The direct military clashes that took place in 2026 between the United States of America (USA), Israel, and Iran have not only produced a security instability limited to the Middle Eastern basin but have also constructed a new geopolitical fault line that shakes the global power system. In particular, the coordinated airstrikes carried out by the USA and Israel against Iran, Iran’s response through its ballistic missile and drone capacity, the energy security crises emerging around the Strait of Hormuz, and the involvement of regional proxy actors in the conflict process all demonstrate that the international system has entered a multilayered process of transformation.
It would not be correct to evaluate this war merely as “the limitation of Iran’s nuclear capacity” or as “an extension of Israel’s security strategy.” On the contrary, the developments experienced reveal that the American-centered international order shaped after the Cold War has been eroding, and that new multipolar balances of power have become increasingly visible. Indeed, the renewed hardening of great-power rivalry, the deepening of energy security crises, and the increasing impact of regional conflicts on the global system show that the current war is not only a regional crisis, but also a “strategic rupture” accelerating the transformation of the international system.
U.S.-Iran relations have been shaped along a chronic line of conflict since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and over time they have turned into a multilayered field of competition in which ideological, geopolitical, and security dimensions have deepened. Iran’s anti-American foreign policy orientation developed after the revolution, together with its anti-Israel discourse, has kept not only bilateral relation but also the regional security architecture in the Middle East in a constant environment of tension and distrust. In this context, Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile capacity, and proxy-force networks defined as the “Axis of Resistance” (actors such as Hezbollah, Shiite militia structures in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen) have been perceived by Washington and Tel Aviv as direct security threats. In particular, Iran’s expansion of its asymmetric capacity through non-state actors has been assessed by the United States and Israel as a strategic element that challenges classical balances of deterrence.
From Israel’s perspective, Iran’s nuclear capacity has been seen not only as a military risk, but also as a potential dynamic of transformation capable of fundamentally changing regional balances of power. In this framework, Israel has for many years tried to weaken Iran’s nuclear infrastructure through covert methods such as sabotage, assassinations, and cyber operations. Moreover, Israel’s evaluation of Iran’s regional policies as an “existential threat” is based not only on a security-centered reading, but also on strategic discourses embedded in Israel’s security doctrine and historical-geopolitical imagination. In this context, Iran’s regional influence has been perceived as a pressure factor or threat directed toward Israel’s secure sphere of existence, compatible with its historical borders. Accordingly, Israel for a long time sought to limit Iran through strategies of attrition and balancing, either directly or through proxy actors. However, this covert conflict regime, over time, turned into a higher-intensity conflict as regional crises intensified, the controllability of proxy actors decreased, and the threshold for direct mutual engagement gradually lowered. In this context, as of 2026, the direct involvement
of the United States in military engagement has shown that this covert conflict process has moved into an open and conventional war-conflict stage.
From the U.S. perspective, the issue is not limited only to Iran’s nuclear capacity or regional behavior; Iran is also evaluated as one of the most critical geopolitical connection points of the China-Russia axis in the Middle East. In this context, Iran functions as a strategic bridge between Eurasia and the Middle East through both energy corridors and land-sea transportation routes. This makes it not only a regional actor, but also one of the nodal points of global power rivalry. Therefore, the weakening of Iran or the limitation of its sphere of influence does not merely mean the reshaping of regional balances of power; it also produces limiting effects on China’s energy supply security, the Middle Eastern extensions of the Belt and Road Initiative, and Russia’s indirect influence capacity in the Middle East. In particular, Iran’s position along the Persian Gulf-Strait of Hormuz line constitutes a critical leverage area for the security of global energy flows, while this situation moves Washington’s Iran policy beyond the narrow context of the nuclear file and places it within a broader geostrategic competition framework. In this respect, the process expresses not only an Iran-centered regional conflict, but also a structural extension of the ongoing global struggle for hegemony reflected in the Middle East.
One of the main reasons why the war has had a global impact is the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow waterway, located at the center of international energy supply security, is a critical passage point controlling approximately one quarter of the global seaborne liquid energy trade, around one fifth of worldwide oil consumption, and a significant portion of global crude oil flows. Therefore, Iran’s strategy of using its asymmetric military capacity and geographical advantage to close the Strait of Hormuz or disrupt maritime traffic is not merely a military defensive move, but a geoeconomic pressure instrument with a high multiplier effect targeting the vital arteries of the global economy.
