In a recent essay published in Foreign Affairs, the two Iranian-American scholars Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr offer a portrait that is, in its own way, “heroic”: an Islamic Republic that, despite the war, has not been broken but has reinvented itself, emerging as a nationalist-technocratic state, generationally renewed in its leadership, cohesive at home and stronger in the region. Yet their central thesis — that the war has shifted the balance of power in Tehran’s favor — conflates two very different things: the survival of a regime and the future of a country.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has certainly survived — so far — the decapitation of its leadership. It has not collapsed, and on this the authors are right, contrary to those in the current American administration who forecast an imminent breakdown. But to go from there to speaking of a rosy future and of an Iran destined to exercise a new regional leadership is a leap of faith that deserves to be dismantled, point by point.

A lever that strangles the one who wields it

The pivot of Iran’s supposed ascent is its control of the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran, the essay’s two authors write, would now possess a permanent economic lever and a deterrent against future attacks. And yet the same essay describes an industry reduced to rubble and the explicit renunciation of any reintegration into the Western financial system.

Things must be called by their name: a country that can interdict Hormuz but cannot export its own crude is not wielding a lever — it is threatening to blow itself up together with its adversaries. Closing the strait harms Iran as much as, if not more than, its opponents, because it deprives Tehran of the only revenue channel it has left, leaving time to work in others’ favor: the “de-Hormuzification” of the Gulf states’ exports is already under way, and in all likelihood irreversible.

There is, moreover, a point that the essay — viewing the region through Irano-centric eyes — leaves in the shadows. The threat over Hormuz is not a neutral geopolitical fact that Tehran has simply appropriated: it is a direct aggression against the Gulf economies, which live on free maritime transit. It is Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Manama, Muscat, Kuwait City, and Doha that pay the first bill of soaring energy prices, trade disruptions, sky-high insurance premiums and capital flight — a cost the authors dismiss as “collateral damage.” A “stronger” Iran on the strait inaugurates no multipolarity: it institutes permanent blackmail against the Arab producers. And a lever that rests on the threat of suffocating one’s neighbors is not a source of order, but of structural instability — the very reason the Gulf is accelerating alternative routes and capabilities.

The nationalism of the Pasdaran is no less revisionist than Khomeinist ideology

Bajoghli and Nasr present the generational turnover as “pragmatic” and “post-revolutionary,” as though the end of ideological romanticism made Tehran a more manageable actor. From the Gulf’s vantage point, the reading is the opposite. The Pasdaran remain an expansionist actor, and the “multifront doctrine” the authors celebrate — the simultaneous activation of Hezbollah, Iraqi militias and the Houthis — is precisely the instrument through which Iran projects power against Saudi, Emirati and Bahraini security.

The Houthis have for years struck Saudi and Emirati airports and oil facilities; the Iraqi militias threaten the peninsula’s northern flank; pro-Iranian networks remain an internal risk factor for Manama. The “strategic discipline” the essay speaks of does not make Tehran more benign: it makes it more efficient in pursuing the same agenda of regional hegemony. Replacing revolutionary rhetoric with nationalist rhetoric does not change the vector of the threat — if anything, it makes it more rational, more calibrated, and therefore more insidious for the Arab neighbors.

The crisis of confidence with Washington is real, but it is not a fatality

Here the authors grasp a genuine problem: the war has created a misalignment between regional interests and American interests in the security of the Gulf. But from this observation they draw the wrong conclusion, painting the GCC countries as passive spectators resigned to a new Iranian order. It is the essay’s most revealing omission.

The Gulf countries are not waiting idly. For years they have been pursuing processes of strategic autonomy: Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and the analogous diversification agendas of the Emirates and Qatar, echoed by Kuwait’s New Kuwait 2035, Bahrain’s Economic Vision 2030 and Oman’s Vision 2040; the peace movements across the region, such as the Abraham Accords, which have opened a framework of cooperation — including on defense and intelligence — with Israel; the strengthening of national armed forces and defense industries; substantial partnerships with India, South Korea and Europe. The very threat over Hormuz is accelerating investment in alternative routes — pipelines that bypass the strait, export capacity onto the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean — that over time erode Iran’s instrument of blackmail.

It is worth recalling, too, that several of these states have long championed dialogue rather than confrontation. Qatar and Kuwait have repeatedly lent their good offices to de-escalation and to keeping channels with Tehran open; even Bahrain, which more than any other has suffered Iranian interference in its internal affairs, has left the door ajar to a conditional normalization. Oman, in particular, has made mediation something close to a diplomatic vocation: Muscat hosted for years the back channels between Washington and Tehran, from the talks that prepared the 2015 nuclear deal to the most recent negotiating attempts, carving out the role of a discreet but indispensable bridge between Iran and its interlocutors. Jordan, for its part, has consistently supported a line of regional de-escalation. Yet Iran has never genuinely reciprocated that approach, treating mediation as a tactical pause rather than a path to accommodation. The persistence of Gulf diplomacy, and the persistence of Iranian intransigence, are two sides of the same record.

The correct response, then, is not to accept Tehran’s “new balance,” but to accelerate the construction of a GCC-centric security architecture — with European and Asian support where useful — that reduces unilateral dependence on Washington without thereby handing the Gulf over to either Tehran or Beijing.

Iran’s economy remains the Achilles’ heel

The essay celebrates control of Hormuz as a new economic lever, but says nothing of the underlying picture: financial isolation, capital flight, unemployment, devastated infrastructure. The “nationalist contract” the authors describe can hold only in wartime. Once the bombing ceases, the social grievances and ethnic fractures that run through the country — the Arabs of Khuzestan, the Kurds, the Baluchis — will resurface, and no flag-waving rhetoric will compress them for long. It is the authors themselves who admit that society “will return to its grievances once the threat recedes.”

The contrast with the Gulf is stark. The GCC capital cities command imposing sovereign reserves and economic transformation plans already in operation. A state that chooses to legitimize itself on competence rather than ideology consigns itself to the judgment of results: and the economic results awaiting post-war Iran are the premise of a new season of discontent, not of stability.

China is not the ally Tehran imagines

The authors present the rapprochement with Beijing as proof of a multipolar order in which Iran would be an “integral actor.” But the relationship must be read with realism. China has energy and commercial interests in the Gulf that do not at all coincide with Tehran’s: it imports decisive quantities of Saudi and Emirati crude, has invested in the peninsula’s ports and infrastructure, and needs above all a stable Gulf and open sea lanes.

An Iran that threatens Hormuz also threatens Chinese supplies. Beijing will therefore treat Tehran as it treats every sanctioned raw-materials supplier — with the firmness of one who has no competitors — without ever sacrificing for its sake the far more substantial relationships with the Arab states of the Gulf. To call “a new era of cooperation” what is in fact asymmetric dependence on a partner with divergent interests is not lucid analysis.

The lesson for Brussels and for the Gulf

The mistake to avoid is the mirror image of the one made by those who predicted collapse: taking Tehran’s self-representation at face value. The Iran of 2026 is neither the triumphant power of its own tale nor a colossus about to fall. It is a state that has traded the survival of the regime for the country’s future prosperity, and that is trying to turn an aggression against its neighbors into a fait accompli to be accepted.

For the European Union and for the Gulf partners, the response is not alarm, but strategic patience: consolidating the GCC’s security architecture, supporting the diversification of economies and energy routes, valuing the agency of the Arab states rather than reducing them to bit players, and keeping channels open with the Iranian oppositions (in Tehran and in the world) without offering the regime the only thing it truly needs — international legitimacy and economic relief. Time, in this game, is not working for the ayatollahs.