ANALYSIS: Israel and the region, how Iran's war is contaminating the whole Gulf

Introduction: a war that refuses to stay within its borders

A conflict that was supposed to remain bilateral

The war between Israel, the United States, and Iran, which opened on February 28, 2026, initially had the contours of a confined confrontation centered on the Iranian nuclear program. That is no longer the case. Satellite images recently obtained by CNN and analyzed by the Institute for Science and International Security show active reconstruction at the Pickaxe Mountain and Parchin sites, two nuclear installations heavily struck since February, revealing that Tehran is using every pause to regenerate its capabilities rather than negotiate in good faith.

What stands out, in July 2026, is the speed at which this conflict spread beyond its original theater. Iranian missiles struck Al-Azraq in Jordan, as well as bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain between July 9 and 10. This is no longer a war between three actors: it is a regional contagion that Tehran deliberately fuels to raise the political cost of any Western firmness.

When a regime strikes countries that asked for none of this simply because they host American bases, it is not waging war on a specific enemy: it is holding an entire region hostage to protect its own power.

Why this contagion is no accident

Iran's strategy of expanded retaliation follows a clear logic: maximize the number of regional actors directly affected by the conflict, in hopes of fragmenting international support for Washington's hard line. By striking several American allies in the Gulf simultaneously, Tehran seeks to turn a bilateral problem into a multilateral crisis, hoping regional diplomatic pressure will eventually weigh on American decision-makers.

This strategic reading explains why Israel, directly engaged in strikes against Iranian nuclear capabilities since the start of the war, watches each new episode of regional retaliation with particular attention, knowing its own security depends directly on the cohesion of the Western front against Tehran.

The Strait of Hormuz, epicenter of a recurring crisis

A closure that hits the entire global economy

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared, on July 12, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz after attacking another commercial vessel, the M/V GFS Galaxy, sailing under a Cypriot flag, leaving one crew member missing. This shipping lane, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes, has become the Iranian regime's preferred instrument of blackmail whenever it wants to exert maximum pressure on its adversaries.

American forces responded with a third wave of strikes in one week, hitting roughly 140 Iranian military targets, according to the CENTCOM statement. Cumulated over three nights, these strikes hit more than 300 objectives across Iranian territory, an intensity that reflects American determination to protect freedom of navigation in this zone vital to the global economy.

A fifth of the world's oil hanging on the whims of a theocratic regime is the most concrete proof that the stability of our Western economies can no longer depend on a single choke point controlled by a declared enemy.

The direct impact on Israel and its energy security

Israel, though not directly dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for its own energy supply, indirectly suffers the consequences of this instability through the general rise in maritime insurance premiums and the volatility of regional markets. This economic interdependence illustrates well why Israeli security and Gulf stability are now inseparable files in the eyes of Western strategists.

Energy analysts note that Brent reached levels near 73 dollars a barrel in early July, a relative decline that should not mask the structural fragility of the system: every new closure of the strait risks a brutal price shock capable of destabilizing economies far beyond the region.

Iranian strikes on Jordan, an ally targeted

Al-Azraq, a base never before hit at this scale

The Al-Azraq base in Jordan, used by American forces and their allies for regional operations, was directly targeted by Iranian missiles between July 9 and 10. This strike marks a significant escalation: Jordan, a kingdom traditionally cautious in its relations with Tehran, now finds itself directly exposed to Iranian retaliation simply because of its cooperation with Washington.

For the Hashemite kingdom, this strike constitutes a major strategic dilemma: maintaining its security cooperation with the United States, essential to its own internal stability, while managing the increased risk of Iranian attacks on its territory. This is a price Jordan had not anticipated paying at this level when it forged its security partnership with Washington.

Jordan is paying today the price of its loyalty to the West. That is precisely why the West cannot afford to abandon its regional allies at the very moment their support becomes most costly for them.

