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Despite promising to end United States involvement in costly and destructive foreign wars, President Donald Trump, together with Israel, has launched a massive military assault on Iran, targeting its leadership and nuclear and missile infrastructure.

Much like his predecessors, Trump has relied on military force to pursue US strategic interests, continuing a pattern that has defined US foreign policy for more than two decades.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the US capital, the US has engaged in three full-scale wars and bombed at least 10 countries in operations ranging from drone strikes to invasions, often multiple times within a single year.

The graphic below shows all the countries the US has bombed since 2001.

These may not include all military strikes, particularly covert or special operations.

The cost of decades of war

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, President George W Bush launched what he called a “war on terror”, a global military campaign that reshaped US foreign policy and triggered wars, invasions and air strikes across numerous countries.

According to an analysis by Brown University’s Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs, US-led wars since 2001 have directly caused the deaths of about 940,000 people across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other conflict zones.

This does not include indirect deaths, namely those caused by loss of access to food, healthcare or war-related diseases.

The US has spent an estimated $5.8 trillion funding its more than two decades of conflict.

This includes $2.1 trillion spent by the Department of Defense (DOD), $1.1 trillion by Homeland Security, $884bn to increase the DOD base budget, $465bn on veterans’ medical care and an additional $1 trillion in interest payments on loans taken out to fund the wars.

In addition to the $5.8 trillion already spent, the US is expected to have to lay out at least another $2.2 trillion for veterans’ care over the next 30 years.

This would bring the total estimated cost of US wars since 2001 to $8 trillion.

Afghanistan war (2001-2021)

The first and most direct response to 9/11 was the invasion of Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power.

On October 7, 2001, the US launched Operation Enduring Freedom.

The initial invasion succeeded in toppling the Taliban regime within just a few weeks. However, armed resistance groups mounted a prolonged resistance against US and coalition forces.

The war went on to become the longest conflict in US history, spanning four presidencies and lasting 20 years until the final withdrawal in 2021, after which the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan.

An estimated 241,000 people died as a direct result of the war, according to an analysis from Brown University’s Costs of War project. Hundreds of thousands more people, mostly civilians, died due to hunger, disease and injuries caused by the war.

At least 3,586 soldiers from the US and its NATO allies were killed in the war, which is estimated to have cost $2.26 trillion for the US, according to the Cost of War project.

Iraq war (2003-2011)

On March 20, 2003, Bush launched a second war, this time in Iraq, claiming that President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction – a claim that proved to be false.

On May 1, 2003, Bush declared “mission accomplished” and the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

However, the subsequent years were defined by violence from armed groups and a power vacuum that fuelled the rise of ISIL (ISIS).

In 2008, Bush agreed to withdraw US combat troops, a process completed in 2011 under President Barack Obama.

The drone wars: Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen

Although not declared wars, the US has also expanded its air and drone campaigns.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the CIA launched drone strikes inside Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border, targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban figures believed to be operating there. These strikes marked the early expansion of remote warfare.

Obama dramatically expanded the drone strikes in Pakistan, particularly in the early years of his presidency.

At the same time, the US conducted air strikes in Somalia against suspected al-Qaeda affiliates, later targeting fighters linked to al-Shabab as that armed group grew in strength.

In Yemen, US forces carried out missile and drone strikes against al-Qaeda leaders.

Libya intervention

In 2011 during an uprising against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the US joined a NATO-led intervention in Libya. American forces launched air and missile strikes to enforce a no-fly zone.

Gaddafi was overthrown and killed, and Libya descended into prolonged instability and factional fighting.

Iraq and Syria

From 2014 onwards, the US intervened in the Syrian war with the stated goal of defeating ISIL. Building on its campaign in Iraq, the US conducted sustained air strikes in Syria while supporting local partner forces on the ground.

In Iraq, US forces advised Iraqi troops, fought ISIL remnants and tried to counter Iranian influence, highlighted by a Trump-ordered 2020 strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

Washington, DC – As the US and Israeli militaries expand their strikes on Iran, the administration of US President Donald Trump has alternated its justification for the war between preventing immediate attacks and countering the long-term existential threat of a nuclear Tehran.

This was on full display on Monday, with Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth appearing to make the case that the culmination of Iran’s regional policies in the 47 years since the Islamic revolution, coupled with the future of its ballistic and nuclear programmes, represented an immediate threat to the US.

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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, argued that Washington’s close ally Israel was planning to attack Iran. In which event, the administration expected Iran to strike US assets, therefore justifying launching a preemptive attack, he said.

To date, the administration has offered little clear evidence to support any of its claims, according to advocates and analysts, as well as Democratic lawmakers who have recently attended classified briefings.

“The reality is, they’ve put forth very little evidence, and that’s a huge problem,” Emma Belcher, the president of Ploughshares, a group that advocates for denuclearisation, told Al Jazeera.

“It says, one: They don’t think they need to [make the case] for the war; that they won’t necessarily be held to account for it,” Belcher said. “But it also says to me that the evidence quite possibly isn’t there, and that they want to avoid particular scrutiny.”

Republicans have largely coalesced around the administration’s messaging, even as Democrats have pledged to force votes on war powers legislation to assert constitutional authority over the president’s military action.

Still, the administration remains in a tenuous political position as Trump’s Republican Party stares down midterm elections in November. Early public polling indicates little outright support from the US public, even as Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) base has been staid in its response.

But the more days that pass, and the more US service members are killed, the more likely that Trump will be confronted with the contradictions to his past anti-interventionist promises.

“The longer it goes on and the more costly it is in terms of lives… the more the lack of evidence becomes an albatross around the neck of the administration – one that it will have to account for come November,” according to Benjamin Radd, a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center’s international relations department.

A kaleidoscope of claims

Speaking from the White House on Monday, Trump praised the “obliteration of Iran’s nuclear programme” in US strikes last June. But moments later, he claimed that efforts to rebuild that programme, coupled with Iran’s ballistic missile programme, represented a menace to the US.

“An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat to the Middle East, but also to the American people,” Trump said. “Our country itself would be under threat, and it was very nearly under threat.”

Trump also said that, if not for US and Israeli attacks, Iran “would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America”.

Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Washington, DC-based Arms Control Association (ACA) said any claims of immediate or middle-term threats posed by Iran in terms of their ballistic and nuclear power are not supported by available evidence.

That is significant, as such “imminent threats” are required for a president justify attacks on foreign countries under both US domestic law and international law, save for approval from Congress.

“Iran did not possess, prior to this attack, the capability to quickly enrich its highest uranium to bomb grades, and then to convert that into metal for constructing a bomb,” Kimball told Al Jazeera.

“At the soonest, it might have taken many, many months to do that, but Iran does not have access to its 60 percent highly-enriched uranium. Its conversion facility is damaged and idle. Its major uranium enrichment facilities have been severely damaged by the US strikes in 2025.”

He explained that despite having “significant conventional short and medium range ballistic missile capabilities”, Iran has said it has imposed 2,000km (1,200-mile) limits on its ballistic missile range, and is not near having an intercontinental ballistic missile capability.

The “latest [US intelligence] assessment is that Iran could, if a decision is made, have an ICBM capability by 2035. So Iran is nowhere close to having an ICBM threat that could be called imminent,” he said, referring to intercontinental ballistic missiles, which have a range of at least 5,000km (3,400 miles).

Democrats say no new intelligence

Secretary of State Rubio on Monday said there “absolutely was an imminent threat” presented by Iran.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” he said. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

But top Democrats who received classified intelligence briefings in recent days said they had not been provided with evidence to justify the attack.

“I’m on two committees that give me access to a lot of classified information; there was no imminent threat from Iran to the United States that warrants sending our sons and daughters into yet another war in the Middle East,” Senator Tim Kaine, who sits on both the Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN on Saturday.

Senator Mark Warner, who was briefed on classified intelligence related to Iran last week as part of the “gang of eight”, a collection of the top lawmakers from both parties in Congress, told the network: “I saw no intelligence that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States of America”.

Several sources speaking to both the Reuters news agency and the Associated Press, following a closed-door briefing of congressional staff on Sunday, said the administration presented no evidence that Iran was planning a preemptive strike, and had instead focused on a more generalised threat posed by Iran and its allies to US troops and assets in the region.

Trump looking for quick success

All told, the Trump administration appears to be arguing that “Iran has been a national security threat to the United States since 1979… that Iran was responsible for more American lives being killed than any other state or non-state actor; that Iran has never been held to account for this”, according to the Burkle Center’s Radd.

Trump, therefore, appears to be taking the position that given the totality of Iranian actions, including during recent indirect nuclear talks, the US “has no choice but to perceive Iran as an imminent threat”.

Oman’s foreign minister, who mediated the talks, had pushed back on the administration’s characterisation, maintaining that “significant progress” had been made before the US-Israeli attacks.

