Iran

Iran is the Middle East's largest Shia theocracy, a founding OPEC member sitting on the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz, the route for roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil trade. That geography, not any single battlefield outcome, is what keeps outside powers negotiating with Tehran even mid-war.

Formal authority runs through the Supreme Leader, a position filled by dynastic succession within weeks of the previous holder's death in an Israeli strike on 28 February. The successor has appeared in no photograph or recording since and governs by written statement; Iran's constitution has no process for testing an incapacitated Supreme Leader's authority, so the gap between what he can do and what he is seen to do remains unresolved.

Beneath him, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps runs a parallel military and economic structure alongside the regular Artesh, a split visible in wartime reporting where the two forces have separately claimed the same strikes, as when the IRGC and Artesh both took credit for attacks on Kuwait and Bahrain in mid-July.