Iran War:
A Conflict Without Brakes

On 18 March 2026, Israeli forces struck natural gas processing facilities at Iran's South Pars field, the Iranian sector of the world's largest natural gas reservoir, shared with Qatar's North Field across the Persian Gulf. The strike triggered three cascading consequences in rapid succession. Iran retaliated with ballistic missiles and drones against energy infrastructure across the Gulf,¹ sending oil and gas prices sharply higher,² in strikes that were not rhetorical; they were kinetic and broadly distributed.³

The Iranian retaliation struck the following facilities:

• Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar — the world's largest LNG export hub, sustained extensive damage and fires from ballistic missile strikes.
• SAMREF refinery in Yanbu and Jubail petrochemical complex, Saudi Arabia — two refineries struck; further missiles intercepted over Riyadh.
• Habshan gas facility and Bab oilfield, UAE — operations suspended amid missile attacks.
• Al Hosn gas field, UAE — evacuation ordered; declared a legitimate target by IRGC-affiliated media.

Saudi Arabia publicly reserved the right to take military action against Iran if it deemed it necessary — a formulation without precedent in the current conflict.

The morning of 19 March brought a Truth Social post from Donald Trump that was, even by his standards, extraordinary. He described Israel as having "violently lashed out" at South Pars "out of anger" and insisted the United States "knew nothing" about the strike.⁴ Both claims were false. Axios, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal subsequently reported, citing US and Israeli officials, that Trump had approved the strike in coordination with Prime Minister Netanyahu, framing it as a message to Tehran over its continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.⁵ Trump's attempt to publicly distance himself from a strike he had privately authorised is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of the fundamental incoherence at the heart of Washington's strategic posture.

Europe is not a spectator to this escalation. It is among its most directly exposed victims. The European economy is still absorbing the structural damage inflicted by the war in Ukraine — elevated energy costs, disrupted supply chains, reduced industrial competitiveness, and the accumulated fiscal strain of unprecedented defence spending commitments. Into this weakened condition, the energy escalation in the Gulf now introduces a second shock that Europe has no instrument to absorb at speed.

Qatar is a primary source of European LNG, accounting for approximately 16–18% of EU LNG supply.⁶ Ras Laffan — now damaged, its fires still being contained as of the morning of 19 March — is the terminal through which the bulk of that supply is processed and exported. Any prolonged impairment of Ras Laffan capacity translates directly into tightening supply for EU importers, compounded by the fact that the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, preventing LNG tankers from transiting the Gulf irrespective of production capacity at the source.

Japan and South Korea face an even starker arithmetic. Japan imports approximately 90% of its crude oil, with a substantial proportion transiting Hormuz.⁷ Tokyo has already publicly declined Washington's request to dispatch warships to patrol the strait, constrained by its constitutional framework and domestic political realities. The economic pressure on these US treaty allies is severe, sustained and growing — and it is pressure for which the United States bears direct responsibility as the co-author of the conflict generating it.

European leaders have begun to articulate this publicly. French President Macron called for an immediate moratorium on strikes on civilian energy infrastructure; Germany's Foreign Minister warned of "a crisis of the gravest order."⁸ These are not abstract diplomatic formulations. They reflect the political reality that European governments are facing: energy prices rising, industrial output contracting, and publics already strained by years of post-Ukraine adjustment now being asked to absorb further shocks generated by a conflict they had no voice in initiating and possess no mechanism to conclude.

The United States entered Operation Epic Fury on 28 February 2026 with a set of explicit economic red lines, chief among them the avoidance of strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure. The rationale was straightforward: Trump's domestic political identity is built substantially on promises of lower energy prices, and the administration understood that any escalation of the Gulf energy crisis would translate directly into domestic inflation and political damage.⁹ Trump had separately lifted partial sanctions on Russian oil exports earlier in 2025 — explicitly to reduce global oil prices — framing it as a concession within the Ukraine negotiation process.¹⁰

The South Pars strike demolished this logic in a single operation. Washington approved a strike on the world's largest gas field, predictably triggered Iranian retaliation against Gulf LNG infrastructure, sent Brent crude through $107 and European gas benchmarks up 6%, and then publicly denied involvement in an attempt to limit the domestic political fallout. The sequence reveals not a strategy but its absence: a policy architecture that was internally contradictory before the first missile hit South Pars, and is now visibly collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

The Strait of Hormuz remains the most direct illustration of Washington's impotence relative to its stated objectives. The strait's status does not depend on what Washington is planning — it depends entirely on what Tehran decides. Iran has demonstrated, repeatedly and now most dramatically with the strike on Ras Laffan, that it will absorb punishment and respond symmetrically to the economic infrastructure of states it holds responsible for enabling the conflict. The path to a Hormuz reopening runs through a political settlement, not a military one — and a political settlement requires a US administration willing to impose constraints on Israel that it has, to date, shown no willingness to impose.

The deepest structural problem in the current conflict is temporal. Israel and the United States are fighting the same war on entirely different timelines, with objectives that are not merely different but fundamentally incompatible.

