By Robbin Laird
The war with Iran has forced a clarity that years of diplomatic hedging obscured. So long as Tehran retains a robust power-projection toolkit and structural leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, it can hold the region and global energy markets at risk, regardless of the outcome of any single campaign. The central question is not how to punish Iran, nor how to stage another round of coercive diplomacy. The question is how to engineer an end state in which Iran is structurally constrained from projecting military power beyond its borders.
Three interlocking lines of effort define that end state.
First, the demilitarization of Iran’s regional power-projection toolkit, missiles, drones, naval harassment forces, and proxy networks, down to a level consistent with territorial defense rather than expeditionary coercion.
Second, the construction of a GCC–Israel kill web that can see, decide, and engage cross-domain threats at speed, transforming the region from a fragmented target set into a coherent defensive ecosystem.
Third, a geoeconomic redesign of energy routes that reduces systemic dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, a twenty-first-century reprise of Calouste Gulbenkian’s early twentieth-century effort to route Middle Eastern oil away from single points of failure.
This is not regime change by another name. It is an argument that a durable end state must be built around enforceable constraints on Iranian power projection, not around illusions about who governs in Tehran.
From Regime-Focused to Capability-Focused End States
Western debate about Iran has oscillated between two failed poles for decades. On one side: transactional arms-control arrangements that leave Tehran’s expeditionary toolkit untouched. On the other: maximalist regime-change fantasies that are long on rhetoric and short on executable strategy. Both have proven strategically barren. The nuclear agreements left ballistic and cruise missiles, UAV arsenals, and a lattice of proxy militias entirely in place. Regime-change discourse generated no operational plan that any regional actor would endorse.
The more productive frame defines the end state in terms of capabilities, geography, and networks, not personalities in Tehran. What matters is function, not form. The core logic is straightforward:
Iran must be denied reliable means to project coercive power into the Levant, the Gulf, and the Red Sea. Regional states, foremost the GCC members and Israel, must be able to detect, absorb, and defeat residual Iranian and proxy attacks through an integrated kill web rather than fragmented national responses. The structural leverage Iran derives from sitting astride the Strait of Hormuz must be diluted by developing alternative energy-export routes across the Arabian landmass and into the Eastern Mediterranean.
This end state does not require a benign Iran or demand internal transformation in Tehran as a precondition. It imposes a new correlation of forces—military, technological, and geoeconomic—that narrows the scope for Iranian adventurism and raises the costs of reverting to the status quo ante.
Dissecting Iran’s Power-Projection System
To demilitarize Iranian power projection, we need to disaggregate it into operational components rather than treat it as a monolithic abstraction. Four pillars define the system.
- Missiles and Drones as Strategic Artillery
Iran has built an arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and increasingly capable UAVs and loitering munitions. These systems serve three operational functions: holding regional capitals, energy infrastructure, and ports at risk; compensating for Iran’s conventional air-power deficits; and providing deniable attack options through proxy launchers. Collectively they constitute a form of strategic artillery, stand-off coercion that does not require a functioning air force to be effective.
Any demilitarization framework must therefore address missile ranges, payloads, and deployment patterns with explicit restrictions, backed by intrusive verification focused on production facilities, storage sites, and test ranges. Critically, these constraints must be enforceable by regional actors, not dependent on intermittent attention from distant capitals.
- Naval Harassment and Chokepoint Leverage
At sea, Iran has specialized in disruption rather than sea control: swarming fast-attack craft, mine threats, and anti-ship missiles positioned to menace commercial shipping at and near the Strait of Hormuz. Even when not activated, these capabilities function as a standing risk premium on global energy flows, a form of permanent fiscal coercion.
Neutralizing this pillar does not mean dismantling the Iranian Navy. It means eliminating or tightly circumscribing those elements specifically optimized for harassment of international commerce, offensive mine stocks, coastal anti-ship batteries within defined ranges of key shipping lanes, and the command-and-control nodes that orchestrate operations against tankers and foreign warships.
- The Proxy Network as Strategic Depth
The most insidious dimension of Iran’s power-projection model is its proxy architecture: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, armed factions in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. These forces provide Tehran with deniable launch platforms, political leverage over fragile states, and human-terrain complexity that complicates retaliation.
A credible demilitarization end state must include sustained rollback of these networks through financial pressure, systematic targeting of expeditionary capabilities, and political strategies that offer host societies genuine alternatives to Iranian-sponsored militancy. It also requires a conceptual shift: proxy territory—southern Lebanon, western Iraq, northern Yemen must be understood not as separate crises but as the forward operating bases of a single Iranian system. Design the defense architecture accordingly.
- The Narrative and Legitimacy Layer
Iran’s regional influence is not purely kinetic. It rests on a narrative that its military instruments represent “resistance” against external aggression, and that its proxies protect vulnerable populations. As long as rockets keep flying and tankers are harassed, that narrative finds receptive audiences.
Demilitarization is therefore not purely a targeting problem. It requires a counter-narrative grounded in fact: that Iranian militarization has brought ruin, not protection, to Arab societies. The alternative security architectures anchored in Arab sovereignty and regional partnerships offers better protection for Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese, and Yemenis than conscription into Iran’s wars.
The GCC–Israel Kill Web: From Isolated Defenses to a Regional Grid
If demilitarizing Iran’s power-projection complex is one side of the equation, the other is constructing a regional defensive ecosystem that both deters and absorbs Iranian and proxy attacks. The kill web concept is the right frame here. It shifts focus from platform acquisition to networks, data integration, and decision cycles from the kill chain model of sequential, platform-centric engagement to a distributed, multi-domain web that can engage threats wherever they appear.
For years, Western planners urged GCC states toward integrated air and missile defense. Progress was uneven. National systems improved, but genuine integration shared early warning, cross-border fire control, common operating pictures remained constrained by political hesitations and technical seams. The war with Iran and its proxies has accomplished what years of seminars could not: it has demonstrated, in operational reality, the cost of fragmented defense. Missiles and drones do not respect national airspace boundaries. They arc across multiple theaters, exploit radar coverage gaps, and search for the weakest link in national intercept inventories.
Fragmented defense turns each capital into an isolated target. A kill web turns the region into a set of mutually reinforcing nodes. A GCC–Israel kill web would rest on several operational pillars:
Sensor fusion across borders: national radar, passive sensors, space-based assets, and maritime surveillance systems feeding into federated data pools that generate a near-real-time, theater-wide air and maritime picture. Distributed command and control: battle management systems that allocate shooters, ground-based interceptors, fighters, naval platforms, electronic warfare assets, based on geometry and magazine depth rather than nationality. Layered and cross-domain fires: high-altitude interceptors, lower-tier surface-to-air systems, point-defense, directed energy where available, and jamming/spoofing capabilities cued by shared tracks rather than siloed feeds. Maritime extension of the web: integration of Aegis-like capabilities, coastal batteries, and maritime patrol aviation into the same decision loop, so that a missile transiting from the Gulf to the Arabian Sea is tracked and engaged as a single problem, not three separate national problems.
In this architecture, the political map does not disappear but it stops dictating the physics of defense. A ballistic missile launched from western Iran toward a Gulf capital may be first tracked by an Israeli sensor, cued to an Emirati battery, and engaged by a Saudi fighter. The kill is achieved by the web.
The kill web is not merely a shield. It is also the enforcement mechanism for any demilitarization settlement. If Iran attempts to regenerate prohibited capabilities, testing a longer-range missile, surging UAV launches from proxy territory, regional states will not wait for deliberations in distant capitals. They will have the situational awareness to detect violations quickly, the means to intercept hostile systems before they reach targets, and the precision to undertake proportional, rapidly executed strikes against launchers, depots, or command nodes.
This changes the enforcement dynamic from episodic Western intervention to sustained regional guardianship. The United States and allied partners remain important enablers, high-end ISR, certain interceptors, diplomatic weight, but they are no longer the sole first responders. Regional actors carry the watch.
Re-imagining Energy Geography: Gulbenkian’s Ghost and a Route Around Hormuz
Even a demilitarized Iranian power-projection complex leaves a geographic reality intact: Iran sits on the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a substantial fraction of globally traded oil moves. So long as the international system depends predominantly on that artery, Tehran retains residual leverage, the ability to threaten closure, drive risk premiums, and command international attention whenever it feels cornered.
To reduce that leverage, we need to think like Calouste Gulbenkian. Operating in the early decades of the twentieth century, Gulbenkian understood that pipelines and routes were instruments of power as decisive as concessions and drilling rights. He spent years constructing arrangements that would allow oil from Mesopotamian fields to reach European markets through multiple outlets, driving pipelines from Kirkuk through Syria to ports at Tripoli and Haifa. By routing production through multiple corridors, he diluted any single chokepoint’s power and embedded oil flows in a broader strategic geography.
