Operation Epic Fury: Implications for the Middle East

Seventeen days into Operation Epic Fury, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, a scenario most strategists had written off; the U.S. has no credible exit strategy, and the Gulf States are trapped in a war they never wanted. On March 18, Wikistrat invited Middle East expert and award-winning journalist Dr. James M. Dorsey to assess why escalation is more likely than resolution, what President Trump's shrinking options look like, and why the post-war Middle East will be shaped less by who wins than by what Iran looks like when the shooting stops

Webinar Recording:

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar with four decades of experience as a foreign correspondent across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and beyond. He is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the RSIS in Singapore, focusing on the politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Dorsey has covered some of the region's most consequential moments firsthand, from the Iranian Revolution to the Gulf Wars, and is a frequent adviser to governments, corporations and international institutions. He authors the widely read newsletter The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.

Key Insights

1. The United States faces a strategic impasse with no obvious off-ramp

The operational premise of the campaign, that a sufficient show of force would compel Iranian capitulation, has not held. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff acknowledged publicly that the administration expected the marshaling of naval assets to produce Iranian concessions. Instead, Tehran absorbed the initial strikes and retained both its retaliatory capacity and its control of the Strait of Hormuz. The administration now confronts a problem on every declared objective: 

• The nuclear claim is undermined by 406 kilograms of enriched uranium that remain unlocated, and recovering them would require a ground operation for which no forces are currently positioned. 

• The missile-degradation narrative loses credibility each time Iran launches another salvo. 

• Regime change shows no signs of materializing. 

  
  

The result is a narrowing decision tree in which each available branch carries significant escalatory risk, while withdrawal without a demonstrable achievement would represent a substantial political liability heading into the midterm cycle.

2. The Strait of Hormuz is not closed, but Iran decides who passes through it

Iran has been precise about the message: this is not a blockade, it's selective access. Turkish and Chinese vessels pass; Indian and Pakistani ships have been waved through. What doesn't move is anything tied to the United States, Israel, or their allies. The framing is deliberate: Tehran presents itself not as closing international waters but as managing traffic, and in doing so has established de facto control without triggering the legal and diplomatic consequences of a formal closure.

3. The Gulf States are in a bind they can't muscle their way out of

This is not a war the GCC wanted. Saudi Arabia and Iran had restored diplomatic relations in 2023, and the Gulf capitals were moving ahead with economic diversification plans premised on regional stability. Now they've been dragged into a conflict by the very security partnership they thought would protect them. The Gulf States are furious at Iran for striking them, but they're also angry at Washington and Jerusalem for engineering the situation. Their $3.6 trillion in pledged investments to the United States bought them no influence over the decision to launch the campaign.

4. A full-scale ground invasion is unlikely, but limited boots on the ground are not

Iran has 93 million people, a military with commanders hardened across the Iran-Iraq War, Syria, and the fight against ISIS, and terrain that would swallow an invading force. The United States doesn't have the assets in theater for a ground war and would need months to marshal them. Politically, a majority of Americans oppose the conflict, and independents, the voters who decide midterms, are as hostile to the war as Democrats. A full invasion is off the table. But limited operations, taking Kharg Island to tighten the economic stranglehold or occupying the three disputed islands at the mouth of the strait, remain live possibilities that could pull Washington deeper into exactly the ground combat it wants to avoid.

5. Israel's decapitation strategy is failing on its own terms

Israel has long operated on the theory that killing leadership collapses organizations. It didn't work with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), it didn't work with Hamas, and there's no reason to expect it will work with Iran, a state with succession planning at least four layers deep. The killing of Ali Larijani is a case study in counterproductive targeting: he was a consensus builder and a figure inclined toward de-escalation. His removal doesn't weaken the regime so much as it eliminates the type of interlocutor who might eventually negotiate an end to the conflict. His successor could be a hardliner like Saeed Jalili, which would further narrow the space for diplomacy.

6. Regime change from below faces arithmetic problems the airstrikes can't solve

No one doubts that a majority of Iranians oppose the regime. The question is how many of them want that change delivered on the wings of Israeli and American aircraft, and how many fear that toppling the government would produce chaos rather than liberation. Even if the committed base of regime supporters is only 20 to 30 percent of the population, that's 18 to 27 million people, and history is clear on this point: popular revolts succeed when the regime's internal cohesion cracks, not when crowds fill the streets. The Philippines in 1986, Indonesia in 1998, the Arab uprisings of 2011, even the 1979 Islamic Revolution itself, all turned on fractures inside the military or ruling elite. Those fractures haven't surfaced yet.

