The Strategic Aftershocks of Trump’s Iran War

These near-term results are all significant. But in the long run, they may turn out to pale compared to the long-term strategic aftershocks that will result from this conflict. Wars can be critical junctures in history—geopolitical earthquakes that accelerate global shifts, create new realities, and reverberate long after the fighting ends. The Iran war is precisely such an earthquake, and the United States and the world will be living with its strategic consequences for years to come.

The Iran war delivered a potentially fatal blow to a U.S.-led international order that was already on life support. The United States is now the main threat to the system that it once led—a system built on U.S.-led alliances and stabilizing principles such as nonaggression, sovereignty, and freedom of navigation. By undertaking a preventive war and with no plausible legal basis—in either domestic or international law—this war has helped normalize aggression as a means of settling disputes among countries.

And that’s just the beginning. By threatening to destroy power plants, civilian infrastructure, and even an entire civilization, Trump has normalized war crimes as a military tactic and diplomatic bargaining chip, even without executing on the threat. He has also helped normalize the weaponization of geographic choke points upon which the global economy depends by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

A future president may seek to revive the principles that Trump has abandoned—rallying the world to oppose Chinese aggression against Taiwan, support Ukraine and condemn Russian war crimes there, or defend of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. But the damage is already done. Even after the conflict ebbs with Iran, it will be much harder for the United States to credibly act in defense of the order over which it long presided.

Nor will the United States be able to count on its friends as before, following a war that has dealt a body blow to the crumbling foundations of Washington’s global alliances. NATO was already reeling from the crisis over Trump’s threat to take Greenland earlier this year and other tensions. But the Iran war may come to be seen as the consummation of the divorce between the United States and its European allies, who were not consulted about a conflict that nearly all of them strongly opposed. Trump called Europeans leaders “cowards” and threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO after some member countries refused to provide naval forces to try to forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz and others set modest limits on U.S. use of European bases to bomb Iran.

Whether Trump acts on this threat or not, its mere issuance further undermines the alliance’s mutual defense commitment. It will likely accelerate Europe’s movement toward defense and even nuclear autonomy.

The war will also have major implications for U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific. For all the talk about prioritizing that region—and especially China—the war in Iran has done the opposite. To mount a sustained bombing campaign in Iran, defend regional allies against Iranian missiles and drones, deal with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and prepare for potential ground operations, Trump had to divert a massive amount of finite military assets from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. Renewed U.S. entanglement in the Middle East cannibalizes attention and resources that would otherwise focus on the Indo-Pacific, while the war’s tax on the U.S. military means that its readiness for a possible conflict with China is compromised. The war has depleted U.S. stocks of missiles and missile defenses necessary for the defense of Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan, and delayed arms deliveries to key Asian partners.

Coming alongside a severe energy crisis generated by Washington’s war of choice, allies in the Indo-Pacific are questioning whether the United States will defend their interests—and, if needed, their security. As a result, allies could distance themselves from the United States, accommodate China, or both.

The harm has been even greater to the U.S. strategic partnership with Israel. Already before the war, U.S. attitudes toward Israel were turning highly negative, driven by the horrific consequences of the war in Gaza and the Israeli government’s extreme-right orientation. But Israel’s perceived role in instigating what most Americans consider to be an unnecessary and costly war in Iran has dramatically accelerated that trend among both Democrats and Republicans, including MAGA loyalists.

Some 60 percent of all Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, according to Pew polling, and 74 percent of younger Americans polled by NBC News in April sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis. Once controversial calls to withhold U.S. military support to Israel are now commonplace—including a measure in Congress just last week, intended to block transfers to Israel of certain types of bombs, that got support from an unprecedented 36 senators. That’s 12 more than the number of senators who supported a similar measure voted on before the Iran war. The possibility that the United States will soon end security assistance to Israel altogether is now very real.

If the Iran war will accelerate the efforts of U.S. allies to de-risk and diversify away from the United States, it will also bring U.S. adversaries closer together. Seeing an opportunity to undermine their U.S. rival, Russia and China have reportedly provided diplomatic support, targeting imagery, and other intelligence to Tehran—and in Russia’s case, weapons as well.

To reciprocate with its main strategic partners, Iran has continued to provide drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine, discounted oil to China, and lessons about fighting the U.S. military to both. If a core objective of U.S. national security strategy in recent years has been to thwart the development of a possible “adversarial axis” among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, then the Iran war seems to have done the opposite.

Washington’s strategic failure in Iran will also boost China’s role as a global power. Not only has the United States demonstrated that it is still prone to entanglements in the Middle East, but Trump’s need to stabilize the global economy strengthens Beijing’s hand going into his summit with President Xi Jinping next month. This increases the likelihood that any deal on trade, advanced technology, and possibly U.S. policy toward Taiwan would advantage China. Global need for alternatives to hydrocarbons will stoke demand for clean technologies, an area where China dominates the world.

Russia has gained, too, in ways that could alter the strategic trajectory of the conflict in Ukraine. Prior to the Iran war, Russia was making little progress on the ground and suffering severe economic pain—and a first-quarter 2026 budget deficit of nearly $60 billion—on top of the tens of thousands of casualties that it was absorbing every month. By boosting oil prices by some 50 percentage points, the war has provided Moscow with a massive revenue windfall on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per day, potentially for months or even years.

The higher oil price made Washington so desperate for relief that in March, it suspended sanctions on purchases of Russian oil, and it could suspend them indefinitely if prices remain high. The war has also diverted scarce missile defense assets from Ukraine, leaving its cities and infrastructure more vulnerable to Russian missile and drone attacks and giving Moscow renewed hope that it can prevail.

The war in Iran is far from over. Gaps between the two sides on the nuclear issue, the future of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s ballistic missile program, and its support for regional proxies remain significant. Both sides are capable of restarting the war at any time. But whether fighting resumes or a deal is reached tomorrow, the war in Iran has already unleashed powerful forces. The strategic impact of those forces will continue to reverberate all around the world long after the war that caused them comes to an end.