The fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Iran war is taking time to take hold, but the winners and losers are becoming clear in the latest round of a 20-month conflict between Israel and its enemies that has already reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East.
Israel has shown that it can take full control of Iranian airspace and strike at will without facing any more resistance than if it were bombing Gaza or Beirut. After a ceasefire, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu can always renew the bombardment at any time, in the knowledge that the balance of power in the region has swung decisively in Israel’s favour, probably for a long time to come.
Israeli dominance stems from its undoubted military superiority over Iran and “the Axis of Resistance”, but more especially from the unprecedented level of support it now receives from the US.
“I want to thank and congratulate prime minister Bibi Netanyahu,” said Trump after US B-2 bombers had struck at Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities on Sunday. “We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before, and we’ve gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.”
In practise, Iranian nuclear threat has always been exaggerated since the collective wisdom of the American intelligence agencies, as recently as March, was that Iran had not decided to make a nuclear device. If it ever did so, it would face inevitable obliteration from an estimated 90 Israeli nuclear bombs.
The Iranian nuclear threat in 2025 much resembles Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003, which provided the justification for US-led invasion of Iraq – though the weapons did not exist.
The most significant cause of the political earthquake in the region has been the enhanced support given to Israel by the US since president Joe Biden refused to curtail Israel’s onslaught on Gaza after the Hamas attack on 7 October, 2023. Traditional American policy had been to support and supply, but also to restrain Israel. Since Trump entered the White House he has doubled down on Biden backing for Israel, culminating in the US joining the Israeli war on Iran.
It is not that the US was unresponsive to Israel’s wishes in the past, but it also had some red lines: in 1982 president Ronald Reagan demanded and obtained an end to the Israeli bombardment of Beirut. In 2015, much against Netanyahu’s wishes, president Barack Obama negotiated the Iran nuclear deal to limit Iran’s nuclear programme, an agreement Trump abandoned in 2018.
Among the biggest losers in the newly configured Middle East are the Palestinians in Gaza, whose horrendous daily death toll has largely disappeared from the news agenda. Over 410 people have been killed by gunshots or shells fired by the Israeli military since late May while trying to reach food distribution sites according to the UN.
square MARK WALLACE Iran's response to US air strikes has given the game away
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“Desperate, hungry people in Gaza continue to face the inhumane choice of either starving to death or risk being killed while trying to get food,” said a UN spokesman.
The so-called Axis of Resistance against Israel which Iran leads is in ruins, with the decimation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the overthrow of president Bashar al-Assad’s pro-Iranian government in Syria last December. In Iraq, where there is a Shia Muslim majority, political parties and militias close to Iran keep a low profile and are no help to Iran.
Iran and the Axis of Resistance were always overmatched by Israel and the US, but they always did rather less resisting than they pretended. Between 2006 and 2023, there was a largely peaceful standoff between Hezbollah and Israel along the Israel-Lebanon border. But it suited Iran and Hezbollah to boast that it was opposing Israel effectively and for Israel to confirm this, claiming that it faced a day-to-day terrorist threat.
The credibility of Iran’s pretension to be the leader of the 150 to 200 million Shia Muslims in the world has been deflated. Until about 2019, the Axis of Resistance had been largely successful in conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. But since 2020, when the leader of the Quds Force, the operational branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Maj-Gen Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by a US drone in Iraq, Iran has seemed to be at a loss for a strategy.
Its one priority since then has been to avoid direct military conflict with Israel or, failing that, not to allow Israel to lure the US into a war on its side against Iran. Consequently, its retaliation against the US bombing raids on its uranium enrichment facilities this weekend was limited to firing half a dozen missiles at the giant US base at al-Udeid in Qatar and telling the Qataris and Americans that the missiles were coming so they could be intercepted.
Trump can now portray himself as a peacemaker – people forgetting that it was he who greenlighted the Israeli air attack on 13 June and then sent US bombers to Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan on Sunday. These are tried and tested Trump tactics, seen for instance when he launched a tariff war against the rest of the world on 2 April, first provoking a crisis by headline grabbing over-the-top action and then dialling back from it to deflate or resolve the crisis he himself had caused in the first place.
This tactic gains him a reputation for Taco (Trump Always Chickens Out), but it often works and may well do so in the case of the current ceasefire, which Trump now says is fully implemented. He now says that he prevented a “forever war” and turned it into “a twelve-day war”, thereby reassuring Maga “America First” Republicans that he has not surrendered to imperialist designs of the neoconservatives and “the deep state” in Washington.
Other losers from the latest round of the Middle East conflict include Russia, which has already seen its long-term ally in Syria overthrown and did not sell effective anti-aircraft missiles to Iran or help it in its hour of need. Russia is paying a price as a would-be global power for engaging all its resources into the war in Ukraine.
The EU and Nato powers are once again exposed as having only marginal influence in a region where they once had real power. During the meeting in Geneva with the Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, they acted as message carriers for Trump.
Likewise the Gulf states, despite their extravagant efforts to cultivate Trump during his visit to the region, are largely reduced to being onlookers when it comes to the radical reshaping of the Middle East by a conflict in which only Israel, the US and Iran are the real players.
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