From Tehran, the smoke was visible across the city before dawn broke on 1 March 2026. Within hours, the world had a name for what was happening: Operation Epic Fury. Within a day, it had a death toll that included the man who had led the Islamic Republic for nearly four decades.
The United States and Israel launched multiple air strikes across Iran on Saturday 28 February, striking multiple targets and killing the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The strikes did not come without warning. For weeks, US naval and air assets had been massing in the region, and the diplomatic channel, brokered by Oman, had recently collapsed. The strikes followed the failure of indirect talks between the US and Iran in early February 2026, with divisions including Washington's demand that Iran end all nuclear enrichment activity.
The United States and Israel launched a major assault on Iran with the stated aim of toppling the regime in Tehran. President Donald Trump said that the operation would seek to eliminate Iran's nuclear and missile programmes, destroy the country's navy, and change its leadership. The stated legal basis was pointed: the US told the UN Security Council that the action was taken under Article 51 of the UN Charter, referring to self-defence until the council takes action, and argued that Iran had been in breach of several UN Security Council resolutions limiting its nuclear programme.
To understand why Washington and Jerusalem chose this moment, you have to look at what had already changed in the year prior. Israel's decimation of Hamas and Hezbollah leadership, coupled with the downfall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, considerably weakened Iran's axis of resistance in 2024. Then came June 2025, when Israel initiated Operation Rising Lion, a large-scale aerial assault targeting Iranian nuclear facilities and military sites, after which the US bombed the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, the Natanz Nuclear Facility, and the Isfahan nuclear technology centre. The Pentagon later assessed that those strikes set Iran's nuclear programme back by one to two years.
Beginning in late December 2025, massive nationwide anti-government protests erupted in Iran, driven largely by economic crisis, the collapse of the rial, and rising prices. The protests, which included calls for regime change, became the largest in scale since the 1979 revolution, spreading to over 100 cities across the country. The Iranian government responded with violent repression, including massacres of protesters, with the deadliest incidents occurring on 8 and 10 January 2026. That crackdown made a renewed confrontation between Iran and the West feel increasingly inevitable.
The nuclear question remained the declared casus belli. Before the February strikes, Trump's own envoy Steve Witkoff had told Fox News that Iran was "probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material." That assessment sat uncomfortably alongside official White House claims that the June 2025 strikes had already obliterated Iran's programme. Some eight months on, however, the International Atomic Energy Agency had been unable to resume inspections in Iran. The opacity cut both ways: it made a definitive assessment of the threat impossible, while also making it impossible for Tehran to credibly demonstrate restraint.
Critics of the operation have raised pointed questions that deserve serious consideration. The current escalation began after Omani mediators announced progress in Geneva negotiations, where Iran had reportedly agreed to zero uranium stockpiling and full verification by the IAEA. Oman's foreign minister said those active and serious negotiations had been "yet again undermined" by the strikes. The parallel with the 2003 invasion of Iraq is one analysts have not shied away from drawing: the comparison is difficult to ignore, yet what is happening now suggests something far more ambitious than coercive diplomacy.
The human cost on the ground is already severe. Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson told NPR that 158 students were killed at an elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, with some still under the rubble, and that hospitals in the centre of Tehran had also been hit. Iran blamed Israel for both strikes. Three US service members were killed and at least five seriously wounded in retaliatory Iranian strikes on the second day of the operation. In Israel, at least nine people were killed and others wounded in an Iranian missile attack near Jerusalem.
Iran's response has extended well beyond Israel and the United States. Tehran's retaliatory attacks targeted US assets in multiple Middle East countries, including Israel, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Oman. The Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical energy chokepoint, has become the central arena of economic leverage. Tanker traffic through the strait has dropped by approximately 70%, with over 150 ships anchoring outside it to avoid risks.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, about 20 million barrels of oil, worth roughly $500 billion in annual global energy trade, transited through the Strait of Hormuz each day in 2024. Some 84% of crude oil and condensate shipments through the strait were destined for Asian markets, and 83% of LNG volumes moving through the Strait of Hormuz were headed for Asian destinations. For Australia, whose trade ties and energy security are deeply interwoven with those of its Asian neighbours, this is not an abstract risk.
Oil prices surged, with Brent crude rising by up to 13% to $82 per barrel, amid fears of prolonged supply shortages that could push prices toward $100 per barrel. Oil prices surged on Monday following the attacks, as some analysts predict they could soon reach over $100 a barrel. Experts tell Wired that how the White House directs the conflict over the coming week, as well as Iran's and other oil producers' responses, will be key in determining just how high prices eventually climb. OPEC and its allies said on Sunday they would raise daily output by 206,000 barrels, a gesture analysts widely described as insufficient to offset the disruption.
"A prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a guaranteed global recession," said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group. That is not a fringe view. A sustained interruption affecting flows through the strait would represent a structural shock to global energy markets, with approximately 20 million barrels per day transiting the corridor, and under such conditions oil prices rising above $100 per barrel become increasingly plausible.
There are, however, grounds for cautious optimism about a worst-case scenario being avoided. Energy Aspects founder Amrita Sen told CNBC that she does not think a full closure is very likely. "The US and Israel would just take that out, very, very quickly. The US has way more superior military power to just neutralize any of Iran's abilities to do that," Sen said. Even so, should American soldiers continue to die, the administration will face significant pressure to strike Iran again, and an escalatory cycle can only end if cool heads prevail, with little evidence today that there are cool heads in either capital.
The strategic calculus is genuinely difficult to resolve. Those who support the operation argue that a nuclear-armed Iran would destabilise the Middle East for a generation, that diplomacy had repeatedly failed to constrain Tehran's enrichment programme, and that the window of military opportunity created by Iran's weakened proxies and domestic unrest may not recur. Analysts do not expect either Russia or China to provide significant defence or security support to Iran, echoing their responses to the June 2025 strikes. That limits Tehran's external backstop considerably.
Those opposed point to the absence of a clear post-conflict plan, the civilian toll already mounting inside Iran, and the risk that military force succeeds tactically while failing strategically. Historical precedent from Iraq and elsewhere shows that airpower alone cannot dismantle a large, dispersed nuclear programme. Israel's own National Security Advisor has acknowledged that only negotiations have dismantled nuclear programmes in the past, citing South Africa and Libya. There is no doubt, as Chatham House experts noted, that this is a critical moment that will reshape the region and profoundly affect Iran itself. The Iranian people will bear the greatest cost. For Tehran, this is not a short twelve-day war or a contained round of escalation that can be paused and reset. This new stage of conflict is existential and clearly about regime survival.
For Canberra, the implications are both strategic and economic. Australia has longstanding commitments under the AUKUS framework and its alliance with the United States, yet it also depends on stable Asian energy flows and open sea lanes for its own trade. A conflict that grinds on for weeks, keeps the Strait of Hormuz in effective shutdown, and draws in the Houthis from Yemen, as Council on Foreign Relations analysts warn remains possible, would push up fuel prices at the bowser and put pressure on an already stretched household budget. The government in Canberra has so far said little publicly. That silence will become harder to maintain.
What this moment demands is not triumphalism from one side or reflexive condemnation from the other. The evidence that Iran's nuclear programme posed a genuine threat is substantial. The evidence that the diplomatic path was not yet exhausted is also real. Reasonable people, looking at the same facts, can reach different conclusions about whether force was justified at this time. What no reasonable person can afford to ignore is the scale of what has been set in motion, and the urgency of finding a path back from the edge before the economic and human costs become irreversible.