Three weeks into the war Israel and the United States launched on Iran, the conflict is not unfolding the way its architects planned. That is the central argument made by Ghazala Wahab, editor of Force magazine, defence analyst and author of several books on West Asia and South Asia, including Dragon on Our Doorstep and Born a Muslim, in a conversation on the Nous Podcast. Washington and Tel Aviv, she says, expected a short, decisive campaign: a handful of strikes, a rattled Iranian public, and a government forced back to the negotiating table within days. Instead, more than two weeks in, Iran is dictating the terms of a ceasefire, and the war's costs are landing hardest on the coalition that started it.
A War That Refused to Go to Script
Wahab traces the miscalculation to three factors. First, Iran had concluded after last year's twelve-day exchange with Israel that it could no longer absorb strikes and hope for de-escalation; this time it committed to retaliating at full strength regardless of cost. It had also spent the intervening year decentralising its command structure, so that even if senior leadership were eliminated, mid-level political and military officers retained the autonomy to keep operations running — a deliberate hedge against exactly the kind of decapitation strikes Israel attempted.
Second, Russia and China, which had stayed publicly cautious during the 2024 exchange, came out openly this time — sharing intelligence, supplying weapons and the means to operate them, and backing Iran diplomatically. Third, the reported killing of Iran's supreme leader in the strikes, whatever its precise details, elevated Tehran's standing across the Muslim world and shifted opinion in its favour even in parts of the West, Wahab says, functioning as a moral force multiplier that outweighed the usual Shia-Sunni fault lines dividing Iran from its Arab neighbours.
Iran's own preparation mattered as much as its adversaries' assumptions. Having treated the United States and Israel as its only real threats for four decades, Tehran built its arsenal and doctrine specifically around their weaknesses. Early in the war it fired older, less accurate missiles, deliberately forcing American, Israeli and Gulf air-defence systems to burn through expensive interceptors on cheap threats — trading, as Wahab puts it, a two-hundred-rupee drone for a hundred-thousand-rupee missile. Only once those defences were exposed and depleted did Iran begin using its more capable second line of missiles.
The Toll Plaza at Hormuz
The United States has struck Kharg Island, through which roughly ninety percent of Iran's crude exports flow, while insisting it has so far shown restraint by not hitting oil facilities directly — a restraint it says will end if the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted. Wahab pushes back on the framing that Iran has "closed" the strait. What Tehran has actually done, she says, is open something closer to a toll plaza: vessels it permits move through without incident, while others are turned away or delayed. India's own ships were initially held up despite outreach from the Prime Minister, then let through hours later. She expects the list of countries Iran allows through to keep growing, with the durable damage falling on the United States and its allies rather than on neutral trade.
Kharg's vulnerability is not new — Iran defended it through repeated attacks during the Iran-Iraq war and has had decades to build alternative export routes. Wahab expects Tehran is prepared for further strikes there, and warns that if Gulf partners pressure Washington to keep the fighting away from energy infrastructure, the war may simply become more vicious toward civilians instead, pointing to a strike that killed civilians in Iran the same morning as the interview.
Why the Gulf Won't Follow Iran's Lead
Could this war also loosen America's grip on the wider Arab world, given how visibly its air-defence umbrella has failed to shield Gulf states from disruption? Wahab is doubtful. The Arab-Iran rivalry, she argues, is fundamentally political, not sectarian — the sectarian framing is a convenient garment draped over a much older contest over regional influence. Unlike the Arab lands, which were Ottoman colonies before European powers redrew them into Iraq, Syria, Jordan and the Gulf states after the First World War, Iran was never anyone's colony. That history of independence produced a fierce national instinct for resistance that persists today, visible in the regular protests against Iran's own authoritarian government, including women's demonstrations and the unrest of this past January — protests people are willing to risk their lives to join.
Gulf monarchies, by contrast, derive their power not from their own populations but from proximity to Washington, and that, Wahab says, is precisely why they cannot afford genuine independence: without the American security umbrella, many fear a 1979-style upheaval at home. Their deepest threat, in her reading, has never really been Iran, Russia or Israel — it is their own citizens. When Bahrain's people protested their rulers, the government had to call in Saudi troops to suppress its own population. That fear of internal unrest, not loyalty to Washington, is what locks the smaller Gulf states in place, and it is why Wahab thinks a real regional realignment away from the United States is unlikely unless Saudi Arabia and the UAE themselves take a firm position.
