Israel

This Pulse survey, conducted in March 2026, explores perceptions of the ongoing war and its potential trajectories, focusing on expectations around its duration, outcomes, and broader regional and global implications. The findings reveal a high degree of uncertainty, with no clear consensus on how or when the conflict will end, reflecting the complexity and fluidity of the situation.

The United States–Israel–Iran war, which began with a set of vaguely defined objectives including regime change in Iran and the dismantling of its missile and nuclear capabilities, now appears to be shifting toward a different set of priorities. Iran has managed to internationalise the conflict in a way that has redirected attention toward containing the scale of global economic disruption. Put simply, the focus is increasingly on securing the flow of oil amid what is being described as one of the most severe energy crises in modern history. Much of the world’s attention has centred on the Strait of Hormuz, and rightly so. This vital shipping lane accounts for roughly 20% of global liquid petroleum consumption, as well as a significant share of global liquefied natural gas trade (LNG). However, with the Iran-backed Yemeni Houthis now entering the conflict, the risks facing regional oil exports and maritime routes have intensified further. As the de facto controllers of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the Houthis are in a position to disrupt shipping through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.   This raises several critical questions. Why have the Houthis chosen this moment to enter the war? Under what conditions might they escalate their involvement? And what would be the consequences of a closure of the strait?

Economic and geopolitical relations between China and Israel have undergone significant changes following the War on Gaza. Chinese regulatory authorities moved to classify certain areas within Israel under what is known as the Red Category, an official administrative designation that identifies these locations as high-risk investment zones. This classification imposes legal restrictions that prevent the injection of new financial investments into these areas.   As a result, a legal environment has emerged in which Chinese companies rely on security warning protocols and personnel safety considerations as a formal justification for controlling capital flows and suspending the implementation of certain financial obligations under previously signed contracts. This development necessitates a careful examination to understand how these risk assessment mechanisms operate and their tangible impact on the economic relationship between the two countries.

The strategic partnership between the United States (U.S.) and Israel has long demonstrated an exceptional ability to absorb and manage tactical divergences. Yet the developments accompanying the launch of the U.S. operation "Epic Fury," conducted in parallel with Israel’s "Visiting Lion" operation in late February 2026, have placed this alliance under an unprecedented test in the modern Middle East. Although this coordinated campaign initially achieved decisive operational successes, most notably the elimination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the dismantling of the command structure of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the image of complete alignment projected by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conceals fundamental divergences in visions and objectives.   A careful reading of the historical trajectory of this relationship, alongside its current political constraints, suggests that a prolonged conflict will expose the sharp divergence in the strategic interests of the two capitals. As the confrontation shifts from rapid strikes to a complex regional war of attrition whose consequences extend beyond Washington and Tel Aviv, these differences are likely to evolve into deep structural fractures. This paper offers a strategic analysis of this emerging dynamic, arguing that the fundamental differences in the capacity to absorb economic repercussions, manage human losses, and navigate rigid electoral timelines will transform muted tactical disagreements into an overt strategic rift that will be increasingly difficult to contain or deny.

The United States and Israel's joint military campaign against Iran is upending the strategic order of the Middle East in ways that extend far beyond Tehran. The strikes have killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, targeted Iran's military and nuclear infrastructure, and triggered retaliatory Iranian attacks across the region. As the war enters its second week, a second and potentially more consequential shift is taking shape. With Iran's role as the dominant pole of regional opposition to Israel now in question, a new rivalry is hardening between Israel and Turkey, one that carries different stakes, different risks, and a far more unpredictable trajectory than the confrontation the current war was designed to resolve. Understanding this emerging fault line requires examining both the structural forces pushing the two states apart and the domestic political dynamics that risk turning competitive rhetoric into irreversible confrontation.

The United States entered the second week of its joint military campaign against Iran on March 7, 2026, having launched Operation Epic Fury alongside Israel on February 28. Within days, the conflict had killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, triggered Iranian retaliatory strikes across the Gulf, and drawn in regional powers from Bahrain to Lebanon. For the Republican Party, the war arrived at what was already an exceptionally precarious moment — one in which the historical forces of midterm politics, falling presidential approval, and a restless voter coalition had already conspired against them. The onset of a major, unpopular war has only deepened those vulnerabilities, and the question facing the GOP heading into November is no longer simply whether they will lose seats, but how many.

The U.S.-Israel and Iran War has affected the interests of many countries. In the last few days, China emerged as a significant player in these events. Beijing called for an immediate halt to the attacks by both sides and the protection of vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, culminating with the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pledging to send a special envoy to the Middle East for mediation.   Beijing has interconnected interests in the Middle East that are significantly affected by the war and will most likely reshape its strategic opportunities in the region, particularly in terms of energy security, trade routes, and diplomatic relations with key regional players. Beijing’s pragmatic foreign policy approach toward the region relies on protecting its economic interests and maintaining a strategic balance. So, the war could provide an opportunity for China to navigate new opportunities in the region and, consequently, expand its influence, particularly by strengthening ties with other oil-producing nations and increasing its investments in reconstruction efforts.   Likewise, China’s strategic partnership with Iran mainly revolves around oil supply and large-scale investments. The consequences of the war raise questions about the future of this relationship and the possibility that China may reshape its foreign policy toward Tehran if it faces a potential decline in Iran’s ability to sustain such interests as a result of the strain on its power after the war.

The Feb. 28, 2026 United States–Israeli offensive against Iran represents the most consequential escalation in Gulf security dynamics in over a decade and introduces immediate, medium-term, and long-term risks to global energy stability. The strikes targeting senior leadership and strategic military infrastructure triggered Iranian retaliation across the Gulf region and sharply increased the probability of disruption to maritime energy flows, particularly through the Strait of Hormuz.   While physical supply outages remain limited at the time of writing, markets have responded by repricing geopolitical risk. Crude benchmarks surged on reopening, freight and insurance costs rose materially, and volatility spiked across commodities and currency markets. The core economic question is not whether prices react, they already have, but whether the conflict transitions from a risk-premium shock to a sustained supply disruption.   The Strait of Hormuz remains the central transmission channel. Roughly one-fifth of globally traded oil and more than one-third of seaborne liquefied natural gas pass through this chokepoint. Even temporary interference has outsized macroeconomic implications. Assessing the implications of the crisis requires examining immediate market reactions, potential disruption scenarios, medium-term supply responses, and the longer-term structural consequences for global energy security and macroeconomic stability.

The fundamental character of modern aerospace warfare has undergone an irreversible paradigm shift, transitioning abruptly from the deployment of exquisite, highly survivable platforms to the brutal arithmetic of industrial attrition and affordable mass. This operational reality was starkly illuminated in late February 2026, with the commencement of Operation Epic Fury by the United States Armed Forces and the parallel Operation Roaring Lion executed by the Israel Defence Forces.   Following the collapse of nuclear negotiations, the allied coalition launched a massive preemptive military campaign. Deploying an overwhelming concentration of aerospace assets, the coalition struck over one thousand strategic targets deep within Iranian territory during the opening twenty-four hours. United States forces executed over nine hundred individual precision strikes in the first twelve hours alone, utilising stealth bombers, naval fighters, and cruise missiles, escalating to more than one thousand, two hundred, and fifty targeted strikes within forty-eight hours. Simultaneously, the Israeli Air Force conducted over seven hundred sorties on the first day, dropping more than one thousand two hundred munitions to achieve immediate tactical successes and air superiority.   However, the immediate and sustained retaliation by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, designated Operation True Promise IV, has placed an unprecedented and mathematically gruelling strain on the allied integrated air and missile defence architecture. Within the first forty-eight hours of the conflict, the adversary entente launched roughly four hundred and twenty medium-range ballistic missiles targeting many countries in the region. This barrage was accompanied by massive swarms of loitering munitions. The staggering depletion rates of multimillion-dollar interceptors and precision strike munitions against high-volume, low-cost adversary threats have exposed a profound mathematical vulnerability in contemporary military logistics. As the global defence industrial base proves incapable of replenishing these exquisite arsenals at the speed of combat consumption, both the allied coalition and the adversary entente are confronting a rapidly approaching logistical exhaustion horizon. To continue the war and secure a decisive strategic victory, it is an absolute strategic imperative for both sides to aggressively substitute these high-end, legacy assets with scalable, cost-asymmetric alternatives, pivoting their operational doctrines toward deployable mass and continuous attritional endurance.

The first quarter of 2026 marked a strategic turning point in the deployment of hard power and the management of geopolitical interaction. For decades, computing technologies remained largely confined to operational support roles, such as processing intelligence data or guiding precision munitions. January and February, however, witnessed a structural shift as military planning moved away from human-dependent decision cycles toward managing autonomous algorithmic kill chains. This transformation was formally articulated in the “Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy” issued by the United States Department of War (DoW) on Jan. 9 2026. The directive aims to entrench American military dominance by rapidly integrating AI across warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations, while transforming the defence apparatus into what officials describe as an “AI-first” military structure.   This doctrine rested on strict operational parameters prioritising overwhelming lethality, rapid execution, and objective-driven systems that place mission success above all other considerations, deliberately excluding social and political variables from algorithmic decision cycles to ensure decisive superiority in battlefield decision-making. This shift was reflected in two unprecedented operations: the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during Operation Absolute Resolve in January 2026, and the decapitation strike targeting Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during Operation Silent Holy City, conducted within Operation Epic Fury in February 2026.   These operations reflected the integration of large language models, dynamic data architectures, tactical assessment algorithms, and autonomous unmanned systems, fundamentally transforming the speed, precision, and geopolitical cost calculus of neutralising high-value targets. Together, they signal that AI has moved beyond a supporting analytical role to become a strategic architect of the battlespace and a driver of kinetic execution.

The military operations that unfolded over twelve days in June 2025 between Iran and Israel marked a sharp breakpoint in the trajectory of regional military balance. The confrontation resulted in a substantial erosion of Tehran’s military infrastructure and inflicted significant material losses. The depth of this operational failure was most evident in the near-total collapse of Iran’s integrated air-defence system, with confirmed intelligence assessments indicating that Israel succeeded in neutralising more than 80 surface-to-air missile batteries and destroying over 120 launch platforms. This effectively stripped Iranian airspace of its protective shield and imposed a state of absolute Israeli air superiority.   Amid this collapse, Tehran effectively lost its entire arsenal of the Russian-made S-300PMU2 (“S-300 PMU-2”) systems, which it had acquired in 2016 after protracted negotiations and at considerable financial cost. These systems were systematically destroyed between 2024 and 2025. Iran’s domestic air-defence industries, represented by the Bavar-373 and Khordad-15 systems, also demonstrated clear operational inadequacy when tested in a real combat environment.   This exposed a wide technological gap between Israel’s offensive capabilities and Iran’s defensive assets. The Iranian air-defence network failed to record the downing of a single manned Israeli fighter jet, and Iran’s ageing air force, reliant on pre-revolution legacy aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat, the Phantom, and the Tiger, supplemented by 1990s-era MiG-29s, stood incapable of competing or deterring effectively.   This total inability to contest the battlespace not only underscored tactical failure but delivered a decisive blow to the strategic assumptions underpinning Iran’s defence doctrine for decades, particularly its reliance on “asymmetric missile deterrence” and hybrid layered-defence networks.   Confronted with a reality in which its missile capabilities were neutralised and its aerial shield dismantled, the Iranian leadership was compelled to adopt a “post-war reset” strategy, launching an urgent acquisition campaign aimed at closing the technological gap by turning eastward towards Russia and China to rebuild its lost deterrence.   The fundamental question that will shape the next phase in the Middle East remains: Can this “hybrid deterrence”, comprising domestic missiles alongside imported, only partially integrated weapon systems, endure against an adversary that has already demonstrated both the willingness and the capability to deliver devastating strikes deep inside Iran?

The question of the West Bank has transcended its status as a mere component of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict to become a substantive test of the coherence of international law and the deterrence foundations upon which the post–Second World War international order was built.   On 9 February 2026, the Israeli Security Cabinet endorsed a package of extraordinary measures designed to consolidate Israeli control over the West Bank. The measures included rescinding the longstanding prohibition on the sale of land to Jews through the repeal of the Jordanian statute that barred the transfer of Palestinian property to Jewish purchasers; lifting the confidentiality of land registry records; transferring planning and construction powers in parts of Hebron from the Palestinian municipality to the Israeli Civil Administration; and broadening oversight and demolition authorities to extend into Areas A and B, which fall under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction in accordance with the Oslo Accords.   These decisions are likely to generate profound structural transformations in property registration and transfer regimes by permitting the public disclosure of landowners’ identities. Such disclosure opens the way for direct negotiations between Israeli purchasers and Palestinian proprietors, thereby facilitating a faster pace of acquisition and further entrenching settlement expansion throughout the West Bank.   In this context, the Israeli Settlement Council (Yesha) characterised the measures as “the most consequential in fifty-eight years,” portraying them as an effective governmental declaration of the restoration of the Land of Israel to its people. These moves do not represent an isolated incident; rather, they constitute one stage in an intensifying trajectory that, over the past two years, has fundamentally reshaped the conflict's underlying parameters, generating a transformed reality that necessitates analytical frameworks beyond traditional paradigms.