US President Donald Trump’s quick and dramatic turnaround from threatening to kill “an entire civilization” in Iran on the morning of April 7, 2026, to announce a two-week ceasefire later that day left many observers with a feeling of whiplash.
While it is difficult to predict whether the truce between the US and Iran will hold or how events will unfold, the dynamics of the conflict so far reveal multiple vulnerabilities in the short term and multiple detrimental effects on the region in the medium and long term.
Already, the ceasefire has shown signs of strain. Iran and the USA almost immediately offered dueling accounts about the agreement, including whether it would cover the war in Lebanon.
Iran and Pakistan, the main broker, said it would, while the US and Israel, which pledged to honor the US deal, he said he won’t. Indeed, the day after the ceasefire went into effect, Israel carried out some of it the most intense bombings in Lebanon to this day.
Like one expert in Middle East politicsI believe that the involvement of so many governments and militant groups – both in the negotiation process and in terms of the regional effects of the conflict – make it more difficult to maintain a truce.
Over the past decade, there has been a shift in regional alliances in the Middle East, leading to increasingly persuasive foreign policies from many countries and a deepening rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The current war only fuels these dynamics, fueling competition and offering governments and militant groups new opportunities to exert influence over adversaries.
The current reality also underscores the idea that external intervention and privileging war over diplomacy has made conflict resolution increasingly difficult in a region with a long history of imperial expansion, great power competition, and bitter political divisions.
Regional fault lines
One of the most striking aspects of the war in Iran that began on February 28 was how quickly it escalated in terms of geographic scope and the actors drawn into it.
The three main countries involved – Israel, US AND Iran – all are facing internal political tensions, polarizations and crises of legitimacy. Outside countries like China, Russia and Pakistan have decided theirs strategic interests and diplomatic means in conflict in indirect involvement.
The conflict has also drawn in a number of regional governments and other groups, from (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states) to Hezbollah in Lebanon AND Houthis in Yemen.
All of this is bound to deepen fault lines that make regional tensions and sectarian conflict more likely in the long run.
Meanwhile, public opinion in the Arab world appears profound damage to the reputation of the US in the region and a loss of credibility in the international legal and humanitarian system.
Events since the start of the war have been pretty bad. The war has ended 1200 Iranian civilians deadover 3.2 million Temporarily displaced Iranians and significant damage to Iranian infrastructure. Thirteen American soldiers have also died during the conflict, as they have more than two dozen in Israel and the Gulf states.
That means nothing from the death toll in Lebanonwhere more than 1500 people have died and more than 1 million displaced since early March.
The politics of regional instability
The Houthis in Yemen, one of the participants in the conflict who remained surprisingly silent in the outbreak of the war, are instructive in understanding the complex and fractured dynamics of the region.
As a religious rebel movement that follows the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam, the Houthis, who took Yemen’s capital in 2014have been the target of sustained military operations by Saudi Arabia AND United Arab Emirates since 2015.
This has only pushed them closer to Tehran.
It was accepted opponents of IsraelThe Houthis declared war on the country following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza.
In 2024, the Houthis attacked shipping in the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, a key point of drowning. This prefigured, in a much smaller and less important way, Iran blocking actions the Strait of Hormuz during the current crisis.
The Houthi campaign to block shipping resulted in a US-led international coalition and significant military strikes against the insurgent group, their re-designation as a foreign terrorist organization and ultimately a ceasefire agreement between the US and the Houthi movement in May 2025.
However, the underlying regional disputes and internal rifts involving the Houthis were never resolved. Eventually, the Houthis returned to the war against Israel in the midst of the recent war in Iran. attacking Israel on March 28.
They have refrained from attacking the Red Sea and are currently observing a ceasefire. But entering the war allowed a weakened Houthi movement to signal its resolve, military capacity and commitment to its alliance with Iran, even as Yemen continues to face a severe economic and humanitarian crisis.
The Houthis have now added influence as well play the role of spoiler amid ongoing diplomacy.
The costs of avoiding diplomacy
Of course, the Houthis are not the only movement that will perceive the war against Iran as an opportunity to exert regional influence.
Just as the Houthis and their enemies are using regional conflicts to enhance their domestic legitimacy and strategic advantages, so the most prominent participants – Iran, Israel and the US – are remaking their past conflicts on the battlefield.
Amidst all these current regional trends of crises and disputes, the strategic goals of the United States itself have remained extremely unclear. The Trump administration has wavered from a focus for regime change to prevent Iran from the development of nuclear capacities.
So far there is there are no indications that talks with Iran to extend the ceasefire into a full diplomatic deal will successfully deter Iran from pursuing uranium enrichment. Indeed, one of the contested points of the framework for talks with Iran is obvious acceptance of Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment.
In 2018, Trump dropped it Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actionor the so-called Iran deal. In it, Iran agreed to conditions, including limiting uranium enrichment, that would block its path to a nuclear weapon if it wanted one.
Under the Iran deal, Tehran had also complied with inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Only long after the American withdrawal from the deal, Iran started again uranium stockpiling and pursuing enrichment.
In her 2020 book on the tenuous 22-month diplomatic process leading to the Iran deal, titled “Not for the faint of heart”, Ambassador Wendy Sherman wrote about how complex, challenging and delicate such multilateral negotiations can be.
But the recent war against Iran suggests that the current machine-gun policy approach to Tehran and the Middle East favored by the US and Israel comes with serious costs and risks.
In the wake of a war with unclear objectives, unclear strategic objectives and high human costs, the region is far less stable than it was when the conflict began. This has made the path to lasting peace even more difficult now that diplomacy is back on the table.
Ioana Emy Matesan is an associate professor of government, Wesleyan University
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
