utility as instruments for protection and deterrence—against the risk that hosting them invites entanglement and retaliation. The war will almost certainly accelerate a trend toward strategic hedging that was already underway, with countries turning to China, Russia, and Europe for certain types of arms and partnerships, while deepening their reliance on Washington for others. Whatever path individual nations choose, the result is the same: increasing militarization and an end to previous attempts at dialogue and de-escalation.

The long-term outlook for Iran offers little reassurance. Should the country fracture along ethnic and regional lines­­—an outcome the United States and Israel appear willing to risk—it could repeat the chaos and catastrophic unraveling of Iraq after 2003, spilling radicalism and disorder across the region. A weakened but still hostile Iranian regime would resemble Iraq after 1991: diminished but dangerous. And whatever form of government ultimately emerges, the strikes have almost certainly deepened Iran's determination to acquire a nuclear deterrent capability.

Across every scenario, one thing is certain: the Middle East is entering a new era of insecurity and war footing. The structural failures that are the true roots of the region's turmoil—not Tehran—will go unaddressed, papered over by the noise and urgency of the conflict. And ordinary citizens, desperate for change, will pay the highest price.

© Time