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Experts warn US-Iran war launched on ‘false premises’ risks decades of instability with no clear endgame

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A panel of international affairs scholars has delivered a blunt assessment of the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, warning that the conflict was launched on “false premises,” has no discernible strategic objective, and risks drawing major powers into a broader confrontation that could reshape the global order for decades.

Speaking during a webinar hosted by Harici Media, titled “The Middle East at a Breaking Point: Escalation Scenarios and Future Outlooks,” three analysts — from Oman, the US, and Germany — painted a picture of a region engulfed by a war none of its inhabitants chose, waged by powers whose aims remain opaque even to close observers.

The panel was moderated by Hassan Ünal of Başkent University in Ankara, who also serves as director of the New World Research Center.

“The war has been decided between Tel Aviv and Washington and we are paying the price”

Abdullah Baaboud, a member of Waseda University’s Qatari Chair of Islamic Studies and a native of Oman, opened with a sharp indictment from the perspective of the Gulf Cooperation Council states. Speaking from Oman — one of Iran’s nearest neighbors — Baaboud said the war had been “decided illegally against a neighboring country” and launched under fabricated justifications.

“There are no strong excuses to enter into war,” Baaboud said. “The most powerful country in the world is conducting it with another powerful country in the Middle East. Both are nuclear powers, and they’re conducting it against a neighboring state under the false premises of nuclear arms or regime change or regional policy or missile technology.”

He noted that even the war’s architects appeared unable to articulate coherent objectives. “Even the people who created and entered into the war are not clear about their war objectives and the reasons for their war,” he said.

Baaboud revealed that Oman had been deeply involved in mediating between Washington and Tehran prior to the outbreak of hostilities — just as it had during last year’s so-called Twelve Days War. According to Baaboud, Oman’s foreign minister had indicated that Iran had agreed to virtually all US demands, going “way beyond” the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal. Tehran had accepted conditions on enrichment, stockpiling, and was prepared to discuss missile technology and regional policy. In return, Iran sought assurances that sanctions would be lifted and it would be permitted to trade freely with its neighbors.

“We were all very hopeful that this is going to avert a devastating war for the region,” Baaboud said. “And you all know what is going on now.”

He described a conflict in which not only military sites but civilian infrastructure, schools, and leadership figures had been struck. Iran, for its part, had retaliated against US bases, Israel, and Gulf states it suspected of hosting American forces. “We have become a victim of this war, not a war of our choice,” Baaboud said. Iran’s closure or attempted closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on oil installations had prompted some regional states to suspend exports, a development Baaboud warned would deliver a “huge impact on the world economy and the world energy needs.”

Looking ahead, he cast the conflict as an accelerant of the Gulf’s pivot toward Asia. “Their policies in the region are actually so perplexing for us that they are pushing us more towards Asia, towards China,” he said. The war, coming on the heels of what Baaboud described as “genocide and ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, had generated a profound crisis of confidence in the US as a strategic partner. “I think we are at a very serious inflection point where things are changing,” he warned. “It is madness, and we are paying a very high cost for this madness.”

“It’s not that difficult to manipulate President Trump”

Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, offered a forensic account of the policy failures that led to the current conflagration. He traced the conflict’s origins to the unraveling of the JCPOA, noting that even the Obama administration had undermined the deal’s spirit by imposing new sanctions while removing others.

“I think the approach of the Obama administration to the JCPOA was to treat it as if it was some type of corporate contract in which you could find loopholes,” Weinstein said. The first Trump administration then “destroyed that agreement” and assassinated Qasem Soleimani, steps that drew bipartisan applause in Washington even as they moved the US closer to open conflict.

Weinstein reserved particular scorn for the Washington policy establishment’s refusal to heed warnings. “If you were in the minority of voices that warned that this was creating the conditions for a potential war, you were sort of cast aside as being prone to hyperbole and being alarmist,” he said. Even weeks before the strikes began, the prevailing mood in Washington held that the Trump administration might conduct limited operations as a “coercive negotiating tactic” but would never embark on full-scale war. “Anyone who said otherwise was kind of deemed an alarmist. I mean, that’s just a fact.”

He was equally blunt about Iran’s miscalculations. The late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Weinstein said, had fatally misjudged the nature of the administration he was dealing with — one in which provocative social media posts could tip the balance from negotiation to invasion. “The late Supreme Leader was tweeting out AI images of US ships being sunk to the bottom of the sea and threatening to use Chinese weapons against US ships,” Weinstein recounted. “With a normal administration, that would be seen as domestic rhetoric and would be ignored. But with somebody like President Trump who quite literally spends a lot of time on Twitter, that has the power to shift his decision from maybe giving negotiations a little more time to invading the country.”