She is especially blunt about Saudi Arabia, arguing that its custodianship of Mecca and Medina, its role alongside the US and Pakistan in creating the Afghan mujahideen and later al-Qaeda, and its long alliance with Washington built on pricing oil exclusively in dollars have done more damage to the global Muslim community than any other country — while an average Muslim, she notes, still fails to distinguish between Arabia as a place and Saud as a ruling family whose name it now carries.
How Far Can This Go
Asked whether pressure from Netanyahu and pro-Israel lobbying in Washington could push the conflict toward tactical nuclear weapons, Wahab is candid about the limits of her certainty, but notes that Donald Trump's own remarks about being able to end the war "in half an hour" read, to her, as a veiled reference to exactly that option — one the United States, as the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, has a history that makes plausible. What restrains it, she argues, is that Iran now stands alongside three nuclear powers — Russia, China and North Korea — making any use of nuclear weapons a far larger gamble than in 1945, when no adversary could retaliate in kind.
A ground invasion, she says, is not realistic. Iran is too large, too far away, and — as the war's opening weeks have shown — barely understood by American and Israeli planners, who went in effectively blind to its military thinking and command structure. Historically, US ground invasions have followed the near-total destruction of a country's capacity to resist, as in Iraq after forty-five days of continuous bombing, or Afghanistan, where an initial vacuum of resistance later hardened into a costly insurgency. Iran presents neither condition, which is why, Wahab says, Washington is instead trying to incite Iranians to rise up themselves rather than commit its own troops.
She is sharper still on the question of who wages war on civilians. Citing the doctrine that "all targets are valid targets," she argues that the self-styled civilised West has never, in practice, distinguished civilian from military targets — from the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to chemical warfare in Vietnam to the bombing campaigns of both Iraq wars — in contrast to wars like those between India and Pakistan, where both sides have generally avoided civilian targets. She expects that pattern, not restraint, to define the war's next phase.
The Proxies Wait, and Netanyahu Vanishes From View
Hezbollah is fighting "shoulder to shoulder" with Iran, Wahab says, largely because Israeli encroachment into southern Lebanon left it no choice but to physically resist on the ground. Hamas, by contrast, is relatively quiet, having absorbed heavy losses over the past two years and lost much of its senior leadership — though she expects the Palestinian question, including the war on Gaza, to remain part of any eventual negotiation, not least because Iran's leadership has continued marking Quds Day publicly even amid this war. The Houthis have stayed out of direct combat so far, but Wahab believes that could change: if Saudi Arabia continues what she calls its "double speak" — talking peace while, as in the recent shooting-down of a US refuelling aircraft, allowing operations from its own territory — Iran may ask the Houthis to escalate, including a possible attempt to block the Bab-el-Mandeb strait.
On the swirl of claims around Israeli casualties — competing rumours about Netanyahu's brother, his own reported condition, and days of silence from an Israeli leadership normally never off social media — Wahab says Israel's information blackout makes verification impossible, but she is personally inclined to believe significant losses have occurred among Israel's senior ranks, pointing to the prolonged disappearance of previously ubiquitous Israeli commanders from public view as circumstantial evidence.
A New World Order, and India's Miscalculation
Wahab sees the war's endgame feeding directly into a larger contest: Russia and China, she argues, do not want this war to end on American terms, and will use it to press for restoring the authority of the United Nations and rolling back US unilateralism — an agenda that predates this war but that the war has now handed real momentum. She expects the same dynamic to shape any eventual settlement in Ukraine, since Moscow will bring that conflict back to the table once talks begin. The result, in her assessment, will not be the end of American power altogether — the US retains real strength in areas like AI-driven technology — but the end of the idea that it can act unilaterally anywhere it chooses.
She is unsparing about India's own position, comparing the country's foreign-policy establishment unfavourably even to the American planners she has just criticised for lacking judgement. India, a founding member of both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS, has failed to grasp BRICS's significance as a vehicle for an alternative world order — even as Donald Trump, whom she does not credit with strategic insight, treats it seriously enough to threaten member states with a hundred percent tariff. New Delhi, she argues, revealed its alignment with Israel far too openly before the war even began, when a more neutral posture — consistent with India's own historically good relations with Iran, including its investment in Chabahar port under the current government — would have served its interests better. She reads India's domestic anti-Muslim politics as shaping that overt tilt, and notes that Indian leaders have faced open ridicule and memes at home over the position in a way she has not seen in a decade.
Asked directly whether an old world order is collapsing and a new one emerging, Wahab does not hedge: whatever the precise terms on which this war ends, and whatever comes next in Ukraine, she believes the unipolar moment — in which the United States could act anywhere on its own terms — is closing, and that Iran, Russia and China, joined eventually by Gulf states rethinking their own security arrangements, are pushing toward a collective structure to replace it.
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