If US President Donald Trump ends the war with Iran without a deal, he risks leaving Tehran with a stranglehold over Middle East energy supplies and Gulf Arab oil and gas producers grappling with the fallout of a conflict they did not start or shape, geopolitical analysts warned on Wednesday, hours before he addressed the country.
Instead of crushing Iran's theocratic rulers, it could leave them stronger, emboldened by surviving weeks of US-Israeli attacks, firing on Arab Gulf states and rattling global energy markets by effectively shutting the Strait of Hormuz.
In an interview with news agency Reuters before a scheduled address to the nation on Wednesday, Trump said the United States would end its war on Iran "pretty quickly" and signalled on Tuesday he could wind down the war even without a deal.
An end to the war without clear guarantees on what would follow would pose a significant danger for Gulf states, leaving the region to absorb the consequences of a war that would be concluded to Iran’s advantage. "The issue is the cessation of the war without a real outcome," said Mohammed Baharoon, director of Dubai's B'huth Research Centre. "He (Trump) might stop the war, but that doesn’t mean Iran will."
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As long as US forces remain stationed in bases in the Gulf, Iran will continue to threaten the region, he said. That asymmetry lies at the heart of Gulf concerns: that Iran could emerge from the war undefeated and with enhanced leverage - able to threaten shipping lanes, energy flows and regional stability - while Gulf countries are left to shoulder the economic and strategic costs of an unresolved conflict.
Baharoon said the erosion of freedom of navigation in the region would be a huge concern for the Gulf. Iran, he said, could begin "playing the territorial waters card" and setting the rules in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for global energy supplies.
"This goes beyond Hormuz," he said. "Iran has put its hand on a pressure point of the global economy."
Tehran’s ability to disrupt energy flows, he said, sent a clear message that anyone contemplating future attacks on Iran should think twice.
That logic helps explain why Gulf states have avoided being drawn into the war. Officials in the region say their overriding concern has been preventing a war that began as a US–Israeli campaign against Iran mutating into something far more dangerous - a confrontation between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims that reshapes the Middle East for decades.
'Trump's fundamental misjudgement'
The risk of escalation has been compounded by what political analysts describe as a fundamental misjudgment by the United States and Israel about how Iran would respond to unprecedented strikes on its leadership.
The killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei early in the conflict, intended as a decisive blow, rewrote the rules of engagement. He was replaced by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, and what was meant to decapitate the system became, in the eyes of Iran’s rulers, a provocation requiring resistance and revenge.
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"In one stroke, Trump and (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu have turned a geopolitical conflict into a religious and civilisational one,” said Middle East scholar Fawaz Gerges. "They have elevated Khamenei from a contested ruler into a martyr."
The killing of Ali Khamenei served to add legitimacy in Iran to the theocratic leadership's most hardline instincts, regional analysts say, binding the clerical establishment and the elite Revolutionary Guards to a narrative of existential resistance in which surrender is unthinkable and endurance sacred.
They say the assumption that removing the top leaders would cause the system to fracture ignored Iran’s layered institutions, parallel power structures and long record of resilience -- from eight years of war with Iraq to decades of US sanctions.
The result, the analysts say, is not surrender but radicalisation -- an angrier and more defiant Iran, and a region left to absorb the fallout. "Khamenei was an Ayatollah, this is not something you do -- certainly not a foreign power killing an Ayatollah," said Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute. "But this is Trump...a man who has no brakes, and for the Shi'ite clerical establishment...he broke every little norm and protocol."
(With inputs from Reuters)