The diplomatic consequences for Amman

The Jordanian government, in its official communications, firmly condemned this attack while reaffirming its commitment to the Western coalition against Iran. This public firmness, in such a tense regional context, demonstrates the political courage of a country that could legitimately seek to distance itself from the conflict, but instead chooses to embrace its role in the anti-Iranian coalition.

This Jordanian solidarity deserves to be recognized and concretely supported by Western capitals, through increased security and economic assistance, rather than mere declarations of diplomatic sympathy that do not offset the real risk faced by Amman.

Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain under Iranian fire

A coordinated salvo against four American bases

Between July 9 and 10, Iran also targeted military infrastructure in Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, hitting a total of four bases used by American forces in the region, according to several reports picked up by regional media. This coordinated salvo demonstrates a simultaneous multi-theater targeting capability that Tehran had not deployed at this scale since the start of the conflict.

In Chabahar, in response to American strikes, massive power outages were reported by Iranian state media themselves, a sign that the regime is also absorbing significant internal costs, even as it chooses to continue escalation rather than defuse the crisis.

When a regime accepts inflicting power outages on its own population rather than halting its attacks on its neighbors, it is the ultimate proof that the survival of power matters more, to Tehran, than the welfare of its citizens.

Qatar, mediator and target at once

Qatar occupies a particularly delicate position in this crisis: both a direct target of Iranian retaliation and a mediator of indirect negotiations between Washington and Tehran, held in Doha. This dual posture illustrates the diplomatic complexity facing small Gulf states, forced to manage their relations with Iran while suffering its direct military attacks.

Qatar's foreign ministry has nonetheless maintained its facilitator role, reporting positive progress on shipping traffic and frozen assets during talks in Doha, before their suspension until the end of state funerals in Iran. This is a remarkable diplomatic balancing act in such an explosive context.

Bushehr, the civilian nuclear risk at the heart of the strikes

A plant under constant military watch

American strikes carried out near the Bushehr nuclear plant illustrate the most delicate dimension of this regional escalation. Built with Russian technical assistance, this civilian plant sits in a zone where Iranian military capabilities also operate, considerably complicating the precise targeting sought by American and Israeli forces.

The risk of a radiological incident, even a limited one, would immediately transform international perception of the conflict, offering Tehran a major propaganda argument to denounce irresponsible Western aggression, regardless of the regime's actual responsibility for the initial escalation.

Firmly supporting strikes against Iranian military capabilities does not preclude demanding, in parallel, absolute precision near any civilian nuclear site. The two requirements are not contradictory: they are complementary.

What this proximity reveals about the limits of the military campaign

The proximity of legitimate military targets to sensitive civilian infrastructure illustrates a reality that war propaganda, on every side, tends to minimize: modern military campaigns, even the most precise ones, carry margins of risk that can never be fully eliminated. This is an uncomfortable truth, but a necessary one to state.

American military officials insist on the surgical nature of their strikes, but transparency about the risks incurred near Bushehr remains insufficient for a full public assessment of the situation, which legitimately fuels certain concerns among Washington's European allies.

Israel's direct role in the military escalation

Israeli strikes that feed Iranian justifications

Tehran invoked Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon to justify its own breach of the ceasefire and its renewed closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to statements from IRGC military command. This justification, even though it primarily serves to mask Iran's own provocations against commercial shipping, illustrates how interconnected the Lebanese theater and the Gulf theater have become in Tehran's strategic calculus.

Israel, for its part, considers the neutralization of Iranian military and nuclear capabilities an existential security objective, regardless of the justifications Tehran puts forward for its own regional provocations. This divergence in interpretation between the two camps makes any lasting de-escalation extremely difficult to negotiate.

Zelensky has said it repeatedly for Ukraine facing Russia, and the principle applies just as much here: you do not negotiate the existential security of a democratic nation with a regime that treats every gesture of good faith as proof of weakness to exploit.

Israeli-American coordination on the Iranian file

Coordination between Israel and the United States on this file remains close, even though tactical nuances exist over the pace and scale of strikes deemed necessary. This relationship, though sometimes tense on specific points, remains the foundation on which the entire Western strategy of containing Iran's nuclear and military program rests.

