As the war in Iran grinds on, the tension between the Israeli and Gulf approaches has sharpened. Iran’s strikes on Gulf territory mean there will be no return to business as usual. Arab Gulf states are increasingly leaning toward effectively quarantining Iran until it becomes something akin to Cuba: diminished and rigid but contained. Israel, by contrast, is perfectly content to smash the country—degrade the Islamic Republic militarily until it is like civil-war era Syria: fractured, with the regime broken and its regional capacity destroyed.
Aside from some divergencesGulf states want to degrade Iran’s power without pushing it to collapse. With this in mind, Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait have quietly pushed for a swift end to the war; Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have signaled their readiness to absorb further escalation if it produces durable constraints on Iran’s military capabilities. Officials in Abu Dhabi have argued for a “conclusive outcome,” while Oman and Qatar have emphasized coexistence and negotiation. But despite these differences, there is a consensus on wanting to see Iran weakened.
As the war in Iran grinds on, the tension between the Israeli and Gulf approaches has sharpened. Iran’s strikes on Gulf territory mean there will be no return to business as usual. Arab Gulf states are increasingly leaning toward effectively quarantining Iran until it becomes something akin to Cuba: diminished and rigid but contained. Israel, by contrast, is perfectly content to smash the country—degrade the Islamic Republic militarily until it is like civil-war era Syria: fractured, with the regime broken and its regional capacity destroyed.
Aside from some divergencesGulf states want to degrade Iran’s power without pushing it to collapse. With this in mind, Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait have quietly pushed for a swift end to the war; Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have signaled their readiness to absorb further escalation if it produces durable constraints on Iran’s military capabilities. Officials in Abu Dhabi have argued for a “conclusive outcome,” while Oman and Qatar have emphasized coexistence and negotiation. But despite these differences, there is a consensus on wanting to see Iran weakened.
For Israel, the calculus is different: Weakening the regime to the point of state collapse is an acceptable outcome. If that means chaos, fragmentation, or the collapse of Iran as a unitary actor, that is a price that Israel is willing to pay. Indeed, some Israeli strategists see it as the ideal outcome.
The reality, however, is that both approaches might not turn out the way their advocates hope. There is a strong risk that Iran will not end up not like Cuba or Syria, but instead like North Korea—a garrison state that survives by becoming more dangerous, not less. How that triangle of outcomes resolves depends largely on actors whose calculations diverge sharply and whose confidence may outrun their control.
Israel has long pushed for war with Iran. Operation Epic Fury reflects a strategic sequence that has been years in the making, launched alongside a U.S. government that is more aligned with Israel’s designs than any in recent memory.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar stated the war’s goal is to “remove the existential threats that Iran poses to Israel for the long term,” while acknowledging that “regime change may be a consequence.” He has declared the war effectively won without indicating when it might end—and the Israel Defense Forces have announced plans for at least three more weeks of operations to degrade Iran’s defense industry.
All this suggests that Israel’s objective is the progressive destruction of Iran’s capacity to project power, even at the cost of instability and fragmentation. Israel does not need the Islamic Republic’s collapse, but it sees a unique opportunity to pursue its maximalist goals. From the Israeli government’s perspective, the window for such action is closing, as it knows that U.S. support for Israeli adventurism is eroding across the political spectrum.
For now, however, the assumption among U.S. and Israeli leaders is that Israeli strategic dominance is both desirable and achievable. But a regional order built on permanent Israeli paramountcy, with both Iran and Arab states expected to acquiesce to it, is not a recipe for stability. It’s an invitation for further conflict.
Opposition to Iranian designs is widespread among Arab populations. But so is opposition to Israeli predominance, and that opposition is structural, not rhetorical. The Gulf states regard Israeli dominance as incompatible with their own sovereignty and security concerns, not to mention the views of their citizens. This creates the central tension in the region’s evolving order, one which is consistently underestimated by advocates of Israeli strategic dominance.
