Summary

  • Stakeholders defending new territorial and economic facts on the ground across the Middle East have created structural incompatibility of positions, a dynamic in which each diplomatic failure resets baseline expectations and normalizes sustained regional conflict.
  • Iran retains the capability to disrupt the global economy through strikes and control of the Strait of Hormuz, while Gulf states have been drawn into the conflict as targets with economies forcibly reoriented under duress.
  • Israel occupies nearly 20% of Lebanon’s territory, and according to Malik’s analysis, Netanyahu harbours no interest in a peace deal with Iran that would stabilize a regime he had a chance to bring to its knees.
  • Trump has announced a “great settlement” ending the war nearly 40 times while strikes and counter-strikes continue, a pattern that follows the mechanism fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly identified in 1995 as “shifting baseline syndrome” — each cycle of failure resets the population’s expectation of normal.

The war between the United States and Iran has entered a phase in which violence, displacement, and economic disruption have become normalized across the Middle East, a condition that analytical frameworks examining stakeholder positions and adaptive baseline-shifting suggest is structural rather than episodic.

Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik characterized the state as one of “war denial,” writing that the conflict now operates as “low-grade strikes, hot and cold rhetoric, and near conclusions to the hostilities that never come.” A lexicon has emerged to describe this condition — ceasefires described as “fragile,” “tenuous,” “tested,” and “challenged” — “all while missiles, drones and killings continue,” Malik wrote. The conflict has become a matter of what she called “absurdist ‘ceasefires’” that redefine the very meaning of war.

The acceleration of casualties under ceasefire frameworks

The pace of killing has intensified even within frameworks nominally designated as peace. Nearly 1,500 people have been killed in the last two months, amounting to one-third of total fatalities since the conflict’s escalation in early March, according to Malik’s accounting. More than one in four of those dead are children. In Gaza, nearly 1,000 people have been killed since the October 2025 ceasefire. In Lebanon, since the April ceasefire, Israel’s operations — Malik described killings, the ejection of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes, and the pummeling of parts of Beirut — continue. Around 1 million people remain displaced.

The timeline itself is unstable. The US, along with mediator Pakistan, suggested a peace deal could be announced on a Sunday, but Iran disagreed that everything had been ironed out, then threatened to pull out of talks altogether after Israel struck the outskirts of Beirut. Since the ceasefire between the US and Iran in April, the two have traded strikes, including recent US attacks on cities in southern Iran. Trump, over the past week alone, announced strikes on Iran, expressed a desire to take Kharg Island — which handles 90% of Iran’s crude oil exports — and then declared the war ended in a “great settlement.”

Stakeholder positions: why no resolution point exists

Multiple distinct clusters maintain genuinely incompatible positions, and no single intervention satisfies even two of them simultaneously.

Iran retains “the power to seize up the region and the global economy with strikes and control of the Strait of Hormuz,” Malik wrote. Tehran threatened to pull out of talks after Israeli strikes and continues to trade strikes with the US post-April ceasefire. This capability creates a strategic logic in which ongoing low-grade conflict functions as leverage — maintaining pressure on adversaries and signaling resilience — rather than an intolerable rupture demanding resolution.

Israel occupies nearly 20% of Lebanon’s territory. According to Malik’s analysis, Netanyahu “will probably wish to press his advantage in Lebanon under the guise of vanquishing Hezbollah, while harbouring no interest in a peace deal with Iran that would stabilise a regime he had a chance to bring to its knees.” Netanyahu “appears to defy Trump and strike Iran unilaterally,” Malik wrote — a characterization of documented conduct in which Israeli strikes have occurred during US-brokered peace announcements.

The United States, according to Malik, faces a gap between peace rhetoric and the inability to control either allied or adversarial actors. Trump is “embarrassed and exposed” by Iran’s defiance and response, promising peace while threatening to wipe out Iran’s “entire infrastructure,” Malik wrote. He has made approximately 40 such peace declarations while the conflict has expanded.

Gulf Arab states — Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar — have been drawn into the conflict as targets. Seventeen percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas global supply has been eliminated. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has reshaped Saudi Arabia’s economic priorities, diverting money toward infrastructure such as ports and data centres. Dubai faces anticipated severe economic contraction, with major airlines continuing to suspend flights. Arab countries “remain a holding pattern of insecurity, hostage to the impossible balance between Tehran, Tel Aviv and Washington,” Malik wrote.

Lebanon’s population is treated as terrain rather than polity: approximately 1 million displaced, 20% of territory occupied. Gaza remains “an open wound.” Malik’s structural observation names the mechanism: “The problem with war is that, the longer it goes on, the more it creates new realities on the ground, and new, diverse agendas that cannot be wrested back to what preceded the conflict.” New economic infrastructures, territorial occupations, and displacement populations have created facts on the ground that each stakeholder now defends.

Spatial reconstitution: genius loci fractured

The sustained conflict has reconstituted the spatial order of the Middle East across every scale of analysis — regional, national, and household — in ways that resist reversal.

