President Donald Trump is hours away from his deadline to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure if the country’s government refuses to make a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz.
What happens in the hours after a strike, analysts say, could further destabilize the region and global energy markets.
Trump on Monday doubled down on his vow to order sweeping strikes against bridges and power plants if the strait remains restricted by 8 p.m. ET. When asked if he was concerned about accusations of war crimes, Trump said: “No, not at all.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the mission would unleash “the largest volume of strikes since Day One of this operation.”
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Analysts broadly agree that Iran is unlikely to back down under pressure and think Tehran will instead try to inflict economic and political pain if the Trump administration carries out its plan.
“They always strike back,” said Mark Cancian, a former Marine colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Experts expect the strike would be a concentrated salvo of missiles and drones aimed at slipping past air defenses and striking high-visibility targets such as oil facilities, ports or urban areas, to generate shock and headlines.
“The military answer is they can’t hurt us very much,” Cancian said. “But politically, individual losses get portrayed as a military stalemate, and so they have much more effect than they do from a military perspective.”
Iran’s missile and drone launches dropped sharply after the war’s opening days as U.S. and Israeli strikes degraded its launchers and stockpiles, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis. But analysts say Tehran is focused on economic infrastructure in the Gulf Arab states, where even limited damage can ripple through global energy markets.
Iran’s response will likely depend on what the U.S. strikes look like, said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a think tank focused on foreign-policy restraint. If Washington attacks Iran’s power plants, that could spur Tehran to respond in kind to its Gulf Arab neighbors, which could lead to a humanitarian crisis as those countries rely heavily on electricity to desalinate drinking water.
“That’s something that could really hurt them,” Kelanic said of countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. “And it raises the question of: What do these countries do in response?”
Iran has so far conducted a limited series of attacks on Gulf oil and gas production infrastructure, including on refineries and gas fields in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Those attacks, while not massive, are already contributing to spiking global oil prices. If the U.S. bombs more oil production facilities in Iran and Iran then increases the frequency and intensity of such attacks in response, the global oil markets will quickly feel the consequences, Kelanic warned.
“That could cause lasting problems for global energy supplies,” she said.
U.S. strikes on energy infrastructure could create lasting damage that keeps oil and gas offline long after the fighting ends, said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, and author of “Oil, the State, and War.”
“If you destroy all the infrastructure, the oil will not flow again or not for a long time, because it will need to be repaired,” she said. “That is the difference between a disruption for the length of the conflict and a disruption for years.”
Ashford said Iran has already shown that it is willing to respond similarly. Another scenario is that it taps its regional proxies, such as Yemen’s Houthis, to widen the disorder.
“That increases the danger and the contagion to the global economy pretty substantially,” she said, “because you start having to price in much longer-term disruptions.”
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