On Israel’s role, Weinstein was characteristically direct. “A lot of people give the Israelis a little too much credit. They claim that the Israelis have manipulated Trump or pushed Trump into embarking on this regime change war. It’s not that difficult to manipulate President Trump,” he said. “I think they’ve done it masterfully, but it’s not that difficult of a task.”

Weinstein dismantled the notion that the Trump administration was executing a sophisticated strategy. Conservative circles, he said, had convinced themselves that the successful abduction of Venezuelan President Maduro provided a blueprint for regime change in Iran. “The problem is that Iran is not Venezuela,” Weinstein said. “The Iranian regime has been preparing for this moment and the decapitation of the Supreme Leader for decades.” Unlike Syria, there was no organized opposition figure capable of uniting a critical mass of Iranians.

The Iranian diaspora, he argued, bore partial responsibility for Washington’s miscalculations. “Diasporas don’t necessarily give the best advice. They gave terrible advice on Iraq, they gave really incorrect advice on Afghanistan,” he said. The expected mass uprising had failed to materialize because there was no unifying leader and because the regime’s repressive apparatus — the Basij and the IRGC — had deployed immediately to suppress dissent.

Weinstein described the war’s supreme irony: a president who campaigned against nation-building was now inextricably engaged in it. “When you gratuitously bomb the capital of a large country like Iran and you bomb its government facilities, whether you like it or not, now you’re in the business of nation building,” he said. “We’ve created another generational crisis.”

The new supreme leader, he noted, was “as ideological as his father” but now carried “the added chip on his shoulder that his father, mother, wife, and one of his children were killed by the United States.” Day-to-day authority, meanwhile, had passed to the IRGC. “We’ve just made things a lot worse for ourselves,” Weinstein said.

He concluded with a bitter observation about squandered opportunity. Trump, he argued, had been uniquely positioned — as an iconoclastic second-term president with an obedient party — to negotiate a comprehensive deal with Iran, even to open a US embassy in Tehran. “Instead, he chose to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors, mistakes that he spent his entire political career criticizing.”

“The unipolar world is gone — it’s really gone”

The third panelist, a German analyst identified as Mr. Rahr, situated the Iran conflict within a sweeping geopolitical framework. He warned that the war carried the risk of a broader confrontation between nuclear powers, noting that direct or indirect clashes involving the US, Israel, China, or Russia were “at least conceivable.”

Rahr identified an unspoken US strategic objective: pushing China out of the Middle East and limiting its influence over Persian Gulf energy resources. He noted that China was closely observing the military situation, “particularly the strength and weakness of American air defense systems,” and suggested that Washington’s violation of international law in attacking Iran could influence Beijing’s strategic calculations regarding Taiwan.

On Europe, Rahr delivered a withering verdict. The continent, he said, was “simply too weak and disunited to create an autonomous pole in the multipolar world.” He identified a widening rift between northern European states — Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, the Baltics — focused on militarizing against Russia, and southern nations such as Spain, Italy, and Greece, which favored normalized relations with Moscow and were “more sympathetic to the Arab point of view.”

Europe’s strategy, such as it was, amounted to waiting for a change of administration in Washington. “The only strategy which I detect today in Europe is to wait until Trump maybe will be ousted by the Democrats, another president will be in power,” Rahr said. “But this is not a strategy.”

He argued that northern European states were supporting the US war against Iran as a transactional calculation: backing Trump in the Middle East in exchange for American support against Russia in Ukraine. Europe’s growing raw materials shortage, meanwhile, was driving deindustrialization while American energy and arms industries enjoyed “an unprecedented boom.”

Rahr’s personal forecast envisioned a tripolar world order: the US with a dependent Europe, China as the dominant partner in its relationship with Russia, and a volatile Middle East where “a coalition of Islamist forces could attempt to establish a new political order.” A long-term American-Israeli security architecture in the region, he warned, “would effectively mark a return to a new Cold War era” — one he judged unsustainable.

“We’ve lived through Pax Americana — and look at the result”

During the question-and-answer session, Baaboud traced the historical arc of Gulf security from British withdrawal to what he termed Pax Americana, cataloguing the crises that followed: the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, the invasion of Iraq, and the current conflict. He argued that the US was now positioning Israel as its regional security guarantor — a “Greater Israel” being “pushed down our throats” — after Iran and Saudi Arabia had both ceased to serve that function.