At the regional scale, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and systematic strikes on the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain have shattered the stable spatial coherence that previously allowed routine movement and economic exchange. Kevin Lynch’s spatial taxonomy maps onto the conflict’s geography: the Strait of Hormuz functions as a dominant edge, a choking-point boundary characterized as closed; the scattered nations form a continuous geography of insecurity defined by strikes and counter-strikes; suspended Dubai flights function as a landmark of absence. The temporality is equally dissolved — “timings are never agreed upon,” Malik wrote — naming a region whose temporal-spatial coherence has disintegrated.

At the national scale, economic structures have been forcibly reoriented. Saudi Arabia’s priorities have been redirected toward ports and data centres. Qatar has lost a major portion of its LNG capacity. Dubai’s aviation and tourism sectors face contraction.

At the household scale, Christian Norberg-Schulz’s concept of genius loci — the unified qualitative character of a place that supports orientation, identification, and dwelling — describes what has been lost. Refuge has been destroyed for hundreds of thousands of households across Lebanon, Gaza, and the wider region. The displaced inhabit what Jay Appleton’s prospect-refuge framework would characterize as pure exposure: the prospect of threat without the refuge of home. Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of intimate space — the corner, the nest — are not simply inverted but actively contested.

Malik wrote that “the sense that this is how it is, and how it always has been, will settle, as people continue to try to make lives during the biggest regional conflict in the Middle East in contemporary history.” The search for sheltering niches persists not because the place supports it but because permanent flight constitutes its own spatial annihilation.

Shifting baselines: why normalization is structural, not merely psychological

The mechanism by which populations accommodate conditions that should be intolerable is not new. Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined “shifting baseline syndrome” in 1995 in his work on fisheries ecology — the process by which each generation of scientists accepted as normal the depleted stock levels it inherited. The concept has been adapted across conservation and environmental psychology. Each cycle of strike-and-ceasefire resets the baseline; the population adapts to a progressively worse normal.

This framing identifies a specific failure mode: the condition Malik names — “this is how it is, and how it always has been” — is not an emotional response but a structural feature of prolonged conflict. Each diplomatic failure makes the next more likely as the baseline shifts further. The novelty Malik identifies is not that normalization occurs but its simultaneity: Gaza, Lebanon, the Gulf states, Hormuz, and US-Iran bilateral strikes are all active at once, collapsing the previously operative fiction that these are separate conflicts manageable separately.

Scenario landscape

The structural analysis supports a scenario landscape in which normalization remains the highest-probability trajectory.

Trend continuation — low-grade strikes, rhetorical escalation, nominal ceasefires that do not cease, and progressive normalization continue; displacement becomes semi-permanent infrastructure; economic reorientation becomes structural. No actor has demonstrated the will or capacity to break the current cycle. Probability band: 35–45% over 12 months.

Extremistan event — a decisive Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or critical infrastructure collapses regime capacity, or Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic for an extended period, shattering the “low-grade” character into a phase transition. The activation mechanism is the conduct Malik documented: Netanyahu appears prepared to act unilaterally. Probability band: 10–20%.

Diplomatic breakthrough — a credible peace agreement addressing Iranian nuclear ambitions, Israeli security concerns, Lebanese sovereignty, and Gaza simultaneously. The structural incompatibility of principal positions — Netanyahu’s disinterest in stabilizing Iran and Iran’s retained leverage — forecloses convergence. Probability band: 5–10%.

External shock — Chinese or Russian intervention, a global energy-price spike, or a domestic US political shift restructures the strategic calculus in ways none of the principal parties currently anticipates. The historical frequency with which external shocks have restructured Middle Eastern strategic dynamics drives the probability band: 15–25%.

Return to pre-conflict spatial order — Lebanon’s borders restored, Gaza rebuilt, Hormuz reopened, Gulf economies resumed — functions as an aspiration benchmark, not a forecast. No current trajectory leads there. It is included against which the others are measured.

The wick of the wicked problem

The conflict presents characteristics that the policy-sciences literature associated with Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s wicked-problem framework: it has no definitive formulation. It is simultaneously a US-Iran confrontation, an Israeli security operation, a Lebanese sovereignty crisis, a Palestinian humanitarian catastrophe, a Gulf economic disruption, and a global energy-supply shock. Each framing implies different stakeholders, different solutions, and different stopping rules.

Malik’s concluding sentence names the adaptive mechanism by which populations accommodate conditions that should be intolerable: “Because humans take a lot of killing.” In doing so, she identifies what is arguably the conflict’s most durable feature — the normalization she describes removes the urgency that might otherwise force a resolution, and in that removal, the sustained regional conflict perpetuates itself.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Genius Loci — Sense of Place
Reads the character and felt quality of a place.
Wicked Futures
Explores a long-horizon, deeply entangled future with no clean resolution.
Wicked Problems
Treats a problem as wicked — no stopping rule, no clean test of success, every attempt consequential.
Bayesian Reasoning
Starting from base rates and updating beliefs proportionally as evidence arrives.
Creative Destruction
Innovation that grows the economy by dismantling the incumbents it displaces (Schumpeter).