Waking up on the morning of 28t February, you would have been forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu. Since Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023, war has been an almost permanent feature of the Middle East, casting the region into a downward spiral of crises that seemingly has no end. News that the United States and Israel had begun striking Iran, crippling its military installations and killing members of its political leadership, was thus as unnerving as it was unsurprising. We have, in many ways, seen this all before.

Long before 2023, conflict plagued geopolitics in the Middle East. The history of the region since 1945 is scarred with Arab-Israeli wars, American interventions and bitter civil strife. For those mining the past for insights on how and when the current crisis will end, there is no shortage of case studies to explore. A sharp rise in oil and gas prices has made many cast their minds back to October 1973 and the Yom Kippur War for answers. There are, of course, similarities between the two conflicts beyond rising energy costs, including Israel engaging in combat on multiple fronts and shockwaves felt on the global market. Yet, focusing on the similarities of the analogy risks obscuring the more consequential differences.

Anwar Sadat and his Syrian allies launched the war in 1973 with clear, limited objectives: retrieve territory in the Sinai and the Golan Heights lost during the Six Day War, and break the deadlock that had ground Arab-Israeli diplomacy to a halt. Current American-Israeli goals are more elusive – ranging from the destruction of missile facilities to the more ambitious prospect of regime change – and make an end point even harder to forecast. This absence of clear objectives does not in itself make a ceasefire impossible, but it does complicate the ability of the respective political leaders to recognise and declare that their aims have been achieved.

Beyond strategy, there is another, arguably more important, difference to 1973. For policymakers and analysts seeking the course the conflict will follow, it would perhaps be better not to look only at the combat dynamics, the rhetoric, or even the economic effects, and instead look to how today’s uncertain world order is shaping the fighting and the conditions under which it might be brought to a close.

We are not in the world of the Cold War anymore. Back in the 1970s, US and Soviet leaders possessed the necessary incentives and the ability to constrain and help terminate the fighting. The two great powers were eager to manage and maintain their relationships in the region, preserve an emerging détente between them, and avoid the risk of nuclear confrontation. Both also had tangible leverage over their Middle Eastern allies and partners, being the predominant external powers in the region since the old colonial powers of Britain and France had left the scene. Their influence, of course, should not be overstated; battlefield developments and the agency of regional leaders played important roles. However, more than the actual fighting, it was the structured, bi-polar world order and the corresponding superpower pressure that limited escalation, reduced risk, and created the conditions for a ceasefire.

The situation in 2026 looks much different. Not only is this not a war with clearly defined strategic objectives like those found in the 1973, it is also taking place amid a world order that is adrift, without a settled hierarchy or shared expectations about which states should act, and on what terms, in moments of crisis. As former Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon has argued, we are now in ‘a world that is between orders’, transitioning from an age of American unipolarity towards a more diffuse distribution of power. In practical terms, this manifests itself in weaker crisis coordination, less predictable alignments and greater uncertainty about who bears responsibility for managing escalation and de-escalation. It is this confusion that shapes how many of today’s wars are fought, and how they are ultimately brought to an end.

Despite some of the Trump administration’s more stunning maximalist policies, the US recognised the limits of its power at the start of the century with the disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, conflicts that drained the country both financially and morally. Now, other states, buoyed by America’s reluctant and unreliable role, have perceived that now is the time to claim their positions as poles in a new global order. Whether it is the more established states of China, Russia or India, or those just emerging such as Brazil and Indonesia, a whole host of states are striving to shape the future of international politics to their particular vision. Yet ambition does not automatically translate into ability, and nor does ability always give birth to a willingness to bear the political costs associated with managing conflicts.

Despite talk of decline, the war in the Middle East shows that US power has not yet dwindled as much as some have claimed. Washington remains the external power best placed to alter the trajectory of the conflict, possessing unmatched military capabilities and considerable diplomatic and economic weight. Compared to 1973, though, this time it is not an external balancer and mediator; instead, it is one of the principal participants, fully engaged in operations inside Iran and across the region. The central problem, therefore, is not just the absence of a solidified world order, but the fact that the actor most capable of coordinating a settlement is itself pursuing a fluid array of objectives.

