Two shooting wars in eighteen months, more than 11,000 dead by the counts that exist, a naval blockade on one side and burning tankers on the other — and the people paid to forecast this conflict say the third round, likely to come after the US midterm elections on November 3, will be the worst one. The Pentagon is drawing up a new battle plan, according to the New York Times and other US media; whether President Trump signs it is unknown.
The arithmetic of the war so far, as CBC News lays it out: the first round, in June 2025, opened with US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, ran 12 days, and ended in a fragile ceasefire. The second began in February 2026 after a large US buildup, with Israel striking Iran’s senior leadership, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Since June 2025, Western NGOs put the death toll in Iran above 7,000, including civilians and government figures; Lebanese media report more than 4,000 dead there; 21 US service members were killed, mostly in Iranian strikes on Gulf bases; more than 70 Israelis died. Deaths were also recorded in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen. These tolls come from NGOs and local media, not any verified central count, and should be read as floors, not measurements.
What Iran says it will do next
Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran analyst at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies who spent more than two decades in Israeli military intelligence, told CBC that a third round would be worse based on what Iranian officials themselves are telegraphing: attacks on Gulf energy facilities, damage to civilian infrastructure and communications, and cutting the internet cables that run under the Strait of Hormuz. He raised the possibility of limited assaults by Iran’s large land army against Gulf states hosting US bases, among them Kuwait and Bahrain. “The problem is there is no silver bullet solution to the impasse we are now at in the Persian Gulf and in front of Trump he has only bad and worse options,” he said. Citrinowicz’s earlier warning — that striking Iran would not cause regime change but would widen the war regionally — is what the record of the past eighteen months shows.
The current, quieter phase is still a live war. The US is blockading Iranian ports; Iran keeps hitting commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, where it says seven tankers have caught fire or been damaged, and where traffic had fallen 86% from its early-October level by mid-month, as rews previously reported. Trump, posting on Truth Social Thursday, accused Iran of driving up oil prices before the midterms and implied the damage is exaggerated: “They are even making up fake hits, mines and everything else.” A report this week from the Critical Threats Project and the Institute for the Study of War reads the same attacks as deliberate pressure: “part of the ongoing Iranian campaign to pressure the United States to meet Iranian demands, including control over the Strait, by driving up global prices.”
Plots against personnel, posts thinned out
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton warned in an unclassified memo to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, obtained by CBS News, that Iran has “substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel” abroad and that “the lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain other countries.” The memo names no targets or countries and says nothing about imminence. The State Department has ordered non-essential staff and families out of Saudi Arabia, put other embassies on “restricted operations” status, and the military has been quietly shrinking its footprint at regional posts, US officials told CBS. The stated reasons include Houthi drone and missile attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and airports — one strike on Riyadh’s King Khalid Airport this month killed at least a dozen people, including a US citizen, and injured hundreds.
At a Florida rally Friday, Trump kept the resumption option explicit: “We may do another little Epic Fury, or they’ll agree,” using the name of the February campaign. Analysts interviewed by CBC think he has no achievable version of it. “I don’t see any possibility of what Trump is looking for — which is like a knockout punch, a military strike — which will essentially force the Iranians into a compromise or capitulation,” said the Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour. Brookings’ Suzanne Maloney said the war has, if anything, deepened Tehran’s commitment to its ideology, and that renewed strikes would draw retaliation from Iran’s proxies — the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon — against soft economic targets such as airports that could damage Gulf states for years.
The betting problem inside the Pentagon
One complication of planning a war in 2026 is that its timing and outcome are traded on prediction markets, and people with nonpublic knowledge can bet. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo, reported by Ars Technica, banning all Department of War personnel from financial transactions using nonpublic information, directly or through third parties, on pain of UCMJ and federal criminal action. His mechanism argument is the interesting part: insider bets leak operational intelligence to adversaries, and positions warp judgment. “A logistician with money riding on a strike date has an interest in that date. An analyst with a position on an outcome has an interest in that outcome.”
The memo had a trigger. New Polymarket accounts placed highly specific, well-timed bets on a US-Iran ceasefire just before Trump announced one in April, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Associated Press reported; the White House warned staff against trading on private information the day that report appeared. Separately, a Trump teleprompter aide reportedly made $100,000 on Kalshi betting on the contents of prepared remarks. Kalshi and Polymarket both prohibit insider trading, but a platform ban is a weaker deterrent than a court-martial. The administration, meanwhile, is arguing in court that only the CFTC may regulate these markets — courts have split, and states want the Supreme Court to restore their right to restrict prediction-market gambling. The incentive system the memo is fighting is one the administration’s own regulatory posture has been feeding.
Eight ministers say no
The diplomatic track is running and going nowhere. Foreign ministers of the E3 — the UK, France and Germany — met in Turkiye on Friday with the R4 group of Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt, plus Italy, to warn against further attacks on Iran, Al Jazeera reported, with France’s foreign minister saying escalation would “create nothing but losers.” Pakistan and Qatar have spent weeks mediating without result. Iran’s stated price for a deal: sanctions relief, reparations for strike damage, release of frozen assets worth billions of dollars, and the right to keep its enriched uranium. Washington has insisted any deal cover the nuclear program, and earlier rejected an Iranian offer to reopen the strait within seven days in exchange for lifting the blockade.
The nuclear question that justified the June 2025 strikes remains unresolved in a specific way. Iran then held enough enriched uranium to pursue a weapon in theory, but many independent experts and US intelligence sources assessed it was likely months from one and — the load-bearing assumption — that the supreme leader had not made the political decision to cross the threshold. Al Jazeera’s assessment of how the war has changed since February finds the fronts, the politics and the strait all transformed, with the IRGC warning that renewed US attacks would trigger a wider response. The number to watch is November 3: every analyst in this story expects the decision point to come after it, and the Pentagon’s plan will either be signed or shelved.