The contemporary analogue is the Arabian Peninsula. Several Gulf states already operate or plan pipelines that can move crude from Gulf coast fields to Red Sea terminals. These systems remain underdeveloped relative to the strategic need, treated as redundancy rather than as the backbone of a new energy geography. A serious end-state strategy requires more:
Expanded cross-peninsula capacity: increase the volume of oil and gas that can flow from Gulf fields to Red Sea ports and beyond, reducing the share of exports that must transit Hormuz. Integration of Iraqi and Eastern Mediterranean potential: build corridors linking Iraqi production south and west, connecting into Saudi and Jordanian networks and providing multiple outlets to the Mediterranean, Gulbenkian’s logic applied to contemporary infrastructure. Hardened and defended routes: place pipelines, pumping stations, and terminals under the same regional defensive umbrella as cities and military bases. Attacks on them—whether by Iran directly or through proxies—constitute collective security violations that trigger the kill web’s response.
The region would thereby translate a century-old insight into twenty-first-century practice: control of the routes can be as decisive as control of the wells.
Linking Military Demilitarization and Geoeconomic Rewiring
It is tempting to treat military demilitarization and energy-route diversification as separate files, one for generals, one for energy ministers and project financiers. That would be a mistake. The two are mutually reinforcing and must be synchronized.
If Iran understands that alternative export routes exist and are politically and militarily defended by a coalition that includes both Arab states and Israel, its leverage diminishes even before the last missile is dismantled. The temptation to stage spectacular maritime disruptions wanes when those actions no longer threaten to choke global energy flows but instead reinforce an international consensus that Tehran is a spoiler in a system that works around it.
Conversely, if regional states invest heavily in alternative routes but neglect the kill web defending them, they simply paint new targets for Iranian coercion. Pipelines and Red Sea terminals become attractive objects of pressure. Only when those assets are integrated into a responsive defensive and retaliatory system. shared ISR, rapid attribution, pre-authorized response options, does the strategic balance actually shift.
A well-designed end state must therefore synchronize three lines of effort: the negotiated and enforced drawdown of Iranian power-projection assets; the buildup of a GCC–Israel defense web capable of both shielding and imposing costs; and the phased expansion of non-Hormuz export routes, hardened against disruption.
Managing the Risks of a Cornered Iran
Any strategy aimed at demilitarizing Iranian power projection and diluting Hormuz leverage must account for how Tehran will respond. A leadership that perceives itself being systematically squeezed out of its traditional levers will be tempted to escalate in three directions: intensified proxy warfare, unconventional tools (cyber, sabotage, terrorism), and nuclear brinkmanship.
Mitigating those risks requires several parallel efforts. Clear signaling about limits and off-ramps: Tehran must understand that specific behaviors, missile proliferation beyond agreed parameters, attacks on new energy corridors, major proxy offensives, will trigger unified and tangible responses. It must also see that compliance opens access to economic integration and reduced isolation. Resilience in partner states: cyber defenses, counter-terrorism cooperation, and societal resilience programs across the GCC and Israel must be strengthened to absorb non-kinetic blows without political overreaction that hands Tehran propaganda victories. A narrow but real diplomatic track: demilitarization cannot rest solely on force. Structured dialogue—likely through intermediaries—must keep channels open, clarify intentions, and allow incremental adjustment as the regional balance evolves.
The objective is not security guarantees for Iran in the classic sense. It is to outline a future in which Iran can exist as a strong but constrained state within a resilient regional order, rather than oscillating between revolutionary adventurism and strategic isolation. Those are the only available options. The kill web and the Gulbenkian routes make the latter less sustainable.
A Regional Order Built on Constrained Power, Not Illusions
The war with Iran and its proxy network has stripped away much of the comfortable ambiguity that Western and regional policymakers had lived with for three decades. Incremental sanctions, rhetorical red lines, and episodic strikes cannot substitute for structural change in the military and geoeconomic architecture of the Gulf and the broader Middle East. Regional states are no longer content to function as passive clients waiting on Washington or European capitals to manage their security environment.
The end state worth working toward is concrete. Iran’s military posture anchored in territorial defense, not expeditionary coercion. GCC states and Israel operating as a de facto defensive community, linked by a kill web that converts geographic vulnerability into shared strength. Energy routes that reflect Gulbenkian’s logic of diversification and redundancy, reducing the decisiveness of any single chokepoint. External powers supporting and underwriting the system, but no longer constituting its sole axis.
This is not a utopian vision. It accepts that Iran will remain hostile across multiple domains if the regime remains in power but militarily significantly diminished, that proxy embers will continue to smolder, and that crises will still erupt.
But it shifts the default condition from constant vulnerability to managed, constrained competition. It offers a way to end the present war not with another fragile pause but with a re-engineered regional order in which Iran can no longer so easily hold the rest of the region and the global economy hostage.
That is the lesson the current war is teaching.
The question is whether policymakers are prepared to act on it.
For the. historical background, see the following: