Immediately after President Donald Trump launched a “massive and ongoing” attack on Iran early Saturday, the Islamic Republic used its stockpile of missiles and drones against Israel and U.S. installations in Gulf countries. By Monday, the regime quickly escalated to bombing a U.K. base on Cyprus, launching drones toward a U.S base in Turkey and attacking the shared Australian air base in Dubai. Iran also reactivated its proxy terrorist networks; when Hezbollah entered the fray, Israel bombed Lebanon and sent in ground forces.
For all the strategic objectives that remain unknown about the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, this much is clear: Regional fallout was predictable and the shocks to global order are growing by the hour.
The whole world now knows that the Trump administration did not and is still not planning to get Americans to safety.
Whether Iran’s goal is to force Gulf nations into conflict or to permanently crack the alliances the United States has enjoyed in the Middle East, the regime’s response has been calibrated to create chaos far beyond the Persian Gulf. In doing so, it has also extracted an existential price — Americans’ sense of security and strength abroad.
“I felt betrayed and left out to dry by my own government,” Cody Greene, a business development manager from Tampa, said when speaking to Business Insider on Thursday. He told the outlet he has been trying to leave Dubai since Sunday.
U.S. Embassies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Lebanon are officially closed, but only after images spread of the embassy in Riyadh up in flames from an Iranian drone strike. By the time the State Department delivered warnings to U.S. citizens to leave the region, commercial flights were already grounded to avoid being blown out by crossfire. On Wednesday, U.S. Embassies in Jerusalem and Doha issued statements saying they “were not in a position to directly evacuate or assist Americans” in leaving the Middle East. The whole world now knows that the Trump administration did not and is still not planning to get Americans to safety.
In Pakistan, U.S. consulates immediately became the target of Shia protesters expressing anger over the killing of the ayatollah and his bloodline; Marines killed nine Pakistanis in Karachi in response to the perceived threat. Protesters across Europe, who see American ambition as the real threat (think: Greenland), gathered around U.S. Embassies; crowds in Greece chanted, “The people will provide a way out of war, imperialism is not invincible.”
Some European leaders are distancing themselves from the U.S.-Israel campaign and are still refusing direct involvement. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the U.S. could not use air bases in Spain for the “unjustified” and “dangerous military intervention” in Iran. French President Emmanuel Macron declared the U.S. campaign “outside international law” but felt compelled to reposition a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to defend French assets and “resume traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.” Notably, Macron underscored that France is making defensive movements to uphold “binding defense agreements with Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE” — not to defend Israel or the U.S.
Turkey has zero interest in allowing the U.S. to arm Kurdish groups in Iran.
Turkey is in a particularly tough spot. As the country that straddles Europe and Asia, it has long been a place where diverse interests, from Russia to Hamas to Britain, can meet to seek diplomatic solutions. But as a physical neighbor to Iran, Turkey has been forced to preserve its own welfare. Already dealing with its own Kurdish insurgency, Turkey has zero interest in allowing the U.S. to arm Kurdish groups in Iran. Barely recovered from the Syrian refugee crisis, the country plans to close its borders against a population influx of nearly three or four times what we saw coming out of Syria; people fleeing Iran are likely to brave the open seas to find refuge in continental Europe, a humanitarian crisis no region is prepared to manage. In its pique at being forced into this position, Turkey is denying the U.S. use of its air and maritime space, refusing logistical coordination to a country that would otherwise have been its NATO friend.
Trump and co’s previous foreign policy choices are now coming home to roost. In choosing to concentrate power in the White House and deplete the Foreign Service, the administration has few ambassadors or seasoned diplomats in the Gulf states who can make sure the U.S. and its allies are prepared to deal with Iran’s continued retaliation. In one of his first acts as president this term, Trump attempted to fire nearly 250 seasoned Foreign Service officers.
“The State Department lost experienced crisis operators who speak Arabic, who’ve evacuated thousands of Americans from war zones, who have the personal relationships with regional leaders that make diplomacy work at 2 a.m. under fire,” explained Ryan Gliha, a senior Foreign Service officer who recently served as the U.S. representative to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
“We were pushed out with no assessment of what skills were walking out the door. You don’t notice that loss on a quiet day. You notice it when the region catches fire,” he said. You don’t notice that loss on a quiet day. You notice it when the region catches fire. Trump’s biggest mistake was the apparent assumption that the only ally he needs in this war is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For decades, Washington’s presence in the Middle East was designed to maintain a strategic balance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and to constrain Iran’s nefarious activities. But the Trump team’s basic math failed to account for the fact that the rest of the region seeks to constrain Iran and Israel. The Iranian regime, having lost many leaders in defense of their cause and with survival on the line, is certainly calculating its next move with a high pain tolerance in mind. But what’s missing from the Trump administration’s arithmetic (we cannot call it calculus) is Americans’ limited tolerance for foreign wars and domestic economic pain. Current estimates have the U.S. military cost at $2 billion dollars for four days of conflict — the equivalent of what seven U.S. states combined spend on their residents in a year (Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi and Missouri). The toll of conflict is well beyond military costs; civilian deaths increase daily and the economic shocks are still to come. But U.S. isolation is very much here.
Nayyera Haq is a global affairs journalist. 
