The Iran War has claimed thousands of lives, most of them in Iran itself. The war has cost Iran as much as $300 billion in economic damage. For its part, the Pentagon spent nearly $44 billion through mid-September to wreak that amount of havoc. For advocates of the war—but no one else—that’s a good return on investment.

Because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and disruptions in shipments of oil and gas, people all over the world have experienced the war through increased prices for energy, transportation, and food. The ripple effects through the global economy of record high prices for diesel have been devastating for farmers , truckers, and the mining sector. Back in August, the International Monetary Fund warned that the war, if it continues, could trigger a global economic recession.

And the war is continuing—even though Iran and its adversaries have at least temporarily stepped back from direct attacks and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has recovered to a certain extent (Iranian shipments excluded). At the UN General Assembly last month, Donald Trump promised (yet again) that he would annihilate Iran if the country doesn’t agree to some kind of peace deal. Despite the fact that the Iranian economy is reeling as a result of war and sanctions, which the government in Tehran is now acknowledging , Iranian leaders have pledged not to surrender.

As if these effects aren’t enough, the Iran War is also setting into motion a number of other geopolitical transformations—in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf states, and even further afield. Trump and his Israeli partner-in-crime Benjamin Netanyahu expected a quick war, a tidy regime change in Tehran, and the collapse of its “axis of resistance.”

Instead they now face a Pandora’s boxful of unintended consequences.

Yemen’s Forever War

Not far from the Strait of Hormuz, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, lies Bab al-Mandab. This chokepoint, which controls traffic in and out of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal at its northernmost point, is responsible for 10 percent of global trade . During the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia redirected the flow of its oil westward through a pipeline to its Red Sea ports, thus increasing the importance of Bab al-Mandab.

But now the Saudis face attacks from the Houthis, a group of Yemenis allied with Iran that have been operating out of an enclave in the north of the country along the Red Sea and not far from the strait. Beginning last decade, the Saudis backed the government of Yemen in its attempts to defeat the Houthis and unify the country, an effort that ultimately failed and forced a ceasefire back in 2022.

Thanks largely to the war in Iran, however, that ceasefire is over. The Houthis have decided to take this opportunity to break out of their enclave to seize territory along the Red Sea— grabbing the port of Mokha in mid-September—and interrupt shipping through Bab al-Mandab. They have also used rather sophisticated weaponry to attack energy infrastructure—including the aforementioned East-West pipeline—throughout Saudi Arabia.

In response, the Saudi-backed Yemeni government has declared all-out war against the Houthis. Where the Saudis go, the Trump administration is sure to follow. Reports The New York Times :

More than 200 U.S. intelligence and military analysts are assisting the Saudi government in command centers inside the kingdom, helping to analyze and select targets in support of its Yemeni allies, according to one current and one former U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. The United States is also providing aerial refueling for Saudi warplanes conducting defensive air patrols, they added.

Saudi assistance enabled Yemeni government forces to retake the port of Mokha this week.

In its attacks on the Houthis last year, the Trump administration committed war crimes – killing dozens of African migrants in a strike on a detention center , killing 80 civilians in a bombing of port infrastructure , and assisting Saudi attacks on schools, hospitals, and markets. It shrugged off those charges, much as earlier administrations failed to reckon with their involvement in the initial Saudi bombings that turned Yemen into a hellscape and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians .

Now, however, the Trump administration faces an additional risk. Its efforts against Iran are increasingly linked to the Saudi campaign to eradicate the Houthis, making another “forever war” in the region all the more likely.

The Iraqi Vacuum

As negotiated by the Biden administration, the last U.S. troops finally left Iraq last week, 23 years after the U.S. war there began and 12 years after U.S. soldiers returned to the country to battle the Islamic State. The Americans leave behind a deeply corrupt state riven by ethnic and political divisions. The U.S. invasion in 2003 and the inept state-building that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein also created an opportunity for Iran to increase its influence in the country through Shi’ite clerics and paramilitary forces.

September 30 was supposed to be the deadline not only for U.S. troop withdrawal but also the disarmament of Iranian-backed militias. The first happened; the second has been postponed until June 30. The militias are likely to ignore this second deadline as well.

