For decades, the United States and Israel fought an undeclared war with Iran through proxies and covert operations, carefully avoiding direct confrontation. That has been gradually changing over the past few years, but the situation exploded on February 28, 2026, when the U.S. and Israel launched a joint surprise attack on Iran. The fighting has disrupted global energy markets, drawn in countries across the Middle East, and raised urgent questions about what Iran’s future might look like.
We’re here to answer your questions about the rapidly unfolding events on the ground, the background of the conflict, and what may come next.
How did we get here?
Iran has been at odds with Israel and the U.S. for the past 46 years, but until recently, the conflict between them remained indirect.
For decades, the fighting was conducted through proxy groups — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza — that attacked Israeli and American targets across the Middle East and beyond while serving as a buffer, keeping direct confrontation away from Iran itself.
That changed after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. The assault drew Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran-backed militias in Iraq into a widening conflict, each feeling pressure to stand alongside their allies in Gaza. However, most of these groups were designed for guerrilla warfare, meaning sustained campaigns of smaller attacks meant to exhaust the opposing side over time rather than large-scale, direct confrontation. Within about a year, most of these groups had been decimated.
As Iran’s buffer crumbled, it responded with something it had never done before: two direct missile and drone strikes on Israel. Then, in June 2025, the conflict escalated into all-out war when Israel launched a surprise attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, missile sites, senior military officials, and nuclear scientists. Israel said at the time that Iran had taken unprecedented steps toward weaponizing enriched uranium, putting it just weeks away from building a bomb.
After nearly two weeks of fighting, the U.S. joined the offensive, striking Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan with bunker-busting bombs dropped by B-2 bombers and Tomahawk missiles. A ceasefire followed shortly after, and Washington and Tehran began negotiations on a new nuclear deal. The talks quickly deadlocked. The U.S. demanded that Iran dismantle its domestic uranium enrichment capability, cut off its regional proxies, and scale back its ballistic missile program. Tehran refused to put any of those items on the table.
With diplomacy stalled, international sanctions on Iran tightened further, and its already battered economy deteriorated sharply. In December 2025, the country’s currency collapsed, setting off widespread anti-government protests. The government responded with a brutal crackdown; human rights organizations estimated that tens of thousands of protesters were killed, with many more wounded and arrested.
U.S. President Donald Trump warned that Washington would intervene if the crackdown continued, and began moving significant military assets to the region. International pressure mounted as well, with multiple countries introducing fresh sanctions in response to the violence. With the pressure rising, Iran returned to the negotiating table, but the two sides’ positions remained as far apart as ever. As the talks collapsed, the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, igniting the current conflict.
For more on the long history of tensions between Iran, Israel, and the U.S., check out our deep-dive here.
For more on the protests and the situation leading up to the war, check out our articles here and here.
Why did Israel and the U.S. decide to strike Iran?
Israeli and American officials cited two main justifications for launching the war: Iran’s ongoing efforts to expand its missile program, and the risk that its nuclear facilities would soon move beyond the reach of any military strike.
In a video published shortly after the strikes began, Trump cited decades of Iranian hostility toward the U.S., including attacks by Iran and its proxies against Americans since 1979. “It’s been mass terror, and we’re not going to put up with it any longer,” Trump said.
He added that Iran was trying to rebuild their nuclear program and develop long-range missiles that could threaten Europe and even America.
In an interview near the beginning of the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the urgency of acting before Iran’s capabilities became untouchable. He noted that Iran was building new military sites, including underground bunkers that would have made their ballistic missile and nuclear programs “immune within months.”
“If no action was taken now, no action could be taken in the future,” Netanyahu told Fox News. “And then they could target America. They could blackmail America. They could threaten us and threaten everyone in between. So, action had to be taken. And you needed a resolute president like Donald J. Trump to take that action.”
Did Iran pose an “imminent threat” to the U.S. or not?
The debate over whether Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. has divided experts, and even figures within the Trump administration itself.
The controversy was sparked early in the war by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told reporters on March 3 that the imminent threat the U.S. was responding to was the fact that “if Iran was attacked — and we believe they would be attacked — that they would immediately come after us.”
