Iran regional war (2026)
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The Iran regional war of 2026 is John Kiriakou's designation for the conflict once it stopped being containable to its original participants.

The immediate sequence he reports on 30 July: Iran launched another round of missiles at a US base in Jordan after a brief pause in strikes, which itself came after US and Saudi forces attacked Iranian or pro-Iranian militias in Iraq.

Kiriakou notes that he had called it: "I'm going to blow my horn here. Didn't we say a week ago we were looking at expansion of this conflict and it was going to turn into a regional war?"

The roster of belligerents is what settles the term for him. "now it's not just the US and Israel against Iran. The Iranians of course have been bombing Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan. Well, now the Saudis are involved and remember a few days ago Yemen's Houthis got involved and said that they would begin attacking Saudi ships. They've done that. Not just Saudi ships, but Saudi oil And now the Saudis are striking back, not just against the Houthis, but against pro-Iranian militias in Iraq." His conclusion: "It's a regional war. Whether we've called that called it that officially or not, it's a regional war."

Why Iran would now build a weapon

Kiriakou draws a strategic inference he flags as controversial. Reviewing Netanyahu's successive congressional warnings, that removing Saddam Hussein, then Muammar Gaddafi, then the Iranian government would each bring peace to the Middle East, he concludes that "We do all of Israel's dirty work for it. We kill thousands, tens of thousands of people, and what do we get out of it? Nothing."

From the Iranian side, he argues, the lesson is the opposite of disarmament: "If you are the leader of Iran or a leader of Iran, what do you do to protect yourself? The only thing that you can do is build a nuclear weapon. We are not having a conversation right now, for example, about North Korea. You know why? Because North Korea has a nuclear weapon. And so nobody dares attack North Korea." He expects it: "I think, frankly, that's the next step. You can't bomb them forever."

The absent great powers

Kiriakou says he expected more from Iran's partners than either delivered. When Israel first attacked and the United States followed with what he calls the mother of all bombs, "a lot of us expected the Russian government to at least issue a statement saying that they supported Iran or that they would supply Iran with radars or that Iran was under the defence umbrella of Russia. And there was no such statement." His reading of the silence: "to me, that was kind of a green light to the Israelis that you can go ahead and bomb Iran and we're not going to do anything about it."

China behaved the same way, and Kiriakou reaches for the same satirical headline he uses elsewhere, that China is content to sit back and watch the United States destroy itself, "which is exactly what's happening." He distinguishes the two: China is "playing the long game", whereas Russia, with a historically closer relationship to Iran, is the one that surprised him.

His own forecast is attritional rather than resolvable. Having travelled to the Persian Gulf every three or four weeks until the war began, he says his partners there now tell him not to come, "they bomb the airport, they bomb the hotel, they bomb this country and that country", and he sees "no end in sight. I really don't."

See also

- Houthis
- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Iran Nuclear Assessment
- Saudi-Iran diplomatic rivalry
