“Iran stands alone, and they are badly losing.”
So said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday. The country’s “neighbors, and in some cases former allies in the Gulf,” he added, “have abandoned them, and their proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, [are] either broken, ineffective, or on the sidelines.”
The assessment deserves more attention than it has received. Hegseth described Iran’s isolation as a military outcome, but it was in fact a structural inevitability—one confirmed when U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz announced on Wednesday that Washington stood with its Gulf Arab allies in a unanimous Security Council vote condemning Iran for its attacks on civilians across the region. By accelerating a regional realignment already underway, Operation Epic Fury has handed Washington a rare strategic opportunity: the establishment of an Abraham Accords 2.0, elevating normalized relations between Israel and the Gulf States from diplomatic symbolism into an integrated security architecture.