Radd noted that under the War Powers Act of 1973, a US president has between 60 and 90 days to withdraw forces deployed without congressional approval. Therefore, Trump appears to be saying, “We’re not obliged to prove to Congress any of that if we can conduct and execute this operation within the 60 to 90 day window,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ploughshare’s Belcher said that the administration’s own actions led to the current situation with Iran.

She pointed to Trump’s withdrawal of The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, which had seen the US impose maximum sanctions on Iran, and Iran, in turn, begin enriching uranium beyond the levels laid out in the agreement. Trump also derailed nuclear talks last year by launching attacks on Iran.

“We’re in this situation precisely because President Trump gave up on an agreement that was negotiated by his predecessor,” Belcher said. “He gave up on diplomacy.”

‘America First’ war?

In his speech on Monday, Hegseth, in particular, appeared to try to frame the war within Trump’s political worldview, pledging to “finish this on America First conditions”.

He drew a contrast with the US invasion of Iraq, describing the attacks on Iran as a “clear, devastating, decisive mission”.

“Destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy – no nukes,” he said.

He also sought to draw a distinction between a “so-called regime-change war” and US attacks that happened to lead to regime change. As of Monday, US strikes had killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several top officials, but the ruling government has remained intact.

Hegseth said that the US is unleashing attacks “all on our terms, with maximum authorities, no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars”.

It remains unclear how the message will resonate with the US public.

A Reuters-Ipsos poll released on Sunday suggested dismal approval for Trump’s strikes, but also indicated that large swaths of Americans were unsure about the conflict.

That could create opportunities for those challenging Trump’s actions and his justification for them.

“I think it does seem as though the narrative is still up for grabs,” Belcher said.

United States President Donald Trump’s second term in office has been defined by the abduction of Venezuela’s left-wing President Nicolas Maduro, joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among hundreds, and new threats against other leaders from Latin America to even Europe.

This policy is testing alliances, legal norms, and the idea that shock action abroad yields predictable outcomes at home. At its core is a message Trump repeats in different ways: “We can reach you – and we might not protect you if you do not do what we want.”

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Trump talks directly to foreign leaders, promising swift punishment or personal favour, and casts himself as the only US president “with the gloves off”.

While his supporters see strength and candour, critics underline threats and deals aimed at domestic politics as much as foreign capitals.

A doctrine built around enemies

Trump’s decision to attack Iran has been described as the “biggest foreign policy gamble of his presidency”, with analysts saying he has pivoted from “swift, limited operations like last month’s lightning raid in Venezuela” to what could be a more protracted conflict that is already morphing into a wider regional war.

His doctrine is anchored in identifying adversaries – Iran, China, Russia and North Korea – alongside a cluster of actors such as Venezuela, Cuba, certain Latin American leaders, as well as drug cartels, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Analysts at the Atlantic Council say Trump’s National Security Strategy “elevates great power competition with China and Russia while casting Iran and North Korea as rogue regimes”, creating an organising map of enemies reflected in his rhetoric and operations.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute describes Trump’s strategy as “a deeply transactional document”, arguing that security guarantees and pressure on adversaries are framed around what others “pay” or concede to the US.

Iran and the regional spread of war

The Pentagon has named its Iran campaign Operation Epic Fury, with Trump insisting the US “did not start this war”, but intends to finish it – a claim rejected by Iran’s foreign minister in an interview with Al Jazeera.

Trump said US forces would “lay waste” to much of Iran’s military, deny Tehran a nuclear weapon, and “give Iranians a chance to topple their rulers”. Some media reports said he has privately claimed Iran would “soon have a missile that can hit the US”, even though intelligence assessments do not support that.

Analysts say Trump is hoping the US-Israeli strikes would incite a popular uprising to oust Iran’s rulers, even though outside airpower has never directly achieved government change without ground forces. The Atlantic Council warns the Iran attack risks drawing Washington into a wider regional war “without a clear endgame”.

A briefing from the Royal United Services Institute says if Iran’s retaliation causes significant US casualties, Washington will be under intense pressure to expand Operation Epic Fury into a larger military campaign.

Meanwhile, hawks in Washington see an opportunity. A report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies says the attacks on Iran provide “a historic opportunity to help the Islamic Republic fall”.

Trump has told the US media the military operation could take “four weeks or less”, even as his defence secretary acknowledged it could be shorter or longer, depending on how Iran and its allies respond.