Israel's strategic objective is one of two outcomes, both requiring sustained engagement. The first is regime change in Tehran — achieved not through a conventional ground invasion, which is militarily and logistically unfeasible across Iranian territory, but through a combination of sustained military degradation, economic destruction, covert pressure, and the eventual activation of internal instability and fragmentation. The second, if regime change proves unachievable, is to set back Iranian military and nuclear capability by ten to twenty years — eliminating or severely degrading its missile programme, its nuclear infrastructure, and its regional proxy network to an extent that removes Iran as a credible near-term threat.¹¹ Either outcome requires time. Months, not weeks. Neither is achievable on the timeline Washington is prepared to sustain politically.

The United States, by contrast, cannot afford a long war. The domestic political mathematics are unfavourable and deteriorating. Trump's core economic promise — lower prices, restored prosperity — is being actively undermined by the energy shock the conflict is generating. NATO allies and Asian allies whose energy security is being directly threatened are applying sustained pressure for resolution. The spectre of the mid-term elections, at which current polling suggests Democrats are competitive for both the House and Senate, concentrates the administration's attention on an exit.¹²

Trump's character introduces a complicating variable. His Truth Social post of 19 March — simultaneously distancing himself from a strike he approved, threatening Iran with annihilation, and instructing Israel to stand down — is the behaviour of a man managing contradictory pressures through performance rather than strategy. Trump does not admit strategic mistakes. He doubles down, blames predecessors, and reframes failures as victories. This pattern makes a clean acknowledged pivot toward war termination psychologically unlikely. He would be more apt to declare victory unilaterally and redescribe whatever settlement emerges as a triumph — regardless of whether it corresponds to any of the war's stated objectives.¹³

European leaders have thus far responded to the escalation with statements. Statements are not leverage. Europe possesses concrete, deployable instruments of pressure on Israel — instruments whose deployment has been persistently deferred by a combination of political caution, fear of accusations of antisemitism, and the institutional inertia of a Union designed for consensus rather than crisis response. The energy emergency now unfolding demands that this calculation change.

The most significant instrument available is the EU–Israel Association Agreement of 2000, whose Article 2 makes respect for human rights and democratic principles an essential element of the relationship — a standard legal formulation that, in EU treaty practice, creates the basis for suspension in the event of a "serious and substantial failure" by either party.¹⁴ The European Commission has consistently declined to trigger this clause, despite repeated European Parliament resolutions calling for its activation and legal analyses concluding that the threshold has been met. In the current context — with Israel having struck the world's largest gas field, triggering Iranian retaliation that has directly damaged facilities supplying EU member states with LNG — the case for invoking Article 2 as a minimum diplomatic signal has become considerably stronger. Europe's own energy security is now directly at stake, not merely its normative commitments.

A second instrument is coordinated conditionality on arms transfers. Several EU member states have already taken individual decisions to suspend or restrict weapons exports to Israel. A coordinated EU-wide embargo, or at minimum a formal suspension of new licences pending a commitment from Israel not to strike further energy infrastructure, would represent a qualitatively different form of pressure than statements from foreign ministers.¹⁵ It would impose real constraints on Israel's operational capacity and, critically, send a signal to the Trump administration that European support for the broader Western coalition is conditional on Israel exercising restraint. Europe's silence in the face of escalation has been misread as acquiescence. It should not continue to be.

The argument against deploying these instruments is well-rehearsed: European leverage over Israel is limited; unilateral European action will not change Israeli behaviour; and the costs — diplomatic rupture, accusations of abandoning a democratic ally — outweigh the benefits. This argument mistakes the purpose of leverage. The goal is not to compel a change in Israeli decision-making through European pressure alone. The goal is to alter the political environment within which the Trump administration makes its own decisions about whether and how long to sustain the conflict. European conditionality gives Washington a political tool: the ability to tell Netanyahu that continued energy escalation risks fracturing the Western coalition in ways that directly damage American interests. Without European pressure, that tool does not exist.

Europe must be equally clear about what a further Israeli strike on Iranian energy infrastructure would mean for the continent. Ras Laffan is damaged but not destroyed. A second major strike on Gulf LNG infrastructure — or an Iranian escalation that closes or destroys additional processing capacity — would push European gas prices to levels not seen since the acute phase of the Ukraine crisis in 2022. Industries that have only partially recovered from that shock would face renewed existential pressure. Governments that have spent two years assuring publics that the worst of the energy crisis is behind them would face immediate credibility collapses. Europe has a direct, material, economic interest in preventing a second strike — and must deploy its instruments in service of that interest rather than its instinct for procedural caution.

Israel is acutely aware that its political environment in the United States is undergoing a structural shift — and that this shift is accelerating. The data are unambiguous. Public support for Israel among Americans, particularly younger cohorts and conservatives under 35, has declined materially over the past three years.¹⁶ More consequentially, the political figures who are reshaping the identity of the American right — Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the broader "America First" media ecosystem — have made scepticism of AIPAC's influence and outright hostility to unconditional US support for Israel a central and increasingly mainstream feature of their political messaging. These are not fringe voices. Carlson reaches audiences of tens of millions per episode across platforms. Fuentes commands millions of young, engaged conservative followers. They represent precisely the demographic — young, male, Republican-leaning — who were traditionally the most reliable bedrock of US political support for Israel. That bedrock is cracking, and Israeli strategists know it.

Israel is not simply a close ally managing a relationship. It is an actor that understands it is operating in a closing window — and that it must prevent, at all costs, a premature US withdrawal from the conflict. Every instrument of influence available to Israel within the Trump administration is therefore being deployed not only to shape US military decisions but to ensure that Washington remains in the war long enough for Israeli objectives to be achieved. The imperative, from Jerusalem's perspective, is to keep the United States engaged — and to do so for as long as the current political configuration permits.

The principal instruments of that influence are well-documented. Within the Trump administration, the central figure has been Jared Kushner — Trump's son-in-law, possessing unparalleled personal access, and someone whose relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu predates Trump's political career. Kushner operates not as a formal diplomatic envoy but as an informal channel through which Israeli positions are translated into White House preferences in ways that bypass the standard machinery of the National Security Council. Alongside Kushner, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its aligned network of donors and political action committees represent the structural backbone of Israeli political influence in Washington.¹⁷ AIPAC's 2023–2024 electoral cycle spending exceeded $100 million, making it among the most financially significant political organisations in American federal elections. Its ability to reward compliance and punish deviation among Republican incumbents remains, for now, structurally intact — even as the ideological ground beneath it shifts.

The mid-term elections of November 2026 represent Israel's most immediate political deadline. Current polling suggests the Democrats are competitive — and several forecasters give them better-than-even odds of capturing the House, with the Senate in genuine play across battleground states including Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.¹⁸ A Democratic House majority would introduce legislative friction around military spending, authorisations, and oversight of the administration's conduct of the war that does not currently exist. Israel understands that the mid-terms mark the moment at which the Trump administration's unencumbered freedom of action begins to erode — and that it must extract as much as it can from the remaining months before that erosion begins. After the mid-terms, from Israel's perspective, things will be considerably tougher. The window is not abstract. It has a calendar.

The deeper strategic logic that drives Israeli urgency is this: if Israel can emerge from the current conflict as the unchallenged regional hegemon of the Middle East — with Iran militarily degraded, its proxy network dismantled, and no rival Arab state capable of mounting a credible counterweight — it will no longer require the kind of unconditional US political, military and diplomatic support that has been the bedrock of its security since the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson.¹⁹ A position of genuine regional dominance is self-sustaining in a way that dependency on Washington is not. The shift in American public opinion, the rise of the America First movement, the generational realignment of the Republican coalition — none of these would matter to an Israel that no longer needed them. This is not an abstract aspiration. It is the strategic objective that gives coherence to what might otherwise appear as reckless escalation. Every strike on Iranian infrastructure, every expansion of the conflict's scope, every act that deepens American entanglement and makes a clean US exit politically costly — all of it serves the same end: to use this administration, while it lasts, to reshape the regional order permanently. The question Israel is asking is not whether to do this. It is whether the window will remain open long enough.

Whether Israeli lobbying can continue to hold the Trump administration's course against the accumulating weight of domestic and international pressure is ultimately a question about Trump himself. Trump does not admit strategic mistakes. He does not acknowledge that a policy he adopted was misconceived. He doubles down, reframes, and when necessary identifies external actors — predecessors, allies, bureaucrats, the media — on whom to place the blame for any adverse consequences. This pattern, consistently observed across his political career, suggests that a clean acknowledged pivot toward war termination is psychologically and politically unlikely. Far more probable is the scenario in which Trump eventually declares victory unilaterally — reframing whatever settlement emerges, however incomplete, as a triumph of personal strength and diplomatic genius — while the underlying objectives for which the war was fought remain ambiguous or unachieved. For Israel, that scenario may be preferable to the alternative: a Washington that concludes it has been led into a conflict that serves Israeli interests at American expense, and draws the appropriate lessons for the relationship going forward.

The events of 18–19 March 2026 are not a turning point in the sense of introducing new actors or new dynamics. They are the crystallisation of dynamics present from the beginning: a conflict whose logic serves Israeli strategic objectives better than American ones; an energy escalation whose costs fall disproportionately on allies who had no voice in the decision; a Washington whose contradictions are increasingly visible and decreasingly sustainable; and an Israel that understands it must extract as much as it can from this administration before the political mathematics of American domestic life reassert themselves.

Europe must prepare for a medium-term energy disruption and elevated prices. This is not a tail risk — it is the baseline. But preparation without action is inadequate. Europe possesses leverage over Israel through treaty conditionality and arms transfer policy. It has a direct material interest in preventing a further strike on Gulf energy infrastructure. And it has, for the first time since the outbreak of the conflict, a compelling case to make to Washington: that European support for the Western coalition is not unconditional, and that continued Israeli energy escalation is eroding the foundations on which that coalition rests. Deploying that case, firmly and publicly, is not hostility to Israel. It is the exercise of Europe's own strategic interests in a moment when those interests are directly and materially at stake.

The rest of the world is not waiting for a resolution. It is pricing in the possibility that none is imminent. Europe should stop waiting too.