The stalemate in the U.S.-Iran war could quickly settle into the Middle East’s new normal, with Tehran using its missiles, drones and regional proxies to keep its rivals constantly on edge and insecure, a former Pentagon official warned at a report launch in Washington on Wednesday.
Alongside the possibility of an eventual reconciliation, the new report from the Middle East Institute describes preparations for a dangerous future: An Iran more seriously pursuing nuclear weapons—and some of its neighbors doing the same, spurred by doubts about Washington’s willingness to come to their defense.
Jason Campbell, the Pentagon’s country director for Afghanistan from 2016 to 2018 and one of the authors of the MEI report, said that in the medium term, Iran seemed more interested in imposing costs on its neighbors and on the U.S. military presence in the region than in pursuing any kind of lasting settlement.
“What I see going forward is a lack of a firm resolution,” Campbell said, “and this perpetual situation where you have Iran using its asymmetric capabilities as a means of deterrence and, really, stated plainly, extortion across the region.”
Not even sophisticated U.S.-provided air defenses have been able to remove Iran’s ability to inflict damage at will, he said. Even if most of Iran’s missiles and drones can be intercepted, the few that get through are causing havoc, exposing a glaring hole in America’s regional security umbrella.
To appreciate how quickly Washington’s assumptions had unraveled, he suggested rereading its National Security Strategy, released Dec. 4, 2025. Not even a year old, it now “looks like it was written in a different era,” he said.
“It explicitly lists the Middle East as fourth among five priority regions of the world,” he said, before reciting the strategy’s top regional priorities.
“Number one is that Gulf energy not fall into the hands of an enemy,” Campbell recounted. “Number two was that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, and number three was that the Red Sea remain navigable.”
Washington was hardly known for sticking to its strategies, he said.
“This is even, I would argue, a step beyond that.”
Yet Ross Harrison, an MEI senior fellow, argued that the war could also open a path toward reconciliation, however unlikely that seems today. Vietnam’s eventual normalization of ties with the United States and global reintegration would have seemed implausible at that war’s end in April 1975, he said.
“Wars tend to break things. They break assumptions,” Harrison said. “They change dynamics between, let’s say, Iran and the Iranian people.”
For the Iranian state to follow a path similar to Vietnam’s, though, it would have to emerge from the war feeling secure, he said, arguing that Hanoi normalized ties because of the confidence it gained in successfully resisting a much stronger power.
“They left that war confident: confident in their own security, confident in the fact that they had defeated or at least prevented the United States from achieving its objectives,” he said, adding that it was not implausible Tehran could end up the same way.
Still, unlike Vietnam, Iran will face a choice over whether to keep pursuing nuclear weapons. Harrison judged a dash to a bomb unlikely in the short to medium term, due to “the intelligence penetration of Iran by Israel and the United States.” But he cautioned against assuming Iran would abandon the program.
If Iran believed it could make that dash, he said, “I think it probably would.”
Turkish officials are already preparing for exactly that possibility.
Gönül Tol, MEI’s Turkey specialist, said officials she interviewed for the report believed Iran’s new leadership was now more likely to pursue nuclear weapons.
“They think that Iran is certainly going to get the bomb, and Turkey has to do something about that,” she said, summarizing her chapter in the report.
Tol said she did not expect Ankara to seek a nuclear bomb soon, given the risk of serious damage to ties with NATO allies. The more likely course, she said, was to preserve the ability to do so by pursuing enrichment capabilities.
“Turkey is very likely to pursue what we call nuclear hedging, which means developing the nuclear technology that could allow Turkey to build the weapon when or if it decides to do so politically,” Tol said, adding that Turkey could pursue a spectrum of capabilities, including becoming a “threshold state.”
Tol pointed to Turkey’s pursuit of Canadian civilian nuclear technology as a route to greater autonomy over its program. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is scheduled to visit Turkey this week for talks on energy and defense, with bilateral cooperation deals in both areas expected to be signed.
“Not what I would have expected from Canada,” said the moderator of the report launch, Laura Kelly of The Hill newspaper.
Washington, for its part, is already urging its regional allies to shoulder more of their own defense. Speaking at the Global Security Forum in Doha on Tuesday, Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria and Iraq, said America’s longstanding oil-for-security bargain with the Middle East was “transitioning” as Washington takes a more hands-off role, while insisting “we’re not leaving.”
“Every time we try and intervene and change the person or the regime, it seems to have been a mistake,” he said, before acknowledging the uncertainties at play. “This transition is complicated and difficult, and we don’t have a playbook.”
Still, for all the talk of U.S. partners in the region taking security into their own hands, Tol saw little prospect of a ready replacement for American power.
She said she was skeptical that the Mecca pact between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan amounted to a “Muslim NATO,” given that the three countries have different weapons systems and ultimately “don’t have a shared threat perception,” even if frustration with Washington had brought them together.
Turkey feels most threatened by Israel, she argued, while Saudi Arabia’s main concern is Iran and Pakistan fears India. NATO, by contrast, was built around a shared fear of Soviet expansionism.
For now, at least, the region’s immediate future hinges on decisions made in Washington, where congressional support for the nearly eight-month-old war has been shaky at the best of times, and could diminish further within weeks.
Campbell said projected Democratic gains in the House and Senate in the Nov. 3 midterm elections could force a needed refocus in Washington by increasing the prospect of Congress restricting funding for the Iran war.
Once the new Congress takes office in January, there could be “more of a push towards these things like reducing funding for the war,” he said. That pressure could compel U.S. officials to decide what they need to accomplish in the short term, with rebuilding regional air and missile defenses the most likely priority.
But the need to refocus was already urgent, he argued, describing a disconnect between the White House’s public promises of postwar prosperity and falling gas prices and the choices already being forced on partners facing Iranian attacks.
“We have partners in the region that are right now — today — under threat or under attack from Iran and its proxies,” he said. They were “having to make decisions that are going to shape the future of the geopolitics of the region, in a way that I don’t get a sense is fully appreciated here in Washington.”