He also lamented Europe’s failure to build meaningful partnerships with the Middle East, noting that the Euro-Arab, Euro-Gulf, and Euro-Mediterranean dialogues had all collapsed. “We can’t talk about a particular European project that has been successful in this region,” Baaboud said, even as Europe remained “the most affected region by the development and the chaos in the Middle East.”

Weinstein, asked to assess how the war might end, offered a cautious and self-consciously uncertain projection. “If I had to make an educated guess, I would say that it ends in some sort of stalemate or negotiated settlement with an updated Iranian regime that is not any better on human rights or democracy but might be willing to make a few concessions to the Trump administration to stop the war,” he said. He dismissed the optimistic scenario of a democratic Iran emerging within five years as unrealistic given current conditions. “Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen in the next few years, including people in the US government, are lying,” he added.

He characterized the broader pattern as endemic to American foreign policy. “This is the US approach to the Middle East: to create seismic change and complete instability and have no idea how it’s going to end. And this is the US approach to the Middle East for the last 25 years. And we’re back at it again.”

Rahr closed the discussion by declaring the post-Cold War unipolar order defunct. “The unipolar world is gone. It’s really gone. And a new thing has to be created, probably a new Yalta,” he said. He expressed doubt that regional states would accept a Greater Israel but acknowledged the vacuum left by the war would need to be filled. “The Americans will return home after the war. The Chinese are economically intelligent. The Russians are out for the moment,” he said. “The vacuum will be filled by something which I don’t yet understand by whom, but it will be filled.”

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Anthropic uncovers Claude use by Iranian, Houthi, and Russian units

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11/09/2026

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Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has disclosed attempted “abuses” of its Claude AI model ranging from conventional weapons to biological research by state-linked entities, foreign intelligence services, and cybercrime networks, publishing the findings in a detailed threat intelligence report.

A significant portion of the report comprised the development of guided missile software by the Houthis in northern Yemen and the conversion of the model into a military reconnaissance tool by Iran-linked actors seeking to target US naval assets in the Middle East.

Covering the period between December 2025 and August 2026, the report shared details of activities detected across seven primary areas: cyberattacks, influence operations, mass surveillance, conventional weapons development, biological risks, and unauthorised model distillation.

The company announced that it had terminated all accounts violating its rules and shared the resulting data with relevant international counterparts.

According to findings by Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence unit, a weapons cell based in northern Yemen, where the Houthis operate, substituted human software engineers with the Claude Code system across three distinct missile development programmes.

These efforts comprised a tactical rocket equipped with a terminal guidance system powered by a commercial smartphone processor, a multi-stage ballistic missile with a target range exceeding 2,000 kilometres, and missile designs carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle.

The cell utilised the artificial intelligence to adapt open-source autopilot software to the smartphone processor, optimize flight control algorithms, and compile firmware.

Structuring their Claude accounts like a virtual engineering team, the Houthis assigned one account to write code, another to conduct research, and a third to review and audit the written code.

The report noted that the group conducted an actual test launch with a guided rocket in the Yemeni theatre.

Immediately following the failure of the live-fire test, the actors were documented returning to the Claude platform within hours to upload telemetry data and diagnose the cause of the malfunction.

The cell was observed successfully compiling offline simulation tools capable of operating independently even if access to Claude were severed.

Iran tracked US warships and personnel

Another military case detailed in the report involved attempts by Iran-linked cyber actors to target US naval forces in the Middle East.

These actors were found to have scraped open-source military data to draft operational targeting manuals directed against American warships and personnel.

Iran extracted name rosters of American military personnel from the captions of publicly accessible military photographs, monitored vessel and aircraft transponder data, authored code to scan commercial satellite imagery, and mapped vulnerabilities in maritime satellite communication terminals.

Other networks linked to the Tehran government were determined to have developed domestic and regional surveillance systems. A Qom-based unit produced a malicious web browser extension disguised as a prayer-time application to harvest credentials from social network users, funneling the data into a central case management system designated “Arman”.

Additionally, official Iranian institutions reportedly cloned authors’ voices using AI and operated multilingual disinformation networks to lay the groundwork for the supreme leadership succession.

Russia also used it for an autonomous kamikaze drone swarm

The report stated that an independent Russia-based software team developed fully autonomous kamikaze uncrewed aerial vehicle swarm software dubbed “DronDoc” or “Serafim”.

Affiliated with a university connected to the Russian Academy of Sciences, the team was said to have trained the artificial intelligence to distinguish between friendly and hostile elements using footage retrieved from the Ukrainian battlefield.

The developed system was designed with the capability to select targets, execute live human classification, and issue detonation commands without requiring human intervention, with simulations run directly against coordinates in the Donetsk region.

