Jan 28, 2026
3 min read
The regime sees a new attack as an existential threat
There is an image that best describes the Middle East these days: a broken map moving in one place, moving everywhere.While Tehran openly talks about "all-out war," in northern Syria a violent crackdown rewrites the balance of power.In Gaza, the peace rules are still being discussed when peace is the thing that has been lost.In the Red Sea, the Houthis are threatening new attacks on land routes.And now the airship.American aviator Abraham Lincoln approaches Iran, like a shadow passing through the region.
The Middle East is entering a phase where the danger is not an isolated escalation but an accumulation of multiple fronts originating in different places and destined to merge into the same chaos.The possibility of a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran could be the main reason.Sending such a large naval force would restart the classic language of American power, in which every movement of the fleet becomes an armed political message.And this time, the weapons will target not only the nuclear field, but also strategic infrastructure and military and political leadership.
Tehran knows it perfectly well: today's attack will be perceived as an existential threat, a blow to the heart of the regime.And its regional networks - Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraqi and Syrian militias, the Houthis in Yemen - know this too, and although weakened, have already made clear that they will not stand idly by and watch.The map of related crises is expanding.The Hezbollah-Israel nexus is perhaps the most important.In recent weeks, leaders of the Lebanese Shiite movement have reiterated that any offensive against Iran would be interpreted as an immediate casus belli aimed at revitalizing the southern front against Israel.
Despite the ceasefire announced in 2024, the line of contact remains among the most unstable in the region: exchanges of fire, targeted raids and intensive surveillance activities have never stopped.Same scenario, different location: the Gaza Strip, the center of a seemingly endless crisis.The ceasefire imposed in October has provided neither security nor stability: Israeli bombing has resumed, Hamas has not given up its arsenal and the political terrain has changed.
The so-called “Peace Council,” the diplomatic body that Trump wanted and presented as a post-conflict solution, has become a symbol of this new disjointed order: an international body created outside of the United Nations — and perhaps in opposition to it — with broad reconstruction and security powers, funded by countries that bought seats, and lacking Palestinian representation in real decision-making.
While people are still dying in Gaza, diplomacy is discussing investment, infrastructure, tourist centers: reconstruction as a composition of destruction.As in the case of Syria: the recent offensive launched by the new president Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is highly respected in the West, changed the balance of power in the northeast: the Kurdish forces - for many years the fundamental partners of the international coalition against ISIS - were defeated and forced to individually reintegrate and accept the government army.A swift, brutal campaign, probably supported behind the scenes by Turkey, which always had an open account with the Kurds of the PKK.
This new structure in Syria, which remains formally “reunified,” nevertheless opens up two troubling fronts: the risk of sectarian reprisals against Kurdish communities, and the concrete ability of ISIS cells to exploit the chaos to reorganize beyond the borders of Syria and Iraq.On the southern side, Yemen confirms the multi-level nature of the conflict.The Houthis turned the Red Sea into a geopolitical weapon: ships The attacks put pressure on the energy corridor connecting Asia and Europe.But the real rift today is between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: two countries that for years functioned as a single bloc and are now moving in opposite directions.
The body of the last assassin, Rana Gwili, was found in Gaza.
Riyadh wants to avoid the fragmentation of the Yemeni state;Abu Dhabi seeks to consolidate control of southern militias and strategic maritime corridors.Quiet but potentially explosive competition for space.And in this volatile mosaic, a central question arises: an attack on Tehran will automatically ignite the rest of the fronts, expanding the conflict on a regional scale.The question today is not only what Washington and Tehran will do, but also the reaction of the many armed actors living under their strategic umbrellas.This automatic multiplication of consequences is what makes the system so fragile.
Gaza, Syria, Iran and Yemen are not separate crises, but part of the same unstable architecture.What is common is a complete lack of political strategy to see the next night.No one seems to have a reliable plan for what will happen after the first attack, after the first counterattack, after the next crack in the balance that has already been lost.This is the real risk today: not the war itself, but the lack of a plan to avoid it.
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