Many interpreted this as an admission that Israel had effectively dragged the U.S. into the conflict. However, Rubio rejected that reading, arguing the strikes would have been necessary within the next year and a half regardless, because that was when Iran would “cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage.”
On the nuclear threat specifically, some administration officials cited concerns that Iran was rebuilding its nuclear program.
However, in her prepared written testimony to a March 19 House Intelligence Committee hearing, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard appeared to contradict these concerns, stating that since the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, “there has been no efforts…to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.”
When asked whether the intelligence showed Iran had posed an imminent threat, Gabbard declined to answer directly, saying only that “the only person who can determine what is and is not a threat is the president.” This response drew criticism from some national security analysts, who argued that assessing threats was precisely the intelligence community’s job, not the president’s.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe offered a different framing, arguing that the imminent threat was demonstrated by Iran-backed attacks on Americans over the past several decades, which he pointed to as proof that “Iran has been a constant threat to the United States for an extended period of time.” Critics argued in turn that those attacks had mostly occurred in the Middle East, not on American soil, and had been carried out by Iranian proxies rather than Iran itself.
On March 17, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Trump, resigned, stating that Iran did not pose an imminent threat and accusing Trump of launching the war due to “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Kent’s resignation drew both attention and scrutiny. He has a history of promoting conspiracy theories, including claims about intelligence officials’ roles in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In his resignation letter, he also drew an analogy between the current war and the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003, accusing Israel of forcing the U.S. into both conflicts.
Beyond the political debate, there are genuine legal and strategic questions about what “imminent” actually means. Is a threat imminent if it is a year or two away? What if waiting to act would make any future military response significantly more dangerous or even impossible?
The answers to those questions are heavily debated.
Stanford law professor Allen S. Weiner argued that the bar set by international law is clear: “The notion that Iran presents a general security threat to U.S. interests does not constitute a threat of imminent attack. Nor does the possibility that Iran might at some point in the future acquire either nuclear weapons or intercontinental missiles capable of reaching the U.S. homeland amount to a threat of an imminent attack.”
Scott R. Anderson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s National Security Law Program, said that the situation is a little more complex. He noted that while much of the international community requires a specific threshold for imminence, the U.S. has long maintained a broader definition of the right to self-defense, one that takes into account the full scope of the threat posed by an adversary, not just the immediacy of a specific attack. He added, however, that the current application of this principle is taking the concept to its limits.
Geoffrey Corn of Texas Tech Law and Orde Kittrie of Arizona State Law argued that the current war was in line with the laws of war because it is simply a continuation of an “ongoing and long-term conflict with Iran,” given a sustained pattern of Iranian and Iranian-proxy attacks on American and Israeli targets. These included both drone and missile attacks on American personnel and ships in the Middle East, as well as plots to assassinate U.S. officials such as Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Iranian American activist Masih Alinejad.
In light of these repeated attacks over an extended period, Corn and Kittrie posited that the U.S. right of self-defense “continues until Iran’s willingness or capacity to continue such aggression ends,” and that it is “legally valid for the U.S. to target enemy military sites when and where such strikes are most likely to accomplish objectives and produce maximum advantage.”
In terms of the nuclear threat in particular, Dr. Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), and Tirza Shorr, senior researcher and program coordinator at the JCFA, rejected the argument that the strikes were unjustified because it would still take time until Iran could assemble a nuclear weapon.
“Once Iran reaches the assembly threshold, there is no reliable way to verify it has not already crossed it. The window for preventive action closes permanently the moment a hostile regime achieves a deliverable nuclear capability. This is precisely why the United States acted,” Diker and Shorr said.
What are the goals of the war?
Israel and the U.S. have presented different and potentially conflicting aims for the war.
In his first statement in the war, Trump said the war was mainly aimed at defending “the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” He added that the U.S. would destroy Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, as well as its navy and its support for proxies across the region.
The president stated as well that the war would create the conditions that would allow the Iranian people to “take over” the governance of their country. “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass,” he said.
Israel’s stated goals have been similar to this initial list presented by Trump.
Netanyahu has said that the main goals of the war are destroying Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, ending its ability to support proxies in the region, and creating the conditions for the Iranian people to bring down the regime.
