Iran in six questions

In the end, maybe the surprise came not in the attack, but the details, whether…

• the CIA tracking Iran's supreme leader for months

• pinpointing the exact time and location of his big all-hands, or

• handing that intel off to Israel to pull the trigger around 9.40am Saturday.

The result? Israel's opening strike alone wiped out a veritable LinkedIn of names: not just the supreme leader (Khamenei), but also his revolutionary guard boss (Pakpour), defence minister (Nasirzadeh), military chief of staff (Mousavi), and later Ahmadinejad (of "Israel is a cancerous tumour" fame).

All while the US focused on capability, hitting missile sites, comms centres, and naval assets (it’s investigating who is behind the deadly strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran).

So with the months of will-he-won't-he now giving way to oh-he-just-did, here are the six big questions now worth your time, starting with...

• First, why now?

Kudos to whoever suggested maybe the Pentagon had to act before its Claude subscription expired, but this was realistically linked to the…

• a) talks: the Iranians offered big nuclear cuts, but still quibbled on some details (enrichment at home vs abroad) and held firm on others (ballistics, proxies)

• b) balance: the mass US footprint vs the ebb of Iran's grip and proxies, and

• c) deadline: the bombs fell just as Trump's latest 10-day deadline expired.

So throw in the window of the ayatollah's big Saturday meeting, plus maybe a few US pressures at home (tariffs, midterms), and it’s on.

• Second, was it legal?

No, but the mere debate now highlights its own irrelevance in major decisions, so we include it here as an excuse to cite Germany's Merz, who just argued, "international law too often benefits dictators, enabling their brutality while handcuffing democracies".

If you’ll excuse the comparison, it’s almost a modern version of the 1st-century’s “law was made for man, not man for the law” in how it inverts the point. Several democracies (from Canada to Australia) were quick to endorse the hits, and might adopt that justification.

• Third, what's Trump’s endgame?

Trump wants regime change. The murkier bit is how. And while there've been critics warning of some kind of Iraq 2.0 ahead, the first Iraq war (or even Venezuela) seems a better analogy: there's zero talk of occupation here, but rather a degradation of Iranian forces until someone better emerges, whether via succession, coup, or uprising.

So this is almost an assassination masquerading as war. Regime change was impossible with the ayatollah in power, and maybe it's possible with him gone. To be clear, nobody knows, and some of the "Delcys" Trump had in mind are now dead — but he seems to have calculated that the opportunity still outweighs the uncertainty.

• Fourth, what's Iran's endgame?

By retaliating with hits on US allies and partners across the region — not just US bases but also luxury hotels and airports — it's a classic asymmetric response aimed at...

• ratcheting up the costs on US enablers in hopes they'll force a US backdown

• demonstrating the regime’s reach, and

• distracting the US and Israel while Iran’s rulers regroup.

But while the strategy seems calibrated (it didn’t hit NATO member Turkey, for example) and is overwhelming some air defence systems, it might also be ill-conceived (Trump isn’t exactly known for prioritising allied wellbeing), if not actively now backfiring: achieving the impossible, virtually the entire Arab world is now united… against Iran.

• Fifth, the winners and losers?

A dictator who spent decades pledging death to Israel/America just got death by Israel/America, and the cold reality is this means another win for US and Israeli deterrence.

Meanwhile, it's a loss for Moscow and Beijing: they’re not Iran's formal 'allies', so there's nothing surprising about them not lifting a finger, nor lacking a finger in the region to lift.

Rather, this is a broader hit to both a) their brand, which is now less “join us as a US counterweight”, and more “we might buy your oil or drones but you're still on your own”; and b) their strategy: partnering with pariahs to distract and dilute Western power makes sense until you start running out of pariahs. And…

• Finally, what does this all mean for the markets?

The aviation ripples alone will be massive here: Gulf carriers (Emirates, Etihad, Qatar) funnel almost half of all Europe-Asia passenger traffic through hubs that are now closed.

The other big hit is to oil, though DC isn't tapping US strategic petroleum reserves for now, signalling confidence in US inventories and the low US reliance on the Gulf.

But Brent prices peaked up ~13% soon after the strikes, reaching 14-month highs (~$82/barrel). And that's a reflection of the fact Iran's revolutionary guards are warning tankers not to enter the critical Strait of Hormuz.

So you've now got ~150 tankers waiting outside, plus several major exporters stuck back inside (Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, plus partially the Saudis and Emiratis) — together with Iran, that's now ~20% of global oil supply on pause.