US war on Iran and its larger consequences

Donald Trump's war in Iran has brought conflict close to the border with Pakistan. Afterall, Iran is one of Pakistan's four neighbours. In some way or the other, all four neighbours would be affected by the United States war in Iran. Pakistan has also to be mindful of the fact that it has, after Iran, the world's second largest Shiite population. The Pakistani Shiites are very troubled by the American-Israeli attacks on Iran. They were involved in the demonstration outside the large American consulate in Karachi. They were fired upon – it is not clear whether the fire came from the American forces that were guarding the consulate or by the Pakistani forces sent to the aid of the Americans. Nonetheless, ten people were killed. Sixteen more people died in the demonstrations that went violent in other parts of the country.

Doanld Trump has made no serious effort to explain why he chose to launch a large military operation in Iran. Push by Israel may have been one reason but Isreal has the military strength to take on Iran without involvement by the United States. The Jewish state is very nervous that a nuclear-armed Iran would destroy Israel. Under no circumstances it is prepared to see Iran equip itself with nuclear arms.

That notwithstanding, American hostility towards Iran goes back to the time when Reza Shah Pehalvi, the Iranian monarch, was deposed and sent into exile. "Death to America" became a popular slogan when Iran came under the rule of Shiite clerics. One of the early hostile acts by the religious government in Iran was to raid the large American embassy in Tehran and take 444 American prisoners. These were kept confined; they were released only when Ronald Reagan became the United States president.

There was no immediate reason for the American-Israeli attack on Iran other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjmain Netanyahu's belief that whoever succeeded Trump may not be as responsive to his fears that Iran would develop a nuclear bomb and hit his country with it. As was typical of the way Trump operated, he seemed not to have given much thought to what he expected by the intense bombing of Iran in association with Israel. Working together in the first week of the war that began on February 28, 2026, the two countries hit 4,000 Iranian targets from the land, sea and air. As a group of journalists writing for The New York Times reported, the bombing campaign was one of the most intense periods of strikes involving US forces in decades. It did not reveal a broad strategy other than destruction of both military and civilian infrastructure.

At a briefing for reporters on March 10, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States had struck over 5,000 targets in 10 days and that the day they spoke "would be our most intense day of strikes". In their briefing, the two officials discussed the "threat" that Iranian forces pose to the region. "The last 24 hours have seen Iran fire the largest number of missiles they have been capable of firing yet," said Hegseth. In addition to preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons, the Defense Secrtary said, the war's objectives were to destroy the Iranian Navy and eradicate missiles stockpiles and missile launchers and prevent the country from being able to manufacture missiles. It was clear from the list of targets that the aim was to dramatically reduce Iran's threat to Israel. It was very unlikely that any of the weapons that were being attacked could reach the United States.

The United States and Isreal were close allies in the war against Iran. European leadership was keeping itself at some distance from the United States and Israel. They had little voice at the beginning of the war but according to analysts they feel more emboldened as the war goes on. They need to take a position in the conflict. "They need to do that because they are elected politicians," said Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research group based in London. "Pretending that you have no control over things is not something that will go well with the European public. They're already restive and frustrated."

It fell to German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to sum up Europe's predicament after he sat next to Donald Trump in the Oval Office on March 3, listening to the American president's bullish briefing on the military campaign. "We don't know if the plan will work and whether the military strikes from abroad will enable political change from within," Merz said. "This plan is not without risk, and we too would have to bear its consequences."

That the plan was not working became clear. Trump had said that he would be involved in selecting the new Iranian leader to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who, along with his family, was killed in an airstrike launched by Isreal. In the 37 years that Ayatollah was the supreme Leder before being killed, he transformed the office to which he was elected from a traditional religious affairs bureau with a political cast into security juggernaut with oversight of the military, intelligence, the economy, foreign affairs and the clergy. His 56-year-old son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was elected by the council of clerics to succeed his father. According to Saeid Golkar, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee who wrote an article on the leadership change in Iran, the successor to his father was already considered the "mini supreme leader".

European analysts had other worries. "If you had real collapse, fragmentation, refugee flows from Iran, that would have a huge impact on Europe," said Thomas Wright, a fellow at the Brookins Institution who was senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. "Will they engage with the Trump administration to heighten its awareness of that scenario to avoid it?" he said.

It wasn't clear that Trump and his close associates gave much thought to how Iran would act to damage American interests. The narrow Strait of Hormuz through which a significant amount of oil and gas passes was blocked by the Iranians. The result was significant increase in the price of crude oil. Service stations serving the public also raised the price of petroleum available to them.