Within days of the Iran strikes on Saturday, the war has spread across the region, with Israel on Tuesday saying it has launched ground operations in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Iran’s retaliatory attacks have targeted US assets and even civilian infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and other Gulf nations.

This is exactly the escalation experts had warned about: strikes framed as targeted decapitation of Iran’s leadership now pulling in a weakened Hezbollah and even Lebanese civilians, reinforcing the perception that the US is willing to put an entire region at risk to prove that it can reach one man or topple one regime.

Like he did in Venezuela by capturing Maduro in an in‑and‑out raid in Caracas after a CIA tip – an episode analysts say emboldens similar thinking elsewhere.

‘Troubling precedent’

The Caracas raid came on the back of a “maximum pressure” campaign, which saw sanctions, criminal cases and asset seizures in a high‑visibility operation. Maduro’s abduction gave the US considerable control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies calls the Maduro operation “a military victory with no viable endgame”, arguing that while the exfiltration of the president was tactically successful, the structural drivers of Venezuela’s crisis remained in place.

A Brookings analysis warned that the raid “sets a troubling precedent for US‑led regime change by special forces”, suggesting that other Latin American leaders may see it as a potential US “template” rather than a one‑off.

Like Colombia, whose President Gustavo Petro was referred to by Trump as “sick”, suggesting a Venezuela-like intervention there “sounds good to me”, and warning Petro to “watch his a**”.

Petro in January said the US was behaving like an empire that treats Latin American governments as subjects, warning that Washington risks shifting from “dominating the world” to being “isolated from the world”.

The killing or abduction of leaders or prominent figures from other nations violates international law. Experts say Trump’s expanding “targeted killing” doctrine erodes the taboo on assassinating political leaders, making reciprocity more plausible.

Protection as transaction

With allies, Trump’s posture is less kinetic but equally blunt.

Trump once boasted about telling a NATO partner, “You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent … No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”

The comments triggered alarm in European capitals and prompted what analysts described as efforts to “Trump‑proof” NATO by locking in higher defence spending and deeper political commitments.

The European Council on Foreign Relations alleges Trump has “exported MAGA to Europe”, turning NATO into “a protection racket in all but name” where security guarantees appear conditional on allies’ political and financial alignment.

A declassified White House memo from 2019 remains the clearest example of how Trump’s transactional logic extends to partners. The memo shows Trump responding to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s request for more weapons.

“I would like you to do us a favour though,” Trump purportedly said before asking Zelenskyy to investigate former US President Joe Biden and his son – a conversation that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Who could be next?

Put together, the Maduro raid, the Iran attack, threats to Petro and pressure on NATO suggest who could be next: Latin American leaders labelled soft on drug cartels; the Iran‑aligned groups in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon; or smaller European nations branded “delinquent” by Trump.

US media reports say Trump’s advisers have urged him to focus on the domestic economy, warning that a prolonged confrontation with Iran could alienate parts of his “America First” base that are sceptical of open‑ended wars.

Meanwhile, Trump’s backers cite the rising NATO outlays, the Maduro raid and Iran strikes as proof that Trump “does what he says”. Some argue that degrading Iran’s nuclear programme, even without regime change, would still count as a victory for Trump.

Critics, however, worry that the Iran campaign could escalate into the biggest US military campaign since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, with some of Trump’s stated claims on Iran not backed by intelligence.

Whether the US power produces durable outcomes without blowback – in Iran, Lebanon, Latin America and inside the US – is a key test for Trump in the days ahead.

For decades, Ali Larijani was the calm, pragmatic face of the Iranian establishment – a man who wrote books on the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and negotiated nuclear deals with the West.

But on March 1, the 67-year-old secretary of the Supreme National Security Council’s tone changed irrevocably.

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Appearing on state television just 24 hours after US-Israeli air strikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, Mohammad Pakpour, Larijani delivered a message of fire.

“America and the Zionist regime [Israel] have set the heart of the Iranian nation ablaze,” he wrote on social media. “We will burn their hearts. We will make the Zionist criminals and the shameless Americans regret their actions.”

“The brave soldiers and the great nation of Iran will deliver an unforgettable lesson to the hellish international oppressors,” he added.

Larijani, who accused US President Donald Trump of falling into an “Israeli trap”, is now at the centre of Tehran’s response to its biggest crisis since 1979.

He is expected to have an important role alongside the three-man transitional council running Iran after Khamenei’s death.

So, who is the man tasked with steering Iran’s security strategy as its war with Israel and the US continues?

