United States of America (USA)

War is often fought on numerous battlefronts with state of warfare constantly evolving. In the case of the US-Israel-Iran War, drone and economic warfare are primarily tools of battle between the warring sides with the possibility extension to the seas following President Donald Trump’s proclamation of a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. Although the primary theater of war in this conflict has been the skies with an impending theater about to open in the seas of the Gulf, there is another more unconventional theater that has been operating since the beginning of the war, the theater of social media. Since the beginning of the war both the US and Iran have used memes and social media platforms such as X and Instagram as propaganda tools to attack each other’s credibility and shift the war narrative in their favor by engaging wider audiences.   The purpose of this analysis is to explore the idea behind how social media and memes opened a new theater of war between the US and Iran since the start of hostilities in February 2026 and its consequences. This exploration is based on the idea the use of social media and memes transforms the individual from a spectator to active participant in the conflict, while also normalizing violence through humor. Moreover, by transforming social media into a theater of war, the belligerents transform the concept of war into an aesthetic, especially through the US military and White House’s use of social media and memes.    

Recent developments point to a discernible shift in U.S. foreign policy, as Washington moves away from traditional international principles towards a more pragmatic, interest-driven approach. Within this evolving framework, islands and narrow maritime chokepoints have gained renewed strategic prominence as critical instruments of influence. No longer viewed as remote geographic outposts, islands are increasingly regarded as pivotal assets for securing energy flows, safeguarding supply lines, and controlling maritime navigation. This shift reflects a broader strategic intent to assert effective control over key geographic positions in order to sustain military presence, expand economic influence, and command the vital corridors through which global trade flows.   This heightened focus on islands in current U.S. policy reflects a strategic mindset that tightly links geography, military presence, and sovereignty. Within this framework, geographic locations are treated as assets that can be leveraged through acquisition or utilised as instruments of pressure and bargaining. In this context, islands are seen as discrete, manageable nodes that can be secured or defended to project influence across wider regions. This approach is evident in the handling of territories such as Greenland, Kharg Island, the Chagos Archipelago, and the Falkland Islands during Donald Trump's presidency. Against this backdrop, the present analysis seeks to unpack the geopolitical foundations and strategic drivers shaping the Trump administration’s approach to islands, positioning them as central instruments in the reconfiguration of American influence.

Modern patterns of armed conflict are shifting from time-limited operations reliant on advanced, low-volume technologies to protracted confrontations driven by industrial attrition and the large-scale deployment of autonomous systems. This transition exposes critical deficiencies in the traditional defence industrial base's production capacity. As munitions stockpiles decline amid ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, military assessments increasingly identify manufacturing capability, supply chain resilience, and the speed of industrial mobilisation as decisive factors in strategic competition, alongside technological innovation.   In response to these dynamics, national security institutions are moving to reactivate historically grounded models that integrate the commercial manufacturing sector into military production. This approach was notably deployed during the Second World War, when Ford Motor Company redirected its civilian production lines to manufacture bombers, Chrysler Corporation established dedicated facilities for tank production, and General Motors allocated its industrial capacity to the production of aircraft engines and munitions.   The current operational environment demands a sustained supply of conventional mechanical platforms and expendable systems, including unmanned aerial vehicles and sensor-equipped tactical vehicles. As battlefield requirements increasingly outpace the production capacity of defence manufacturers, the automotive sector emerges as a uniquely positioned industrial base, combining large-scale output with advanced mechanical engineering capabilities. This reality necessitates a focused assessment of the structural and technical attributes that make it the most viable sector for rapid conversion to support military production.

For more than five decades, the petrodollar system has served as one of the central structural pillars of American financial supremacy. Since its establishment in the 1970s, the system has anchored the United States’ monetary power by ensuring that Gulf oil exports remain overwhelmingly denominated in United States dollars. Under this arrangement, Gulf producing nations receive American security guarantees in exchange for recycling their oil revenues into US Treasury securities and dollar-denominated financial markets—a self-reinforcing cycle that has entrenched the dollar’s status as the world’s foremost reserve currency and systematically reduced American sovereign borrowing costs for decades.   The United Arab Emirates has, historically, been among the most faithful participants in this arrangement. Its national currency, the dirham, remains pegged to the USD, and its extensive sovereign wealth funds are invested predominantly in dollar-denominated assets. Nevertheless, a convergence of recent developments—an armed conflict in Iran, severe disruptions to Gulf oil exports, and an acute domestic dollar liquidity constraint—has placed the UAE at an unprecedented geopolitical and financial crossroads.

At the outset of 2026, the global natural gas market underwent a profound structural shift that eroded much of the stability built over years of rebalancing in the aftermath of the 2022 European energy crisis. Markets had been advancing towards a phase of relative supply abundance, underpinned by expanding liquefaction capacity in the United States (US) and large-scale Qatari projects. This trajectory was abruptly reversed on Feb. 28, 2026, when Operation Epic Fury triggered the most severe energy shock to confront the international system in decades. The US-Israel-Iran War and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, removed nearly one-fifth of global liquefied natural gas supply from circulation within days.   This paper analyses the structural transformations in the global natural gas market induced by the crisis, tracing supply and demand dynamics before and after the outbreak of the conflict. It further evaluates the implications for key actors within the international energy system, including countries most exposed to global gas market volatility, such as Egypt and Jordan.

