Hardliners in the Iranian military overruled its President, who had promised no more attacks on Gulf neighbors. Iran launched fresh drone and missile attacks toward Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE. In the conflict so far, Iran has targeted civilian infrastructure including the Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Kuwait City and and Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan airports.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they would not allow oil out of the region until attacks stop, while President Trump said both that the war “could be over soon” and predicted it would end well before the initial four-week timeframe he had predicted, while also threatening harsher strikes if Iran disrupted oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz.
The suggestion that the war could be a short one helped bring $100 a barrel oil – up about 50% since hte start of the conflict – back down into the mid-$80s and reversed significant stock market declines on Monday. Moving to more provincial concerns about the travel industry, it’s not clear how Spirit Airlines can emerge from bankruptcy and survive at $100 oil.
Against this backdrop American Airlines has delayed a return of flights to the region.
- Philadelphia – Doha suspended until May 7
- New York JFK – Tel Aviv will not restart until April 23
American Airlines confirms to me,
American Airlines has suspended operations to and from Doha until May 7, 2026 and has delayed the restart of its service to Tel Aviv until April 23, 2026. To provide additional flexibility, we will extend our travel alert allowing customers whose travel plans are impacted by this adjustment to rebook without a fee or cancel and receive a refund. We are working closely with our partner airlines to assist customers traveling between the Middle East and European cities with service to the U.S during this period.
This is further out than United and Delta currently are scheduling flights, and they’ve historically restarted their flying to the region earlier than American following suspensions over the past two and a half years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see their flights push as well.
There’s very little airspace currently usable for flights from the U.S. or Europe to the Gulf region.
European safety restrictions (currently only in force through Wednesday but may be extended) restrict operations at any altitude in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The FAA prohibits flying in the Tehran and Baghdad flight information areas and have a security advisory in place overwater in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
U.S. and European airlines generally cannot overfly Russia due to sanctions and the country closing its airspace in response as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. As a result, flight corridors are very narrow, such as north via the Caucasus and Afghanistan, or south via Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Oman.
Ultimately, Iran is a violent theocratic police state that engages in execution, torture, mass surveillance, arbitrary detention, censorship and legal discrimination. It executes people in huge numbers, often after opaque and unfair trials. It kills, tortures and jails protesters, journalists, and dissidents, and retaliates against their families. It uses forced veiling, police harassment, surveillance and prison to control women and girls and imposes discrimination against women in marriage, divorce, inheritance and public life broadly – and tolerates ‘honor violence’ and killing of women by family members. Iran persecutes ethnic and religious minorities as well as LGBT people.
This regime, directly and through its proxies, has repeatedly attacked the United States from Hezbollah’s 1983 Beirut barracks bombing killing 241 and Hezbollah’s 1996 Khobar Towers bombing killing 19 Americans and wounding 372 to killing over 600 U.S. troops in Iraq and, in 2024, killing 3 service members in Jordan in 2024.
Iran sent assassins to kill President Trump, and an Iranian Revolutionary Guard operative who was seeking hits on the President, former President Biden and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley was convicted by a federal Jury last week. Another Iranian operative was charged with a plot to kill Trump in November 2024.
This is a dangerous enemy of the United States, the region and world, and its own people. So I don’t lament anything that happens to its leaders, and certainly hope for improvement. At the same time, beyond degrading its nuclear capabilities – and Israel has already suppressed its proxies – it’s not clear how much the United States is able to influence conditions on the ground.
The current offensive has taken out much of the country’s leadership, but we’ve also taken out more ‘moderate’ leaders with whom we’d hoped to negotiate. I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger on this operation. I hope it succeeds, and that the second- and third-order consequences will be limited. On that score I’m less sanguine.
(HT: Marty Paz)
This regime is in its last days one way or the other. It may very well be that it will take more time after this current actions end, but the ball is already rolling on this. Question is just how much more evil and damage it creates until it falls.
They will not “surrender” in the traditional way westerners might think of – they are shiite fanatics, that while have some sort of a rational, when events happen that start to pull on the strings of the deep shiite radicalism they have in their minds they go into to a religious frenzy.
This is for for them the “days of the hidden Mahdi” (the shiite messiah).
So, collapse from the inside of some kind seems to be the way it will happen eventually, rather than external war (unless you nuke them). Just might take time.