Attacking Iran, U.S. Could Remove an Adversary From Strategic Calculations

Saturday night, a missile struck the United States 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, a base where I served in 2023. That strike is a reminder of how much the strategic landscape has hardened in recent years.

It is a significant gamble. Whether it succeeds will not be clear for some time.

How did we get here, and what does it mean for Australia? The answer to both is complex. Much will be written in coming days about the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1983 bombing of U.S. Marines in Beirut, and the attack on USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. But the more relevant point is what Iran has represented strategically over the past two decades.

Iran’s 2019 campaign of attacking merchant vessels in the Gulf of Oman, including the seizure of a commercial ship in the Strait of Hormuz, had tangible consequences. War risk insurance premiums rose sharply for vessels transiting the strait, a waterway through which roughly a quarter of the world’s oil flows. It was this pattern of attacks that prompted my 2020 Royal Australian Navy deployment to the Middle East as part of the International Maritime Security Construct, helping protect freedom of navigation through one of the world’s most critical chokepoints.

Since 1979, the U.S. and its allies have repeatedly surged forces to manage instability linked to Iran, while also in the past two decades sustaining major commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Middle East has consumed strategic attention, military resources and political capital. That sustained focus constrained Washington’s ability to compete as effectively as it might have with China. The Indo-Pacific was emerging as the central theatre of strategic competition while the U.S. and its allies remained absorbed elsewhere.

Washington has attempted to step back. During my time at the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain from 2022 to 2023, U.S. naval force flow in the Middle East was at its lowest level in decades. Yet the Middle East still matters. The U.S. has enduring allies and economic interests there, and Iran’s destabilising activity continued to draw U.S. forces back.

In 2025 and 2026, aircraft carriers were diverted from the Indo-Pacific, where they were intended to deter China, to respond to crises in the Middle East. For a country that identifies China as its primary strategic competitor, that reallocation sits uneasily with its stated priorities.

Iran has also advanced a nuclear program with long-term weapons ambitions. There is no publicly available evidence that it was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, and many assessments suggest it remained years away, if at all. Even so, Iran’s hardened and dispersed nuclear infrastructure ensured that it would remain a persistent strategic complication for the U.S.. Facilities constructed deep underground and bolstered against air attack are difficult to reconcile with a purely civilian nuclear intent.

In his address following the strikes, Trump indicated that regime change in Tehran was an objective, though not the sole one. That rhetoric raises the stakes. Moving from degrading capability to seeking political transformation alters the scale and risk of the undertaking.

There is no widely accepted historical example of air power alone producing regime change without ground invasion, internal uprising or elite defection. U.S. efforts at regime transformation in the Middle East have produced mixed results at best. This is therefore a high-risk strategic play.

If this succeeds, it could remove one persistent adversary from the U.S.’s strategic calculus and allow greater focus on the Indo-Pacific. For Australia, China’s military modernisation and coercive behaviour in our region represent the most consequential long-term security challenge. Sustained U.S. attention there matters to our strategic outlook.

Periods of U.S. distraction have carried costs. While Washington was absorbed in the Middle East, China accelerated island building and militarisation in the South China Sea. More recently, weapons support to Ukraine and operations against the Houthis have drawn down stockpiles and strained force availability.

This attack on Iran may be an attempt to consolidate commitments rather than expand them. It may fail. It may deepen instability. But if it succeeds, it could strengthen deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and, in doing so, enhance Australia’s security.

Jennifer Parker is an adjunct professor with the University of Western Australia Defence and Security Institute and a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute. She served for more than 20 years as a warfare officer in the Royal Australian Navy.

AI contributed no ideas to this article—Jennifer Parker.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).