Iran is very likely to be attacked by the U.S. and Israel in early October of 2026 to preempt an Iranian attack on Israel two weeks before the November 3, 2026, U.S. midterm elections. It is possible that Iran may preempt the preemption if well-informed and guided by Russian or Chinese satellite reconnaissance. Retired pro-Trump U.S. General Jack Keane has warned Tehran that any attack by Iran just before the midterms would be a miscalculation given The president’s promise of a violent U.S. response.
Tehran’s strategic logic in maintaining the closure of the Straits of Hormuz is the infliction of energy costs on the U.S. electorate leading up to the November 3rd midterm elections, with the hope of weakening the Republican hold on Congress. However, the link between the Republican presidency and an American electorate that is largely indifferent to the fate of the Middle East is likely to fade when compared with other electoral issues, such as the debate surrounding redistributive taxes and the effect of tariffs on the cost of living.
An Iranian strike on Israel would immediately involve the U.S. and capture the attention of the voting American public, highlighting the link between the Republican Party and those Democrats that support Israel and the notion of a quagmire war. While only a bare majority believe the war to have been unnecessary, the action would highlight the impact of U.S. decisions that led Iran to close the Straits of Hormuz. An Iranian strike on the Persian Gulf states, in particular Israeli ally UAE, U.S. allies Qatar and Kuwait, and Houthi adversary Saudi Arabia, would not achieve electoral salience in the U.S.
From Tehran’s perspective, the previous three periods of intense and intermittent fighting (June 13-25, 2025; Feb 28-June 17 & July 7+, 2026) have significantly degraded to about ninety percent Iran’s air defenses and offensive missile and drone capabilities, despite claims by Iran and other deliberate exaggerations. Iran is estimated to have 1,500 missiles with high accuracy and several tens of thousands of long-range drones capable of reaching Israel and U.S. targets in Jordan. Iran can manage a rate of fire of 20-30 missiles per day, peaking at 40, which is far less than the original rate of 480 launched per day at the beginning of hostilities. Iran can also launch 50 drones per day. The importance of the size of the arsenal is that it is a limitation on the length of an Iranian attack, which is important because Tehran cannot be seen to have been successfully suppressed by a U.S.-Israeli attack, or it will give the impression of a victory by Washington to the U.S. electorate. Thus, Iran is likely to be able to sustain two weeks of high-intensity missile launches (30 missiles and 50 drones per day, dwindling to a few after two weeks of U.S.-Israeli counter-bombardment). Their optimal time to initiate an attack is mid-October, totaling 300 missiles and 500 drones.
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Striking into Israel will re-ignite the Gaza issue in the U.S.’s leftish electorate and highlight the U.S.’s shortage of defensive missiles, which will provoke the America Firsters on the right. Striking U.S. bases in Jordan and Israel will raise the issue of U.S. casualty sensitivity, which is particularly salient when Washington has decided against sincerely justifying the war to its citizens. Iran may also create an opportunity for a shoot-down of U.S. aircraft overflying Iran or the taking of U.S. prisoners.
Striking Israel is very likely to lead to significant pressure by American supporters of Israel on Washington to inflict significant damage on Iran. While Israel is disproportionately more vulnerable to Iranian attacks than in 2025, due to the shortage of U.S. and its own defensive missiles, and this has incentivized Israel to avoid directly confronting or provoking Iran since June 2026, the war will provide political cover for other Israeli objectives in Gaza and Lebanon and will therefore likely be welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A secondary benefit to Iran is to further demonstrate to the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait their relative weakness and the absence of U.S. assistance.
Iran has a third incentive to strike before the midterm elections, which is that the U.S. is almost certain to “mow Iranian grass” with Israel perhaps six months to a year after the midterm elections, if not immediately, once it has accumulated sufficient defensive interceptor missiles.
