Scenario analysis is not prediction. It is a structured method for mapping the range of plausible outcomes in a fast-moving crisis — identifying the key variables, the critical thresholds, and the actors most likely to determine which path a conflict takes. Applied rigorously, it guards against both false certainty and analytical paralysis. This article applies that method to the Iran war.
Strategic Context
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran, targeting the country’s nuclear infrastructure, ballistic missile program, and military command. The attack, initiated during the final stage of nuclear negotiations in Geneva, killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with numerous senior officials and has since expanded into a sustained campaign now entering its second month. At least 1,937 people have been killed and 24,800 injured, with strikes hitting military and civilian sites alike, tragically including a girls’ school in Minab that claimed over 170 lives, presumably due to outdated targeting data.
Iran’s response has followed a simple but devastating logic: if we burn, everyone burns. Tehran has launched waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and at US military bases across the Gulf. A drone struck the British airbase at Akrotiri, Cyprus. Hezbollah has reopened its northern front with Israel, drawing in Lebanon. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed hitting the global economy; with oil prices exceeding the 100 dollars per barrel, with approximately 2,000 vessels and 20,000 seafarers stranded in the strait.
Diplomatically, the picture is one of managed chaos and paralysis. Trump claims peace talks are going “extremely well,” while Tehran publicly denies any serious negotiations are underway. Foreign ministers from Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia met in Islamabad on March 29 to discuss de-escalation, but none of them are (for now) parties to the conflict, and none have the leverage to stop it. The diplomatic landscape, in short, is one of maximum noise and minimum agency.
With that chessboard in view, three scenarios present themselves.
Scenario Analysis
Frozen Escalation — The Status Quo Persists
“We’ve won this. This war has been won,” US President Donald Trump told reporters on March 24, claiming it for at least the twelfth time while simultaneously deploying more troops, requesting $200 billion in additional funding, and postponing strikes he had already announced. In the status quo scenario, this gap between declaration and reality becomes permanent.
The hypothesis is straightforward: Washington, spending over a billion dollars a day and facing congressional scepticism, decides the air campaign has achieved enough. The bombs continue falling at a reduced rate, there is no ground operation and no strikes on vital energy infrastructure. Iran continues at its current tempo — drone barrages, missile harassment, Hormuz disruption — which is also the maximum it can do. Neither side escalates, neither side halts hostilities as diplomacy continues, maybe via third-party mediation (the gathering in Islamabad being the most visible current example), seeking a mutually acceptable outcome that would allow the United States to claim victory while enabling the Islamic Republic to avoid the perception of defeat.
If this war grinds on without decisive result, ironically so, the intervention may go down in history as having prolonged the life of a dying regime. As Ilan Goldenberg, former US government official who spent years war-gaming this exact scenario, has argued, Khamenei’s natural death would likely have triggered a genuine internal reckoning. Instead, the regime made its most consequential succession decision under existential threat, handing hardliners the upper hand and consolidating power in the Supreme Leader’s own son: thirty years younger, deeply embedded in the IRGC, and radicalised by a war that killed members of his own family. Populations under foreign attack tend to set aside internal grievances and close ranks. Iran’s mass protests of early 2026 may not resume in a climate of nationalist emergency, the regime’s weakest domestic moment may have passed.
Moreover, if the United States withdraws, leaving Iran as the primary authority over the Strait of Hormuz, energy-starved European countries may quietly move toward bilateral deals with Tehran, effectively paying Iran for the oil the war was supposed to deny it. It would not be without precedent: after Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA, France, Germany and the UK created INSTEX precisely to preserve trade with Iran against American pressure. An inconclusive American exit could leave Iran not just politically consolidated, but materially stronger than it was on February 27.
Drift to Escalation — The Most Likely Path
This scenario is assessed as most probable because the structural conditions driving escalation are visible on both sides of the conflict, and because both principal actors display decision-making patterns that make de-escalation harder to sustain than escalation.
The Washington Institute has noted that the Trump administration “stumbled at the outset by failing to clearly communicate the need for and objectives of this war” with stated goals shifting from nuclear prevention, to regime change, to the Strait of Hormuz reopening, sometimes within the same week. Trump’s own posts capture the incoherence with unusual clarity: on April 1, he called Iran’s new leadership “much less radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors” — and in the same message announced he was “blasting Iran into oblivion, back to the Stone Ages.” Without a clear and achievable objective American decision-making is unpredictable and therefore dangerous and prone to escalate.
Source: USA TODAY
On the Iranian side, unpredictability is structural rather than circumstantial. With senior leadership decimated, Iran has activated its “decentralised mosaic defence” — 31 provincial IRGC commands operating under pre-delegated authority, empowered to launch missiles and drones without waiting for Tehran. Designed explicitly to survive decapitation, the doctrine works. But dispersed command authority also means that local commanders can act without central political oversight which raises miscalculation risks, as when Iranian strikes on Oman were attributed to autonomous units unreachable by central command.
The facts on the ground reflect this logic of double unpredictability. The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations, and USS Tripoli with her 2,200-strong Marine Expeditionary Unit is moving into the region from Diego Garcia. Escalation is not just rhetoric, it is arriving.
As it does, Iran will strike deeper into GCC territory — creating a self-reinforcing loop in which Gulf states, absorbing strikes they did not invite, pressure Washington to go further and actually eliminate Iran as a long-term threat. Their exposure gives them a powerful incentive to push for escalation. That pressure, in turn, drives the conflict beyond what Washington might otherwise choose.
