U.S. and Israeli war in Iran, which Trump says will be ‘short term,’ has global reach

Dozens of civilians, including children, were injured in Iran’s drone attack on Bahrain. France is deploying warships to secure shipping trade in the Strait of Hormuz. Australia is facing backlash from President Trump over its handling of the Iranian women’s football team. With the increase in oil prices, markets in Asia contracted.

Lebanon reports that half a million people have been displaced by conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. The US State Department told non-essential personnel in Saudi Arabia to leave following attacks that killed workers from India and Bangladesh. Ukrainian anti-drone experts are turning their attention from their war with Russia to helping stop Iranian attacks. The defense minister of Switzerland, always neutral, said his country believes the US-Israel war violates international law.

In less than two weeks, the Trump administration has instigated a truly global conflict with no quick and clear path to resolution, even as congressional Republicans gathered at his Miami resort insisting Trump insisted it would be a “short-term trip.”

“Short term! Short term!” In an upbeat speech about the conflict, Trump said: “The world respects us now like never before.”

“We are counting down the minutes until they leave,” he said of Iran’s remaining leadership, adding that the United States “will show no mercy” until Iran is “completely and decisively defeated.”

The war is not limited to Iran; But it is certain that it also caused destruction in Iran; With more than 1,300 reported deaths, toxic clouds from attacks on fuel depots hang over Tehran, a city of nearly 10 million people.

Although the effects of the war are not limited to the Middle East, they are widespread there as well, as Israel entered Lebanon and Iran launched a wave of retaliatory attacks on US allies in the Persian Gulf. The clashes have halted regional air traffic, threatened desalination plants that provide drinking water to millions of people, and tarnished the safe reputation of modern metropolises such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Unlike the last US attack on Venezuela to capture and oust President Nicolás Maduro, the US war against Iran has been met with fierce military resistance, forced the withdrawal of a number of allies, reignited proxy wars, greatly destabilized the oil trade and changed the dynamics between the US and other major powers such as China and Russia.

China, which imports more than 50 percent of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz, has largely stayed out of the conflict, but Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Sunday that the war “should never have happened” and “does not benefit anyone.”

Meanwhile, UCLA international policy analyst Robert David English said Russia has emerged as the sole winner of energy shortages in the region; The Trump administration is considering reducing oil sanctions on Russia to reduce pressure on Middle Eastern resources.

The Kremlin said Monday that Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that Putin offered his thoughts on a “rapid political and diplomatic solution” to the conflict.

The scope of the war was determined in part by Iran, which has historically limited its response to U.S. attacks, but it was also determined by Iran. Warned after bombing US nuclear facilities Last summer, he said he would treat any new attack, large or small, as an act of war and respond in kind.

Attacks on U.S. facilities and allies in the region reflect that strategy and are intended to make the war more politically costly for the United States, in part by straining global markets and regional allies, experts said.

But Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology at the UCLA International Institute who teaches courses on Iran and Middle East politics, said, “You can’t attribute the increasingly global aspects of the conflict to Iranian strategy alone, because the longer wars in this region go on, they tend to spread and produce unintended consequences.”

He said this could be a deterrent to starting wars in the region, but “it also makes it harder to end them.”

The rise in oil prices to nearly $120 a barrel on Monday (before a notable bounce back to below $90 when U.S. stock markets closed) is one of the war’s most far-reaching effects and has clearly caught Trump’s attention.

“Oil prices, which will drop rapidly in the short term if the Iranian nuclear threat is eliminated, is a very small price to pay for the USA, the World, Security and Peace. ONLY FOOLS THINK DIFFERENT!” Trump wrote on social media on Sunday.

How long prices will remain high or volatile is a matter of debate, but Trump’s “short-term” predictions have been disrupted by increasing attacks on oil and gas facilities in the region.

“If you can tolerate more than $200 per barrel of oil, continue this game,” Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Sunday.

Prices at the pump have risen for average Americans; Some of them were attracted to Trump’s candidacy because of his promise to avoid foreign wars and focus on lowering the cost of living for U.S. citizens.

Now Trump and other administration officials are facing questions about their own role in bringing the world to war, and they are offering a variety of justifications. They claimed, without any evidence, that the United States faced the threat of an attack from Iran. Trump has repeatedly implied that his goal is to destroy the government.

Meanwhile, Iran has shown no signs of bowing to Trump, rejecting his calls to “surrender” and have a say in choosing their new leader. Iran appointed Mojtaba Khamenei after Trump said the strict son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be “unacceptable.”

The election was welcomed by Azerbaijan’s president and the leader of Yemen’s Houthi rebels, among other allies.

According to US officials, seven US soldiers have been killed in the conflict so far. By one estimate, U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for nearly $1 billion in war costs every day. Democrats criticized Trump for both.

“This war comes from the same President who built a $400 million ballroom in the White House. The same President who said $100 a barrel for oil was worth it. The same President who doubled the health premiums for millions of Americans. But do we have the money for another endless war?” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) wrote on X on Monday.

Other world leaders focused on global economic impact.

While traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which carries approximately 20 percent of the world’s oil, has almost stopped, producers in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have stopped their oil activities without routes open for export.

In response, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested that French and other allied naval forces could escort oil tankers in the strait, shifting the security burden there from Washington to Europe, leaving European ships vulnerable to hostilities and potentially drawing the European Union further into the conflict.

They had already agreed to allow the US to use bases on their territory, but the US and Spain fell out after Spain refused to allow the US to use its bases and Trump threatened US trade with the country.

Macron also provided additional military support to Cyprus after his meeting with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis at the Cyprus air base on Monday.

Macron said France would send 11 more warships to operate in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz after an Iranian drone hit a British military base in Cyprus on Monday.

Macron said, “When Cyprus is attacked, it is Europe that is attacked.”

The island of Cyprus, located just 250 miles from Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, has emerged as a strategic and vulnerable nerve center in the US offensive against Iran. It hosts vital British military bases and acts as an intelligence, surveillance and logistics hub to counter Iranian influence and proxy attacks.

The UK was conducting air defense in support of the UAE and Typhoon jets neutralized two drones, one over Jordan and the other heading towards Bahrain, British defense secretary John Healey said on Monday.

Trump claimed Monday that the United States was heading toward victory but acknowledged that he had fallen short of his goals.

“We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” he said, adding that the conflict would end “pretty quickly.”

Iran may seek to expand the economic and geopolitical influence of the conflict to maintain pressure and push for a ceasefire in its favor, including by attacking regional infrastructure and energy resources. But it could also backfire, said Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Affairs.

“Iran is becoming more like North Korea in this sense,” he said, “and has isolated itself even more.”