Meanwhile, the Russian-origin “Midnight Blizzard” group targeted the Ukrainian drone supply chain and staged attacks aimed at foreign officials and drone engineers by compromising hotel Wi-Fi networks.

A procurement manager stationed at a design bureau in Moscow was also discovered drafting plans via Claude to circumvent European sanctions. The individual was recorded assembling fraudulent tender and logistics correspondence to transport German-made magnetometers, space-grade photovoltaic sheets, and military aviation oxygen systems into Russia through intermediary firms based in China and Hong Kong.

Biological threats and pathogen engineering

The report disclosed five concrete cases regarding the deployment of artificial intelligence in hazardous biological research. Virologists attached to a military research institute were documented using AI for gain-of-function research aimed at enhancing the transmissibility and immune-evasion capabilities of the mosquito-borne Chikungunya virus.

Similarly, experimental designs were prepared to adapt the H5 avian influenza variant, which carries a 50% mortality rate in humans, to mammals and confer airborne transmission capabilities, while immune-evasion mechanisms of pathogens from the smallpox virus family were modelled.

The identities of paralytic neurotoxins subject to export control lists and haemorrhagic fever virus proteins featured on the World Health Organization’s priority epidemic list were deliberately masked and submitted to the AI for analysis.

In addition, a consultant working on behalf of the Malian State Intelligence Service designed a mass surveillance platform designated “Lakana 360” with the assistance of Claude.

The system was designed to monitor approximately 25 million SIM cards registered across three mobile operators in the country without requiring court orders, intercept audio recordings, and cross-reference records with biometric databases.

Separately, leading Chinese artificial intelligence firms including Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Xiaomi were alleged to have initiated hundreds of millions of unauthorised sessions to extract the logical reasoning chains of Claude models. Moonshot and DeepSeek platforms reportedly routed their own users’ queries secretly through Claude, in the process exposing Chinese police surveillance feeds from hundreds of cameras covering military facilities in Chengdu, internal credentials of Chinese state-owned enterprises, and live database access codes connected to the Russian Defence Ministry to third parties.

Türkiye detail in the report

The report also detailed cases involving the abuse of the Claude AI model, incorporating findings concerning an Istanbul-based technology firm.

In case GTG-84005 of the intelligence report, an operation aimed at commercial election manipulation targeting voters in Malaysia was intercepted.

According to the findings, the operation operated under the guise of a startup providing cyber intelligence and counter-disinformation tools. Anthropic determined that Istanbul-based BBS Bilisim Teknolojileri was behind the infrastructure.

According to documents, the company marketed the architecture as a paid influence operation service styled as a “military-grade, AI-powered, real-time political operations ecosystem”.

Managing roughly 1,000 synthetic X accounts, the system processed demographic and electoral data across 222 parliamentary constituencies in Malaysia, calibrating targeting around sensitive social fault lines including ethnicity, religion, and the monarchy.

The network also circulated content from Russian and Chinese state media masquerading as independent Malaysian news via an artificial media outlet designated “Malaysia Pulse”, while manufacturing fraudulent intelligence dossiers targeting an opposition politician and civil society organisations.

Anthropic reported that the network received a request to generate 1 million artificial impressions in support of the Malaysian Prime Minister and sought to secure a contract with the country’s national communications regulatory authority.

While no evidence emerged that the undertaking succeeded, the associated user accounts were closed and operational digital indicators were shared.

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EU pursues closer ties with Israel on space and air defence

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09/09/2026

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The EU is turning to Israel to bolster its new initiatives in high-tech air defence and space capabilities.

Shimrit Maman, head of the Israel Space Agency, travelled to Brussels this week and met on Tuesday with European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation Ekaterina Zaharieva to discuss key sectors, including artificial intelligence and robotics.

The visit took place ahead of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s first major speech on space, scheduled for Thursday at a summit in Paris.

In the speech, Von der Leyen is expected to warn against mounting hostilities and emphasise the necessity of strengthening Europe’s presence in space.

“It’s very hard to do everything by yourself,” Maman told Politico, adding that the militarization of space is “already happening, it’s just we are not aware of the extent,” and noting that allies are showing growing interest in “dual-use” technologies intended for both civilian and defence purposes:

“One thing we’re working on is early-warning systems. For example, during the last wave [of missile attacks] with Iran, we saw this very clearly. How we were getting the alerts to all the civilians in Israel, and that made the casualties so low. This is part of the system. We’re working on a very holistic view, where you can alert in advance, the system alerts the citizens.”

Following several years of effective disengagement caused by political tensions surrounding the invasion of Gaza, the EU has recently begun forging closer military and technological ties with Israel through a series of agreements.

