When Mr. Trump returned to the White House last year, a region exhausted by war was eager for negotiations and fresh starts. Instead, the president ended promising nuclear talks with Iran and pressed ahead with an ill-articulated and economically perilous war — a conflict that seems almost designed to destabilize the region.
The United States has failed to define an endpoint for the attack on Iran. The war may or may not topple the current Iranian government (to be replaced with what?) and may or may not lead to U.S. forces seizing any remaining nuclear material (a job made more difficult since Mr. Trump’s bombing spree last summer is said to have left said material buried under rubble). The war may be almost over — or just getting started. Perhaps the United States will send ground troops. Or maybe Mr. Trump will decide it’s all too much trouble and try to walk away, only to discover he can’t. Certainly, whatever else happens, the reputation and power of the United States are being degraded in real time.
Here’s what I see: a war destined to become part of the regional trend of fragmentation (or the threat of it). Israeli and American leaders know they may not be able to purge the intricate leadership of the Islamic republic altogether, but their war may pull Iran apart, either ideologically or territorially or both, and thus make the threat smaller and more diffuse, opening new opportunities to meddle and subvert. They may calculate that the resulting chaos is an acceptable price to pay for a reduced threat from a vast, unified, opaque Iran.
That would be in line with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which wound up fragmenting that country politically, leaving its cohorts so busy vying among themselves and seeking foreign sponsors that they had little time to pester their foreign neighbors. Israelis benefited along similar lines in Syria, where the fall in 2024 of the dictatorial al-Assad dynasty, which exerted iron-fisted rule for half a century, left a sudden vacuum in the place of centralized power. The Kurds have an autonomous zone, Israel has seized yet another so-called buffer zone, the southern governorate of Sweida is jockeying for autonomy and Turkish and Russian bases remain. Lebanon, long divided by civil wars between its sects, now risks losing the southern part of the country to Israeli occupation. Turkey, meanwhile, is eyeing its own Kurdish population for signs of another armed separatist uprising inspired by the war in Iran. Even Palestinians are being divided: Gaza sliced into zones, Palestinians in the West Bank corralled and cut off from one another by ceaseless settlement expansion.
Israel and the United States seem to be going for broke in this war, seeking to expand in territory or influence, striving for unchallenged regional power. They may succeed, or they may not. In the meantime, nations in the region risk being pulled apart.
Methodology and sources
This map uses data from ACLED and news reports, as of March 16. It is not exhaustive. Interceptions of projectiles are included, mapped to where the interception occurred. Friendly fire, unconfirmed events and attacks where the responsible party was uncertain were excluded. Ethnic regions were drawn from the GeoEPR 2023 dataset and are approximations.