The mechanism behind Operation Epic Fury

Posted on: 2 March 2026

On 27 February 2026, Oman's foreign minister announced a "breakthrough" in nuclear negotiations with Iran: Tehran had reportedly agreed to halt uranium stockpiling and submit to full IAEA verification. Twenty-four hours later, at 7am local time on 28 February, American and Israeli missiles struck Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Tabriz and six other Iranian cities. Khamenei's residence was destroyed. The supreme leader was killed along with his daughter, son-in-law and grandchild. Iranian state media confirmed his death overnight between 28 February and 1 March. He was the first Iranian head of state to be assassinated since Naser al-Din Shah was stabbed by an anarchist in 1896. This timeline, the agreement arriving the day before the missiles, is the key to understanding what is actually happening. Not in the official statements, but in the incentive structures that produced them.

The operation carries two names: "Epic Fury" for the Pentagon, "Roaring Lion" for Israel. This is not an aesthetic detail. It signals two distinct agendas converging on the same target for profoundly different reasons. The United States struck military infrastructure, missile facilities and naval installations; what defence secretary Pete Hegseth called "the most lethal, most complex, and most precision aerial operation in history." Israel struck the leadership: Khamenei, defence council secretary Ali Shamkhani, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, defence minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and at least four other senior officials, killed according to the Israeli military in three separate meetings hit simultaneously. The division of labour is surgical and reveals two different objectives: Washington degrades capability, Jerusalem decapitates command.

For Israel, the logic is direct and, within its own frame of reference, rational. Iran has funded Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis for decades. The nuclear programme, despite Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 which destroyed enrichment facilities at Fordow and Natanz, remained a permanent shadow. Netanyahu had told Trump in February, as Axios reported, that making a good deal with Iran is impossible and that even if one were struck, Iran would not honour it. For the Israeli prime minister, any negotiation is a concession of time to an existential enemy. The question was never whether to strike, but when. And the moment a diplomatic agreement was about to crystallise was paradoxically the worst possible moment from Israel's perspective: an Iran legitimised by the international community through a verifiable treaty would have been more dangerous, not less, because it would have enjoyed diplomatic protection while rebuilding its capabilities behind the shield of a negotiated framework.

For the United States, the calculus is different and more layered, but converges on the same result. Trump announced the attack on Truth Social at 2.30am, with no press conference, no public briefing to Congress, with only the Gang of Eight notified shortly before launch. The eight-minute video concluded with a direct message to Iranians: "When we are finished, take over your government." This is the language of regime change, not denuclearisation. But there is a problem: the key nuclear infrastructure had already been destroyed nine months earlier. The CSIS notes that the targets in this second wave include administrative headquarters, dual-use research facilities and the Iranian atomic energy agency's main building. This is not an attack on a nuclear programme; it is an attack on a regime. The difference between the two is enormous, because it implies an objective that no aerial bombardment in history has ever achieved on its own.

Anyone who lived through Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 recognises the pattern immediately. For Britain, the resonance is particularly acute. The 2003 Commons vote on Iraq, won by Tony Blair with 412 to 149, remains the defining trauma of twenty-first century British foreign policy. The Chilcot Inquiry spent seven years documenting what happens when military action outruns strategic planning. The core finding was not that the invasion was wrong in principle, but that the absence of adequate preparation for the aftermath turned military success into political catastrophe. The Stimson Center, writing within hours of the Iran strikes, reaches a strikingly similar conclusion: "Air strikes alone cannot topple a government, and Iran in 2026 is likely to emerge battered but not broken, a costly example of American hubris and the limits of airpower." The Atlantic Council adds that "the greatest danger may be a prolonged campaign that fails to produce dramatic internal change and lacks a clearly defined termination mechanism." Eighty million Iranians, a millennial national identity, an educated middle class and a pervasive security apparatus are not a problem that missiles can resolve. No one in the Trump administration has publicly presented a plan for the day after. Asked by NBC who might replace the supreme leader, Trump replied: "I don't know, but at some point they'll be calling me to ask who I'd like."

What is not being analysed sufficiently is the dynamics of retaliation and its structural significance for the future of the region. Within the first twenty-four hours, Iran struck not only Israel, where a missile killed nine people in Beit Shemesh with sirens sounding across the Jerusalem area, but also Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. Zayed International Airport was hit by a drone that killed a civilian and injured seven. The Burj Al Arab sustained an impact on its outer facade. Jebel Ali Port, one of the world's largest, caught fire. Kuwait International Airport was struck. Schools across the UAE switched to remote learning. More than 1,400 flights were cancelled across the region.

This pattern of retaliation is neither random nor irrational: it is game theory applied in real time. Iran knows it cannot win a conventional military confrontation with the United States and Israel. But it can radically alter the cost-benefit calculation for their regional allies. If hosting an American base means that tomorrow a missile hits your international airport, the hotel that symbolises your tourism economy and the port through which your trade flows, the price of the alliance becomes suddenly concrete and visible. Not for the governments, which understood the risk, but for the populations and the business elites who until yesterday regarded the American military presence as a free insurance policy. The discovery that this insurance carries an enormous excess could redraw Gulf alliances more decisively than any diplomatic summit. Qatar condemned the Iranian attack as a "flagrant violation of national sovereignty" and reserved the right of response; but the real question, the one being asked in every boardroom of every major company headquartered in Dubai, is different: what is American protection worth if the price is becoming an Iranian target?

For Britain, the Gulf dimension carries specific weight. The UK maintains a permanent naval facility at Mina Salman in Bahrain and HMS Juffair, its largest military base east of Suez since 2018. British Aerospace has billions in defence contracts across the Gulf states. London is the financial centre through which much of Gulf sovereign wealth flows. The question of whether Gulf allies begin to recalculate the value of Western military partnerships is not abstract geopolitics for Britain; it is a direct commercial and strategic concern. If the price of American protection becomes too visible, the demand for European alternatives, or for neutrality, rises. And Britain, post-Brexit, has positioned itself precisely as the Atlantic bridge between Washington and the Gulf. That bridge now has traffic moving in directions no one planned for.

The Strait of Hormuz is the other mechanism operating silently beneath the surface. The first oil tanker has already been attacked, according to Omani sources cited by Euronews. Twenty per cent of the world's oil transits through that corridor, barely 33 kilometres wide. Iran does not need to win the war; it merely needs to be able to paralyse global energy trade for weeks. This is asymmetric leverage that no bombardment can eliminate, because it depends on geography, not technology. And every day the Strait remains under threat, the oil price rises and the global economy pays the bill for a conflict that its promoters present as a solution. For an already fragile UK economy still navigating post-Brexit trade adjustments, an energy price shock of this magnitude is not a foreign policy abstraction. It arrives at the petrol pump and on the utility bill.

If this pattern holds (and the historical precedent suggests it will), we should observe three dynamics in the coming weeks: internal Iranian fragmentation without a clear leadership capable of negotiating the surrender Washington wants; escalation by proxy militias in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria rather than the demobilisation the Pentagon expects; growing regional instability fuelled by the discovery, on the part of the Gulf states, that their alliance with the United States carries a cost they had never previously been required to pay. The temporary security council announced by Ali Larijani in Tehran, with the warning that any "secessionist groups" attempting to exploit the situation would face a harsh response, is the first signal that the regime is not collapsing but reconsolidating around wounded nationalism. President Pezeshkian has declared Khamenei a martyr and vowed revenge. The IRGC has announced "the most ferocious offensive in history." These are the same words heard after Soleimani in 2020, but with a structural difference: then the regime was intact; today it is decapitated. The question is whether decapitation will produce disintegration or radicalisation. The historical record, from Iraq to Libya, from Chechnya to Afghanistan, indicates that the second outcome is almost always the one that materialises.

Removing a leader does not remove the system that produced him. The Iranian regime has forty-five years of institutional architecture, of power networks, of parallel structures built precisely to survive an event like this. Khamenei was the apex, not the structure. And structures survive people. Every attempt at aerial regime change in modern history tells us this. This one, in all probability, will tell us the same.