The ‘Kennedys’ of Iran

Born on June 3, 1958, in Najaf, Iraq, to a wealthy family from Amol, Larijani belongs to a dynasty so influential that Time magazine described them, in 2009, as the “Kennedys of Iran”.

His father, Mirza Hashem Amoli, was a prominent religious scholar. And like Larijani, his brothers have held some of the most powerful positions in Iran, including in the judiciary and the Assembly of Experts, a clerical council empowered with choosing and overseeing the supreme leader.

Larijani’s ties to Iran’s post-1979 revolutionary elite are also personal. At age 20, he married Farideh Motahari, the daughter of Morteza Motahhari, a close confidant of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini.

Despite his family’s conservative religious roots, his children have had a diverse trajectory. His daughter, Fatemeh, a medical graduate from the University of Tehran, completed her specialisation at Cleveland State University in Ohio, US.

The mathematician philosopher

Unlike many of his peers who came solely from religious seminaries, Larijani also has a secular academic background.

In 1979, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Sharif University of Technology. He later completed master’s and doctorate degrees in Western philosophy from the University of Tehran, writing his thesis on Kant.

But it is his political positions that have been the centrepiece of his career.

After the 1979 revolution, he joined the IRGC in the early 1980s, before transitioning to government, serving as culture minister under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani between 1994 and 1997, and then as the head of the state broadcaster (IRIB) from 1994 until 2004. During his time at the IRIB, he faced criticism from reformists who accused his restrictive policies of driving Iranian youth towards foreign media.

Between 2008 and 2020, he served as the Parliament (Majlis) speaker for three consecutive terms, playing a major role in shaping domestic and foreign policy.

Return to the security fold

Larijani ran for the presidency in 2005 as a conservative candidate, but did not make it to the second round. In the same year, he was appointed the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and the country’s chief nuclear negotiator.

He resigned from those posts in 2007, after growing distant from then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear policies.

Larijani entered parliament in 2008, winning a seat to represent the religious centre of Qom, and became the speaker. This allowed Larijani to grow in influence, and he maintained his connection to the nuclear file, securing parliamentary approval for the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

After leaving his position as parliamentary speaker and member of parliament in 2020, Larijani attempted to run for president for a second time in the 2021 election. But this time, he was disqualified by the Guardian Council, which vets candidates. He was disqualified again when he attempted to run in the 2024 presidential election.

The Guardian Council gave no reason for the disqualifications, but analysts viewed the 2021 move as a way for the establishment to clear the field for hardliner Ebrahim Raisi, who won the election. Larijani criticised the 2024 disqualification as “non-transparent”.

But he did return to an influential position in August 2025, when he was reappointed as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council by President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Since taking the post, his stance has hardened. In October 2025, reports emerged that Larijani had cancelled a cooperation agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), declaring that the agency’s reports were “no longer effective”.

Diplomacy amid war

Despite that tough stance, Larijani is often regarded as pragmatic and someone inside the Iranian system who may be willing to compromise, in part due to his past role in backing the 2015 nuclear deal.

Just weeks before the current escalation, Larijani was reportedly engaged in indirect negotiations with the US.

In February, during talks mediated by Oman, he stated that Tehran had not received a specific proposal from Washington, and accused Israel of trying to sabotage the diplomatic track to “ignite a war”.

In an interview with Al Jazeera prior to the US and Israel’s attacks on Iran, Larijani described his country’s position on talks as “positive,” noting that the US had realised that the military option was not viable. “Resorting to negotiation is a rational path,” he said at the time.

However, the air strikes, which began on February 28, have shattered the diplomatic window.

In his latest address, Larijani assured the nation that plans were in place to arrange the leadership succession according to the Constitution. He warned the US that it was delusional to think killing leaders would destabilise Iran.

“We are not intending to attack regional countries”, he clarified, “but we are targeting any bases used by the United States”.

The more pragmatic tone appears to have disappeared – for now. Larijani has rejected media reports that he wanted new talks with the US, saying on Monday that Iran would “not negotiate” with Washington.

Instead, with Khamenei gone and the region on the brink, Larijani has promised a response to the US and Israel with “a force that they have never experienced before”.

As its joint attack with the United States on Iran continues, Israel sees its task as the culmination of a longstanding policy on: ushering in regime change from within.

Taking to the airwaves in the wake of the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Iranian people directly, calling on them in Farsi to “come to the streets, come out in your millions, to finish the job, to overthrow the regime of fear that has made your lives bitter”.

