Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Around the globe, analysts are trying to process what Iran's crisis says about the changing geopolitics of the region. (Reuters: Toby Melville)
Based on the still scattered accounts emerging from Iran, much of the population is now hunkered down in terror, processing the shock and grief of an unprecedented crackdown by a brutal regime that has left thousands of people dead.
Around the globe, analysts are also trying to process what the events of the past week say about the changing geopolitics of the region.
The spectre of Israel joining with countries including Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Qatar, Oman and Egypt to press Donald Trump not to launch a military strike against a weakened Iran is something that would have seemed incomprehensible even a couple of years ago.
Has the killing of protesters stopped in Iran? (Norman Hermant)
Self-interest and risk assessment
For many countries in the Gulf, their embrace of the United States in the past half century has been heavily built on their fear of Iran and its proxies as the aggressor in the region.
When Israel launched a strike against Hamas negotiators in the suburbs of the Qatari capital of Doha late last year, it prompted a fundamental rethink for many of these countries about the shifting power balances — and where the threats to their security actually lay.
Sure, Israel had already degraded and diminished the power and threat posed by Iran in the region through its proxies — Hezbollah and Hamas.
But the Doha strike was direct and personal. It was now Israel that was seen as the aggressor rather than Iran.
It's worth having that context in mind when considering what we have witnessed this week.
The primary concern of those countries in the region that intervened against a US strike weren't doing so for the good of the Iranian people, and certainly not in support of a regime they loathe.
Self-interest drove the assessment that a strike would not topple the regime and replace it with something better.
Instead, the assessment was that the sorts of kinetic options available — once again striking Iran's nuclear installations, for example, or the facilities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — risked only creating chaos in Iran.
That potentially spelt instability across the region and disruption to oil markets.
Iranian people an afterthought
While Iran was threatening retaliation if there was a US strike, its diminished military capacity made that a much smaller threat than it once would have been.
The fact that such strikes were unlikely to actually aid the Iranian people was a bit of an afterthought.
Hopefully Trump's messages that "help was on its way" didn't filter through the internet blackout imposed in Tehran.
If it did, events would prove once again show people in the region that they could not rely on the US, as the Kurds found out in Iraq in 1991.
The people of Iran now find themselves in a sort of limbo: the regime appears intolerable but for now un-topple-able.
Long time Iran watchers say the anti-imperialist, anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment that underpinned earlier times in the Iranian Revolution have dissipated as generational change has left much of the population too young to remember the events of 1979.
But anti-American and Israeli rhetoric is still mouthed by the Khamenei regime. US and Israeli influences were being blamed this week for the massive protests that had exploded across the country.
What Israel does now about Iran will be crucial.
Achieving change will be difficult
The brutal crackdown on protesters which, by most accounts now, has left thousands dead, may have stymied the internal push for change.
The fact that the Trump administration was advised that a military strike could not be guaranteed of success shows that achieving change is going to be difficult.
Israel has repeatedly demonstrated in recent times — for example via its clinical strike in July 2024 when it assassinated the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran — that it is deeply embedded in Iran.
Whether it can translate that into forcing a change in the behaviour of the regime, if not the regime itself, is hard to say.
In the meantime, the Gulf states are increasingly playing more independent and assertive roles in the region.
Their views — and actions — are not always aligned. For example, witness the recent differing roles of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic in Yemen.
But the Gulf states recognise their economic and security interests lie in finding accommodations with Israel, even if they now see Israel through a wary prism in terms of their own self-interest.
The issue of Palestine
The issue that has been sidelined by the dramas in Iran — the actions of Israel in Gaza and the West Bank — has not gone away.
And it will continue to disrupt any chance of those accommodations being made.
The announcement by the White House this week that "phase two" of the Gaza ceasefire plan had begun didn't exactly send people into the streets cheering, particularly given the shortcomings of "phase one".
The pattern of Donald Trump's foreign interventions suggests he may well have already lost interest in Gaza since he thinks he has "solved" it.
Certainly the first phase saw the release of all living Israeli hostages — and most of the dead — and a de-escalation of Israeli attacks in Gaza.
More than 450 Palestinians have been killed since it came into effect, according to the Hamas-run Health Authority.
Hamas has not surrendered its weapons
Israel continues to occupy around 50 per cent of the strip, and some satellite analysis shows the "yellow line" that demarcates its controlled territory in the strip has been gradually being pushed further into the enclave.
At the same time, aggression against Palestinians in the West Bank has only escalated.
Israel has also grabbed land in both Syria and Lebanon.
A different tone
It is striking how different the tone of the response to attacks on civilians in Iran and the occupied territories is.
The ambiguous status of Gaza and the West Bank compared to a sovereign nation like Iran — means that Israel's incursions into the territories are rarely regarded as an invasion. Yet the tens of thousands of civilians who have been killed are not regarded as Israeli civilians either.
The pattern of Trump's foreign interventions suggests he may well have already lost interest in Gaza since he thinks he has "solved" it.
The pragmatic politics of the other regional players may therefore become much more important.
They have an interest in a proper settlement of these issues, if only because they are threatened by the continued existence of Hamas.
All in all the roles that the US, Iran, and Israel play in the region have all profoundly changed in the last two years.
Just how the regional neighbours respond to this change will be vital to determining the future of both Iran and the Palestinians.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.
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