7. The Houthis are the wildcard that hasn't detonated

Yemen's Houthis have stayed out of the fight so far, and their restraint matters enormously. If they enter, the conflict expands to Bab al-Mandab, threatening the waterway connecting the Suez Canal to the Arabian Sea. Saudi Arabia has been able to bypass the Strait of Hormuz by piping oil to its Red Sea coast, but those western ports sit within Houthi strike range, and the Houthis have already demonstrated the ability to hit Saudi energy facilities. Their entry would close the last workaround the Gulf States have for getting hydrocarbons to market.

8. The war's expansion map is larger than anyone is discussing

The conflict's potential spillover extends well beyond Iraq and Lebanon. Saudi Arabia has a mutual defense treaty with Pakistan; if Riyadh enters the war, Islamabad faces contractual obligations it may not want to honor. If Washington decides to support ethnic insurgencies inside Iran, particularly among the Kurds or the Baloch operating out of Pakistan's Sistan-Baluchistan province, it risks destabilizing the Turkish and Pakistani borders simultaneously. Iran's population is 43 percent ethnic and religious minorities, and those minorities populate every border region. A loss of central government control wouldn't just produce internal chaos; it would send shockwaves into every neighboring state.

9. The UAE may be considering taking the three islands at the mouth of the strait

Abu Dhabi has long claimed Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb, three islands seized by the Shah in 1971. Dr. Dorsey raised the possibility that the UAE, which has been more hawkish toward Iran than any other Gulf state, could move to occupy them under the cover of the broader conflict. The islands would give whatever occupying force a physical foothold inside the strait itself. But any unilateral Emirati action would draw massive pressure from the other Gulf states, who would insist that whatever the Gulf does, it be done as a coordinated action.

10. Iran has no interest in de-escalation, and neither does anyone else

Negotiations happen when the cost of not negotiating becomes unbearable. For none of the three combatants has that threshold been reached: 

• Iran has stated ceasefire conditions it knew were unacceptable. 

• The Trump administration can't withdraw without something to show for it. 

• Netanyahu retains operational freedom and domestic incentive to continue. 

  
  

The Iranians are betting that American domestic politics will eventually force Trump's hand, as midterm pressure, public opposition, and economic fallout accumulate. That calculation may prove correct, but "eventually" could be months away, and a great deal of damage can be done in the interim.

11. The reputational damage to the Gulf may outlast the physical damage

The Gulf States built their economic transformation strategies on a single premise: that the Arabian Peninsula was a zone of stability insulated from the region's conflicts. That brand has been destroyed. Data center investments, airline hub positioning, tourism campaigns, foreign direct investment pipelines: all of it depended on the perception that whatever happened in Iraq or Syria or Yemen wouldn't touch Dubai or Riyadh or Doha. Repairing the physical infrastructure is an engineering problem; Restoring the confidence of global investors and multinational corporations that the Gulf is a safe place to park capital and build operations is a much longer project.

12. The enriched uranium controversy traces back to a single American decision

Iran adhered to the 2015 nuclear agreement for the first year after President Trump withdrew from it in 2018, hoping compliance would pressure Washington back to the table. When that failed, Tehran began gradually violating the accord, including enriching uranium beyond permitted levels, again as leverage rather than a weapons program. The 406 kilograms that now dominate the conversation were not originally enriched with the intent to build a bomb. That doesn't mean Iranian thinking hasn't evolved since, but it does mean the crisis has a traceable origin in an American policy choice, and the demonization on both sides has made it impossible to acknowledge that lineage in any productive way.

13. What Iran looks like after the war will shape the Middle East more than who wins it

The honest answer, as Dr. Dorsey put it, is that nobody knows where this ends. The most consequential variable isn't the military outcome but the political condition of Iran when the fighting stops. A revolutionary government that survives intact will be angry and vengeful, and will negotiate from a posture of grievance; A post-revolutionary Iran, no longer defined by 1979, would be an entirely different actor. The three natural heavyweights of the Middle East remain Iran, Turkey, and Egypt, countries with large populations, deep historical identities, educated workforces, and battle-tested militaries. The Gulf States have financial muscle and resources, but not the structural weight to anchor the region alone. Which version of Iran emerges from this war will do more to determine the region's trajectory than anything happening on the battlefield today.