However, as the war has continued, U.S. officials have presented shifting and at times contradictory goals for the war.
On March 2, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told reporters that “this is not a so-called regime-change war,” and emphasized that “Our ambitions are not utopian; they are realistic, scoped to our interests and the defense of our people and our allies.” He added that the U.S. was not attempting “nation-building” or “democracy-building.”
However, Hegseth also addressed the Iranian people, urging them to “take advantage of this incredible opportunity” and for Iranian security forces to side with protesters.
On March 5, Secretary of State Rubio reportedly told Arab foreign ministers that the U.S. wasn’t seeking regime change, but did want to see different people in power in Iran.
On March 6, Trump appeared to imply that regime change was a goal of the war, stressing that there would be no ceasefire until an “unconditional surrender” by Iran, followed by “the selection of a great and acceptable leader(s).”
Director of National Intelligence Gabbard told the House Intelligence Committee on March 19 that “the objectives that have been laid out by the president are different from those that have been laid out by the Israeli government.”
She clarified that while Israel has been focused on “disabling the Iranian leadership,” the U.S. was focused on destroying Iran’s missile capabilities and navy.
On March 20, Trump listed the objectives of the war as “completely degrading” Iran’s missile program, destroying Iran’s defense industry, “eliminating” the country’s navy and air force, preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and protecting American allies in the region. The list made no mention of replacing the current regime in Iran or even of supporting protesters trying to overthrow the regime.
In the fourth week of the war, Trump stated that the U.S. had begun negotiations with Iran concerning a possible agreement to end the war. He mentioned several conditions for such an agreement, including banning Iran from enriching uranium domestically, the removal of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and possibly concessions concerning Iran’s ballistic missile program.
What is the IRGC, and why does it matter?
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is the main base of power in Iran outside of the Supreme Leader. It was formed in 1979 by the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini, as a counterweight to the existing army.
The IRGC was tasked with protecting the revolution from internal unrest and spreading its ideals around the world, including by supervising, training, and arming proxy groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. The Basij is the IRGC’s main force for internal security and has led brutal crackdowns on protesters.
Since its establishment, the IRGC has gained power over much of Iran’s political and economic system. Many politicians are former IRGC officers, and IRGC-owned companies control much of Iran’s infrastructure, banking, shipping, and manufacturing. Some estimates say it controls over half of the entire country’s economic output. The IRGC even intervenes in the operations of other Iranian companies, including through the use of threats, to prevent competition and control the market.
The IRGC is also structured specifically to survive an external attack. Over the past few decades, it has operated under a doctrine its commanders call “mosaic defense.” This system is deliberately decentralized. Each of Iran’s 31 provinces has its own semi-autonomous IRGC command, with its own weapons stockpiles, intelligence capabilities, and pre-delegated authority to launch strikes if communications with the central leadership are severed.
In terms of the current war, that means removing a few leaders, even the Supreme Leader and important military commanders, isn’t enough to completely destabilize the IRGC and the regime as a whole. They’ve been preparing for a situation just like this. While this system creates some difficulties, including an inability to precisely coordinate between the different parts of the IRGC in a crisis, it ensures the system can maintain control and makes any effort to dislodge it much more difficult.
Who is leading Iran now?
Officially, Iran is currently being led by Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the former Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. However, the truth of the matter is a little more complicated.
Khamenei was injured in an airstrike at the start of the war, and his condition isn’t clear. He hasn’t been seen in public since the war began, and several reports have indicated that he is isolated and unresponsive. Written statements have been issued in his name, but it remains unclear if he actually wrote them.
In addition, Iran’s system of government is relatively complex, blending democratic institutions with theocratic rule. Power is shared among a large collection of overlapping institutions, though the Supreme Leader effectively has veto power over most of them. (For a deeper dive into how Iran’s government works and the various options for who could run the country after the war, check out our explainer here.)
With the Supreme Leader incapacitated, the other branches of government are taking the reins, with the IRGC reportedly holding the most power at the moment. Mojtaba Khamenei is seen as heavily reliant on the IRGC’s support. The military group reportedly pressured the body responsible for selecting a new Supreme Leader to pick him, overriding opposition from powerful rivals. This means that even if he were actively in charge, the IRGC would still have an outsized say in the country’s governance.