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“Your suffering and sacrifices will not be in vain. The help you wished for – that help has now arrived,” he said of the US-Israeli air strikes, which have already killed more than 555 people in Iran, including 180 at a girls’ school in the country’s south.

“The Israeli authorities don’t spell it out, but it is clear that what they want to see is a regime change in Iran,” said Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at the Department for War Studies at King’s College London, who had returned to Israel to research a book before the latest round of strikes took place.

“I’m stuck in Tel Aviv and spend many hours with Israelis in a local shelter. I’m taken aback by the strong support among these – mainly liberal – Israelis of the war,” he said. “They, like their leaders, believe that if you only topple the Iranian regime, the Middle East will totally transform for the better, which is, of course, nonsense.”

But there is a question of how invested Netanyahu and his allies are in ensuring that regime change in Iran is smooth.

Israeli officials know that Iran, including its opposition, has a diverse array of views and backgrounds.

Many Iranians who have taken to the streets, including in the large protests that took place in January, are united only in their hostility to the government, with various factions calling for everything from the restoration of the monarchy to a full democracy. Others, however, are rallying on the government’s side after the attacks on their country and Khamenei’s killing.

Questions remain

“I think there’s a public opacity to Israel’s war aims,” former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera. “My sense is that Israel has no real interest in smooth regime change. I think most [Israeli leaders] regard that as a kind of fairytale, though that’s not something Netanyahu and allies might be ready to admit publicly.”

“Israel’s more interested in regime and state collapse,” Levy noted. “They want Iran to implode, and if the spillover from that takes in Iraq, the Gulf and much of the region, so much the better.”

“They’ll have removed a significant regional counter to their freedom to act, leaving Israel and its allies free to remake the regions and, critically, to continue both killing Palestinians, and possibly even move against Turkiye, which is the next logical step,” he said, reflecting a recent rise in anti-Turkiye rhetoric in Israel, with politicians even characterising the country as the “new Iran”.

However, while public appetite for the war may be high, there is an understanding that the duration of that war might not be of Israel’s choosing.

The bulk of Israel’s military spending is underwritten by the US, where the attack on Iran is proving less than popular. Equally, in a world where many states had belatedly grown critical of Israel’s genocidal actions towards Palestinians – in particular in Gaza – US diplomatic heft has been vital in protecting its ally from criticism, and even wider sanctions.

How long the US’s allies in the Gulf are ready to withstand Iranian assaults on their territory in response to a war they had repeatedly cautioned against is far from clear. Equally, how long it might be before regional diplomatic pressure on US President Donald Trump begins to have an impact is also hard to predict, Levy warned.

“It’s fitting that this is the holiday of Purim, which also marks the survival of the Jewish people over a threat from Persia 2,500 years ago, and we still celebrate it today. People understand that,” Barak said.

“Israel going to war in tandem with our greatest ally and the world’s greatest power is unprecedented,” Barak continued. “It’s hard to make any predictions, but Trump has his own priorities and his own endgame, which might not be the same as ours. It could be that Trump pulls out and leaves Israel holding the bag. What happens then, I don’t know.”

Public backing

Iranian missiles may be hitting Israel, but analysts there say the general sentiment among the public is supportive of active hostilities against Iran, with the backing of the US.

It stems from years – if not decades – of messaging that Iran and its allies are the main threats to Israel.

From Netanyahu’s repeated warnings that Iran is on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, to the predictions from politicians of all stripes that Israel’s destruction at the hands of Iran is imminent, the outbreak of a conflict that many Israelis see as the final showdown with their enemy has almost been welcomed.

Politicians from the right to the centre-left have backed the US and Israeli decision to attack Iran.

Yair Golan, the leader of the centre-left Democrats, who, in May last year, outraged many Israelis by saying that the endless killing of Palestinians risked reducing Israel to a “pariah state”, welcomed the war, saying the Israeli military had his “full backing” in “removing the Iranian threat”.

Other opposition politicians, such as the centrist Yair Lapid and the right-wing Naftali Bennett, have all fallen into line behind Netanyahu in his confrontation with Iran.

“People here know Iran is a threat. They know it because Iran keeps telling us,” said Mitchell Barak, a political pollster who was an aide to Netanyahu in the early 1990s. “They [Iran] have the weapons, the will, and we know they’re ready to attack. Everyone is happy that the war is under way, and this time, it will be finished.