The Iranian-aligned Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) have been incorporated into the Iraqi military, but some forces close to Iran remain on the outside. Even the PMF is not necessarily subordinate to the state. “State status gives a faction money, offices, access, and political protection,” writes Ameer Al-Auqaili at FPIF . “A separate command structure leaves room for independent operations.”

Those independent operations, conducted by a coalition of forces known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, have apparently included an attack last month, coordinated with the Houthis, on the Saudi East-West pipeline. Back in July, the U.S. military joined the Saudis in attacks on the PMF. Iraq has thus become another front in the Iran War: seven of the 18 U.S. combat deaths in that war have occurred in Iraq. Although Trump called the Iraq War a “very expensive excursion into hell,” he has already gone down that road with Iran, and more attacks on the PMF as part of that war may be in the offing.

Even as approximately 1,500 U.S. personnel leave Iraq, the Trump administration is sending another aircraft carrier to the region, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, with 10,000 sailors and Marines. According to Baghdad-based political analyst Ahmed Younis , the U.S. force withdrawal from Iraq raises “the possibility that Iran’s proxies will feel increasingly empowered in the absence of a Western military presence. These groups may attempt to expand their role in shaping state policies and consolidating their presence within key institutions.” That, plus a revival of the Islamic State, might prompt Trump to send U.S. troops back into Iraq.

Welcome to a second road to hell, this one paved with all manner of Trump’s intentions.

Axis of Resistance Over?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has focused not only on destroying Hamas in Gaza. He has set his sights on eradicating Iran’s entire “axis of resistance.” Toward that end, Israel has attempted to eliminate Hezbollah in Lebanon and reduce Iranian influence in Syria.

To be sure, Netanyahu wants to “solve” the Palestinian problem by displacing and disenfranchising the population. But Iran is by far the more powerful actor in the region, and Netanyahu dearly wants to uproot what he considers the core threat facing Israel.

Israel managed to kneecap the Hezbollah leadership in Lebanon through a campaign of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies alongside a 66-day campaign of airstrikes and ground operations. Israeli forces occupied southern Lebanon, destroying entire towns and establishing five military bases, and set about killing the replacements to the replacements of the Hezbollah leadership. At the same time, taking the degradation of Hezbollah as a signal, Syrian rebels pushed out the Iran-aligned regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

But Iran hasn’t lost its influence in the two countries. Hezbollah managed to rebuild, with the help of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards , in time to launch missiles at Israel after the Iran War began. Israel estimates that Hezbollah, now reorganized around smaller cells, has as many as 15,000 rockets and missiles and is now investing into more drones. The myth that Israel can completely eradicate its adversaries applies as much to Hezbollah as it does to Hamas, which continues to operate in Gaza despite months of punishing air strikes and incursions by Israeli Defense Forces.

Iranian influence in Syria certainly took a nosedive when Assad was pushed from power. Relations between Tehran and the new government of Ahmed al-Sharaa remain frozen . But at the community level, Iranian influence persists, either in the form of religious identification (for the Shia population), political sympathies (in favor of Tehran in its war against the United States and Israel), and even military (such as the Syrian Islamic Resistance Front and various Alawite paramilitaries).

Further afield, Iran has conducted limited operations in Europe. Tehran launched a drone attack against a British military base in Cyprus back in March. Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, a pro-Iranian outfit, has claimed responsibility for a string of attacks on financial institutions and Jewish sites across Europe. Most recently, the United States withdrew 12 bombers from a British airbase in anticipation of an expected Iranian drone attack, although it’s impossible at this point to confirm Iran’s involvement in the plot.

The point here is not to exaggerate an Iranian threat to justify continued military operations against the country, continued U.S. military presence in the region, or continued Israeli efforts to eliminate what it considers an “existential threat.” Quite the contrary: Iranian influence remains as durable in the region as the regime appears to be in Tehran. No amount of military force short of nuclear apocalypse is likely to change that. Israel has tried, and it has failed, both alone and with the United States. The axis of resistance is not exactly stronger after these many attempts to kill it, but it hasn’t disappeared either.

As any practitioner of jujitsu can tell you, resistance grows fiercer the more you push directly against it. A ceasefire, a peace deal with Iran, a meaningful political engagement with Iranian allies in the region: in the long run, such sideways strategies that rely on balance and leverage will prove far more effect in dissolving an axis of resistance.

The post The Geopolitical Earthquake of the Iran War appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus .