It wasn’t long after the launch of Operation Epic Fury, the US-led war against Iran, that repercussions began to be felt across the world. Retaliatory strikes rained down on hotels and airports across the Gulf. Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon reignited. Stock markets slumped, oil prices surged. Even as the Iranian diaspora celebrated the assassination of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, thousands of pro-Iran demonstrators marched in Iraq, Kashmir and Pakistan; dozens tried to storm the US consulate in Karachi.
As the war continued to widen, the New Statesman spoke to Fiona Hill, the British-born foreign policy expert who has served as an adviser to presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, to discuss the US’s endgame, what the UK and Europe should be doing, and the lessons from Iraq.
Megan Gibson: We last spoke after the US’s strike on Venezuela, when we discussed the return of the Monroe Doctrine, with the US seeking dominance in its own sphere of influence and regions like the Middle East seemingly becoming more of a secondary consideration. But it looks as though the US could once again be involved in a long entanglement in the region. Is this war a break from the administration’s national security strategy?
Fiona Hill: This is the dilemma of the moment that we’re living in, particularly with somebody like Donald Trump. He is inherently unpredictable, even to himself. And if he sees an opportunity to do something that from his perspective will accrue benefits, he will take it. It’s clear that the war with Iran is a war of choice, just like the war [in] Iraq… There was, of course, [then] a major effort to put together a rationale; we had Colin Powell going before the UN. Ultimately we know as a result of inquiries that that rationale was fairly paper thin, but here we haven’t had that at all. There isn’t any [rationale], be it thin or otherwise, that provides any justification. It seems very clear that President Trump has been following Israel’s lead, as he did previously in the strikes on Iran in June 2025. It’s obvious they saw a window of opportunity to do what we saw the US do in Venezuela, which is just decapitate the regime… It fits with the sorts of things Trump has done before. He likes to have these highly performative, big-bang shows of force, [but] he’s inherently actually cautious. He wouldn’t have done this unless he thinks he can get away with it.
But Vladimir Putin thought the same thing. He thought he would decapitate Ukraine, get rid of Zelensky, have a lot of shock and awe… Trump has no intention of taking over Iran, obviously. He is telling Iranians to rise up and take control of the country. And that is just fraught with all kinds of uncertainty and also peril because it’s not like the Iranians have been able to organise themselves into any opposition movement. What is it that Trump is shaping here? We know that the Iranian regime has named others to step in for Khamenei, and given his age it was obvious there would be a succession plan. We might end up with a horrendous, bloodier version of what we had in Venezuela where [President Nicolás] Maduro is gone but the regime stays in place.
Since you mentioned Iraq: are we witnessing the resurgence of neoconservatism as the default in American foreign policy?
I don’t think that’s the way to describe it. But there’s all the contours that we saw in the case of Iraq. It’s just a different manifestation. This is about pure, unadulterated American power. But the neocons had a more coherent foreign policy ideology, and in their view they were trying to reshape the international system.
Israel has been pushing [for a war] against Iran because for Israel, the great fear from Iran is not just a nuclear programme, but the ballistic missiles and all of the support for all the terrorist groups around Israel that have become a real existential threat. But this is also an enormous mess because we see that this could really bring the US back into embroilment in the Middle East. And all of the purported partners of Israel, particularly those in the Gulf, they’re also getting hit. There’s no love lost for them with Iran, but they certainly did not want to have this massive destabilisation [in the region] on top of what Israel has already done in Gaza. There was a hope they were moving out of this period of absolute chaos and brutal slaughters. Now we’re heading into what looks like all of that all over again.
Is it possible that there is an endgame here from Trump that we’re not seeing?
In Venezuela, it seems like somebody made a deal with someone in the Venezuelan regime below Maduro to get rid of him. In Iran, do we know if something like that [was] arranged beneath Khamenei? Israel obviously is pretty well informed about what’s going on on the ground, but a lot of the information the US used to get about the state of play in Iran came from other [allies] that are obviously stepping out of this, that didn’t want to be part of this attack on Iran… By the sounds of things [these countries] were warned that this [war] was about to happen, but they weren’t really consulted and brought into the mix. This is by no means a sure thing in terms of how this is going to play out. President Trump has been very lucky with the early decapitation of regimes before, but it hasn’t necessarily led to a whole new set of developments that trend in the direction of stability.
History shows that operations like this usually have consequences that are not immediately apparent. What will you be looking for in the coming days that could indicate where this is going?
It’s going to be multifaceted. First, we’ll see what actually happens on the ground in Iran. There’s not a clear guide as to what Iran looks like at the end of the theocracy. And you’ve got 15-20 per cent, depending on how you count it, of the Iranian population still very much vested in this system… This is complicated, just like Iraq was, and Syria was – these are very complex societies, so we’re going to have to watch very carefully how that’s unfolding.
There’s the broader dynamic with Israel and Gaza: how on Earth is this going to affect the future of what was supposed to be a settlement for Gaza? There [is the impact on the Gulf], the countries that were largely thought of as sure bets for investment and safe havens for populations. Remember, there’s lots of Russians operating out [of] the Gulf states now, [and] as people have left other war zones, they’ve often gone to Dubai, Doha and elsewhere. Iran is lashing out at the targets that it can hit the easiest, not necessarily the targets that are going to have the most impact on restraining the US.
The whole Middle East now is a target. Interestingly, the locus of most [recent] diplomacy has been in the Middle East, in the Gulf. You’ve had Qatar, you’ve had UAE, you’ve had the leaders – [Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman] and others – all heavily involved in coordination of peace negotiations, for Ukraine and elsewhere. All the global contours of [modern-day] conflict are starting to get entangled here.
And how does this shape the view of the US? The US is looking like a liability for many countries, not an asset. The US has gone into this with Israel; its so-called traditional allies don’t seem to have been in the picture here. It’s like a wrecking-ball approach. It’s very Trumpian: he sees an opportunity, goes in there with the wrecking ball, and then the question is how does everybody else pick up the pieces? Who is actually going to be picking up all of this when we now have the Middle East literally in flames?
You mentioned the Gulf as a locus of diplomacy. Another country that has assumed that role in recent years is Turkey. What is the possibility of Turkey, a Nato member, getting swept into this conflict?
This conflict is right up against the borders of a Nato member. And has Turkey been fully apprised of this? [It] has difficult relations with Iran and not just with Israel. What does it think about the future of European security as the US starts to pull away?
These are not just wars that happen somewhere else. These are conflicts that come to you. That hybrid grey-zone that we’re always talking about, that’s what the Iranians specialise in – critical national infrastructure attacks and propaganda and cyber assaults. When you have less capacity to hit back in a conventional sense [like Iran does], then you find all kinds of other ways to hit back. I would imagine that the Iranians’ hitlist of people they want to target is back in action again too.
How will this war go down within the US?
You’ve got a lot of older Americans who remember 1979 and the hostage crisis, and feel very much affected by what Iran did [at the US Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 people hostage]. But for younger Americans, this is just not an issue for them. Even many of the people who joined [Trump’s administration], people like Pete Hegseth and JD Vance, were very much traumatised and scarred by their experiences in the wars of choice of Afghanistan and Iraq. They wanted to keep the US out of all of these entanglements. So they’re going to have to distort everything they’ve been saying, yet again, in service of Trump’s latest set of decisions.
Keir Starmer has made clear that the UK wasn’t involved in the initial strikes and it would not participate in offensive strikes. Emmanuel Macron has vowed to expand France’s nuclear arsenal. What should the UK and Europe do in the coming days?
We’re basically in a position now where all bets are off. Everything is intertwined and this is going to be extraordinarily difficult, but it all comes down now to Europe and other countries that really have to figure out how they want to intervene diplomatically, politically, to try to create some framework for getting us all out of this. This is a region massively now destabilised. This is going to play out in many ways that we haven’t foreseen yet.
The US [apparently] doesn’t think that its allies have anything to do with [this conflict], but that’s rubbish because it’s on their borders. They have populations that are going to be affected, they have interests that are going to be affected. There have to be Article Four consultations for European members of Nato, as well as Canada. And they should also be making plans to collect as much intelligence as they can, particularly on the military front, and try[ing] to figure out what their own strategy should be… It’s in no one’s interest to have an Iran that basically implodes into the situation that we’ve seen in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. And this is entirely likely given the pathway that we’re on now.
It’s been revealing to me how little we seem to have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US’s national security strategy, which wasn’t published that long ago, gave us no inkling that this [was] where we [were] headed. This wasn’t a priority. Again, nuclear weapons are always a priority for President Trump; people have to understand that he’s very much shaped by these desires for nuclear deals. But then, in the case of Iran, there’s the issue of its ballistic missile capacity as well, which, frankly, we should worry about with North Korea, Russia and China too. Now we have drones, we’ve got a whole realm of arms control, not just the nuclear side, that is unregulated.
From the point of view of a citizen, somebody who’s not in government, we should worry a lot about what the impacts are likely to be on us as well, because civilian casualties have been mounting in all of these conflicts over the last several years.
How is this conflict going to impact Russia and China?
There’s all of these [interlinking] ties. Once you get into these big system changes, you effectively get a world war. One of the main countries, in this case the US, is involved one way or another in all these conflicts and when it abrogates its role as the neutral arbiter of a lot of other conflicts, that makes everything incredibly destabilising. Trump comes in saying he’s a peace-maker; now he’s a war-maker.
Iran, for the Russians, has actually been something of a stabilising force because, far from being an imperial rival back in the old days, Iran actually has been for the Russians a mainstay. Remember, the Iranian drones that everyone’s talking about now, the Shahed, were instrumental for Russia [earlier in its war in Ukraine]. Now the Russians are producing a variant of Iranian drones.
Obviously, China relies on safe passage [for shipping] through the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps it’ll put more pressure on the Arctic as China and others look for different routes around the northern seas to avoid the Strait of Hormuz. What the war does for China is create instability that China cannot afford because it is quite dependent on the Middle East, writ large, for energy. I don’t know whether this will necessarily spur President Xi to quicken the pace of what he’s going to do about Taiwan, but certainly this broader instability isn’t necessarily good for China.
The war also puts a lie to the Trump discussion about spheres of influence because, certainly in terms of the Middle East, this is an area of interest to everybody. This is a sphere that China and other countries are extraordinarily interested in. China will be watching very closely to see what happens to the US. Again, increasingly, the US is looking like a liability, potentially even a spent force. We seem to have seen a breakdown in the US alliance structure and a [more] tight relationship between the US and Israel, but in a way that might be seen as a liability for both the US and Israel down the line. It’s hard to say at this particular point that the really rich alliance structure that the US relied on in the past, and also tapped in to for Afghanistan and Iraq, is operating in the same way.
The death of Khamenei is clearly a symbolic moment for Iran. But is this the end of the Islamic Republic?
Look, this is a complicated place with a sophisticated population and a massive diaspora. You can’t just describe Iran in terms of the people at the top, no matter how much they seem to have framed the whole system. I think what is difficult here is to [predict] which of these other forces will come in.
The direct successor of Khamenei could have more of an iron grip – or could this now become a looser system? We’ve got all kinds of people in the mix here who are coming out of leftfield. We’ve got the son of the deposed shah, who’s out there [calling for] restoration of the monarchy, or him as the monarch, [with the suggestion that] some other democratic Iran will miraculously appear without any necessary preparation on the ground.
Is this going to be another revolution for Iran? Is this going to be another of these horrific situations where you just end up with a state of chaos? The majority of the Iranian public is left to contemplate how they take advantage of this moment as Trump [urged when he said “take over your government… this will probably be your only chance for generations”]. That is just a really tall order. We don’t know how this military operation is going to turn out and, frankly, the people who are perpetrating it don’t know either.
This could unfold in so many different ways for the region. Israel, just like the US, has lost a lot of its credibility with many of its traditional supporters because of the way it handled the intervention in Gaza. So we’ve got two major players here, the US and Israel, that are not as well thought of [as they once were]. Other countries will not give them the benefit of the doubt.
This is an edited extract from a longer interview. Hear the full conversation on the New Statesman’s Daily Politics podcast
[Further reading: Trump, Iran and America’s years of iron]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 04 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Trump's global terror
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment