pivotal

As the United States and Iran exchanged attacks this week, one date was increasingly looming over the conflict.

The US midterm elections on November 3 could prove a pivotal moment in the war, as senior advisers to President Donald Trump seek to prevent the conflict from returning to all-out war before the polls when Republicans will be defending narrow majorities in both houses of Congress.

The push for restraint comes as Washington turns to economic pressure on Iran instead of military force. In August, the Trump administration announced its so-called “Economic D-Day”, imposing sanctions on 60 entities that it says facilitate oil revenues for trade with Iran and threatening other countries doing business with Tehran with secondary sanctions.

At the same time, the US naval blockade of Iranian ports in and around the Strait of Hormuz continues to exert pressure on Tehran’s oil exports.

Vice President JD Vance has meanwhile sought to downplay the war, which the US and Israel launched with attacks on Iran on February 28, as rising fuel prices and public opposition in the US threaten to become political liabilities for Republicans before the vote.

But there are clear limits to the restraint the Trump administration can show, with US forces continuing to strike Iran in recent days, and US leaders insist that further military action remains an option. Vance said this week that “everything that could happen is on the table,” including economic, military, diplomatic and covert pressure.

That leaves the coming two months as a particularly tricky period to navigate. Washington will want to avoid an all-out war while ratcheting up economic pressure, but Iran has its own calculations and could respond militarily anyway, potentially forcing the US into an escalation it would rather avoid before Americans go to the polls.

Here’s what we know.

Why do the midterms matter for Trump?

The midterms will determine whether the Republican Party can retain its narrow control of Congress. If the war escalates again before then, that could persuade more people to vote against the Trump administration.

Containing the fighting until November, therefore, may help prevent an already deeply unpopular war from dominating the political agenda.

A late-August Reuters/Ipsos poll suggested that just 31 percent of Americans support the war, compared with 63 percent who oppose it. Trump’s approval rating has also fallen since the outbreak of hostilities, from 40 percent to 33 percent, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.

Observers say the Trump administration did not expect things to get to this point.

In early March, Trump insisted the war would last for “four or five weeks”. Instead, the conflict has dragged on, and unexpected consequences – including Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz causing energy prices to spike – have made it even more unpopular with US households.

US diesel prices hit a record high on Thursday, surpassing the previous peak recorded in 2022, as higher crude oil prices and refining bottlenecks drove up the cost of a fuel that underpins much of the US economy.

That is particularly damaging for a president who campaigned partly on a promise to dramatically reduce energy costs – as well as not to get involved in “unnecessary” wars.

The fallout from the war has not stopped at the petrol pump. Sustained increases in fuel and transport costs feed into the price of groceries, manufactured goods and other everyday purchases – potentially worsening inflation when Democrats are making the cost of living a defining issue for the midterm campaign.

A Politico poll conducted in August suggested that 61 percent of Americans believe the Iran war had made life more expensive for their families, four percentage points higher than a month earlier.

Can Trump keep the war contained until November?

There are signs that his administration is trying to do exactly that.

In recent weeks, Washington has intensified its campaign to economically isolate Iran, threatening severe sanctions against countries that continue trading with it while maintaining military pressure around the Strait of Hormuz.

With strikes on Iran earlier this week, Trump has also indicated he is willing to engage in sporadic attacks, while trying to keep the war from escalating back to all-out conflict.

Senior administration officials have simultaneously sought to play down the scale of the military confrontation. Asked at a White House briefing whether the Iran war would be resolved before the midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance said he “wouldn’t call it a war” and claimed there was “no active shooting right now”.

Asked when Iran would stop attacking commercial shipping, Vance said: “You would have to ask the Iranians.” He also said the conflict was having “less effect day by day” on global energy markets. The US claims it is escorting about 30 ships per night through the Strait of Hormuz – and officials claimed some 18 million barrels of oil were transported through on Tuesday this week. However, shipping data does not appear to fully support this claim.

