Analysis-A war meant to break Iran could leave Tehran stronger, and Gulf exposed

By Samia Nakhoul

DUBAI, April 1 (Reuters) - If 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.

Instead of crushing Iran's theocratic rulers, it could leave them stronger, emboldened by surviving weeks of U.S.-Israeli attacks, firing on Arab Gulf states and rattling global energy markets by effectively shutting the Strait of Hormuz.

In an interview with 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 concluding 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 Center. "He (Trump) might stop the war, but that doesn’t mean Iran will."

As long as U.S. 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 U.S.–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.

'FUNDAMENTAL MISJUDGMENT'

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.

"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 U.S. 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."

IRAN'S OIL WEAPON

U.S. and Israeli decision‑makers did not go into the war blind to Iran’s ideological power, but appear to have underestimated its resilience, said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert.

The assumption, he said, had been that air dominance -- achieved by destroying missile launchers, command centres and senior figures -- would deliver freedom of movement and strategic containment. Instead, the Iranian system tightened rather than splintered, in part because it is sustained by parallel institutions designed to regenerate under pressure, he said.

Washington also misjudged Iran’s capacity for asymmetric retaliation, political analysts in the region say.

Tehran does not need to win the air war, it needs to impose costs, they say. Over decades, Iran has invested in identifying pressure points rather than matching force with force, and has come to regard energy assets and the Strait of Hormuz as central to its strategy.

By striking energy infrastructure and threatening the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has driven up oil prices, fuelled inflation around the world and shifted pressure onto the U.S. and its partners.

The objective, analysts say, was not battlefield victory but enforcing economic exhaustion. If the war becomes economically unbearable, survival itself becomes victory, they say.

A premature end to the war without security guarantees would leave Gulf states exposed, with any future Iranian retaliation possibly not confined to the region.

Tehran retains the capacity to activate long-standing global networks, using channels developed over decades to target Israeli, U.S. and allied interests far from the battlefield.

"They haven’t started yet, but they have a vast capability to punish the United States and Israel," Ranstorp said, describing Iran as a hydra-like threat whose tentacles can be activated far beyond the Middle East.

That threat hangs over any U.S. exit. If the U.S. pulls back - and Israeli operations depend heavily on U.S. backing - Tehran will not see the outcome as defeat.

The theocratic system will have endured and the balance of power will not have altered dramatically, and Iran will be seen in the region as more dangerous than before, regional analysts say.

(Editing by Timothy Heritage)