Iran’s fourth incentive to strike early is that China’s patience with Tehran’s closure of the Straits is likely to diminish as the benefits to Beijing of U.S. disruption are outweighed by its need to replenish its strategic reserve of oil from its principal Saudi and Iraqi suppliers. The U.S. conflict with Iran has undermined the credibility of Washington’s protection in the most important energy region in the world, creating opportunities for Beijing’s influence.
Most importantly, the Straits of Hormuz are only weakly held by Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump has little understanding of how to fashion international coalitions. If U.S. President George H.W. Bush were in office during a closure of the Straits of Hormuz, he would have provided the side payments to marshalled international institutions to legitimize a coalition to secure the Straits. This force would include the U.S., the amphibious forces of France, Italy, the UK, Germany (plus delinquent hanger-ons like Canada), Japan, South Korea, and Australia, plus minor forces of the GCC, likely even China in a constabulary role. India and Pakistan, both of which have complicated but generally positive relations with Iran, will likely stand aside.
The U.S. has three response options. The first is to immediately resume the bombing of Iran. The value of this approach is that it will inure the U.S. population to the conflict and attenuate the shock of U.S. casualties and aircraft losses and likely also provoke Iran out of frustration to strike targets against the GCC and farther afield. The shock value of an Iranian attack on the U.S. electorate is likely to be diminished. Reasons for not attacking are the danger that Washington will lose control of the narrative and the possibility that the conflict will produce other politically unanticipated developments.
The second option is not to pre-empt Iran and seek to avoid the attention of decision-makers in Tehran by evacuating as many U.S. personnel and aircraft from within range of Iranian missiles and drones. Iran will appear incrementally more the aggressor, even if it is striking Israel in the name of freeing Gaza and Lebanon.
The third option is for the U.S. to preempt Iran at the beginning of October 2026 and thereby blunt the political surprise value and the attack intensity two weeks before the midterm elections. This approach seems the most politically and tactically beneficial to Washington because it attrites Iran’s offensive systems it has accumulated since June, numbs the U.S. electorate to the forever war, which cannot be avoided in any case until the Straits of Hormuz are reopened, and allows Washington to choose the timing of the attack, creating the best possible circumstances for defensive preparation.
The timing of these decisions to attack (or not attack) is guided by the logic of overlapping closing windows of opportunity for military advantage with an infinite regression of mutual preemptions, which in the nuclear strategy field is termed the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack.” In a non-nuclear context, the payoffs of attacking first are far less striking, but the Donald Trump administration’s gamble for political resurrection has a sub-optimal rationale.
Emory University Professor Dan Reiter, in his influential 1995 article, Exploding the Powderkeg Myth, argued that states almost never make decisions to attack on the basis of military advantage. Even the Israeli cabinet in the lead-up to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War prioritized the approval of the attack by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, despite the frantic pleas of the Israeli Air Force of the dire consequences of striking second. However, in the case of the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, alliance considerations are largely irrelevant to the Trump administration. U.S. diplomatic efforts under the Biden and Trump administrations in Brazil or Indonesia, for example, prioritized having those countries sign onto the Abraham Accords, recognizing Israeli annexation of lands, rather than making the concessions necessary to win allies for the war in Ukraine or to defend Taiwan. The nationalistic intensity of Iranian foreign policy, while nominally an Islamic state, leads it to eschew close alliances with major powers like Russia, China, or India, with whom it would have to make political concessions. This was even true with the Shah’s arrangements with the U.S.
The current war in the Middle East is primarily a function of U.S. domestic politics and U.S. power. Shifting demographics away from a European-descended population, coupled with a collapse of the American fertility rate, has split the electorate, with some seeing in Israel a common cause, much as there was a common cause with supporting Apartheid South Africa. Plus, the U.S. has the instruments available to try and achieve its strategic goals, funded by the U.S.’s unprecedented 25 percent of the world’s nominal GDP. Victory, defeat, stalemate, or quagmire, the U.S. can afford exploratory foreign policy, as it did in Korea (S), Vietnam (D), Lebanon (S), Iraq (V), Bosnia (S), Afghanistan (D), and Iraq (S).
