A deal was on the table. They bombed it

On the morning of 28th February, I woke to an emergency alert telling everyone in Qatar to stay indoors. Moments later came the sounds, blasts, intercepted drones, the unmistakable audio of a region entering war. I write from Doha, from inside a country that has spent years constructing the diplomatic infrastructure that made this region’s fragile stability possible. I am not a distant analyst watching these events through a screen. I woke up inside them.

As someone who has spent the better part of a year tracking this conflict’s slow, deliberate approach; Trump’s escalating threats, the collapsed negotiation windows, the mounting US military buildup in the Gulf, I was not shocked that war had arrived. What shocked me was when it came.

Just the day before, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al Busaidi had given a remarkable interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation, describing what diplomats had achieved after three rounds of indirect talks in Geneva as a historic breakthrough: Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling and zero accumulation of enriched nuclear material, with full verification. “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb,” Al Busaidi told CBS, “I think we have cracked that problem, a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before.” A deal, he was confident, was within reach. Technical talks were scheduled for Vienna the following week.

Less than 48 hours later, Israel and the United States launched Operation Epic Fury.

This is the central obscenity of this war. It was not launched in a vacuum of diplomacy. It was launched in spite of a diplomatic breakthrough that had taken months to construct. The negotiator’s optimism was still reverberating in the world’s newspapers when the bombs fell. Iran retaliated across the region,  striking US military bases, civilian hotels, airports, and LNG infrastructure across the Gulf, dragging the most stable and prosperous states in the Arab world into a war they did not choose, did not want, and were not consulted on.

READ: Iranian state TV says Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed in US-Israeli attacks

The admission that clarified everything

In the days following the strikes, something unusual happened: the architects of this war began telling the truth, inadvertently.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted to reporters on Capitol Hill that the United States had launched its attack knowing Israel was planning to strike Iran regardless, and that Washington feared Iran would retaliate against American forces. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio told reporters. “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.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded with a bluntness that matched the moment: Rubio had “admitted what we all knew, the US has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian threat.”

The admission did not go unnoticed even within Trump’s own coalition. JD Vance, who in 2024 declared that war with Iran “would be a huge distraction of resources and massively expensive to our country”, was reportedly sidelined after intensely questioning senior officials in the days before the strikes, eventually reduced to watching from the Situation Room while the decision was taken at Mar-a-Lago. Tulsi Gabbard, who once built her presidential platform on “no regime change wars,” sat beside him in silence. Trump launched the war without congressional authorisation.

What this sequence confirms, in its starkest form, is the argument that Mearsheimer and Walt made in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) nearly two decades ago: that

American foreign policy in the Middle East is systematically shaped by interests and lobbying infrastructure that prioritise Israeli strategic goals in ways that demonstrably contradict US national interest.

They concluded that when the lobby succeeds in shaping US policy, “Israel’s enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying.” What was a scholarly argument in 2007 is now, quite literally, on the public record. The US Secretary of State said it out loud.

The architecture of a broken promise

To understand what is happening, we have to be specific, not just structural, about what the US-Gulf security arrangement actually was, and what it was not.

The United States has maintained military bases across the Gulf for decades. The logic offered was mutual: American power projected into the region would deter aggression, preserve the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz, and provide a security umbrella under which Gulf economies could diversify and develop. In return, Gulf states provided basing rights, logistical support, and crucially, the political legitimacy of Arab hosts for an American regional presence that would otherwise carry the optics of pure occupation. The arrangement was also deeply financial: Gulf states have been among the largest purchasers of US military hardware, sovereign wealth fund investors in American markets, and holders of dollar-denominated reserves that underpin American monetary dominance.

This was not an alliance of equals. It was never designed to be. But it carried explicit and implicit commitments. The implicit commitment, never written but widely understood, was that the United States would not be the origin point of regional destabilisation. That it would not use its military presence in the Gulf as a launch platform for wars that served third-party interests at the expense of the states hosting that presence.

On 28th February, that commitment was violated in the most direct way imaginable. Iran’s declared response explicitly targeted US bases across the Gulf and civilian infrastructure in countries that had nothing to do with the decision to go to war. The US issued a “depart now” advisory to its own citizens across the region,  having just created the conditions that made departure necessary. Qatar, which I write from, has operated as one of the world’s most active conflict mediators precisely because it understood that in a volatile neighbourhood, credibility as a neutral diplomatic actor is both a moral commitment and a survival strategy. It brokered negotiations in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza. It provided the political infrastructure for multiple rounds of US-Iran talks. The reward for that investment in regional stability was to wake up to an emergency alert and the sound of drones overhead.

