Operation Epic Fury Is Producing the Opposite of Security: What the Record of Middle East Intervention Actually Shows

The word “imminent” is doing a lot of work in the justification for Operation Epic Fury. One month into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, a Carnegie Endowment analysis by senior fellow Sarah Yerkes offers the first systematic accounting of what that word has produced in practice. Her conclusion — that a conflict launched in the name of American security is generating the opposite — is stated plainly in the headline. But the argument behind it is denser than the summary suggests, and the historical record it draws on is longer and more damning than Yerkes has space to fully develop. This piece examines both.

What the Carnegie Analysis Actually Claims

It is worth being precise about Yerkes’s argument before interrogating it. She is not claiming that a negotiated settlement with Iran was achievable, or that the status quo ante was stable, or that the Trump administration’s concerns about Iranian capability were fabricated. Her argument is narrower and more empirical: that the chosen instrument — a decapitation-and-regime-change campaign without stated goals or a visible exit strategy — is producing three measurable harms to U.S. interests.

First: Gulf allies who did not initiate the conflict are absorbing disproportionate costs, straining partnerships the U.S. depends on for basing rights, intelligence sharing, and energy security. Second: killing Khamenei did not unlock Iranian liberalism — it handed the succession to his son Mojtaba, who is reportedly more entangled with IRGC hardliners than his father. Third: civilian casualties from U.S.-Israeli strikes are driving anti-American sentiment both in the region and, per polling, at home.

None of these claims require the reader to believe the war was unjust. They require only that the reader look at what is observable one month in and ask whether the outcomes match the stated goals.

The Alliance Tax: Gulf Partners Are Paying for a Fight They Didn’t Start

The geography of this conflict’s costs is striking. Bahrain’s desalination plant was hit by Iranian drones, cutting water supply to thirty villages. Qatar’s Ras Laffan — the largest LNG production complex on the planet, handling approximately 77 million tonnes per year — was struck. Oil and gas facilities in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE absorbed additional hits. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have all suffered more human casualties than the United States.

Meanwhile the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy — published before the war began — explicitly described the Middle East as a region where “America’s historic reason for focusing” would “recede,” framing it as “a place of partnership, friendship, and investment” rather than military commitment. Gulf leadership had taken that framing seriously and was investing in regional security mechanisms designed to reduce dependence on U.S. military guarantees. The war has reversed that progress and reinstituted, in Yerkes’s phrase, “a vicious and expensive dependency cycle both sides would prefer to exit.”

The European picture is no cleaner. Trump launched the strikes without consulting NATO allies, catching the continent off guard. When Iranian actions threatened the Strait of Hormuz — through which approximately 20% of global seaborne oil and LNG travels — Trump demanded allied warships to help keep it open. Multiple NATO members refused. Trump responded on Truth Social by calling non-compliant allies “COWARDS.” France and Germany prepared a defensive posture, but reluctantly. The UK authorized use of its bases but did not join the strikes. No NATO member proactively participated.

This is not the alliance posture of a nation that has conducted a strategically coherent operation.

The Succession Problem: When You Kill the Moderate, You Inherit the Hardliner

The most consequential single outcome of the strikes may be the leadership transition they triggered. Ali Khamenei, for all his hostility to the United States, had spent decades managing a balance between hardline IRGC factions and more pragmatic elements of Iranian governance. That balance — however dysfunctional — created space for negotiated agreements like the 2015 JCPOA.

His son Mojtaba Khamenei, who has now assumed effective authority, is by all available accounts more closely aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps than his father. Whether this translates into a harder negotiating posture, an accelerated weapons program, or something worse depends on internal Iranian dynamics that U.S. intelligence is now describing as increasingly opaque — because, as Trump acknowledged, U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed most of the Iranian leadership, making it difficult to identify who has the authority to make a deal and whether that authority is credible.

Yerkes draws the obvious parallel to the 2006 Palestinian elections, in which the Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda pushed for democratic elections in Gaza without preconditions. Hamas — a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — won. The parallel is instructive: external pressure for political transformation, applied without a realistic model of who fills the post-transition vacuum, reliably produces outcomes worse than the status quo it sought to replace. The International Crisis Group warned in January 2006 — before the election — that an unconditioned push for Palestinian elections risked exactly this outcome. The warning was ignored.