Elsewhere, the so-called middle, rising and regional powers have struggled to translate their growing influence into effective conflict management. The powers of Europe, beleaguered by another war on their eastern flank in Ukraine, are desperate for the economic impact to end but unwilling and largely incapable of engaging in anything other than defensive measures. India has been able to negotiate a few of its own oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, yet like the regional powers of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, it ultimately has limited sway over the United States, Israel, or Iran when it comes to core questions of war and peace. This is not to say these states are irrelevant, rather that their influence tends to be partial and insufficient on its own to shape the policies of the three belligerents.

Even China, the state many believe is close to reaching parity with American power and capable of shifting the world towards a Cold War-style binary order, has been relatively cautious. Despite brokering Tehran’s rapprochement with Riyadh in 2023 and maintaining a significant relationship with Iran, it is not yet a major security actor in the Middle East. Beijing does have incentives to stop the war, particularly given its dependence on regional energy flows, and it possesses forms of indirect leverage through trade and investment. Yet it has shown limited willingness to assume the responsibilities and risks that would come with a more assertive role in conflict mediation. While possessing real influence, Xi Jinping remains wary.

For the Middle East, as for much of the rest of the world, America remains an indispensable nation, but one whose position is now complicated by its direct involvement in the conflict. As in the Russo-Ukraine War, the United States retains a unique capacity to shape outcomes, yet the Trump administration’s position is simultaneously complicated by its other commitments and calculations. No other external power or coalition is currently both able and willing to broker a settlement on broadly acceptable terms, leaving the outcome largely to the interaction of the belligerents themselves.

Given the lack of trust, the long-burning resentment, and the existential dread shared among all parties in the US-Israel-Iran conflict, it is difficult to imagine an easy conclusion is in sight. Real, lasting peace does not come cheap in the Middle East, and this latest crisis looks particularly difficult to resolve. There will be no bold Kissingerian shuttle diplomacy or nuclear brinkmanship this time; not because diplomacy has become impossible, but because the mixture of a recognised world order, concentrated influence and shared incentives that enabled such efforts in 1973 is absent.

Tehran has, thus far, demonstrated it has the resilience to withstand a barrage of attacks and internal unrest, and the ability to strike back at Israel and US bases spread across the Middle East. American involvement in the conflict will likely be shaped by the reaction of the market, with rising oil prices and the pressures of inflation feeding domestic political anxieties, especially with the upcoming midterm elections. Yet even if the United States can soon extricate itself from the conflict, the underlying drivers of the conflict will remain. The continuation of the Iranian regime faces what Israel believes to be a unique opportunity to reshape the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East, and there is little to stop the two trading blows for the foreseeable future.

The difficulty of ending the war in Iran reflects a broader trend found in this current age of transition. Left with an assortment of reluctant or parochial powers scattered across the globe, contemporary wars have often been managed yet left unresolved, with states resorting to the weaker measures of de-escalation and ceasefires. Lacking reliable, engaged great powers operating inside an established world order, recent conflicts like those in Gaza, Kashmir and Nagorno-Karabakh, have paused on unstable equilibria, with core tensions remaining unresolved and dormant, ready to erupt again at any moment. The war in Iran is likely to resemble this pattern.

This is not to say the world of the Cold War was a serene geopolitical paradise. The ideological duel between the United States and the Soviet Union fuelled carnage in the Global South and took the world to the brink of thermonuclear destruction; pining to go back would be naïve. Nor is it to argue that when the next order arrives it will be much safer for everyone. Multipolarity will be complex and will require reform to the system of institutions that underpin it. We will also have to wait some time for it to be formalised; world orders are an aberration of history. In the meantime, we will be left with a difficult world; one in which wars are less often decisively concluded and more often managed into uneasy and temporary silences.