The First Week of the U.S.–Israel–Iran War: Battlefield Assessment and Next-Phase Risks

This policy brief assesses the first seven days of the 2026 U.S.–Israel–Iran war. It argues that the conflict has moved beyond the level of a limited punitive exchange but remains below the threshold of full-scale regional war. The central finding is that the war has entered an unstable intermediate condition characterized by sustained missile-UAV exchange, widening maritime and economic spillover, and growing allied operational integration. The brief finds that the most important driver of next-phase escalation is not average strike performance, but the risk of a threshold-crossing event, including a successful strike on a critical node, a major civilian-casualty incident, sustained deterioration in interception performance, or explicit expansion of war aims. It concludes that the conflict remains under constrained escalation, but the margin of stability is narrowing.