Another central figure who has emerged as other leaders were eliminated is Iran’s Speaker of Parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf. He is reportedly managing much of the war effort, and has strong ties with both the IRGC and the other branches of government. Ghalibaf served as a commander in the IRGC and as the mayor of Tehran. He also ran for president four times but failed to gain enough support every time.
After Trump claimed that the U.S. and Iran were starting negotiations to try to end the war, Israeli media reported that the negotiations were happening through Ghalibaf. Politico also reported that the U.S. sees Ghalibaf as a leading candidate to rule Iran after the war. However, Iran has denied that any talks are taking place.
While Ghalibaf is seen as relatively pragmatic by some experts, he has presented hardline positions in his public statements and is aligned with hardliners in the Iranian establishment. Even if he is willing to accept concessions to the U.S., it is unclear whether the rest of the country’s leadership would allow him to sign such an agreement in the first place.
Other Iranian leaders, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, have largely been sidelined in recent weeks. Pezeshkian has been forced to walk back some of his more moderate statements, including an apology he issued for drone and missile strikes on Arab countries. It is unclear how much say, if any, other leaders in Iran have at the moment outside the IRGC.
Why haven’t protests resumed in Iran? Wasn’t the war supposed to bring down the regime?
Not exactly.
Regime change was never one of the goals of the war listed by American or Israeli officials. Instead, the goal was described as “creating the conditions” for the Iranian people to rise up against the regime. That’s an important difference, because it means regime change is a result expected only after the war. Why is this the case?
Firstly, Iran is currently a war zone. That’s why, at the beginning of the war, both Netanyahu and Trump urged the Iranian people to remain at home for the time being. In addition, regime forces still hold power in many cities, meaning protesting now would still be dangerous, as protesters would face violent crackdowns.
But the obstacles aren’t only logistical. External bombardment tends to generate nationalist sentiment even among people who oppose the regime. Many Iranians, even those deeply opposed to the Islamic Republic, are reluctant to be seen as siding with the foreign powers bombing their country. This dynamic played out during the June 2025 war as well, when anti-government protests also failed to materialize despite widespread public anger toward the regime.
The January crackdown has also left the protest movement structurally weakened. Tens of thousands of the most motivated protesters, the people most likely to organize and lead a new wave of demonstrations, were killed or arrested before the war even began. Any future protest movement would have to rebuild from a severely diminished base.
Many Iranians may also feel hesitant to go out and protest if they feel they don’t have some form of backing, either from the U.S. and Israel or from defected security forces in Iran. Trump’s comments concerning regime officials whom he considers potential partners, including officials tied to the violent crackdown in January, add to the complexity. If the U.S., which had itself promised to help the protesters, instead intends to keep some version of the regime in power, some Iranians may be asking themselves what good protesting will do.
There are also concerns about what comes after the regime. Without an agreed-upon leader or governing coalition to fill the vacuum, the regime’s fall could trigger chaos or civil war. The experiences of Syria and Libya over the past decade loom large here, especially considering Iran is a very large and diverse country.
Some Iranians do rally around Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah, as a transitional figure, and he has significant support among the diaspora. But there is no clear consensus around him inside Iran, and many Iranians may question the legitimacy of any leader visibly installed by foreign powers.
So does that mean the regime is safe?
The honest answer is that no one knows, and the uncertainty may outlast the war itself. Rarely do aerial campaigns like the current operations by the U.S. and Israel take down regimes on their own. If the U.S. and Israel don’t switch to ground operations that would forcibly dismantle the regime, the likelihood is that at the end of the war, it will still be standing.
But that doesn’t mean it’s out of the woods quite yet. During the June 2025 war, there were also no large-scale protests, but as the regime continued to fail to provide basic necessities and the Iranian economy collapsed, unrest eventually erupted anyway.
The summer months in Iran are brutally hot, and if energy and water supplies are as degraded as they were last year, or more so due to the current war, protests may erupt sooner rather than later. Whether those protests end the same way the last wave did, with a brutal crackdown that successfully suppresses them, depends on a few key factors.