For the United States, the importance of the Strait of Hormuz is not limited to the possibility that energy supply security may be interrupted. The truly decisive element is which actor or balance of power controls this strategic passageway. This is because, as much as the continuity of energy flows, the geopolitical control mechanisms that determine the security and direction of these flows are also considered one of the fundamental components of the United States’ hegemonic position in the global system. In this framework, the Strait of Hormuz is seen not only as an energy corridor, but also as both a functional and symbolic extension of strategic dominance over global maritime trade routes.
As data from the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration also demonstrate, the physical interruptions suffered by this daily average energy flow of 20–21 million barrels as a result of the clashes triggered a sudden and destructive supply shock in global energy markets. This situation activated the mechanisms of sensitivity and vulnerability predicted by liberal interdependence theory, creating very serious cost pressure especially on Chinese industry, which is heavily dependent on Hormuz-sourced oil (China supplies approximately one third of its oil consumption through this route) and on European economies trying to diversify their energy basket after the Russia-Ukraine War. The contraction in entry lines raises energy costs and directly feeds the spiral of global inflation and the risk of stagflation. In this respect, the crisis has gone beyond conventional military parameters and turned into a comprehensive economic war shaking global finance and production chains.
When this economic and geoeconomic rupture is evaluated from the perspective of international relations theory, it reveals that the struggle for dominance over critical energy transit routes and chokepoints is directly related to structural power competition. In particular, neorealist and neomercantilist approaches historically position control over such strategic straits as one of the main determinants of great-power rivalries and struggles for hegemony. Indeed, the competition among industrializing great powers over maritime trade routes before the First World War, and the efforts of the parties (especially Japan and Germany) to gain access to strategic raw materials and oil resources during the Second World War, can be evaluated as historical examples of this structural logic. In this context, the Hormuz-centered rupture that emerged in 2026 stands out not merely as a logistical interruption or a regional energy security problem, but as one of the fundamental geopolitical axes on which centers of power compete in line with the global struggle for hegemony in the new multipolar world order.
The transformation of energy-centered competition from merely an economic tension into a security problem that directly triggers military conflict dynamics has also brought about a fundamental rupture in the balance of power in the Middle East. Indeed, the conflict structure that had long been shaped through proxy wars in the region entered a different phase as of 2026 with the beginning of direct military engagement among the United States, Israel, and Iran. In this context, the attacks carried out by the United States and Israel against Iran, together with Iran’s response through its missile capacity; the targeting of U.S. bases; Iran’s attacks against the U.S. military presence stationed in Gulf countries; and the intense pressure directed at Israeli cities all show that the conflict has begun to transform into a classical interstate war.
The direct or indirect involvement of regional proxy actors such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Shiite militia groups in Iraq has expanded the geographical scope of the war and caused it to acquire a multi-front character. In particular, developments on the Lebanese front have created serious pressure and a need for restructuring in Israel’s security doctrine and defense strategies, while simultaneous tensions emerging along the Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Gulf lines have significantly challenged the manageability of the regional security regime. The simultaneous intensification of these multiple crisis areas increases the possibility of mistakes in the strategic decision-making processes of the parties and raises the risk of uncontrolled escalation of the conflict.
Moreover, the direct or indirect involvement of actors with nuclear capacity in this conflict environment carries the potential to transform the current crisis from a merely regional security problem into a dangerous global security threat. Indeed, while the transformation of critical energy corridors such as Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab into conventional battlefields carries the risk of paralyzing global supply chains and macroeconomic stability, the escalation spiral of the crisis is drawing global powers such as China and Russia into the equation, pushing the international system toward multipolar bloc formation and an asymmetric nuclear deterrence crisis.
