When Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion launched on February 28, 2026, the Trump administration faced a complicated regional posture. Gulf states were cautious — wary of becoming targets, reluctant to be publicly associated with U.S.-Israeli military action against a powerful neighbor, and acutely sensitive to the domestic politics of appearing to side with America against a Muslim country. The U.S. State Department’s evacuation advisories for 14 countries from Iran to Egypt reflected the depth and breadth of that uncertainty.

Iran’s response to the strikes, however, was not the disciplined, targeted retaliation that might have preserved regional neutrality. It was, in the assessment of analysts across the political spectrum, a scattershot campaign of indiscriminate fire that has struck civilian hotels in Bahrain, commercial airports in Kuwait and Doha, LNG plants and power generation infrastructure in Qatar, oil refineries in Saudi Arabia, naval bases hosting French and Italian forces, a U.S. consulate in Dubai, and even civilian landmarks like the Fairmont Palm Hotel and the vicinity of the Burj Al Arab. It struck Syria after Syria’s new government condemned Iran’s behavior. It struck Jordan via Iraqi proxy militias. And it sent a missile on a trajectory toward Turkish airspace.

The result, as President Trump noted, was that countries which were “barely interested at first” are now “eager to jump in.” Retired Brigadier General John Teichert explained the practical military consequence on “Washington Watch”: with Gulf bases now open for U.S. use, American jets can strike from just a few hundred miles away instead of a thousand — a logistical transformation that meaningfully expands the range, sortie rate, and responsiveness of the entire campaign.

The realignment is, in the language of geopolitics, a gift of extraordinary magnitude. The Abraham Accords had already set the table for Arab-Israeli normalization. Iran’s indiscriminate warfare has now pushed that process further in a single week than years of diplomacy might have achieved — not through persuasion, but through fear, outrage, and the direct experience of Iranian missiles landing on your own soil.

The breadth of this list is the story. Iran struck a hotel. It struck civilian airports in two countries. It struck LNG terminals and oil refineries. It struck a building hosting French forces and a base hosting Italian forces, drawing European allies into a war they had been carefully watching from the sidelines. It struck Amazon data centers. It struck a U.S. consulate. It struck Syria — a fellow supposed ally — after Syria’s new government publicly objected. And it struck, or came within seconds of striking, the airspace of a NATO member state.

Qatar’s response is particularly instructive. Facing a volley of 65 missiles and 12 drones on March 1 alone, Qatari air defenses shot down 63 of the missiles, 11 of the drones, and downed two Iranian jets. In parallel, Qatari intelligence arrested 10 IRGC operatives — 7 for intelligence work and 3 for active sabotage operations — revealing that Iran had prepositioned an espionage and sabotage cell in a country that hosts the largest U.S. air base in the region. The combination of the kinetic attack and the spy ring has, according to analysts, transformed Qatar from cautious host into active partner in ways that would have been unimaginable a week earlier.

The six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council convened an emergency summit on March 3, 2026 and collectively declared their readiness to do “whatever it takes” to protect themselves — explicitly including fighting back if necessary. The declaration represents a fundamental departure from the cautious, hedged posture that Gulf states maintained at the conflict’s outset, when most were publicly emphasizing diplomacy and privately hoping to stay out of the line of fire.

The strategic significance of Gulf basing access cannot be overstated. As retired Brigadier General John Teichert explained on “Washington Watch,” with Gulf bases open for American operations, U.S. aircraft can reach Iranian targets from a few hundred miles away rather than the thousand-plus miles required from carrier flight decks or Diego Garcia. That compression of distance translates directly into greater sortie rates, heavier payloads, more time on station, and faster response cycles — a logistical multiplication of force that Iran has, effectively, gifted to its adversaries.

Saudi Arabia’s position carries a further wildcard. The kingdom’s defense pact with Pakistan — signed in September 2025 — means that if Riyadh invokes it, Islamabad could be drawn into the conflict despite not having been directly attacked. Pakistan’s military, the world’s sixth-largest and the only Muslim-majority nation with nuclear weapons, has thus far maintained strict neutrality. That neutrality may become harder to sustain if the Saudi-Pakistani treaty is activated.

Europe’s initial posture toward Operation Epic Fury was one of careful distance. Even the United Kingdom — America’s closest military ally — was not prepared to authorize the use of British bases for U.S. strike aircraft at the conflict’s outset. That position collapsed when Iranian strikes began hitting facilities where British, French, and Italian forces were stationed.

The most consequential European shift belongs to France, whose position is genuinely complex. Paris is simultaneously pledging to defend Gulf allies — a direct military commitment — while maintaining diplomatic channels with China aimed at de-escalation. Some analysts view the China-France talks as a genuine peace initiative; others interpret them as European positioning to preserve some Iranian leadership for a post-war negotiated transition, giving Tehran a face-saving off-ramp that the Trump administration has not offered.

Turkey’s role in the conflict has been the most closely watched and the most ambiguous of any NATO member. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been steering Turkey toward a more Islamic, pro-Palestinian foreign policy posture in recent years — going so far as to host Hamas officials in Ankara, condemning U.S. and Israeli strikes as illegal, and publicly mourning the death of Supreme Leader Khamenei. For the first several days of the conflict, Turkey was conspicuously unaffected by Iranian fire — an anomaly that drew pointed questions about whether Tehran was deliberately sparing its most sympathetic NATO neighbor.

The missile incident on March 6 complicates that picture. Whether the trajectory toward Turkish airspace represented a genuine Iranian strike — a miscalculation, a deliberate escalation, or an attempt to implicate Turkey in the conflict and force Ankara to choose sides more explicitly — remains unclear. The timing, coming after days of conspicuous Iranian restraint toward Turkey, has reinforced suspicion that the incident was not accidental. NATO’s response — intercepting the missile and reaffirming Article 5 — puts the alliance on record as treating Iranian fire in NATO airspace as a collective concern, regardless of where Turkey stands diplomatically.

Three scenarios are emerging in the assessments of regional analysts and retired military officials. The first is the scenario Hegseth and General Caine have described publicly: a four-to-five week air campaign that destroys Iran’s remaining defense industrial base, eliminates affiliated leadership, and achieves uncontested airspace control, after which Iran is left too weakened to reconstitute a conventional military threat for years and its population — already seething from the January crackdowns — is given the space and the vacuum of coercive capacity to challenge the regime from within. The TV hijack of IRIB Channel 2 by Pahlavi’s message suggests this internal pressure is already building.

The second scenario is escalation that outpaces anyone’s original plan: Iran activates every proxy simultaneously, Hezbollah re-engages seriously in Lebanon, Houthi forces expand their Red Sea campaign, Iraqi militias escalate beyond Kuwait to attacking U.S. forces across the theater, and the conflict grinds into a multi-front attritional war that begins to look like the “forever war” Democratic critics in the Senate have warned of. The NATO Article 5 discussions, if they ripen into actual invocation, would pull twenty-nine additional militaries into the conflict’s legal architecture in ways whose consequences would be difficult to contain.

The third scenario is the most dramatic and the most uncertain: Iran’s regime fractures from within. The combination of military devastation, economic collapse from oil disruption and sanctions, destroyed security infrastructure, a leaderless succession crisis after Khamenei’s death, and a population that was already in open revolt in January 2026 creates conditions for an internal collapse that no outside military force needs to complete. That scenario — the one President Trump has hinted at with his defection immunity offers and that Crown Prince Pahlavi is positioning himself for — is the realignment that would truly redraw the map. Whether it occurs, and what follows if it does, remains the open question at the center of the most consequential week in Middle Eastern history in a generation.