The first is the state of the regime’s internal security forces, in particular the Basij. Throughout the war, Israel has been targeting Basij facilities, commanders, and officers, weakening these forces in an effort to lay the groundwork for Iranians to rise up once the moment is right. These forces will have a more difficult time suppressing protests than they did in January.
However, that still may not be enough. The protesters are largely unarmed, and that means they’ll have a difficult time facing down armed security forces. For them to succeed, they’ll need armed support. This could be done by providing weapons and training from outside Iran, but that process would take a long time and may harm the legitimacy of the protesters who receive such aid. The more effective option, and the one that has driven most successful internally-led regime changes in the past, would be a large-scale defection by Iranian security forces.
The IRGC, whose entire reason for existence is to protect the Islamic Republic, is an unlikely source of such a defection. But Iran also has a separate national army, the Artesh, which predates the revolution and has always occupied a secondary, sometimes resentful position relative to the IRGC. For that reason, the Artesh is seen by analysts as a more plausible candidate for defection if protests were to expand to a sufficient scale. That scale would need to be even larger than the January protests, with tens of millions of protesters taking to the streets across the country.
In short, it will take time, anywhere from a few months to even a year, to know where Iran is headed, even if the war ends with the regime still in power.
How are Iran’s regional proxies — Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shia militias in Iraq — responding?
Hezbollah and Iran-backed militias in Iraq joined the war shortly after it began. Hezbollah has launched volleys of rockets and drones at northern and central Israel. Militias in Iraq have targeted sites belonging to the U.S. and its allies across Iraq, including the U.S. embassy and oil fields.
Israel has responded with new ground operations against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, as well as with extensive airstrikes on Hezbollah targets across the rest of Lebanon. The Lebanese government has expressed outrage at the terrorist group’s decision to pull the country into the war and has taken actions against Iranian representatives in the country and Hezbollah, although these moves have been relatively limited for now. The Lebanese government is also reportedly attempting to launch direct negotiations with Israel to reach a new ceasefire and possibly even a lasting peace agreement.
In Iraq, the U.S. has responded with extensive airstrikes on targets belonging to Iran-backed militias. Several commanders of these militias have been eliminated since the war began.
Notably, the Houthis in Yemen have still not joined the conflict. During the war in Gaza, the Houthis conducted repeated attacks on Israel and on maritime vessels across the region. For now, they’ve held back from launching similar attacks. While it’s unclear exactly why they’re hesitant to join the conflict, possible reasons include concerns that any action on their part would encourage Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to join the war, as well as the possibility that they’re being reserved for a later stage of the conflict if it continues to escalate.
What is the Strait of Hormuz, and why is it so important?
The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. This passage is one of the most important trade routes in the world, with between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s oil and natural gas trade passing through the Strait.
The Strait of Hormuz is also a vital passageway for the global supply of fertilizer, with about one-third of global maritime trade in fertilizer passing through the Strait. A shortage of fertilizer could affect food supplies worldwide.
These factors and more mean that any disruptions to traffic through the Strait of Hormuz can have significant effects on the global economy.
Why is Iran striking other countries besides Israel and the U.S.?
Since the war began, Iran and its proxies have launched repeated drone and missile attacks against countries across the region beyond Israel, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Turkey, Cyprus, and Azerbaijan.
Iran has insisted it’s only targeting military sites used by the U.S. and oil sites in response to attacks on its own infrastructure. However, the attacks have targeted both civilian and military sites, including air bases, oil facilities, hotels, residential areas, and industrial zones. Even countries considered relatively friendly with Iran, such as Qatar and Oman, were struck.
Part of the reason for the strikes across the region was that Iran hoped that the targeted states would place pressure on the U.S. to stop the war due to fears of economic damage. The Gulf states had been working in recent years to strengthen ties with Iran in an effort to stabilize the region, and the war put these ties at risk.
However, Iran’s plan appears to have backfired. The states targeted have expressed outrage at Iran’s attacks and even threatened military action in response. Qatari forces downed two Iranian fighter jets that neared the country earlier in the war. Several Gulf states have even reportedly encouraged the U.S. and Israel to continue their strikes to ensure Iran can’t pose a similar threat in the future.
Originally Published Mar 25, 2026 01:57PM EDT
