Background
The war between the United States and Iran that has convulsed the Gulf for nearly five months began on February 28, 2026, when the U.S. military launched Operation Epic Fury, a sweeping air and maritime campaign against Iranian command-and-control centers, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) headquarters, ballistic missile sites, naval vessels and submarines, anti-ship missile batteries, air defense installations and military airfields. The strikes followed months of deteriorating relations and were framed by Washington as a preventive move against Iran's nuclear and missile programs. Iran responded within days, and on March 4, 2026, declared the Strait of Hormuz "closed," a waterway through which roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade and a fifth of global liquefied natural gas shipments normally pass. Attacks on tankers and cargo vessels attempting to transit the strait sent Brent crude surging past $120 a barrel and rattled energy markets worldwide.
Diplomacy briefly appeared to gain traction. After months of on-and-off talks mediated by Qatar and Oman, President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding on June 17, 2026, intended to end the fighting and reopen the strait. The truce proved fragile. Iran's supreme leader succession was itself in turmoil — Ali Khamenei was killed in the February strikes, and his son Mojtaba Khamenei, named the new supreme leader, has still not appeared in public, reportedly due to injuries. By early July, cargo ships were again being struck in the strait, and both sides resumed hostilities. The U.S. carried out further rounds of strikes — at one point hitting roughly 140 targets in Iran over a matter of days — while Iran retaliated against Gulf states hosting American forces, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Jordan.
The conflict reached a grim new threshold on July 17-18, when Iranian ballistic missiles killed two U.S. service members at a Jordanian air base, with a third service member later confirmed dead in Iraq during the disposal of an unexploded Iranian drone, and a fourth service member still classified as missing as of this week. It was the first confirmed loss of American lives at the hands of Iranian forces since the war's outbreak, and it hardened the Trump administration's resolve to continue strikes even as members of Congress from both parties raised questions about the legal basis for a conflict that has never been explicitly authorized by lawmakers.
Key Developments
Overnight into July 20, the U.S. military carried out its ninth consecutive night of strikes against Iranian targets, part of a campaign U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) says is intended to further degrade Tehran's ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and to "swiftly punish" IRGC units responsible for the deaths of American troops in Jordan. Iran's military said it had targeted a U.S. ammunition depot at Camp al-Adiri and air-defense radars at the Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait, while the IRGC claimed to have delivered what it called "heavy blows" against American positions in Jordan and Kuwait.
The retaliation has spread across the Gulf's smaller states, which host U.S. military installations and have borne the brunt of Iran's response since the ceasefire collapsed this month. Kuwait's military said it had confronted Iranian attacks and reported damage to a second water-and-power facility, raising concern about the humanitarian toll of strikes on civilian infrastructure. Bahrain said it had thwarted an Iranian missile-and-drone barrage, while Jordan said its air defenses intercepted three of four incoming Iranian missiles. Regional reporting on July 19-20 also pointed to Iranian retaliatory strikes reaching into Syria, though accounts vary on the scope and target of that specific attack, and it could not be independently confirmed at the time of writing whether it represented a new front or an extension of strikes on transiting materiel; this discrepancy in reporting should be treated as unresolved pending further confirmation from CENTCOM or the Israeli military.
Oil markets have reacted sharply to the renewed fighting. Crude prices climbed roughly 12% over the past several days to around $86 a barrel, a significant jump though still well below the $120-plus peaks recorded in the war's opening weeks. Trump, who had floated a 20% "protection" toll on ships transiting the strait under U.S. naval escort, dropped that demand after fierce opposition from the global shipping industry; he has instead suggested Gulf states will "invest" in the United States as an alternative form of compensation for the security guarantees Washington is providing.
Reactions
The widening war has exposed fault lines both in Washington and at the United Nations. In the Senate, Democrats joined a small number of Republicans on July 14 to block, by a vote of 50-46, a procedural motion to advance the annual $1.15 trillion defense authorization bill, citing the unauthorized nature of the Iran campaign and objections to a proposed U.S.-Israel defense technology cooperation initiative embedded in the legislation. It marked a rare breach of the chamber's traditionally bipartisan handling of defense policy, though Majority Leader John Thune has preserved a path to bring the bill back for another vote.
At the UN Security Council, the divide has been just as stark. In March, the Council adopted Resolution 2817 condemning what it called Iran's "egregious attacks" on its neighbors as violence rapidly escalated. But Russia and China have since pushed back hard against further Western-led efforts to use the Council against Tehran, arguing that Resolution 2231 — the instrument underpinning the 2015 nuclear deal — expired in October 2025 and that the Council no longer has a mandate to take up Iran's nuclear file. Moscow has gone further, describing the U.S.-Israeli campaign itself as "another unprovoked act of armed aggression," while Beijing has called for an immediate ceasefire and a return to negotiations rather than new sanctions or resolutions.
Inside the United States, the human and economic costs are becoming a political liability for the administration heading into the midterm elections that will decide control of Congress. Rising gasoline prices and inflation fears, combined with the deaths of American service members, have given Trump's Republican critics — a minority, but a vocal one — an opening to argue that a war launched without congressional authorization has spiraled beyond its original scope. The administration counters that continued strikes are necessary to protect Gulf allies and restore freedom of navigation through Hormuz.
What's Next
Diplomatic channels have not entirely closed. Qatar and Oman, which brokered the June memorandum of understanding, are continuing to press both Washington and Tehran to return to the negotiating table, and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have led prior rounds of indirect talks in Doha. But with Iran's new supreme leader still not publicly visible and Tehran's foreign ministry vowing to defend the country's sovereignty over the strait "by any means necessary," a durable ceasefire appears elusive in the near term.
For the Gulf states caught in the crossfire — none of which are formal parties to the U.S.-Iran conflict — the coming days will test how much damage to civilian infrastructure and how many near-misses with missiles and drones their populations are willing to tolerate before demanding a faster diplomatic resolution from Washington. Energy markets, meanwhile, remain on edge: any signal that the strait could be closed again for an extended period would likely send oil prices back toward their earlier highs, with knock-on effects for global inflation just as central banks had been hoping price pressures would ease. In Washington, the fight over the defense bill and the legal authority for continued strikes is likely to resurface as Congress returns from recess, setting up a domestic political battle over the war that runs in parallel with the fighting itself.