On April 7, 2026, the United States (US) and Iran announced a temporary two-week ceasefire, following intensive diplomatic mediation led by Pakistan during a critical window of escalation. The conflict had erupted on Feb. 28, 2026, when the US and Israel launched coordinated military strikes targeting Iranian infrastructure. In response, Tehran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz to international commercial shipping, precipitating the most severe energy supply shock in modern market history.   The closure effectively paralysed approximately 20 million barrels per day that would ordinarily transit the Strait of Hormuz in peacetime, accounting for nearly a quarter of global seaborne oil trade. Under the terms of the ceasefire, Iran announced a conditional reopening of the strait, while the parties agreed to commence diplomatic talks in Islamabad on April 10. This analysis examines the full scope of the crisis and evaluates the prevailing oil price scenarios, drawing on lessons from comparable historical shocks to assess the fragility of the current environment and its potential trajectories.

President Donald Trump announced that the United States will impose a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz after weekend talks to end the Iran war collapsed without a settlement. The Islamabad negotiations, which were intended to turn a tenuous ceasefire into a durable peace and reopen Hormuz to safe navigation, broke down over unresolved disputes on nuclear enrichment, sanctions relief, and control of maritime transit. In response, Trump issued an executive order directing the US Navy to interdict any vessel attempting to transit the strait, with particular focus on neutral and commercial ships that have paid Iranian transit tolls, which the White House now characterises as an illegal extortion regime rather than a lawful fee regime.   Trump’s declaration instantly elevates the conflict from a regional shooting war to a global maritime and energy crisis centred on the world’s most critical oil chokepoint, a waterway just twenty‑one nautical miles across at its narrowest. By pledging to enforce a blockade without United Nations Security Council authorisation, the president has pushed the United States into a legally and operationally contested grey zone, framing the move as necessary to dismantle the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ grip over the strait and sever a key stream of cryptocurrency and foreign-exchange revenue to Tehran. The administration’s strategy now hinges on whether US naval power, layered secondary sanctions, and sustained diplomatic pressure can actually sustain a prolonged blockade in the face of Iranian asymmetric deterrence. The following analysis, therefore, centers on Trump’s blockade order itself: its operational viability, Iran’s capacity to erode or break it through asymmetric tactics, and the resulting shockwaves for global energy markets, commercial shipping patterns, and regional economic stability.

The landscape of modern air warfare has undergone a profound and structural transformation over the past decade. Air superiority is no longer the exclusive domain of those possessing the most expensive and technologically advanced platforms; rather, it has become accessible to actors capable of effectively leveraging scale and repetition against sophistication and complexity. This new equation has been clearly manifested in the widespread deployment of one-way attack drones, particularly the Iranian “Shahed” series, which has significantly altered established strategic calculations. In their early iterations, these drones operated on relatively simple logic: they were pre-programmed with target coordinates and then launched to navigate their trajectories using conventional satellite navigation systems such as the American GPS and its Russian counterpart, GLONASS. However, this reliance on such systems simultaneously made them the most exploitable vulnerability, as defenders rapidly developed electronic warfare capabilities, including jamming and spoofing tools, to disrupt their guidance and neutralise their missions.   However, this reality did not endure for long. As the intensity of conflicts involving these systems escalated, Iranian drones transitioned into a fundamentally different phase with the integration of communication modules operating via the commercial satellite network Iridium. This was not merely a technical upgrade but a calculated and direct response to GPS vulnerabilities, reflecting a strategic exploitation of civilian infrastructure for military purposes. While GPS satellites struggle to withstand ground-based jamming due to the weakness of their signals transmitted from altitudes exceeding 20,000 kilometres, Iridium satellites operate in low Earth orbit at altitudes of no more than 800 kilometres, emitting signals up to a thousand times stronger. These signals are further protected by layers of encryption that make spoofing or manipulation extremely difficult.   Shahed drones have thus evolved from inert projectiles following a fixed, unalterable path into connected platforms linked to their operators in real time, capable of receiving updates, changing course, sharing data with other airborne units, and even conducting precise strikes against moving targets such as ships at sea. This report therefore offers an in-depth technical and strategic examination of this transformation and its battlefield implications, beginning with the structure and operating logic of the Iridium network, moving through an analysis of the Shahed-131 platform and the integration of these communications into it, and culminating in an assessment of the operational impact this has had on some of the world’s most complex and densely layered air defence systems, namely Israel’s multi-layered architecture, which faced its most severe tests between 2024 and 2026.

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.

In light of the intensifying United States–Israel-Iran War, the prospect of a direct American ground operation has shifted from a remote contingency to a plausible escalation. As strikes expand beyond air and naval targets to critical infrastructure, the conflict is approaching a threshold that could fundamentally alter its trajectory, with risks extending from prolonged warfare to disruption of global energy flows and regional instability.   While Washington may aim for limited objectives through targeted ground incursions, such as seizing key assets like Kharg Island, such operations are unlikely to remain contained. President Trump has acknowledged that “we have a lot of options,” reflecting both strategic flexibility and uncertainty about the next phase.   Iranian leadership has responded in kind. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned that Iranian forces are “waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground,” signaling that any incursion would trigger immediate and sustained retaliation. In this context, a ground invasion would not be a controlled escalation, but a turning point with far-reaching military, regional, and global consequences.

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?

The U.S.-Israel-Iran War is well underway, and the risks of spillover and enlargement is becoming more of a reality as the war goes on. As the conflict continues to expand, several actors are seeking out opportunities to challenge the existing balance of power in the region and aim to exploit the war to expand their influence. In the past decade, Russia has been working to court the United States’ MENA allies into its sphere of influence through the concept of regime stability, while China is taking on a soft power approach through economic and diplomatic cooperation. A prolonged war between the U.S.-Israel and Iran can result in global powers such as Russia and China getting more involved in the region to diminish American influence globally, which can result in a great power competition. The potential of Iran serving as an arena for great power competition will be explored through the American strategic overstretch and the economic shock caused by energy crisis.