The Game Nobody Asked To Play

By Dominus Owen Markham

Let me guess. You’ve been vaguely aware that something has been happening in the Middle East, in the way that you’re vaguely aware of a headache coming on … that low-frequency hum at the edge of your attention that you keep promising yourself you’ll deal with later.

Well. Later is here.

Ten days ago, the United States and Israel launched what they’ve been calling Operation Epic Fury … which is, I’ll grant them, an extraordinary name for something that is going to make your petrol significantly more expensive. Nearly 900 strikes in twelve hours. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is dead. His son Mojtaba has been installed in his place. Oil is trading at over $112 a barrel. Missiles are landing in Qatar. Bahrain has declared force majeure. Turkey has deployed F-16s to Northern Cyprus. Eight American soldiers are in body bags. The Iranian Red Crescent has reported that 65 schools and 32 medical facilities have been struck since the war began. A girls’ school in Minab was hit on the first day. More than 160 people died.

The United Nations has declared a major humanitarian emergency.

And somewhere in Washington, someone is almost certainly workshopping the phrase “phase two.”

I’m not writing this to give you a lecture. I’m writing this because there is a story underneath the story, and it’s one that tends to get buried under the sheer volume of explosion footage and breathless breaking-news alerts. It’s a story about who wanted this war, who benefits from it, and why the answer to both questions is considerably more personal and considerably more grubby than anyone in power is going to admit.

The Three Men and Their Problems

Let’s start where it usually starts: with men who have problems.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been on trial for corruption since 2020. Bribery, fraud, breach of trust. For years, the proceedings have moved at a pace that would embarrass a glacier, with postponements so creative you’d almost admire them if they weren’t so nakedly convenient … a visit from a foreign dignitary here, a security consultation there, the death of a judge’s relative offering a week of legal silence. When Israel entered a formal state of emergency after the strikes began, all non-essential public gatherings were prohibited. Netanyahu’s court sessions were, naturally, among the first things cancelled.

The war, as it turns out, is also rather good for the polls. Netanyahu’s Likud party had been projected to lose seats in the upcoming election. Analysts had been openly discussing whether he was finished. Then, within hours of the strikes on Tehran, every opposition politician of note fell into line. His decades-long project … regime change in Iran, the thing he has been warning about, lobbying for, and building his entire political identity around … had finally, spectacularly, come to fruition. The man who cried wolf has apparently found a wolf.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, had his own considerations. His State of the Union address in February was devoted in significant part to Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, language that analysts noted bore a strong resemblance to the WMD framing that preceded the Iraq War in 2003. Within days, the largest US military buildup in the Middle East since that same invasion was underway. Trump has since publicly demanded that Israel’s president pardon Netanyahu, reportedly saying he doesn’t want “anything on Bibi’s mind other than fighting against Iran.” He is also the man whose administration was, around the same time, dealing with rather uncomfortable disclosures involving the Epstein files. Some Republican members of Congress have made the connection explicit. Whether or not you find that credible is your business. The timing, at minimum, is its own kind of argument.

And then there is Iran itself … or rather, the people running it, who in January of this year killed thousands of their own citizens during the largest protests since the Islamic Revolution. A regime under that kind of internal pressure has its own reasons to reframe the national conversation. The enemy outside is always more useful than the enemy within.

Three governments. Three sets of leaders with acute domestic crises. One regional war.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the chess pieces who didn’t get a vote.

The People Who Didn’t Get a Vote

The girls at the school in Minab didn’t vote on Operation Epic Fury.

The Bangladeshi workers in Kharj who were killed by an Iranian drone strike in Saudi Arabia didn’t vote on it either.

Neither did the hundreds of thousands of travellers currently stranded across the Gulf states, unable to leave, watching their governments issue shelter-in-place alerts at three in the morning. Or the residents of Bahrain’s Maameer village, whose local facility is currently on fire. Or the Qatari families woken by a dozen explosions before their government confirmed that, actually, it was fine, the missiles had been intercepted, go back to sleep.

The Iranian public, for its part, was already living through a repression that had killed thousands of them in protest crackdowns. Now their cities are being struck, their schools and hospitals counted among the casualties, and their new Supreme Leader … installed in a week, because that’s apparently how that works now … is their late Supreme Leader’s son, who seems to have inherited both the job and the Western world’s attention.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, the thing you are most likely to have noticed is the price of fuel.

And that’s not a small thing, actually. That’s the whole point. The war arrives at the petrol pump before it arrives anywhere else. Before it’s a geopolitical crisis, before it’s a humanitarian emergency, before it’s a history chapter, it’s a number on a forecourt sign that seems to have gone up again. Brent crude was trading above $119 a barrel at its peak this week. Markets start to panic past $100. We’re well past $100.