One of the most important factors strengthening the possibility that the war may turn into a global war is the position of China and Russia, and the geopolitical balance change that this position creates within the international system. China is not only one of the largest buyers of Iranian oil, but also evaluates Iran, within the scope of the Belt and Road Initiative, as a critical transit center between the Middle Corridor, the Gulf, and Central Asia. For this reason, any crisis in the Strait of Hormuz directly affects not only energy supply security, but also China’s long-term economic and strategic planning. In addition, the disruption of energy supply chains has the potential to create chain effects on China’s industrial production capacity and global trade networks. For Russia, the deep strategic tension experienced with the West after the Ukraine War has led Moscow to develop closer geopolitical cooperation with Tehran. For Russia, Iran is positioned not only as a regional partner, but also as an important strategic actor balancing Western influence in the Middle East and Eurasia. In this context, Moscow evaluates the weakening of Iran as “the expansion of Western influence in Eurasian geopolitics” and therefore adopts an attitude that provides Iran with diplomatic support, military technology sharing, and political protection on international platforms.
However, these developments are increasingly dragging the international system toward a more distinct tendency of renewed bloc formation. The geopolitical polarization emerging between the U.S.-Israel axis and the China-Russia-Iran line produces a more complex, multilayered, and multidomain structure of competition, different from classical Cold War dynamics. In this new period, conflicts are conducted not only through ideological divisions, but also through multidimensional instruments such as energy security, competition over critical technologies, superiority in artificial intelligence and cyber capacity, control of maritime trade routes, and economic sanctions. This situation increases both the intensity and the spread of competition in the international system, producing a more fragile security environment on a global scale.
It may be exaggerated to say that the current war will directly turn into the Third World War, but it is clear that the present developments are the harbinger of a new era of global conflict. The deepening of great-power competition, the militarization of energy and trade routes, the fragility of the nuclear deterrence balance, long-range precision strike systems, the interlinking of regional crises, the increase in artificial intelligence and cyber warfare capacity, and the ineffectiveness of international institutions all strengthen this tendency. In this framework, today’s international system is rapidly moving not toward an order in which a single great war takes place in the classical sense, but toward an era of global crises formed by interconnected regional wars. For example, the Russia-Ukraine War, the Taiwan Crisis, tensions in the South China Sea, and conflicts in the Middle East constitute different fronts of the crisis dynamics of today’s international system. From this perspective, the U.S.-Israel and Iran War offers important clues about how the new world order will be shaped, while at the foundation of the conflict lies not only Iran’s nuclear program, but also the struggle to redefine the global distribution of power.
In this context, it is also observed that the conflict is not limited only to the existing fronts, and that actors such as Israel and the United States are developing strategic moves aimed at expanding the geographical and political scope of the war. Within this framework, Israel’s policies aimed at expanding its sphere of influence in the regional security equation attempt to create a balancing framework against Türkiye through military and strategic rapprochement with Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus along the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean line. In addition, Israel seeks to establish an indirect sphere of influence in Asian geopolitics through security- and technology-oriented cooperation with India, and similarly displays tendencies to become involved in strategic balance calculations in Arctic and North Atlantic geopolitics through the United States and Greenland line.
However, Israel’s tendency toward this macro-geopolitical expansion contains the risk of triggering existing sensitivities in these regions and transforming local crises into a global reckoning. For instance, military activity in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean has the potential to shake already fragile regional balances and trigger a fault line within NATO, while strategic moves along the Arctic and Asian axes will activate counter-balancing policies by global powers such as Russia and China. Yet these global alliance-seeking efforts by actors beyond their own security hinterlands produce the risk of carrying a regional power struggle onto the ground of a systemic global conflict in which great powers directly confront one another.
From the perspective of world history, similar patterns are also striking. The crises in the Balkans before the First World War and the chain activation of alliance systems did not constitute the war itself, but they formed the accumulation of strategic tension that made it possible. Similarly, before the Second World War, the occupation of Manchuria, the Abyssinia Crisis, and revisionist expansionist policies in Europe were initially seen as regional conflicts, but over time became harbingers of a system-wide war on a global scale. These historical examples show that the U.S.-Israel and Iran tension centered on the Middle East today can similarly be read as a trailer for a larger global conflict.
In this framework, the current war is not the broader global conflict that has not yet emerged; rather, it carries the quality of a critical geopolitical sign and early warning showing along which axes that conflict will take shape.
