Event Recap
The Washington Center for Yemeni Studies convened a webinar discussion examining Iran’s current trajectory and the broader regional consequences of the February 2026 war. The session brought together two leading experts on Iranian politics and Gulf security to assess how the conflict has reshaped the regional balance of power, what the Islamic Republic’s diplomatic posture reveals about its internal logic, and what risks international policymakers continue to underestimate. The discussion took place against the backdrop of partial ceasefire negotiations, a no-war-no-peace standoff between the US and Iran, and intensifying pressure on Gulf states caught between competing security demands.
Setting the Stage: From Fragile Deterrence to Open Conflict
Moderator Fatima Abo Alasrar opened the session by situating the discussion within the rapidly shifting diplomatic landscape. She noted that Abbas Araghchi’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg signaled that Tehran is not approaching negotiations from a position of weakness, but rather pursuing a deliberate sequencing: first, guarantees that fighting against Iran and Lebanon will not resume; second, arrangements around the Strait of Hormuz; and only then a return to the nuclear file. This framing, she argued, tells us something critical about how Iran and the IRGC are defining the conflict, pulling maritime pressure, Lebanon, and the question of mediation architecture into the same diplomatic space as the nuclear issue.
For Yemen, she noted, this raises important questions. The Houthis are not in the diplomatic foreground in the same way Iran is, but their role sits inside this wider regional environment, and their relationship to Iran’s regional posture matters for how we understand risk beyond a single theater.
The Collapse of the Old Balance of Terror
Professor Thomas Juneau offered a high-level assessment of how two months of war have fundamentally altered regional geopolitics. Before October 2023, he explained, the region operated under a fragile balance of terror: the US and Israel preferred to avoid direct confrontation with Iran because of Iran’s ability to retaliate through the Axis of Resistance, while Iran viewed an all-out conventional war as equally irrational. That balance held, he noted, because of perceptions, each side calculated that the other could inflict enough pain to make direct war not worth it.
October 2023 disrupted that calculus. The shock of the Hamas attack on the Israeli strategic psyche gradually produced a rejection of coexistence as a concept, leading Israel—with American support—to pursue total defeat as an objective toward Hamas, Hezbollah, and ultimately Iran. While that objective was not fully achieved, Israel and the US were able to inflict significantly more damage on Iran than Iran could inflict in return. Iranian missile and drone strikes reached their targets inside Israel at less than five percent effectiveness, while Israel achieved significant control of Iranian airspace and struck military, energy, and economic targets. By the time major protests erupted in Iran in December 2025 and were violently repressed, the old balance of terror had been severely damaged.
The February 2026 war, Juneau argued, has produced a new form of deterrence, but a different one. Iranian deterrence is no longer primarily premised on the Axis of Resistance, which has been weakened and failed to prevent direct attacks on Iran. Instead, Iran’s ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz—and the significant economic pain that entails—has become the primary mechanism of deterrence. Strikes on Gulf Arab states represent a secondary but real tool, and the Houthis’ potential ability to close Bab al-Mandab represents a third layer. Crucially, he noted, the Houthis did not close the Red Sea during the February war, though they have the physical capability to do so. The global economic consequences of both closures simultaneously would have been severe.
Iran’s Internal Logic: Continuity, Not Improvisation
Dr. Sarah Bazoobandi pushed back against narratives of a newly radicalized or fundamentally changed Iran, arguing that what we are witnessing is consistency, not transformation. She drew a direct parallel between the JCPOA negotiations under Zarif and Soleimani and the current posture under Araghchi: the Iranian side has always maintained a strict separation between the nuclear file and regional behavior, treating the two as distinct tracks. What has changed is not the strategy, but the context in which it is applied.
She argued that one of the most consequential errors Western policymakers have made, and continue to make, is the assumption that Iranian rhetoric is performative and that rational actors can be extracted from ideological commitments. “The Iranians genuinely mean what they say,” she stressed. When the Islamic Republic talks about resistance, it means resistance at every level of the state apparatus. The assumption that eliminating key figures—Soleimani, Khamenei—would produce capitulation fundamentally misunderstands how the system is built.
She described the IRGC’s relationship to the diplomatic track not as a binary between hardliners and moderates, but as an interdependent system: those in uniform need the diplomacy track for legitimacy and international engagement, while diplomats cannot function without the coercive backing of the IRGC. This has always been the case, she emphasized, and will not change regardless of who is in office.
The Blockade Question: Will Economic Pressure Shift Iranian Calculations?
The discussion turned to whether the current US blockade could alter the regime’s calculus. Bazoobandi was direct in her skepticism, noting that the Islamic Republic has spent decades building the infrastructure to evade exactly this kind of pressure, through networks in Iraq, Russia, and beyond, through oil mixing arrangements, and through alternative banking channels. She pointed to Syria, North Korea, and Russia as cases where blockades did not produce regime capitulation.
