For four decades, the Islamic Republic behaved like a revisionist but still calculation-bound power, extending influence through an “Axis of Resistance” of Shia militias and Islamist movements while staying mostly inside the gray zone. Tehran armed Hezbollah on Israel’s northern frontier, cultivated Iraqi Shia militias around U.S. bases, enabled the Houthis astride the Red Sea, and sponsored a constellation of terrorist and insurgent networks from Gaza to the Gulf. It was coercive enough to shape events, but deniable enough to avoid full pariah status.
The Shrinking Gray Zone
Since the current war began, and especially after the systematic decapitation of multiple layers of regime, IRGC, and proxy leadership, the gray zone between aggrieved regional power and outright rogue state has effectively dissolved. If Iran is to bear the costs of pariah status regardless, it will extract the leverage available to a pariah, salvos of ballistic missiles, mass-produced Shahed-class drones, deliberately indiscriminate strikes on Sunni neighbours, and the long-theoretical, now-demonstrated capacity to hold Hormuz hostage. Iranian strikes have arced across the Levant, deep into the Gulf, and stretched all the way to the South Caucasus, hitting sovereign territory and critical infrastructure in states that had previously tried to remain neutral or de-escalatory.
An Expanding Battlespace
What Iran considers targetable has expanded to include the Gulf’s cosmopolitan financial capitals — those that had assiduously worked to keep the region’s conflicts at arm’s length — and their hotels, dense urban areas, and peripheral dual-use energy infrastructure. Iran is striking at the seams of technologically advanced societies that engineered their way out of a desert: desalination plants, datacenters, power and pumping stations.
- Iran, itself a water-stressed state, is exposing the dependencies of “saltwater kingdoms” whose water security is manufactured, energy-intensive, and geographically concentrated.
- Strikes have also hit and damaged AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, making very real what we all tend to mentally abstract away — that AI, the internet, communications, and the cloud have a topological footprint that is identifiable and therefore targetable.
The unfortunate takeaway here: modernity’s plumbing is part of the battlespace.