“It gives Israelis a great sense of pride that it is a fully joint operation with the United States,” Barak, who spoke from a shelter in West Jerusalem, said. “The aim is regime change and protecting Israelis. They understand that. Israelis are hunkering down and resolved to see this through.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi holds calls with China’s Wang Yi amid Israeli-US attacks on Iran.

The Iranian minister of foreign affairs has briefed senior members of China’s central committee and his counterpart, Wang Yi, promising to do everything to ensure the safety of Chinese citizens in the country amid the war launched by the US and Israel.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made the comment in a call on Monday with Wang, which focused on the situation in Iran as Tehran defended “itself at all costs”, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing said in a statement.

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“Seyed Abbas Araghchi noted that the Iranian side will do its utmost to guarantee the safety and security of Chinese personnel and institutions,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Araghchi told Wang that Washington had “launched war against Iran for the second time during their ongoing negotiations”, despite the two sides having made “positive progress in the latest round of negotiations”.

The US and Israel launched their surprise attack on Iran on Saturday, just after Oman’s foreign minister – who had mediated the last round of indirect talks between Washington and Tehran – said a peace deal was closer than ever.

“A peace deal is within our reach,” Badr al-Busaidi said in an interview with CBS News just hours before the attack on Iran started.

Tehran had “no choice but to defend itself”, Araghchi told his Chinese counterpart, adding that he hoped Beijing would play a role in preventing further escalation of the conflict in the region.

“China values the traditional friendship between China and Iran and supports Iran in safeguarding its sovereignty, security, territorial integrity and national dignity and in upholding its legitimate and lawful rights and interests,” Wang told Araghchi, according to the ministry.

“China has urged the US and Israel to immediately cease military actions to avoid further escalation of tensions and prevent the conflict from expanding and spreading to the entire Middle East region,” Wang said.

The call between the ministers comes as China continues to maintain close relations with Iran and has worked in the past to end Tehran’s isolation on the world stage, including by granting Iran membership in BRICS+ – a bloc representing top emerging economies aiming to challenge the Western-led system – and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, according to the London-based think tank Chatham House.

Ahmed Aboudouh, an associate fellow at Chatham House, said Beijing and Tehran are comprehensive strategic partners, having signed a 25-year strategic agreement in 2021.

“China remains a lifeline for the Iranian economy” amid crushing sanctions, Aboudouh added.

More than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil in 2025 went to China, making up about 13.5 percent of all the oil China imported by sea, Aboudouh wrote in a recent briefing paper.

Dubai’s airport authority says it authorised a limited number of flights as hundreds of thousands remain stranded.

The United Arab Emirates has resumed a limited number of flights amid ongoing travel chaos across the region, prompted by the joint war by the United States and Israel on Iran.

Dubai’s airport authority said on Monday that it had authorised a “small number” of flights to operate from Dubai International airport, the world’s busiest gateway for international passengers, and Dubai World Central airport.

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The authority said that passengers should not make travel plans unless they had been contacted directly by their airline with a confirmed departure time.

Dubai-based Emirates announced the resumption of a “limited” number of flights on Monday evening, and said that customers with earlier bookings would take priority.

Etihad Airways, based in Abu Dhabi, said that commercial flights would remain suspended until Wednesday, but that some “repositioning, cargo and repatriation flights” could take place subject to operational and safety approvals.

At least 16 Etihad Airways flights departed from Abu Dhabi on Monday to destinations including London, Amsterdam, Moscow and Riyadh, according to the flight tracking website Flightradar24.

At least two Emirates flights that departed from Dubai landed in India’s Mumbai and Chennai early on Tuesday morning, according to Flightradar24.

Later on Tuesday morning, two Etihad flights bound for Abu Dhabi were diverted to Muscat, Oman, and an Emirates flight headed for Dubai turned back towards Mumbai, according to the flight tracker.

“An Iran-conflict-driven disruption is typically more geographically concentrated, but it can still be severe, because it affects some of the world’s most important east-west corridors and creates rapid knock-on effects,” Tony Stanton, consultant director of Strategic Air in Australia, told Al Jazeera.

Countries including Iraq, Jordan, Qatar and Bahrain have closed their airspace amid US-Israeli attacks on Iran, and Tehran’s retaliatory strikes on US allies in the region, bringing travel across the Middle East to a shuddering halt.

More than 11,000 flights in and out of the region have been cancelled since the start of the conflict on Saturday, according to aviation data firm Cirium, prompting governments to consider plans for repatriating their citizens.

On Monday, German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Johann Wadephul said that Berlin would send chartered planes to Saudi Arabia and Oman to evacuate “particularly vulnerable” people who are unable to get home.

Stanton, the aviation analyst, said that the airline sector could face a lasting impact if the conflict drags beyond a few weeks, particularly if key routes become unviable and insurers and regulators raise the costs of operating.

“At that point, you can see route maps ‘reset’ – some services suspended indefinitely, hubs losing connection banks, and traffic shifting to alternative routings, or alternative hubs, that are perceived as lower-risk and more reliable,” he said.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has condemned US and Israeli strikes on Iran.

Spain says the United States is not using – and will not be using – joint military bases on its territory for operations against Iran, a mission condemned by Madrid.

“Based on all the information I have, the bases are not being used for this military operation,” Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares told Spanish public television on Monday.

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Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has condemned US and Israeli strikes on Iran that began on Saturday as an “unjustified” and “dangerous military intervention” outside the realm of international law, in another break from US policy.

“The Spanish government will not authorise the use of the bases for anything beyond the agreement or inconsistent with the United Nations,” Albares said, referring to the Rota naval base and the Moron airbase.

The US operates at the bases under a joint-use arrangement, but they remain under Spanish sovereignty.

Defence Minister Margarita Robles said the bases “will not provide support, except if, in a given case, it were necessary from a humanitarian perspective”.

Spain also condemned the retaliatory attacks by Iran on Gulf countries.

According to maps by flight-tracking website FlightRadar24 on Monday, 15 US aircraft have left bases in southern Spain since the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran. At ‌least seven of the aircraft were shown on FlightRadar24 as having landed at Ramstein airbase in Germany.

The Spanish position is an outlier among the major European countries.

Britain had also initially refused to allow the use of its bases for an attack on Iran, but on Sunday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer authorised their use for “collective self-defence”, amid Iranian counterattacks targeting US assets across the Middle East and energy infrastructure in the Gulf region.

France and Germany, meanwhile, are prepared to do the same.

The three countries’ leaders were “appalled by the indiscriminate and disproportionate missile attacks launched by Iran against countries in the region, including those who were not involved in initial US and Israeli military operations”, read a joint statement on Sunday.

“We have agreed to work together with the US and allies in the region on this matter,” they stated.

The US secretary of state says he hopes Iranian people will overthrow the regime, as US military says six service members killed.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested that a planned Israeli attack on Iran determined the timing of Washington’s assault on the government in Tehran.

The top diplomat told reporters on Monday that Washington was aware Israel was going to attack Iran, and that Tehran would retaliate against US interests in the region, so US forces struck pre-emptively.

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“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio said after a briefing with congressional leaders.

“We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

The state secretary’s comments came minutes before the US military confirmed that its death toll from the conflict has risen to six, after two bodies were recovered from a regional facility struck by Iran.

Tehran retaliated against the joint US-Israeli attacks that killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, several top officials and hundreds of civilians, with drone and missile launches across the region, including against US bases and assets in the Gulf.

Rubio argued on Monday that although the US and Israel jointly attacked first, Washington was acting to thwart an immediate threat because Israel was going to strike Iran on its own, anyway.

Israel is a close US ally and has received at least $21bn in military aid from Washington since 2023.

“There absolutely was an imminent threat,” Rubio said. “And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked – and we believed they would be attacked – that they would immediately come after us.”

The assertion highlights the Israeli role in bringing about the war with Iran, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been seeking for years.

On Sunday, Netanyahu said the attacks on Iran are happening with the assistance of his “friend”, US President Donald Trump.

“This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” the Israeli prime minister said in a video message.

Rubio told reporters on Monday that an attack on Iran had to happen because Tehran was amassing missiles and drones that it would have used to protect its nuclear programme and acquire a nuclear bomb.

Israel and the US launched the war less than 48 hours after a round of talks between American and Iranian officials over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Rubio said the goal of the war is to destroy Iran’s missile and drone programmes, but stressed the US would welcome ending the governing system in Tehran.

“We would not be heartbroken, and we hope that the Iranian people can overthrow this government and establish a new future for that country. We would love for that to be possible,” he said.

Later on Monday, Washington urged US citizens across more than a dozen countries in the Middle East – including Gulf Cooperation Council nations, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories – to “depart now”.

The advisory reflects the growing turmoil and threats in the region.

The State Department “urges Americans to DEPART NOW from the countries below using available commercial transportation, due to serious safety risks”, US official Mora Namdar said on X.