In my previous post about the onslaught on Iran by Israel and the USA, I used the metaphor of a coin toss to say how hard it is to forecast the outcome. I left it to others to work out the motive for the attack, unpicking the incoherent contradictions in what the US President has said, weighing the various statements and retractions others have made. Instead, I pondered the question of regime change. It was once derided as a US goal by Trump but now he has adopted. Or maybe not since some of his recent statements boil down to saying the war is won though it is not over.

Anyway, as to regime change, I saw three possible outcomes: the hoped for democratic transition; an even more repressive state; and civil war. News that the CIA has been getting ready to support a Kurdish insurgency makes it seem that civil war is the likeliest.

Nothing is certain, however, and nor should it be. There are many reasons for Kurdish leaders to be cautious about accepting US and Israeli backing for a new insurgency in Iran.

Not least, there is the experience of Kurds being promised much and receiving little from international backers in the past. The US State Department must surely know, as the Kurdish leaders themselves do, that the governments in both Iraq and Türkiye will oppose and probably hinder US support for Iranian Kurds because they don’t want Kurdish success in one country to encourage Kurds in their own.

Further, for all the injustice that has been directed at Kurds for the past century and more, promoting an ethnically aligned civil war in Iran would be destructive for Iran and disruptive for the whole region, in a way that will inevitably keep oil prices high and feed instability more widely.

The evident lack of forethought in the US administration about consequences such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the consequent hike in oil and gas prices means we have no reason to believe they will have thought this issue through either. With the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan boiling into open war at the same time, with Iraq finding a precarious stability, while Syria continues to experience violent conflict, not least between the still relatively new government and Kurdish militias, the prospect is profound regional instability. Chaos, in fact.

This is exactly what the Gulf states feared would happen if the USA and Israel attacked Iran and why they lobbied for diplomatic approaches instead.

The only good that seems likely to come out of all this is that as Angus Hervey has argued, more and more governments and their voters will realise that basing a national energy strategy on imported fossil fuels is a recipe for national vulnerability as well as ecological disruption. Increasing deployment of renewable energy – windmills, solar panels, tidal, wave and geothermal power – would combine mitigation of both environmental and geopolitical risk in one policy package that is much more stable and cheaper than persisting with fossil fuels.

Perhaps what we are seeing unfold is the final, unanswerable argument for hastening the green transition.

Don’t get me wrong: this doesn’t mean that civil war and prolonged regional and global instability are a price worth paying for going further in the green transition. But among the consequences of this illegal war that the US administration has not foreseen, perhaps reducing reliance on fossil fuels will be one.