Trying to maintain a strategy of “no war, no peace” with sporadic attacks is high-risk, analysts have warned. Negar Mortazavi, senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Center for International Policy, told Al Jazeera this week: “Tehran will not capitulate under [economic] pressure. Both sides may believe they can control the escalation, but every new exchange increases the risk of a wider regional conflict.”

One of the US attacks this week is also believed to have hit a civilian home where a wedding was taking place in Kuhestak, southern Iran, killing at least four people, including children, and wounding dozens.

Furthermore, The Washington Post reported on Sunday that senior Army, Navy and Air Force leaders have warned Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth in a written assessment that continuing the war at its current pace is unsustainable and risks undermining US military readiness in other parts of the world.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the US-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Al Jazeera that this week’s attacks point to a US strategy that remains deeply unsettled.

“I think it’s quite likely that what we’re seeing right now is just complete military, strategic disarray on the American position in which the positions, the actions, the tactics, the strategies keep on getting changed,” Parsi said.

Washington had imposed sweeping economic sanctions on Iran in an apparent attempt to make further military intervention unnecessary, he noted. “Seven days later, the US is back into bombing Iran.”

The US appears to be “jumping from one position to the other”, he added.

What are Iran’s calculations?

While the most recent attacks between the US and Iran have been less intense than the heavy exchanges seen in the early weeks of the war and during the two flare-ups in July, the risk of escalation is high. And it may be in Iran’s interests for that to happen sooner rather than later.

Iran has excelled at the use of asymmetric warfare against an enemy with considerable military might – using cheap, mass-produced drones to exhaust US supplies of very expensive defensive systems, and launching attacks on US allies around the Gulf, sowing disharmony.

In particular, Tehran has demonstrated that it can severely disrupt maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, causing global economic consequences.

Continued Iranian attacks on US or regional military assets, shipping or energy infrastructure would place pressure on Washington to retaliate more strongly than via the few attacks it has carried out this week, creating the possibility of an escalatory cycle that could return the two countries to a much wider war regardless of the White House’s electoral calculations.

Furthermore, Washington’s economic strategy to isolate Tehran – an attempt to move away from open warfare – may in fact create a greater Iranian incentive to retaliate.

Parsi told Al Jazeera that Iranian officials appear to believe Trump ultimately intends to restart the war on a larger scale but is just waiting until after the midterms.

That creates a potentially dangerous calculation for Tehran, where it is better to escalate now – while Trump is at his most politically vulnerable. “The reaction of the Iranians to that might be to actually trigger the war themselves early right before the midterm elections in order to maximise the pain that will impose on the US president,” Parsi said.

What happens after November?

Reuters reported on Wednesday that senior White House officials are already considering whether to intensify military operations against Iran after the November 3 vote, although no decision has been made on returning to full-scale conflict, it reported.

A Republican victory in the midterms could give Trump greater political room for this option, particularly if the administration interprets the result as approval – or at least lack of enough disapproval – for the war despite the economic consequences for voters.

A Republican defeat presents a more complicated picture, however. On the one hand, losing one or both chambers of Congress will constrain the administration, as Congress controls government funding. Democratic control of the House or Senate would also give Trump’s opponents greater scope to hold hearings, investigate the US conduct of the war and challenge requests for additional military spending.

Conversely, with Trump no longer facing a congressional election, he may feel less pressure to contain the war, experts fear.

Parsi warned that an electoral defeat could therefore have the opposite effect to what Tehran might expect.

“I’m not so sure that it’s going to pay off necessarily for the Iranians because a Trump that is humiliated at the elections, who is faced with a Democratic [majority] House [of Representatives] and potentially a Democratic Senate, may also become a much more desperate and reckless president,” he said.

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan –  It was a round table of some of the most influential men in the world. Representing Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan – and when they extended to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Plus – Turkiye, as well as the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. Gathered here in Kyrgyzstan were countries at the centre of some of the world’s biggest geopolitical tensions.