Whether Iran ends up resembling the Cuban quarantine model or the Syrian fragmentation model depends primarily on internal cohesion, not external intervention. For now, cohesion is holding. The Iranian security apparatus is brutal and uncompromising. It showed no meaningful fracture lines before the war began on Feb. 28, which is not surprising in a situation where defection is costly and no organized alternative exists.
Across Iran, the state retains a near-monopoly on the use of force. There is nothing comparable to Idlib in Syria prior to the Assad regime’s fall, nor Benghazi at the onset of the Libyan revolution. Mojtaba Khamenei’s succession represents an attempt at institutional consolidation and locking in Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) dominance under wartime conditions. Whether the consolidation holds under sustained military pressure—or whether it merely concentrates fragility at the top—is one of Iran’s critical unknowns.
As the IRGC resources are diverted, the regime could also come under pressure from the peripheries: the Kurdish northwest, but also the Balochi southeast, Azeri areas, and Arab-majority Khuzestan. If the United States and Israel ultimately choose to instrumentalize ethnic minorities, this could serve as a detonator. In Iraq after 1991 and in Syria after 2012, Kurdish forces consolidated territory that the center could no longer control. Their goal was to consolidate autonomy, not to bring down the government, but there was still a destabilizing effect. In both Iraq and Syria, peripheral consolidation proved durable and contributed to the state’s eventual unraveling.
If—and when—transition comes to Iran, it will be determined by whoever inside the country has organizational capacity, territorial presence, and legitimacy to fill the vacuum. The field is thin. Protests last December and January spread to more than 200 hundred cities, but the opposition lacks unified leadership. In exile, it is fragmented across ideological, ethnic, and generational lines: monarchists, the Mojahedin-e Khalq, nationalists, and various ethnic movements that agree on little beyond the end of the Islamic Republic. Washington, meanwhile, oscillates between maximalist rhetoric and tactical silence. That is not a strategy.
The Gulf states want Iran contained, not collapsed, and the quarantine model offers a way to square that circle. The problem is that escalation rests primarily on the United States and Israel, not in the Arab Gulf. And neither the United States nor Israel centers Arab Gulf security in its decision-making.
Amid differing tactics in the Middle East, and a fickle president in Washington, it’s possible that everyone could end up with the worst-case scenario: North Korea. Pyongyang has endured decades of isolation more extreme than anything that Tehran currently faces, and it has never fallen. It survived the collapse of its patron state, famine, and near-total economic exclusion—not by reforming, but by becoming more repressive, more militarized, and more nuclear. If quarantine entrenches the Islamic Republic without collapsing it, this is the clearest precedent: a state that survives by making itself more dangerous, not less.
But the analogy has limits. Pyongyang has maintained powerful patrons in Beijing and Moscow; Tehran, increasingly, has neither. North Korea’s relative ethnic homogeneity has spared it the centrifugal pressures that Iran faces across its peripheries—pressures now being actively encouraged from the outside. The assumption that survival means victory ignores Iran’s material conditions: a collapsing currency, high inflation, and deep discontent, all worsening under prolonged conflict as the IRGC’s economic base and the defense industrial capacity erode. Iran may harden like North Korea but under greater strain and with less shelter: North Korea with Syria mixed in.
The possibility of a permanently closed, nuclear-armed garrison state simultaneously contending with Syrian- or Iraqi-style fragmentation pressures, is one that quarantine advocates cannot adequately control. The Iraq comparison is instructive: The 12 years between 1991 and 2003 produced mass displacement, internal repression on a vast scale, and the conditions that made the aftermath of 2003 so catastrophic—even as Saddam Hussein’s regime endured. Survival under pressure does not equate to stability.
The Islamic Republic may endure for some time without ever making the reforms necessary for long-term survival or full regional integration. Whatever policymakers in Israel, the United States, or the Gulf are hoping for in this war, they may eventually have to confront a far uglier aftermath.