Yet, as Goldenberg has observed, escalation does not resolve the fundamental problem: Iran does not need to win — it needs only to survive. And if it does, this scenario converges with Scenario 1, a regime that has weathered the full weight of the US campaign,
Regime Change — Transformation or Collapse
This is the scenario the US and Israel have officially named as a war aim, and the one that history counsels the most scepticism about. For it to materialise, two conditions must hold simultaneously: the Islamic Republic’s internal cohesion must fracture, and an alternative political structure must be capable of filling the vacuum.
Neither condition currently obtains, the regime holds. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled former crown prince, has positioned himself as a transitional figure, but his association with American and Israeli patronage is more likely to undermine than enhance his legitimacy inside Iran.
The Kurdish minority represents the most organised potential internal challenge: armed, experienced, and with a long history of resistance. But even the Kurds, like most of Iran’s ethnic minorities, are unlikely to move decisively unless the regime is already visibly collapsing. They will wait to smell blood, to witness fracturing of the IRGC, such as defections, internal coups, command breakdown before committing to any action. This remains the most consequential variable, but there is no public evidence of that occurring.
There is, however, a third path worth naming: a Venezuela-style arrangement, in which someone from within the regime negotiates a transition that looks like regime change from the outside but leaves the deep state largely intact. It might satisfy Trump’s need for a domestic win; but not Israel’s, for whom a surviving Islamic Republic apparatus, however rebranded, would still represent a potential existential threat. As Goldenberg notes, Trump and Netanyahu are not fully aligned: for Netanyahu, even an outcome in which Iran is weakened while the United States becomes entangled in the region may be acceptable.
The scenario is not impossible. But the conditions for it are not visible today, and what would follow — genuine transition, fragmentation, civil war — is even less predictable than the conflict itself.
Source: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images via CFR
Conclusions: Foreseeable Consequences
What do these three scenarios tell us, taken together?
First, that regimes are not switched off like lights. The Islamic Republic is a system with deep roots — ideological, military, economic — and external pressure, as history repeatedly shows, is as likely to harden it as to crack it. Predicting the behaviour of states under existential threat is difficult enough; predicting non-rational actors is harder still, and both Washington and Tehran have shown streaks of irrationality in this conflict.
Second, that the security architecture of the Middle East is already changing, and not in ways the United States planned for. The Gulf states did not start this war, nobody asked their opinion, and they are absorbing some of its worst consequences, being squeezed between an unreliable American patron and an enraged Iranian neighbour, the GCC’s are quietly shopping for alternatives. The most striking signal came on March 28th, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky completed a tour of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan, signing ten-year defence agreements and offering to export Ukraine’s hard-won expertise in breaking naval blockades to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. Kyiv, in exchange, is seeking the high-end air defence missiles the Gulf states possess and Ukraine desperately needs against Russian ballistic missiles.
The geometry of this arrangement is worth pausing on. Iran allegedly benefitted from Russian targeting data against Gulf infrastructure; Ukraine is now selling the Gulf states the tools to defend against Iranian drones — the same drones Tehran originally supplied to Moscow. One conflict’s proxy war is another conflict’s main battlefield. This is what multipolar world war looks like in practice: overlapping wars, shifting alignments, and security relationships that would have seemed surreal five years ago.
Third, this war is exposing a structural fracture in the Atlantic alliance that will outlast the conflict itself. The United States launched Operation Epic Fury without consulting its European partners — Washington, in the words of the German government spokesman, “explicitly stated at the start of the war that European assistance was neither necessary nor desired.” Then, as the Strait of Hormuz closed, it demanded those same partners send warships to fix it. They refused: Spain closed its airspace, Italy refused landing rights at its Sicilian base, Starmer called it “not our war,” and Trump responded by telling allies to “go get your own oil.”
This is not a temporary disagreement over burden-sharing. It is the consequence of a pattern, from Gaza to Iran, in which the United States has asked Europe to underwrite military operations it was not consulted on and does not support. The damage is structural, and it will persist long after the bombs stop falling. Neil Renic, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, captured the mood on X: “Stop panicking about the markets and trust Trump’s plan for short term pain for medium term agony for long term catastrophe.”
None of the three scenarios ends cleanly. In each, the Middle East that emerges is more fractured, more militarised, and more volatile than the one that existed on February 27th.
Suggested Further Reading
- Byman, Daniel L. and Waxman, Matthew C., “The Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might” (2002). Faculty Books. 177. — Foundational study of why coercive strategies fail when regime survival is at stake. Directly applicable to Iran’s asymmetric resistance logic.
- Pape, Robert A. Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Cornell University Press, 1996. — The seminal argument that air campaigns rarely produce political compliance against high-resolve states. Essential background for all three scenarios.
- Operation Blind Fury. The Economist, March 21–27, 2026. — The issue’s cover package on the Iran war includes “The Revolutionary Guards Are Taking Over Iran” (online only) and “Who is in Charge?” on the IRGC’s consolidation of power after Khamenei’s death, and “Double Deadlock,” analysing Tehran’s blockade strategy and the difficulty of de-escalation from the US perspective. on Tehran’s blockade strategy and the US de-escalation dilemma. Essential for the arguments running through all three scenarios.
