Iran Stokes the Middle East War With Drone Attacks on Kuwait

Iran fired a drone barrage into Kuwait on Saturday, hitting a U.S. ally following President Trump’s vow to intensify military strikes in a rapidly expanding Middle East war.

Kuwait said it shot down the Iranian volley, but the renewed fire added more tension to a region bracing for more conflict. Trump ordered the military to launch a fresh attack on Iran to bring Tehran to the negotiating table, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

U.S. embassies in the Middle East told Americans to consider departing the region. Airlines are extending flight cancellations to Arab Gulf states, which have spent decades building themselves up as international airport hubs. The U.S. warned airspaces may soon be closed.

Iran kept the Strait of Hormuz—once the passageway for 20% of the world’s crude oil—effectively closed. One ship near the strait was damaged after being struck by a projectile on Friday and another in a separate incident reported a nearby explosion, according to U.K. Maritime Trade Operations group, a security group affiliated with the British Navy.

Iranian and American leaders are both escalating their war rhetoric. Trump said Friday during a televised cabinet meeting that the U.S. “will be hitting them very hard.”

“At some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore,’” Trump said.

Ali Abdollahi, a senior Iranian military commander, said that the U.S. is accelerating a wider regional war and that Iran considers countries in the region cooperating with the U.S. as complicit.

“Any country that chooses to serve as a defensive shield for the criminal and aggressive United States will be consumed by the flames of war,” Abdollahi said, according to Iranian state media.

The Middle East had enjoyed a respite from violence after the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to pause their war in mid-June.

But the Iran-U.S. conflict erupted again in July over control of the Strait of Hormuz. Soon, Trump declared the ceasefire over, and the U.S. resumed bombing Iran. Tehran retaliated against Arab allies of the U.S. in the Persian Gulf.

“The cycles of escalation and de-escalation are getting more rapid. Now, by the time that the United States is trying to de-escalate, like we saw last week, then Iran has already set in motion another escalatory cycle,” said Andrew Leber, a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East program.

“It’s hard to see how this stops. We’re moving further and further away from getting a renewed memorandum of understanding,” he said.

The conflict has only widened this past month. Two LNG tankers caught fire at Egypt’s Damietta port after one of them suffered a drone attack, for which no party has claimed responsibility. The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen declared a blockade on Saudi oil shipments in the Red Sea, dragging another critical global waterway into the conflict. And Saudi Arabia said Iran-backed Iraqi militias attacked its oil facilities and responded with rare airstrikes on Iraqi territory in coordination with the U.S.

Trump has gone back and forth on the U.S. relying on military might or diplomacy with Iran. Earlier this week he said, “very friendly negotiations” were under way, before accusing Iranian diplomats of being dishonorable.

“They always want to talk, but they break their words so often,” Trump said, later adding, “All they do is make me angry.”

The frustration is mutual. Iranian diplomats have expressed exhaustion over the repeated breakdowns in negotiations with the U.S. From their perspective, officials say, there is a lack of trust between the two countries and the prospects for diplomacy deteriorate every time Trump threatens military force.

Arab Gulf countries and their economies are bearing heavy costs from the regional war. Their postures have grown more aggressive, with several Gulf states conducting direct military operations against Iran or their proxies in recent weeks.

“A lot of countries in the region are out of ideas for what to do to manage this issue,” said Leber, the Middle East expert. “They’re trapped between the feeling that they can’t trust any deal with Iran, and that they can’t trust where the United States is going to go next.”