She drew a pointed contrast between the accountability pressures facing democratic governments, which must answer to voters fatigued by prolonged conflict, and the Islamic Republic, which faces no such constraint. “The hardest conditions are ahead of the Iranian people,” she said, “but the government will still find solutions.”
Juneau added an important nuance: while the Axis of Resistance has been downgraded in importance as a deterrence tool, it has not disappeared. Iran’s ability to smuggle weapons to the Houthis, even through heavy blockades, as it has done with Hamas in Gaza for decades, demonstrates a sophisticated state apparatus that should not be underestimated. He anticipated a continued cat-and-mouse dynamic between US measures and Iranian countermeasures.
Gulf States: Collateral Damage, Managed Hostility
On the position of Gulf Arab states, Juneau described them as caught in the middle of a war they did not choose and had little influence over. Their immediate task is damage limitation. Physical damage—including, he noted, estimates of 20 to 50 percent production disruption at Qatar’s Ras Lafan LNG facility—will be repaired at varying speeds. The longer-term damage is to their brand: the image of stability and reliability that has underpinned their economic diversification strategies.
Despite frustration with Washington for launching a war without sufficient consultation, the Gulf states have no alternative to the American security umbrella, he argued. The Islamic Republic is not going anywhere, and the memory of Iranian missiles landing on Gulf territory will persist. What he does expect is a gradual effort to reestablish a modus vivendi with a reconfigured post-war Iran, not reconciliation, but managed hostility and pragmatic coexistence, as Saudi Arabia had begun to pursue since 2022. Qatar and Oman, given their specific vulnerabilities and shared interests, are likely to take that logic further than others.
Bazoobandi added that the Iranian government has deliberately exposed the vulnerabilities of Gulf states, and Gulf capitals will respond by diversifying further, toward Europe, toward Asia, and toward informal parallel tracks with Iran, while maintaining their US alignment. She noted that political agility means different things in different capitals: Abu Dhabi moves faster than Riyadh, but all are ultimately constrained by geography.
What Policymakers Are Underestimating
Both speakers were asked to identify the risks they believe the international community is most likely to miss.
Bazoobandi returned to the core epistemological failure: Western capitals keep analyzing adversaries through a framework built for allies, assuming shared priorities, shared rationality, and shared vulnerability to economic pain. Understanding Iran requires sitting in Tehran and seeing the world through the Islamic Republic’s lens. So long as that fails to happen, she predicted this crisis will evolve into another frozen conflict, periodically flaring, never fully resolved, and sustained by Iran’s resilience and the West’s democratic impatience.
Juneau focused on a specific and underreported risk: the intensification of transnational repression by the Islamic Republic. Drawing on his ongoing research into how authoritarian governments target diaspora communities abroad, he argued that periods of enhanced regime vulnerability combined with increased diaspora mobilization consistently produce spikes in transnational repression. He noted anecdotal evidence already emerging from the Iranian-Canadian community, numbering around 300,000 people, of increased intimidation, defamation, and disinformation campaigns. He expressed confidence that similar patterns are unfolding in the United States, across Europe, and in Gulf countries. This, he said, is an underestimated risk that will intensify in 2026.
Conclusion
The session closed with a shared assessment that the region is entering a prolonged period of instability that does not fit neatly into either war or peace. A new form of deterrence is taking shape, anchored in the Strait of Hormuz rather than the Axis of Resistance, but its contours remain unclear. The international community’s focus on maritime security and nuclear sequencing risks obscuring deeper structural questions: the Iranian people’s compounding deprivation, the Gulf states’ damaged brand and eroding strategic positioning, and the growing reach of Iranian state repression into diaspora communities worldwide. For Yemen and the Red Sea in particular, the discussion underscored that Houthi behavior cannot be understood in isolation from the wider Iranian deterrence architecture—and that the same negotiating playbook applied to the IRGC is likely to produce the same shifting goalposts that has characterized engagement with non-state actors across the region.
Speakers
Dr. Sarah Bazoobandi
Visiting Scholar · Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington (AGSIW)
Dr. Bazoobandi is a Visiting Scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington and was previously a Marie Curie Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies. She is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at Regions University in London. Her research focuses on Iranian politics, political economy, and the internal dynamics of the Islamic Republic and how these shape its regional behavior.
Professor Thomas Juneau
Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs · University of Ottawa
Professor Juneau’s research focuses on Iran, Yemen, and the role of intelligence in national security and foreign policy. Before entering academia, he spent over a decade with Canada’s Department of National Defense as a policy analyst covering the Middle East. He is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Suncor Center for Strategic Studies.
Moderator: Fatima Abo Alasrar
Senior Policy Analyst · Washington Center for Yemeni Studies (WCYS)
Fatima Abo Alasrar is a Senior Policy Analyst at WCYS and Founder of TheIdeologyMachine.com. She previously served as a Senior Analyst at the Arabia Foundation, MENA Director for Cure Violence, and a Research Associate at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. She holds an MA in Public Administration from Harvard University and an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University.