Officials from both countries continue to exchange real-time intelligence, notably on suspicious movements observed around the Parchin and Pickaxe Mountain sites, a cooperation that remains indispensable against a regime as opaque as Tehran's.

Financial sanctions as a weapon of economic contagion

Hitting Mojtaba Khamenei to weaken the whole system

The American Treasury Department announced new sanctions targeting a financial network linked to Mojtaba Khamenei, named successor to the supreme leader, along with thirteen other individuals and entities. These sanctions, which notably target exchange houses moving billions of dollars for already-sanctioned banks, illustrate American willingness to extend economic pressure well beyond the direct military theater.

This financial sanctions strategy has an economic contagion effect that goes beyond Iran's borders: Tehran's trading partners, including those operating in legal gray zones, also find themselves exposed to a heightened risk of secondary American sanctions, further complicating regional financial flows.

Hitting a theocratic regime's wallet is sometimes more effective than hitting its arsenals: the money financing domestic repression and regional militias is, in the final analysis, the real fuel of Iranian power.

Repercussions on regional financial intermediaries

Exchange houses and financial intermediaries based in several Gulf countries now find themselves under increased scrutiny, fearing being associated, even indirectly, with sanctioned networks linked to Mojtaba Khamenei. This heightened caution is slowing certain legitimate commercial flows in the region, a side effect American decision-makers consider acceptable given the strategic objective pursued.

Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, denounced these sanctions as a violation of the Islamabad memorandum, but this protest changes nothing about the documented finding that it was Tehran that reopened hostilities against international commercial shipping.

Succession at the top of the regime, a factor of regional instability

State funerals that redraw the balance of power

The state funeral of the former supreme leader, held in Mashhad, marked a pivotal moment, with an open evocation of succession toward Mojtaba Khamenei. This transition comes amid active war, adding a layer of additional uncertainty about the future coherence of Iranian foreign policy in the region.

Indirect negotiations between Washington and Tehran in Doha were suspended until the end of the funeral ceremonies, a choice that reveals the priority the regime places on the stability of its own power architecture rather than the swift resolution of the regional crisis it itself fueled.

A regime that pauses vital negotiations to organize its own political funeral reveals its real priorities: the survival of theocratic power comes before the fate of the millions of people affected by this regional war.

The unknown Mojtaba Khamenei for regional stability

Unlike his father, whose decades of public statements allowed analysts to anticipate broad doctrinal lines, Mojtaba Khamenei remains largely unknown to Western analysts. His historical influence within the IRGC raises fears of an even more aggressive regional posture, but this hypothesis remains, at this stage, a cautious inference rather than an established certainty.

This uncertainty about the regime's future trajectory is itself a regional risk factor: Gulf countries, Jordan, and Israel must now plan their security while accounting for an Iranian counterpart whose real intentions remain largely opaque.

Oman and regional mediation against the contagion

A technical proposal to limit the damage

Oman, a direct neighbor of the Strait of Hormuz, proposed a free navigation corridor in its own territorial waters, while vessels transiting Iranian waters would need prior authorization, without however being subject to tolls. This proposal is the most concrete diplomatic path currently available to limit the economic impact of the conflict's regional contagion.

The fact that it is a small sultanate, rather than a major Western power or the UN, that carries the most operational proposal says a great deal about the diplomatic vacuum left by the inability of major powers to durably defuse this regional crisis.

Oman's diplomatic discretion accomplishes what grand Western declarations have failed to do since February: propose a concrete technical solution rather than another round of verbal condemnations with no effect.

The limits of regional mediation against a multifaceted conflict

This Omani mediation, however useful on the maritime front, does nothing to resolve the other dimensions of the regional contagion: strikes on Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain continue to follow a distinct military logic, over which Oman has no direct control.

This is why the Western community must multiply channels of mediation and pressure simultaneously, rather than relying on a single diplomatic initiative, however promising, to resolve a crisis now spread across several distinct theaters.