What you pay to fill your car is connected, in a perfectly straight line, to decisions made by men in suits who will never queue at a petrol station in their lives.

The Game

Here’s what I want you to understand about the geopolitics, because it’s actually simpler than it looks once you stop letting the terminology intimidate you.

This is a game with a board, and the players all had their reasons.

Netanyahu wanted regime change in Iran. He has wanted it for thirty years. It has been the through-line of his entire career, the thing that has allowed him to present himself as irreplaceable, the thing that has made domestic scandals seem, to a sufficient number of voters, like a distraction from the real business of national survival. He reportedly called Trump in late February to tip him off about Khamenei’s location and meeting schedule. The plan had been in motion since at least November 2025.

Trump wanted a win. Not a complicated, nuanced, diplomatically managed win … the kind he has no patience for … but a big, visual, undeniable win. A decapitation strike on a regime the American right has despised for nearly five decades. A moment to stand in front of a camera and say: I did what no-one else dared. That he may have walked into something rather larger than a clean victory is becoming clearer by the day. Operation Epic Fury is reportedly costing nearly $900 million per day. That’s not in the budget. Someone’s going to have to ask Congress for more money, and that conversation is going to be awkward.

Russia, for its part, offered condolences and verbal support to Iran, then got on with its own war in Ukraine. It cannot afford to open another front. Its reputation as a reliable ally is taking yet another hit, and it can do nothing about it.

China issued a formulaic condemnation, then quietly noted that its Belt and Road investments in Gulf states are now being struck by Iranian missiles, and that roughly a third of its crude oil passes through this region. The irony of China’s position … ideologically aligned with Iran’s anti-Western posture, but economically exposed to precisely the chaos that posture has created … is so acute you’d almost feel sorry for them, if you were in the mood for it.

Europe is doing what Europe does, which is to try to satisfy several mutually incompatible principles simultaneously while issuing statements of concern. Some leaders are quietly hoping that a weakened Iran means less nuclear proliferation risk and fewer proxy conflicts. Others are worried about the rules-based international order and what it means when the most powerful country in that order simply decides to bomb someone else’s supreme leader and call it self-defence. Neither camp has worked out what to do about the fact that they need America more than they’re willing to say.

And Iran? Iran is a government that survived sanctions, the Green Movement, multiple rounds of protests, international isolation, and an economy that has been functionally strangled for decades. Experts have been warning for years that it is a hard target … that decapitating the leadership doesn’t produce a compliant, pro-Western democracy, it produces a power vacuum that various armed factions will attempt to fill, with considerable violence. The Islamic Republic will not collapse easily. Its only current objective is survival. And its strategy, lacking the conventional military strength to fight the US and Israel directly, is to make the costs as high and as widespread as possible … hence the missiles in Qatar, the drones over Bahrain, the attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure, the warship sunk off Sri Lanka.

The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, inherited all of that on day ten. Trump has already called him a “lightweight” and threatened him.

This is going well.

What You Do With This

I’m not going to tell you what to think. I’ve never had much patience for writers who dress up their conclusions as a kindness to the reader. But I will tell you what I think, for whatever that’s worth, which is that this war was chosen. Not triggered. Not provoked into existence by some final, unavoidable crossing of a line. Chosen, planned over months, and launched by people who had personal and political reasons for wanting it beyond the stated justifications.

That doesn’t make the stated justifications wholly false. Iran’s nuclear programme is real. The regime’s repression of its own people is real. The threat it has posed to regional stability is real. These are not invented grievances.

But real grievances are also extremely useful cover for wars of choice. That’s been true in every major conflict of the past century. The presence of a genuine problem doesn’t tell you that a military solution is the right one, or that the people launching it are doing so primarily because they care about the problem. It tells you that the genuine problem exists, and that someone has decided to use it.

Over a thousand people are already dead. The UN has declared a humanitarian emergency. Eight American service members have come home in coffins. Schools and hospitals in Iran have been struck. Civilians in six Gulf nations are waking up to sirens. The Strait of Hormuz is disrupted, which means global energy markets are disrupted, which means the number on your petrol forecourt is going to keep going up, and that’s before we know how long this lasts or what shape it takes next.

Netanyahu’s corruption trial is currently on pause. His poll numbers are up. His election, expected in October, may be brought forward to summer, while the wartime boost is still generating heat.

None of that proves anything. You’re allowed to hold all of it in your head simultaneously and come to your own conclusions. That’s rather the point.

But I’d suggest, if you’ve been deliberately not looking … that now might be the time to look.

Because the game is already being played, and the pieces being moved are not just on a board in Washington or Tel Aviv or Tehran.

Some of them are filling up their tanks at a forecourt near you.