What is happening in the Middle East marks its entry into another era. This description is not a value judgement: it is neither negative nor positive; what has changed are the rules of the game. Alliances have shifted, strategies have changed, and no actor now moves against a single power or beneath a single umbrella.
This transformation did not begin on 7 October, nor with the fall of Assad in Damascus; both events took place within a system that had already been changing before them. And the change itself is older and broader than what has happened in the region. The countdown had begun in Iraq in 2003, and what ended there was not American power, but the ability of that power to turn its military and economic superiority into an order through which it could determine the terms of conflict and its outcomes. The difference between the two is everything: America remained the strongest, but the system through which it had managed the region stopped working. This failure did not create the alternative. The material from which the alternative would emerge had been accumulating, in China’s rise since the 1990s and Russia’s recovery at the turn of the millennium; what the failure did was bring it into the open. This is what we saw four years later, in Munich in 2007, when rejection of American unipolarity moved from an implicit position to an openly declared political line voiced by Putin. Then came Georgia, followed by Libya, not because Russia had become the world’s leading superpower, but because America was no longer able to prevent what it had once prevented. Russia, however, was the clearest expression of this formation, not its centre. China, meanwhile, was moving beyond the limits of economic power to impose itself as a technological and military power, building ports and corridors and signing long-term agreements outside the dollar; it was China that gave the alternative its depth.
A regional system born under the dominance of a single pole could no longer remain as it was once the conditions that had established it disappeared. No one decided this and no plan drew it, as some imagine; it was the disappearance of those conditions that reshaped the system itself.
The current confrontation between Iran on one side and the United States and Israel on the other is the first conflict to be conducted entirely within this new framework. Its importance lies not in its parties alone, nor in its immediate military outcomes, but in the fact that it reveals the contours of the era replacing the one before it. Through it, we can read the Middle East that is now taking shape.
This confrontation is not a war like those that preceded it in the region, when a single superpower possessed the decision to go to war, its timing, and the ability to rally others behind it, even if it never possessed the conditions needed to end it. The Iraq War of 2003 was the last war of this kind and the first sign of its end: Washington launched it, mobilised for it and chose its timing, only to prove unable to end it as it wished. From then on, the countdown began. What is different today is that the United States no longer possesses even the decision, the timing and the mobilisation on its own. When the United States and Israel struck Iran, Iran fought within a network with allies such as Beijing and Moscow. Even though neither entered directly, their diplomatic, technological and economic support has not wavered, and Chinese military assistance was decisive in enabling Iran to deal painful blows to American bases in the region, as Trump himself described them. Each of the two allies has its own calculation. For Russia, Iran is the North-South Corridor linking its economy to the Indian Ocean and circumventing sanctions, as well as a partner in its war effort in Ukraine. Beyond that lies a simple strategic calculation: the fall or subjugation of Iran would mean not only the loss of an ally, but the loss of a corridor. Russia would lose its route to the Indian Ocean, and China the link connecting Gwadar to Central Asia and securing its oil outside the dollar. More dangerous still for both would be Washington regaining what it has lost since 2003: the ability to isolate the nodes of the network one by one. Beijing and Moscow are therefore not defending Iran, but a principle: that individual isolation is no longer possible. What they share is credibility with the non-aligned countries*: abandoning Tehran under American or Israeli pressure would be a sign of weakness neither can afford. That is why the wager on a grand bargain in which Washington asks Moscow to abandon Iran in exchange for concessions in Ukraine is a double illusion: Washington would not honour such an agreement, nor would Moscow.
For China, too, the calculations run deeper than Iran itself, and anyone who thinks Beijing will retreat for fear of an oil shock is reading its strategy wrongly. The card Washington has long kept for strangling China is the Strait of Malacca, through which the largest share of its imported oil passes. For years, therefore, China has been working to neutralise this card, not to live with it, through several routes rather than one. These include the oil and gas pipelines across Myanmar, running from the Bay of Bengal to China’s Yunnan province and bypassing the strait entirely; and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, from the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea to Xinjiang, with roads, railways and pipelines designed to carry Gulf oil overland without passing through either Malacca or the South China Sea. China also supports two projects in Thailand that cut across the Kra Peninsula, around which the strait bends: the Kra maritime canal, proposed repeatedly but stalled by its cost and political sensitivity, and then the land bridge that takes its place, with a port on each side and a railway connecting them, the project Bangkok is pushing today. Elsewhere, China is building logistical and port partnerships with Malaysia, on the very shore of the strait, together with Gulf actors such as the United Arab Emirates, making China a party in the strait, not merely a user of it. Finally, to the north, there is the polar route, which melting ice is opening along a Russian path entirely removed from any strait controlled by Washington or its allies.