China, an interested spectator of the regional contagion

Beijing watches without direct involvement

China, the top buyer of Iranian oil despite Western sanctions, watches this regional contagion with calculated interest. Every week that Western attention and resources stay focused on the Gulf is a week Beijing gains increased room to maneuver on other strategic files, notably around Taiwan.

This Chinese posture, cautious but interested, illustrates why the Iranian crisis cannot be analyzed in isolation from the rest of the global geopolitical competition between the West and the authoritarian regimes seeking to exploit every sign of weakness or strategic dispersion.

Beijing needs no weapon to benefit from this crisis: every day the West stays absorbed by the Gulf is one more day Western vigilance elsewhere in the world weakens, and China knows this better than anyone.

A strategic lesson for Western coherence

This observation should remind Western decision-makers that firmness toward Tehran must never come at the expense of vigilance on other strategic theaters, notably against China, Russia, and North Korea, which together form a network of regimes hostile to the liberal international order.

Strategic coherence requires treating each file with the necessary determination, without ever giving in to the temptation of artificially ranking threats by their sheer geographic proximity to Western capitals.

Russia, a discreet partner in Iranian escalation

Moscow and Tehran, a convergence of interests hostile to the West

Russia, itself engaged for years in its aggression against Ukraine, maintains with Iran a strategic relationship built on a common adversary: the West. Moscow provided the technical assistance needed to build the Bushehr plant and continues to maintain close military ties with Tehran, notably in the drones Iran has supplied massively for Russian strikes against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.

This bilateral relationship explains why Moscow watches the regional contagion of the Iranian conflict with particular interest: every Western resource mobilized in the Gulf is a resource unavailable to further support Ukraine against continued Russian aggression.

Putin and Tehran share no common values, only mutual hatred of the Western order. This convergence of circumstance should be enough to convince the last skeptics that the Ukrainian front and the Iranian front are two faces of the same battle.

A lesson for Western strategic coherence

Every Western hesitation to firmly support Ukraine sends an encouraging signal to Tehran, and conversely every sign of weakness against Iran encourages Moscow to pursue its aggression without fearing a coordinated Western response on every front simultaneously.

This is why Western strategic coherence must treat these two files, Ukrainian and Iranian, as two sides of the same broader confrontation against authoritarian regimes seeking to overturn the liberal international order.

North Korea, a discreet supplier of ballistic technology

An old ballistic partnership between Pyongyang and Tehran

North Korea has maintained technological ties with the Iranian ballistic program for decades, a cooperation documented by several international proliferation-monitoring bodies. This cooperation partly explains the growing sophistication of the missiles Tehran has used against American bases in the Gulf in recent weeks.

This convergence between sanctioned regimes illustrates, once again, the need for the West to think about its security strategy globally rather than compartmentalized by region, since Pyongyang, Tehran, and Moscow form an informal network of mutual support against Western pressure.

Every North Korean missile that inspires an Iranian one is further proof that the threat to the West is now a coordinated network, not a series of isolated files handled region by region.

Western vigilance must never falter

Western intelligence services closely monitor these technology transfers between sanctioned regimes, knowing a technical advance obtained by one can quickly end up in the other's arsenal, further aggravating the regional contagion already observed since the start of the Iranian conflict.

This constant vigilance must remain a priority for all Western services, even when media attention focuses mainly on the visible strikes in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

The human price of contagion for Gulf civilians

A regional population caught between two fires

Beyond the strategic calculations of governments, it is the civilian populations of the Gulf who pay the daily price of this regional contagion. Power outages in Chabahar, heightened tensions around military bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, and the economic uncertainty tied to oil price volatility directly affect the daily lives of millions of people who have no say over decisions made in Tehran or Washington.

This human reality, too often reduced to statistics about barrels and military targets in official statements, deserves to be recalled with the same rigor as strategic assessments: war has an immediate human cost, even when it unfolds far from Western cameras.