Competition from Washington and strategic rivalry with Moscow and Beijing have nevertheless underlined the requirement for allies possessing sophisticated industrial capacity.

In 2024, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen backed calls by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to create an EU-funded air defence shield.

Three senior officials involved in the discussions said, however, that the plans stalled after officials in the Commission and several national capitals concluded that the project would require reliance on Israeli air defence technology, which was considered too sensitive one year into the Gaza conflict.

Yet Israel’s Rafael, which is expanding its European operations significantly, has now confirmed that it will open a factory to manufacture the Iron Dome air defence system at a former Volkswagen plant in Germany.

One week ago, Greece signed a 3 billion euro agreement with the Israel Ministry of Defense.

The deal provides for the establishment of a new multi-layered air defence network designed to shoot down drones, hostile jets, and rockets.

“We see everything integrating into this multi-layer defence approach,” Maman said, highlighting satellite imagery and artificial intelligence modelling as primary focal points for joint development efforts:

“I’m not only seeing defence as ballistic missiles from Iran… think about a fire, a flash flood or even a long drought… we have a proven track record, and we’re getting really good results.”

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UK reassures US that new Israeli settlement sanctions are symbolic

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08/09/2026

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The UK has reportedly engaged in behind-the-scenes talks to avoid a backlash from the US over anti-Israel sanctions scheduled for announcement today.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Andy Burnham’s government is expected to ban trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank today.

Burnham is seeking to pursue a firmer stance on an issue of high importance to the governing Labour Party, though one that risks angering US President Donald Trump.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband will unveil a new sanctions regime targeting Israel but limited to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Burnham and Trump spoke by telephone on Monday, the Prime Minister’s Office said. A statement noted that the two leaders discussed a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The discussion suggests that Burnham used the call to notify Trump that sanctions against Israel were imminent.

The proposals under review included a new sanctions regime with measures to block the exchange of goods and services with Israeli settlements.

Miliband also evaluated expanding existing human rights sanctions to encompass the blocking of aid, which has drawn criticism for exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

The Foreign Secretary further considered explicitly endorsing the International Court of Justice’s non-binding 2024 opinion that declared Israel’s occupation of territory currently recognised by the UK as the State of Palestine to be unlawful.

Even so, UK officials fear the announcement could cause an early setback in Burnham’s relationship with Trump.

To defuse a backlash from the Trump administration, British diplomats privately informed the US that the sanctions are largely symbolic and will have no tangible impact on the UK’s broader trade or security ties with Israel, according to sources familiar with the discussions.

The proposals were drawn up after Israel decided to issue tenders for the construction of 1,200 settlement housing units in an area of the West Bank.

Disputes between Israeli settlers and Palestinians have intensified in recent months as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a difficult battle to retain his seat in a general election scheduled for 27 October.

Burnham joined the leaders of Canada and five European governments, including France, Germany, and Italy, in signing a statement that condemned the housing plan as “unacceptable” and urged Netanyahu to withdraw the tender.

In a separate statement, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz condemned a call by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir for “nightly assassinations” in Gaza.

Burnham is eager to demonstrate early to the Labour Party that he is adopting a more critical approach toward Israel than his predecessor, Keir Starmer.

Although Starmer hardened his stance against Israel during his two years in office, including by formally recognising the State of Palestine, his initial refusal to demand that Netanyahu halt military operations in Gaza divided the party.

This division led to a decline in Labour’s poll ratings and boosted electoral gains for the Green Party across the country.

Burnham’s return to Parliament last month led to Starmer’s resignation. Burnham apologised for Labour’s handling of Israel’s military operation in Gaza under his predecessor, stating that the party “did not adopt the right stance”.

Last month, Burnham’s new Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, who faced intense competition from a Muslim independent candidate in his northeast London constituency at the last general election, stated that Israel had fallen “short” of international standards.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told the BBC’s “Newsday” programme that there would “undoubtedly” be a US response.

Accusing the Labour Party of “discriminating against the Israeli government”, Huckabee said: “It is like throwing a rock and not knowing where it lands. The UK is a sovereign country and can do as it pleases, but so is the US.”

Republican Florida Congressman Randy Fine also warned that British firms would be barred from doing business with local governments in the state if sanctions were imposed.

In a post on X, Fine said: “Florida has made its stance clear. Any company—or country—that boycotts Israel will be boycotted by Florida.”

Labour MPs and Jewish groups have warned the government that any sanctions against the settlements could amount to a “de facto boycott” of Israeli goods and compromise the safety of British Jews.

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