What is the ultimate objective, if there ever was one, behind the most pervasive use of US air power since 1991’s Operation Desert Storm and 2003’s erroneously-labelled Operation Iraqi Freedom that Iran had to endure recently? Was the purpose of Operation Epic Fury the comprehensive disarmament of Iran, the decapitation of its clerical regime, or the establishment of a new maritime order in the waters of West Asia?
If the answer to any of the above is affirmative, then what remains of the undergirding of the region’s security architecture that has existed since January 23, 1980, when President Jimmy Carter told the US Congress that any outside power’s attempt to seize control of the Persian Gulf would be repelled “by any means necessary, including military force”? The security guarantor has itself turned aggressor again.
The Carter doctrine, now ostensibly buried by the Trump administration, demanded its own institutional architecture. By January 1983, the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, first conceived in March 1980, had evolved into the US Central Command. Around it accreted the hub-and-spoke lattice of security alliances that persist to this day. It consists of more than 50,000 personnel stationed across at least 19 locations. Eight of them are permanent bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and the UAE.
Commencing with the US intervention in Lebanon in July 1958, the underlying assumption of the Carter doctrine also was that forward deployed American power projection capability would deter adversaries and provide reassurance to its regional allies.
The US-Israeli offensive operations, which began on February 28, was overwhelming by every conventional metric. The opening salvo assassinated the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of key government functionaries, while hundreds of attacks were sequentially carried out across 26 of Iran's 31 provinces.
It would be trite to emphasise how unprecedented it is for any nation that, in June 2025, had been virtually stripped of its air defences to survive such an onslaught. Nevertheless, it did so with aplomb. The Israel-US strategy of regime decapitation was based on the erroneous premise that if critical personnel are neutralised, the Iranian security establishment would readily disintegrate, especially given the massive street protests between late December 2025 and February 2026 that were brutally squelched by the regime, killing over 30,000 people.
Instead, the Assembly of Experts elected Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader within days of his father’s assassination. It is evidence that succession planning had long preceded the conflict. What emerged was not a vacuum, but a harder dispensation in which the writ of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now runs more pervasively than it did on February 27. The flawed strategy of coercive regime change instead produced regime consolidation.
The military account is even more illuminating. Iran launched an estimated 8,000 missiles and drones. At least 16 American military installations across the region sustained damage, with several suffering disruptions severe enough to impair their operational effectiveness. The Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid in Qatar, the nerve centre of the coalition's air campaign, was heavily damaged along with the AN/TPY-2 radar system valued at about half a billion dollars, with analysts attributing part of Iran's improved targeting capability to intelligence derived from the Chinese TEE-01B satellite it reportedly acquired in 2024.
Most consequential of all, Iran concluded the war retaining as much as 70 percent of its ballistic missile inventory, while much of its underground missile infrastructure remained largely intact as American intelligence seemed to have grossly underestimated the extent of Iran’s missile stockpiles.
The ‘mosaic strategy’ of Iran has created a formidable asymmetric capability. It was completely vindicated in this conflict. The US and Israel’s precision air power applied at scale against negligible aerial opposition could not disarm an adversary that had spent two decades digging. This is the revolution in military affairs in which mass-produced cheap weapons overwhelm sophisticated military platforms. Ukraine demonstrated this against Russia and Iran has now underscored it again.
Three consequences follow, all of which will outlive the now-aborted ceasefire of April 7. The first is that the forward-deployment thesis has stopped being an asset, and instead has become a liability. Fixed military installations throughout the Gulf now lie permanently within Iran's precision-strike envelope.
In Gulf capitals, military experts and policymakers are publicly questioning whether the continued presence of American military installations still serve their interests, or if it has instead become a source of strategic and tactical risk.
The second is that the Gulf’s hedging between global powers—for long, one of the defining features of Arab statecraft—has entered a markedly different phase. Moscow rebuffed Arab entreaties to restrain Tehran, while Beijing continued its economic engagement and military support to Iran.
Unsure of the efficacy of external guarantees, several Gulf monarchies have now intensified efforts at strategic self-help through investments in European air defence systems, Ukrainian counter-drone technology and discreet discussions over expanding trade settlements in currencies other than the US dollar.
In May 2026, Riyadh floated the idea of a regional non-aggression compact that would include Iran and drew deliberate comparisons to the Helsinki Accords. Whatever its eventual fate, it represents the first sustained attempt in decades to construct a regional security framework with substantially less reliance on an external guarantor or an outside balancer of power.
The third, and most portentous, consequence is that the logic of deterrence has been inverted. Khamenei's fatwa proscribing nuclear weapons effectively died with its author. The domestic political case for an Iranian nuclear deterrent is now stronger than ever. The continuing US attacks have only reinforced that argument.
The message being transmitted to middle powers is also stark: nuclear deterrence enhances survivability; strategic ambiguity creates leverage; and unilateral disarmament risks the fate that befell Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussain or even Ukraine, which gave up nuclear weapons as a consequence of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Saudi Arabia’s nuclear quest stands endorsed by the US itself, though currently it is behind the fig-leaf of civilian use.
Closer home, for over 79 years, New Delhi has played only a very limited strategic role in shaping the politics of West Asia. Strategic autonomy is the ability to protect one's interests and manoeuvre effectively within an evolving international order. It cannot become a justification for remaining absent from the room where decisions affecting India’s vital sea lanes and energy security are made.
The question no longer is whether US predominance has weakened in West Asia—that is a sequitur. All eyes are on the possible emergence of a new regional security order in the foreseeable future.
Manish Tewari | MP, lawyer, former Union I&B minister and author of A World Adrift
(Views are personal)
(manishtewari01@gmail.com)