A US exit from the war with Iran without a formal agreement could leave Tehran with an enduring stranglehold over Middle East energy supplies and Gulf Arab states bearing the costs of a conflict they neither started nor shaped, regional analysts and officials warn.
Rather than breaking Iran’s theocratic system, an inconclusive end to the fighting could strengthen it — with a leadership that has survived weeks of US-Israeli bombardment, closed the Strait of Hormuz and rattled global energy markets now able to claim it was never defeated.
“The issue is the cessation of the war without a real outcome,” said Mohammed Baharoon, director of Dubai’s B’huth Research Center. “He might stop the war, but that doesn’t mean Iran will.”
That asymmetry lies at the heart of Gulf anxieties: Iran could emerge from the conflict with enhanced leverage over shipping lanes, energy flows and regional stability, while Gulf states are left to absorb the strategic and economic consequences of an unresolved war.
Baharoon warned that Iran could begin “playing the territorial waters card” in the Strait of Hormuz — the conduit for roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies. “This goes beyond Hormuz,” he said. “Iran has put its hand on a pressure point of the global economy.”
A fundamental misjudgment
Regional analysts describe the campaign as built on a miscalculation — that unprecedented strikes on Iran’s leadership would fracture the system rather than harden it. The killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei early in the conflict, intended as a decisive blow, instead transformed him into a martyr in the eyes of Iran’s clerical establishment and Revolutionary Guards, binding them to a narrative of existential resistance.
“In one stroke, Trump and Netanyahu have turned a geopolitical conflict into a religious and civilisational one,” said Middle East scholar Fawaz Gerges. “They have elevated Khamenei from a contested ruler into a martyr.”
Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute, said the killing shattered long-established norms. “Khamenei was an Ayatollah, this is not something you do — certainly not a foreign power killing an Ayatollah,” he said.
Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert, said Washington had also underestimated Iran’s capacity for asymmetric retaliation. The assumption had been that air dominance — achieved by destroying missile launchers, command centres and senior figures — would deliver strategic containment. Instead, the Iranian system tightened rather than splintered, sustained by parallel institutions designed to regenerate under pressure.
Endurance as victory
Analysts say Iran’s strategy was never to win an air war but to impose costs — driving up oil prices, fuelling global inflation and shifting economic pressure onto the US and its partners. If the conflict becomes economically unbearable, survival itself becomes victory.
Tehran also retains the capacity to activate long-standing global networks to target Israeli, US and allied interests far beyond the battlefield. “They haven’t started yet, but they have a vast capability to punish the United States and Israel,” Ranstorp said.
Gulf states have deliberately avoided being drawn into the fighting, with officials saying their overriding concern has been preventing the US-Israeli campaign from mutating into a broader Sunni-Shia confrontation that could reshape the Middle East for decades.
A premature US withdrawal without security guarantees, analysts say, would not alter the balance of power significantly — and would leave Iran looking, across the region, more dangerous than before.
(Reuters)
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