Consider the trajectory of the last ten days. There have been multiple attacks on American military assets and economic interests across Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Iran has claimed some of them as legitimate military actions. But in a region this volatile, attribution is never clean. Now imagine an attack on a NATO base in Turkey, carried out under ambiguous circumstances. Or a bombing in a civilian area, using Iranian-style drones, that cannot be clearly traced. Or the sudden exposure of a Mossad network in Saudi Arabia—exactly the kind of report that surfaced recently, and that some observers have read as a potential signal. In each scenario, the immediate effect is the same: a government that wanted to stay out of the war finds itself under immense pressure to respond. If Iranian weapons appear to have struck Turkish soil, NATO’s mutual defence clause could be triggered. If an Arab state uncovers an Iranian-linked cell on its territory, its options narrow. The war, in short, expands—not because anyone voted for it, but because the evidence, however murky, demands it.

This is the deeper danger of the current moment. A state that cannot absorb the costs of a war alone has every incentive to spread them.