Any expert or analyst who wants to measure these alternatives by their capacity today makes the same mistake as those who measured China in 2007 by the position it held then. There is no doubt that the operating overland pipelines from Myanmar, Kazakhstan and Russia carry no more than one and a half million barrels a day, against seven million passing through Malacca. But that figure reflects the present situation, not the direction in which it is moving. The Russian route is expanding and Russia has become the leading supplier, at roughly a fifth of imports; the Thai land bridge is under construction; the Pakistan corridor has an operating road and railway and a planned pipeline; the Kra Canal is postponed, not ruled out; and the climate opens the polar route further year after year. Above all this is a strategic stockpile approaching 1.4 billion barrels, enough for months, and sources spread across forty-nine countries, none accounting for more than a fifth. China therefore does not need to dispense with Malacca now; it needs to make closing it pointless. Once the weapon of strangulation is exposed, the targeted party begins building what will protect it from that weapon, and with every passing year the cost of strangling it rises while its effectiveness falls, because what was once vital gradually becomes one route among several. Iran is at the core of this structure; it is an essential part of the new Silk Roads and is tied to China by a twenty-five-year strategic agreement outside the dollar market. In the same direction, the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea adds another outlet to the network of roads and pipelines, reducing China’s dependence on the maritime routes the United States is trying to choke. What was built quietly since 2007 was not merely infrastructure, but preparation for a day like this: for China to enter the war without flinching at the price of a barrel.
Inside Iran, the wager that external pressure will lead to the collapse of the regime is a miscalculation. There is a deep national sentiment that crosses political divisions, and even the citizens most critical of the religious regime reject their country being subjected to foreign aggression or an American diktat. The nuclear programme and missile capability are therefore seen as two guarantees of sovereignty and two symbols of national dignity, not as a matters belonging to the regime alone. Iran knows from experience, since the repudiation of the 2015 agreement, that a written commitment from Washington guarantees nothing. It therefore has no reason to concede in exchange for a promise.
Iran’s depth does not end at its borders. Iraq is its logistical artery and strategic extension: its crossings and supply routes, alongside the factions most closely attached to Tehran, such as Kata’ib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba, ensure the continuity of the overland route extending westwards. The wager that the de facto authority led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani in Syria can cut this artery is a complete illusion. The Syrian-Iraqi border stretches across hundreds of kilometres of desert, and the army of the de facto authority has neither the numbers nor the tribal reach to seal it. In addition, the Iraqi factions and Hezbollah are adept at heavy smuggling through tunnels, concealment within commercial flows and local collusion. As for the convoy intercepted by Jolani, it was a political display and an overture to Trump; on the ground, however, he avoids confrontation at any cost with armed forces that outgun him.
Let us move to Yemen, where the Houthis hold Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea, and in this way they give Tehran the ability to choke maritime trade at little cost, threaten Gulf installations and strike southern Israel, the second handle, after Hormuz, on global trade. Hezbollah, despite what it has suffered, remains a shield that neither Jolani’s army nor any Turkish contractor can dismantle. The question is not whether these actors retain their former strength: the Houthis reopened the Red Sea front at the start of the war and brought down everything achieved since the October truce; the Iraqi factions hold the crossings; and Hezbollah still imposes an open northern front on Israel.
These actors do not need to recover their former strength in order to perform their function. It is enough that, together, they raise the cost of isolating and striking Iran while opening more than one arena of pressure at the same time. This is what strategic depth means: each front is not required to decide the battle on its own, but to force the adversary to distribute its power and resources across the fronts. Hormuz is not an exception in this structure, but its third strait.
Because none of the major powers wants a direct confrontation with another, the confrontation moves below that level: to straits, crude prices, settlement currencies and proxy wars in which weapons are tested on one front before being deployed on another. This is what makes the Iranian war a war of the new era: it cannot be decided with the tools Washington used to decide its wars from 1991 onwards, because the conditions on which those tools rested no longer exist. This is what the Strait of Hormuz reveals today.
