Discourse surrounding the current war in the Middle East frequently fixates on the economic fallout. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively choked, it is tempting to view this conflict purely through the lens of oil markets. Yet, while energy dominates the headlines, it is not the conflict’s primary driver. To understand how we arrived at this moment, we must examine the domestic and international laws that govern state conduct.
As someone who opposes this war of aggression on Iran, I argue that while a cold war had been brewing in the Middle East for decades, the legal groundwork for today’s full-scale conflict was laid on October 8th, 2023. In response to the Hamas attacks the previous day, Israel’s Security Cabinet invoked Article 40(a) of its Basic Law: The Government. This move shifted Israel beyond limited military operations into a formal, wartime footing, the first such declaration since 1973. Though initially localized to Gaza, this wartime posture established the security thresholds that now dictate Israeli actions across the region. Consequently, it placed Tel Aviv on a collision course with Tehran’s doctrine of “forward defense”.
If October 2023 provided the rationale for Israel’s wartime footing, April 1st, 2024, marked the moment the Middle Eastern cold war turned hot. When Israel struck a building in Damascus, Iran asserted that the structure was a protected consular annex. Israel, however, argued that the building was an active IRGC Quds Force headquarters, thereby forfeiting its diplomatic immunity. While Israel had signed but never formally ratified the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, diplomatic inviolability remains binding on both nations under customary international law, pursuant to Article 38, Section 1(b), of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Operating under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Iran treated the incident as an armed attack on its sovereign territory. The subsequent Iranian retaliatory strikes, launched directly from its own soil in an effort to reestablish deterrence after the Damascus strike, marked a definitive shift: the unwritten rules of proxy warfare had been replaced by open hostilities.
The coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026, which assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and targeted Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, were justified by Washington and Tel Aviv as a necessary preventive response to Iran’s nuclear advances, ballistic missile buildup, and direct attacks on Israel in 2024. Nevertheless, in my view, these strikes wrongly escalated the long-simmering conflict into full-scale war.
For decades, regional strategy operated on the assumption that the path to Tel Aviv’s favor ran through Washington. Today, that relationship has inverted in many respects. With Republicans holding a trifecta in the U.S. government following the November 2024 elections, American policy is increasingly intertwined with Israeli security priorities. Any future U.S. administration seeking to negotiate a durable de-escalation with Iran will likely face headwinds from Congress if such an agreement fails to address Israel’s original rationale for invoking Article 40(a).
Washington can no longer treat the Israel-Iran conflict as a peripheral proxy war to be managed from afar. Now that this cold war has turned hot, any viable off-ramp must grapple with two competing realities: Israel’s threshold for its own defense and Iran’s threshold for strategic deterrence.
We must not, therefore, view this multi-front conflict as a mere supply-chain disruption to be mitigated by economic policy. As long as the war continues, global markets will remain hostage to statecraft.
Kian Jamasbi holds a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law, with a concentration in International, Comparative, and Foreign Law. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His professional website is kianjamasbi.com. He is the founder of Oxuz News, where this commentary is published.