US and Israel Launch Major Strike Campaign to Topple Iranian Regime

Executive Summary

The United States and Israel launched a coordinated military assault on Iran on February 28, 2026, striking nuclear facilities, missile infrastructure, and leadership compounds with the explicit goal of regime change. Iran responded with counterstrikes. Six nations—Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, Syria, and the UAE—closed their airspace, grounding thousands of civilian flights and signaling immediate regional contagion. In the near term, this marks the most consequential US military escalation in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with regime-change objectives carrying similar risks of protracted instability. Over the next one to two years, expect severe disruption to global energy markets, a humanitarian crisis inside Iran, and intensified proxy warfare across Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and the Gulf. Over five to ten years, the strike campaign will reshape the Middle East's strategic architecture—either collapsing Iran's theocratic state and creating a vacuum, or galvanizing its resistance and accelerating nuclear proliferation elsewhere. On an epochal scale, this event tests whether great-power military force can still reshape political orders in a multipolar, nuclear-threshold world without triggering cascading global consequences. The precedent set—open regime-change warfare against a near-nuclear state—will define how Russia, China, India, and others calibrate their own security postures for decades. The implications for collective human governance, energy transition timelines, and the global norms against aggressive war are profound and irreversible.