Seventy Years of the Same Mistake

The succession problem is not new. It is the structural pattern of American intervention in the Middle East, playing out again with different names.

In 1953, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh — a democratically elected leader whose nationalization of Iranian oil had antagonized British and American petroleum interests. The coup installed Mohammad Reza Shah, whose increasingly authoritarian rule generated the domestic conditions for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The revolution that produced the adversary the U.S. has been fighting for forty years was substantially a product of the intervention designed to secure American interests. Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men documents this chain in detail; Kenneth Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle traces how each subsequent American intervention in Iran compounded the antagonism the previous one had generated. The current war sits at the end of that chain.

Iraq in 2003 is the more proximate comparison. The parallels Yerkes draws — “ill-conceived military campaigns justified by faulty intelligence and with unclear aims” — hold structurally as well as rhetorically. The Coalition Provisional Authority’s decisions to de-Baathify the Iraqi civil service and disband the Iraqi army created a governance and security vacuum that RAND’s post-mortem (Occupying Iraq, 2009) identified as the direct cause of subsequent state collapse. ISIS did not emerge from nowhere; it emerged from the power vacuum that regime change without a governance plan had produced. James Fearon’s 2007 analysis in Foreign Affairs demonstrated that Iraq had met the formal criteria for civil war by mid-2006 — three years after “Mission Accomplished.”

Libya in 2011 adds a further data point. NATO airstrikes removed Muammar Gaddafi. What followed was militia proliferation, weapons pouring across North Africa to arm insurgencies from Mali to Syria, and by 2015, ISIS holding meaningful territory in a country that had been a stable, if repressive, state four years earlier. Jason Pack’s USIP analysis documents how quickly the post-Gaddafi vacuum became a regional destabilizer.

The structural logic is consistent across all four cases: removing a known-bad leader, without a credible plan for who governs next and how, tends to produce outcomes measurably worse than the status quo. This is not a partisan point. It is what the empirical record, examined across administrations of both parties, shows.

The Energy Blind Spot

Yerkes notes that Americans are “feeling the costs of the war at the gas pump” but characterizes the impact as “minimal so far.” This may be the analysis’s weakest sentence.

Ras Laffan is not a peripheral energy asset. It is the world’s largest LNG production complex, handling a significant share of global LNG supply to Europe and Asia. The strike on that facility, combined with an ongoing standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, is not a minor disruption. The EIA’s chokepoint analysis estimates that approximately 20% of global petroleum liquids and LNG passes through Hormuz. The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies has modeled Hormuz closure scenarios and their effects on European LNG spot prices; even partial closures produce significant price spikes in markets that are already structurally constrained post-Ukraine.

The “minimal” characterization reflects current pump prices. It does not model what a sustained Ras Laffan degradation or a protracted Hormuz standoff does to European energy markets over a three-to-six month horizon. If that escalation materializes, the American political coalition tolerating the war may thin considerably faster than current polling suggests.

The Fox News Paradox

A Fox News poll showing majority disapproval of a Republican president’s foreign policy is not a routine data point. Fox News’s audience skews toward the president’s base; a finding that more than half of those respondents believe the Iran policy has made America less safe suggests the political coalition supporting the war is significantly thinner than the rhetoric around it implies.

The broader polling is consistent: 58% disapproval of the strikes overall, 38% approval. These numbers matter for the war’s trajectory. A president who cannot sustain domestic political support for a conflict while simultaneously managing alliance friction and an intractable succession problem has very few paths to an outcome he can describe as a win.

The Exit Problem

Yerkes’s sharpest critique — the one the article circles but does not fully land — is the absence of stated goals. Wars without stated goals cannot produce victories by definition, because there is no condition that constitutes success. The Iraq war’s goal migrated from WMD elimination to regime change to democratization to counterterrorism over the course of twenty years; each goal replacement was evidence that the previous goal had failed.

Operation Epic Fury, as described, lacks even that shifting goalpost structure. The pretext was “imminent threats.” Imminent threats have been addressed — Khamenei is dead, much of the Iranian leadership with him. But the war continues. Against what objective? With what end state? Neither the Carnegie analysis nor any public statement from the administration offers a clear answer.

This matters because exit conditions and exit timing are determined by goal achievement. Without a goal, there is no achievement. Without an achievement, there is no exit. And every day the war continues without explicit goals, Yerkes argues, opposition — from allies, from adversaries, from the American public — grows.