The deeper structure: Colonialism with new paperwork

The post-World War II liberal international order was premised on a foundational promise: that mutual interdependence, reinforced by international institutions, multilateral law, and collective security architecture, had made great-power war structurally irrational. Fukuyama’s triumphalism at the “end of history” was the ideological apex of this confidence. The United Nations was supposed to be its guardian.

That order is now visibly failing, and the Middle East is where it has been failing longest and most consequentially.

The United Nations has been unable to prevent this conflict, unable to enforce its own resolutions, and exposed once again as an institution whose peace-making capacity is entirely contingent on the political will of its permanent members.

This is not a malfunction; it is a design feature. What Frantz Fanon understood about the post-colonial order applies here with full force: the architecture of post-war institutions reorganised colonial power rather than dismantled it. In Fanon’s analysis, formal decolonisation changed the visible forms of domination without transforming its underlying logic. Direct territorial rule gave way to security agreements, military basing rights, financial institutions, and trade architectures, all of which structurally favoured Western hegemony while producing the language of mutual protection and shared sovereignty.

READ: Iraqi armed group warns European states against joining aggression against Iran

The US-Gulf security relationship is a near-perfect instantiation of this logic. The Gulf states were offered protection in exchange for access; access to military positioning, energy infrastructure, and the political legitimacy their hosting provided. This was not partnership. It was a more sophisticated form of the extractive relationship that colonial powers maintained with territories they nominally protected while actually managing for their own strategic and material benefit. The British in the Gulf understood this arrangement intimately, having maintained it for over a century before handing the primary role to Washington in the 1970s. What has changed is the paperwork. The underlying asymmetry has not.

What the events of February 28th have done is make that asymmetry undeniable. The protection racket has revealed itself as a racket.

Iran, Israel, and the ideology of permanent war

Iran’s response has compounded its own strategic isolation, and this must be stated plainly. Striking airports, civilian hotels, and LNG infrastructure across countries that had no role in the decision to go to war was not a military calculation, it was the logic of an existential crisis overriding strategic judgment. With Khamenei killed and the Islamic Republic fighting for its survival, there is a difference between understanding Iran’s actions and endorsing them. The civilian cost across the Gulf is real, and it falls on populations who are themselves victims of a war they never chose.

But we should be equally clear about what Israel has demonstrated throughout this process: it is a state that entered this war having already achieved its stated diplomatic objectives through negotiation, and struck anyway. Even members of the Israeli opposition have supported this war. The Israeli cabinet is unified in a way it rarely is on anything. This is not a government making a desperate calculation under existential threat. Iran represented no direct military threat to the continental United States,  a fact confirmed by multiple senior American officials before and during this conflict. What Iran represents is an ideological challenge to Israel’s political project in the region, and Israel has pursued this confrontation with the single-mindedness of a state that has conflated theological prophecy with political strategy.

The question that cannot be avoided, and that the people of this region are now asking with a clarity and anger that will have long diplomatic consequences, is this: where is the end goal? Diplomacy was available. A verifiable nuclear agreement, unreached even under Obama, was on the table. It was bombed. What, precisely, does this war want that could not have been taken through the agreement that was being offered?

READ: Iran says it attacked American oil tanker in Persian Gulf

What can come next

The political and strategic consequences of this war will outlast its military phase by decades.

The Gulf states cannot rebuild their security architecture on the previous terms. A protection arrangement that transforms into threat is not a security relationship, it is a dependency trap, and it has behaved exactly as dependency traps do when the interests of the dominant power diverge from those of the dependent one.

The current form of international law and the institutions meant to uphold it have failed to protect the countries of this region. That is not a temporary failure. It is structural, and must be addressed structurally. A new regional security order, one premised on genuine reciprocity rather than its performance, built through the GCC and multilateral frameworks that include non-Western anchors, is not merely desirable. It is now a necessity.

There is a principle in political analysis that war is a distraction. We should ask, with urgency, what this particular war is meant to distract from,domestically within a United States fracturing over its own direction, and globally in a world where the rules-based order has once again been demonstrated to protect only those with the power to enforce it.

I went to sleep on February 27th in a city that had spent years earning the right to call itself a diplomatic capital, a place where difficult conversations happened, where adversaries found mediators, where the world’s worst conflicts occasionally found a way forward. I woke to the sound of it all coming undone. The promises made in Geneva, the optimism of a mediator who had worked for months to construct a historic agreement, the lives of people across this region who had nothing to do with any of it, all of it was bombed in a single night because a smaller power decided war was preferable to the agreement it had already won, and a larger power lacked either the will or the independence to say no.

That is not a foreign policy failure. It is the system working exactly as it was designed to work, for exactly the people it was designed to serve. The question now is whether anything different can be built in its place, and whether those who have paid the highest price for this system’s contradictions will finally have the agency to build it.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.