The War That Remade the Middle East: What the US-Israel Iran Campaign Actually Achieved
The Islamic Republic of Iran entered 2024 as the dominant external power in four Middle Eastern states. It ran proxy networks across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Its nuclear program was advancing toward weapons capability with uranium enriched to sixty percent. Its ballistic missile manufacturing was expanding. Sixteen months later, former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead, Iran’s nuclear sites have been physically destroyed, and the United States and Israel have run two separate military campaigns, one called Operation Epic Fury, against the same country in under eighteen months.
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The scale of the shift requires some context to land properly. In April 2024, Israel struck a Quds Force facility adjacent to the Iranian embassy complex in Damascus, killing Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi. Iran responded by directly attacking Israel. In the months that followed, Israel and its partners intercepted almost all of Iran’s drones and missiles, then destroyed Iran’s air defense systems, then dealt severe damage to Hezbollah by killing its longtime leader and eliminating large portions of its weapons stockpile. In June 2025, Israel launched a strike against Iran’s nuclear sites and ballistic missile facilities.
Operation Roaring Lion, the Israeli name for the 2026 campaign, and Epic Fury, the American designation, have done what years of sanctions and diplomacy did not: they have materially degraded Iran’s capacity to threaten its neighbors. The joint campaigns eliminated senior figures at the highest levels of the Iranian security establishment, struck the regime’s defense production industries, and further damaged what remained of the nuclear infrastructure after the 2025 strikes.
The argument in Foreign Affairs this month is that this represents not just a military success but an opening for a fundamentally different Middle Eastern order. Authors Dany Shoham and Jonathan Schanzer argue the joint US-Israel campaigns have already created the conditions for broader Arab-Israeli normalization, provided the two countries continue coordinating rather than diverging. Their proposed architecture is a “three seas” framework connecting states on the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf under American leadership.
The counter-argument is also serious. Many American analysts believe the Iran war 2026 has consumed resources in a conflict that cannot produce the regime change both Washington and Jerusalem say they want. Regime change, these critics argue, is not something that can be bombed into existence. The Iranian people produce the successor government or they do not. American and Israeli strikes can weaken the current leadership but cannot install what comes next.
The piece acknowledges this directly and proposes what it calls the post-campaign phase: covert operations, economic pressure, political and information warfare aimed at deepening regime divisions. It also proposes that Washington stop basing its relationship with Israel primarily on military aid and shift toward industrial collaboration on AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and advanced energy.
What is certain is that the US Middle East strategy 2026 has committed to a position from which quiet retreat is difficult. The neutralisation of Iran’s proxy networks, the destruction of its nuclear enrichment capabilities, and the killing of Khamenei are facts that now exist regardless of what either government decides next. The question is whether the opening those facts have created will be used to build something durable or simply fill with a different set of problems.