Since March, then, the strait has been neither a free passage nor a closed one; it has become a permit system. A ship wishing to cross submits an advance application disclosing its ownership, insurance, crew and cargo, and permission to pass is granted only after scrutiny. Those who pass pay around two million dollars per voyage, depending on the size of the vessel and the type of cargo, with the fee shared with Oman and settled in yuan or cryptocurrencies. The figures reveal the scale of the transformation clearly. Before the war, between eighty and 130 ships crossed the strait each day, according to data from the International Monetary Fund’s PortWatch. Since March, more than 150 tankers have accumulated outside it, while Gulf states cut production by ten million barrels a day after their storage facilities filled. Between June and July, after the Islamabad memorandum temporarily restored passage without fees, the average returned to around twenty-five ships a day. The memorandum then collapsed in July and passage fell to around ten ships a day. At the beginning of August, on some days, it fell to only one or two ships.
Iran divided passage between those allowed to cross and those exempted from payment. Russia and Malaysia are exempt from payment, while China receives preferential treatment whose details have not been disclosed; India, Pakistan, Iraq and the Philippines pass in return for paid fees. More importantly, China does not need an exemption in the first place. It China that buy Iranian oil, more than nine-tenths of which ends up in independent refineries in Shandong. Although the discount on Iranian crude narrowed under the blockade rather than widening, because barrels became scarce, China continues to buy. If the calculation were purely commercial, it would have retreated. It continues because buying Iranian oil is, for China, a strategic decision through which it alone determines how much it takes and when. Iran, in return, bears the cost of the shadow fleet, insurance, intermediaries and risk, but the equation goes beyond a calculation of cost: the lever over the strait is Iranian, while the purchase of Iranian oil is almost a Chinese monopoly. Any American blockade therefore runs into the same problem: the breathing space is not a gap in the cordon that can be closed, but China itself, which buys Iranian oil and has no interest in Washington succeeding, but an explicit interest in making it fail.
As for the American blockade on Iranian ports, reimposed in mid-July after the collapse of the Islamabad memorandum, it partially succeeded in disrupting loading, but failed to achieve the purpose for which it had been imposed: forcing Tehran to concede. Kharg Island, from which nine-tenths of exports leave and which lies inside the Gulf west of the strait, remained empty for nearly a month. Satellites detected not a single supertanker at its berths, and Washington presented the images as evidence that the cordon was tightening. But the halt in loading at Kharg did not stop exports. Iran turned to vast floating stocks off Chabahar and Jask outside the strait, to the shadow fleet it had accumulated over thirty years of circumventing sanctions, and to the yuan payment channels it had built for this scenario. Since June, around eighty million barrels have left the Gulf of Oman, and twenty-six Iranian tankers reached the Singapore Strait for ship-to-ship transfers off Malaysia, before loading resumed at Kharg itself on 12 August. This does not mean the blockade came without cost. Kharg’s storage tanks did not fill despite the halt in loading, which means Iran reduced production at some fields to avoid running out of storage capacity, damaging the reservoirs over the long term. Floating stocks also rose to around 135 million barrels. But damage does not mean political subjugation. This is where the confusion lies: the blockade damaged the economy and production, but it did not change the behaviour it was intended to change. Iran did not concede on the nuclear file, did not retreat from the permit system in the strait, and did not accept Washington’s conditions for negotiations. Damage occurred; subjugation did not. The blockade therefore succeeded in raising the cost and failed to turn it into a concession. Indeed, what happened over the past six months produced the opposite result: the blockade that was supposed to narrow Iran’s room for manoeuvre ended up widening it, while the strait on which Washington sought to exert pressure in order to choke Tehran became, in Tehran’s hands, an instrument for imposing the terms of passage.
The clearest evidence appears in the American trajectory itself. In April, Rubio described the Iranian fee as illegal, while Trump said it could be a “joint venture” with Iran. In mid-July, Trump himself announced a 20 per cent American fee on shipments in exchange for protecting the strait, then withdrew it in less than twenty-four hours under pressure from the Gulf states, replacing it with investment promises for which he specified neither an amount nor the countries involved. Washington moved from rejecting the principle of fees to trying to adopt it, then abandoned it when it came to implementation.
But before anything else, I want to correct a common idea about Donald Trump. He is not a neoconservative obsessed with regime change, but a man who understands only the language of deals, especially real-estate deals. This was his fatal mistake: he entered this war without any theory of victory. He reached for his old tools, threats, then strikes, then a blockade. Iran responded with endurance and political manoeuvring. What Tehran is able to withstand as time passes has itself become a growing source of pressure on Washington.
