Sharan Kaur: PM Carney was right to walk back support for a war with no exit strategy

Former Pentagon Middle East adviser Jasmine El-Gamal on the ‘dangerous and uncertain’ situation in Iran and Trump’s ‘shallow understanding’ of regimes.

Sharan Kaur served as the deputy chief of staff for former Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau and is currently a principal at Navigator.

In the world of global diplomacy, the distance between a targeted mission and a regional conflict is often measured in days. For those of us who have lived and worked in the Middle East, watching the current escalation is not just a matter of tracking headlines. It is a visceral experience. My stomach is in knots because I know what the stock market and the satellite feeds do not always show: the sheer, terrifying fragility of the region’s interconnectedness.

Nowhere is this tension felt more acutely than in the shadows surrounding the Islamic Republic of Iran. Despite the deliberate void of reliable information escaping its borders, a silence enforced by technology blocks and state control, the undiminished bravery of its people is felt across the globe.

We see flickers of it in the digital whispers and the defiant spirit that underpins the region’s instability. These are reminders that the true stakes involve human lives; not geopolitical chess moves. This internal resilience, often masked by official opacity, directly shapes the calculations of every regional actor, from Tehran to Riyadh.

When we look at the potential for further escalation, we must look beyond the official communiqués and acknowledge the powerful, unpredictable forces at play within that nation. Forces that can, and often do, spill into the wider conflict zone we are now witnessing.

As westerners, the dynamics of the region are not obvious unless you have experienced them firsthand. Having lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, just a few miles from the Gulf, the geography always felt like a shadow pressing in. Being there in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, that shadow deepened. There was a constant sense that something could erupt.

I grew accustomed to the roar of fighter jets patrolling over the Saudi Aramco headquarters where I was brought on to build its crisis department. I spent countless days at the Aramco Ras Tanura facility, a site that has since been targeted twice by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

I passed hours in the diplomatic quarters in Riyadh where the U.S. Embassy was bombed. My weekends were spent in Bahrain, home to the largest U.S. military presence in the region and its Incident Command Centre. I visited regularly the same locations later attacked in Dubai and Doha. This outcome was not merely a fear I entertained abstractly. It was the thing my family and friends dreaded most.

The Middle East is far more nuanced than most outsiders realize. Its people, their beliefs, and the way they operate do not mirror Western systems of logic or governance. Freeing the Iranian people from the grip of the IRGC is a worthy goal, but how and why we pursue it matters deeply.

History has taught us a brutal lesson we seem determined to repeat - you can kill a terrorist, but you cannot kill an ideology, with a missile. With every assassination, you risk creating future martyrs, because these forces are driven by an extreme form of religious conviction. The people of Iran deserve self-determination and the right to breathe freely. They did not ask to be treated as instruments of American or Israeli foreign policy.

When Prime Minister Mark Carney initially signalled support for the U.S. and Israeli strikes, the intent was clear and, from a realpolitik perspective, defensible. The IRGC is a destabilizing force, and the objective of disarming a regime that has spent decades flouting international norms was one Canada could reasonably stand behind. It was framed as a sharp, surgical effort to remove a nuclear threat and decapitate a command structure.

But we have learned, yet again, that intent is not impact.

The road to this war was not paved by sober calculation. It was paved by an illusion of control, a belief that Washington and Israel could coerce Tehran into submission through threats and limited strikes without triggering a broader conflict.

By manufacturing an atmosphere of fear, the Trump administration sought peace through subjugation, demanding the total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. When fear failed to compel compliance, the logic escalated toward the direct military action we are now witnessing.

From surgical strike to regional war

That strategy rested on a precarious assumption: that Iran would confine the conflict in order to preserve its regime. We now know how deadly that miscalculation was. Shortly before he was killed on Feb. 28, 2026, in a joint U.S. and Israeli strike, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that if a war was started, it would become a regional one. He was not bluffing. From Dubai to Doha, Ebril to Manama, the region is on fire.

The situation has fundamentally devolved. What was sold as a methodical mission is now a chokehold on global stability. We are watching a U.S. president who appears less interested in liberation and more interested in controlling the levers of the global oil and gas markets. The costs of this war are precisely what have historically restrained the West, and those costs are now coming due.

The retaliation was entirely predictable. U.S. bases are under fire, and the threat to the Strait of Hormuz is no longer theoretical. Any sustained disruption to these chokepoints would trigger a shock to global energy prices that feeds directly into the cost of food, transport, and air travel for every Canadian.

Consequently, Ottawa has shifted. Just days after his initial stance, the prime minister has walked much of it back – not because he misspoke but because the issue has evolved. While maintaining his support for stripping the regime of its nuclear capacity, Carney has rightly condemned the U.S. and Israel for acting without engaging the United Nations or consulting allies like Canada. He was correct to characterize the current military campaign as a failure of the rules-based order and a violation of international law.

• Conservatives urge vote on any military role in Iran, accuse Carney of flip-flopping

The American military is peerless in conventional deterrence, but it has consistently struggled against asymmetric tactics. Iran represents the most dangerous version of this challenge: a state that has spent 45 years learning how to survive U.S. power. President Trump now risks exposing those same American vulnerabilities, including a reliance on doctrines and technologies that cannot adapt to a chaotic and shifting battlespace.

Realpolitik requires us to deal with the world as it is. We can support the end of a regime’s reign of terror without endorsing a strategy that burns the house down to catch the thief. Canada’s support was predicated on a mission with a clear beginning and end. What we have instead is mission creep threatening to pull the entire world into its wake.

As smoke rises over the Gulf, the question for Canada is no longer about the morality of the target. It is about the devastating and downstream cost of a war with no exit strategy.