We talk a lot about barrels of oil and military targets in this war, and too little about Gulf families who now live with the fear of an Iranian strike on their own neighborhood simply because their government chose loyalty to the West.

A moral responsibility that falls above all on Tehran

It would be easy, and intellectually lazy, to equally distribute responsibility for this civilian suffering among all belligerents. That would be a factual error: it is Tehran that chose to reopen hostilities against commercial shipping, it is Tehran that chose to strike third countries to punish their cooperation with Washington, and it is Tehran that continues to rebuild its military capabilities rather than negotiate a lasting peace.

This moral responsibility, clearly documented by the timeline of events, must remain at the center of any serious analysis of this regional contagion, lest we risk normalizing state behavior that deserves to be called what it is.

Clearly naming who bears primary responsibility for this contagion is not an ideological bias, it is a requirement of factual rigor against a regime that excels at blurring responsibility to present itself as a victim rather than the documented instigator of this escalation.

What this regional contagion reveals about Tehran's doctrine

A calculated escalation strategy rather than an improvised one

Analysis of the timeline of Iranian strikes reveals a coherent doctrine: every American strike on Iranian territory triggers a regional response calculated to maximize the number of actors affected, without provoking the direct, total confrontation the regime knows it could not win militarily against the Western coalition.

This controlled escalation doctrine allows Tehran to maintain a posture of public defiance while avoiding the breaking point that would trigger a truly decisive Western intervention against all of its remaining military and nuclear capabilities.

Tehran is playing a dangerous game of measured escalation, betting the West will always prefer crisis management to total confrontation. It is a risky bet, and every new provocation brings the regime a little closer to the moment when that bet might no longer hold.

The risk of an Iranian miscalculation

The main danger of this calculated escalation strategy lies in the possibility of an Iranian miscalculation: a strike that caused massive civilian casualties in a Gulf country, or an incident near Bushehr, could force a Western response far larger than anything Tehran has planned for in its gradual escalation calculus so far.

It is this margin for error, more than the declared will of either side, that constitutes the real systemic risk of this uncontrolled regional contagion.

Conclusion: a region paying the price of a regime's obstinacy

The real toll of this contagion

The regional contagion of the Iranian conflict demonstrates that Israel's security, Gulf stability, global energy security, and the cohesion of the Western coalition are now inseparable files. Every missile fired at Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, or Bahrain confirms that Tehran has chosen the path of regional escalation over negotiated de-escalation.

Faced with this reality, the West has no reasonable choice but to maintain its military firmness, its targeted financial sanctions, and its constant support for the regional allies now paying the price of their loyalty to an international order Tehran is actively trying to sabotage.

What the regional future depends on from this file

How this regional contagion is managed in the coming weeks will determine not only the outcome of the Iranian conflict itself, but also the credibility of Western deterrence against other hostile regimes closely watching every sign of firmness or hesitation in this crisis.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

On method

This article is an analysis column based on sourced and verifiable facts at the time of publication. Italicized passages represent my personal opinions as a columnist and should not be confused with the reported facts, which rest on official statements, news agency reports, and expert analyses cited in the text.

On the limits of this file

The regional situation is evolving rapidly and some figures, diplomatic statuses, or military postures could change after this article's publication. Elements relating to Mojtaba Khamenei's future intentions remain, by nature, speculative and are presented with appropriate methodological caution.

Sources

Primary sources

CENTCOM, statement on American strikes against Iran — July 9, 2026

RBC-Ukraine, 140 targets struck in Iran — July 12, 2026

Institute for the Study of War, special report on Iran — July 8, 2026

Foreign Policy, geopolitical analyses on the Middle East — July 2026

Secondary sources

CNN, third wave of American strikes against 140 Iranian targets — July 11, 2026

The Times of Israel, Iran declares the strait closed until further notice — July 12, 2026

Mathrubhumi English, Iranian strikes on American bases in Kuwait and Bahrain — July 9, 2026

Wikipedia, timeline of the 2026 Iran war — accessed July 13, 2026