Tehran is losing barrels and revenues and damaging its fields, but it has demonstrated its willingness to endure considerable economic pain in exchange for keeping its hand on the strait. Washington, however, faces a different kind of problem. Every dollar added to the price of a barrel feeds inflation, hits the purchasing power of American households and shakes the markets. Gulf allies have also cut production, the US midterm elections are approaching, while a section of public opinion rejects another military entanglement in the Middle East. In addition to the economic and political cost to the United States, this war has opened a gap in military stockpiles that cannot be replenished as quickly as they have been depleted. According to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, around two-thirds of the pre-war US stock of Patriot interceptor missiles has been used, while information reported by CNN, citing sources familiar with the latest internal inventory, indicates that nearly 80 per cent of the stock of THAAD missiles has been consumed, alongside a significant decline in stocks of Tomahawk missiles and other long-range precision munitions. It is true that Iran is losing some of its oil revenues, but Trump is losing political capital, while the United States is depleting military stocks and time that are difficult to replace.
In theory, there are many exits, but only one question matters: is there an exit that allows Washington to achieve its original objectives — a free strait and an Iran without nuclear capability — without concession and without redefining victory? The answer is no. Escalating towards Kharg would send prices soaring and expose American soldiers to Iranian drones just thirty-three kilometres from the coast, weeks before the elections. How could Trump justify to his base a war that contradicts his promises to end endless wars? Signing would mean endorsing an Iranian fee system he had already declared unacceptable. Waiting, meanwhile, would mean allowing time and prices to work in Tehran’s favour. One other exit remains: a tactical arrangement marketed as a victory. Oman’s plan for joint management of the strait, with “voluntary fees” instead of a unilateral Iranian levy, offers an escape route for Washington: Iran retains the lever, while the United States can claim that what it pays is not a fee imposed by Tehran. The question remains what price Tehran will demand to let Trump leave without visible humiliation. He applied maximum pressure to a regime whose political architecture, since 1979, was built to absorb precisely this kind of pressure, without having a plan for what happens if Iran does not concede. Today, he has collided with that possibility.
Ukraine is not far from this calculation. What happens in the Middle East is reflected directly on the Ukrainian front. Iran has supplied Russia with thousands of Shahed drones and ballistic technology, while Moscow transfers air-defence systems, space technology and satellite intelligence to Tehran. More importantly, equipment is tested and modified on one front before being deployed on the other. This has been formalised in the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty between the two countries. Every Patriot battery and every interceptor missile redeployed to protect American bases in the Gulf is a resource lost to the Ukrainian front; the Middle East in flames therefore eases the pressure the West is trying to impose on Russia in Eastern Europe. Every dollar added to the price of a barrel because of tensions around Hormuz is direct income for Putin’s war budget. To be fair, attrition works both ways: Ukraine partially drains Russia, in human and financial terms, and drones target Russian oil facilities, striking a resource on which Moscow itself depends. But this attrition does not negate the argument; it confirms it. Despite its losses, Russia is increasing weapons production and using its missiles against Ukraine to keep it under pressure. At the same time, it has neither abandoned Iran nor reduced its support, for the simple reason that weakening Iran would free part of the American power and resources directed against it, allowing Washington to refocus on Russia.
We are not waiting for a Third World War in the classical sense, and this does not rule out the expansion of existing wars or the outbreak of new ones. Conflict today is distributed across multiple levels: militarily in Ukraine and the Middle East; economically through sanctions and blockades; in energy through straits and pipelines; technologically through chips and drones; and monetarily through settlement currencies. Each front feeds the others. In this system, Russia gains from every dollar added to the price of a barrel, China endures because it has prepared for this day for two decades, while the United States pays the military, economic and political cost all at once.
The unipolar order was not born in 1945. The Western order emerged within a bipolar balance imposed by the existence of the Soviet Union, then after 1991, with the disappearance of the opposing pole, it became an order dominated by the United States. Its failure in Iraq was not evidence of the collapse of the institutions created after the Second World War, but of the failure of that unipolar moment Washington inherited after the end of the Cold War. From then on, the United States began losing the conditions that had allowed it to act, while the alternative gradually took shape. The alternative appeared in the political challenge from 2007 onwards, while the economic and technological capacities of other states built up over the following two decades, until the confrontation with Iran came to reveal the limits of American power — and, with them, a Middle East in which umbrellas have multiplied and everyone moves according to rules no one wrote.
* I avoid the term “Global South”, common in Western literature, because it creates the illusion of a single bloc with a single interest, whereas these countries differ in their interests, economies and geographical positions, from Asia to Africa to Latin America. What unites them is not an identity but a position: rejection of compulsory alignment behind a single pole. I therefore use “non-aligned countries” descriptively, not as a reference to formal membership of the Non-Aligned Movement.