What brings them together is not necessarily agreement on everything. It is the space to pursue their interests outside a Western-led framework. Moscow sees that space as evidence of a changing world.

“Over the 25 years since its inception, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has evolved into one of the independent and influential centres of the emerging multipolar world,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told the summit.

The organisation, he said, had grown from six founding members in 2001 into what he described as the world’s largest regional association.

Kyrgyzstan is a small, mountainous, landlocked country with Russia to the north and China next door. The calculation is more immediate: how do you balance between giants?

As Europe and the United States are increasingly looking towards Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan needs to balance relations with all of them.

Shairbek Dzhuraev, president of the Crossroads Central Asia think tank, said the timing of the summit is particularly important.

“The members in the room are precisely heavyweights that are directly involved in key geopolitical conflicts of the day,” he said.

That balancing act is not new. Since independence in 1991, Central Asian states have largely operated through what is known as a multi-vector foreign policy.

Bishkek – like other Central Asian nations – operates by keeping Russia close and building ties with China, while keeping open doors to Europe and maintaining healthy relations with Washington.

For Kyrgyzstan, it is less about choosing sides than keeping options open, underscored by its geography. Being landlocked means dependence on transport corridors and being mountainous makes infrastructure more difficult. Dependence on imported energy and external markets leaves the economy exposed to shocks beyond its borders.

“The biggest weakness of Kyrgyzstan, geopolitically and geographically, is the dependence in terms of transport routes, in terms of energy, in terms of economic relationships”, Dzhuraev puts it bluntly.

So diversification becomes more than an economic ambition. Kyrgyzstan, being one of the smaller members, cannot dictate the SCO’s agenda. But it helped to shape the language.

For decades, Central Asia was viewed largely through the prism of the powers surrounding it. But the wars in the region and beyond have changed that – Russia is under sanctions, so is Iran, China is looking west, Europe is looking east. Suddenly the geography has acquired new value with highways, railways, pipelines, trade corridors, power networks and the periphery is becoming a strategically important passageway. Dzhuraev said: “Kyrgyzstan wanted the summit declaration to recognise that transformation, Central Asia’s movement into the centre stage of international politics”.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is increasingly seen as a counterweight to US influence — a grouping through which China and Russia can advance a different vision of the global order. But the SCO is too diverse for a simple East-versus-West confrontation. That description comes with a qualification that the SCO is not a unified anti-American bloc.

Its members have competing interests, different relationships with Washington and, in some cases, deep disagreements with one another. The question is not whether the SCO rejects the West, it is whether it can resist being defined entirely in opposition to it.

Iran brings that to the centre stage – where geopolitical theory meets a much more immediate crisis. Tehran and Washington have returned to confrontation after more than a month of relative calm. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian used the SCO summit to put the diplomatic question directly on the table.

“I state explicitly that if the United States returns to its commitments under the aforementioned memorandum of understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take reciprocal action,” he said.

The Islamabad MoU signed in June collapsed, with Tehran and Washington blaming each other for violating its terms. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, also called on Washington to return to what its president signed under the MoU. “In that case, everything can be put back on the right track,” he said.

For the SCO, however, Iran is not simply a diplomatic issue – it is an economic one. Washington has renewed sanctions on Tehran and expanded the threat of penalties for those doing business with Iran. For Central Asia, that matters, particularly for countries whose economies are deeply intertwined with Russia and increasingly connected to Chinese trade networks. Dzhuraev is sceptical whether countries such as Kyrgyzstan comply fully with sanctions, “The declaration will most likely not match the reality,” he said. “China and other countries have already rejected what they describe as unilateral sanctions.”

The reality is that sanctions can hurt, as they have hurt Iran and Russia. Not as intended for economic collapse, but they brought pain for the masses and put a spanner in their economies. But enforcement across a region built around cross-border trade is another matter. For Central Asian economies, complete compliance is difficult because the economic relationships are too dense, which is quite different from Western compliance. Both with Iran and Russia, transport and trade links have been growing steadily, so countries are unlikely to simply switch them off overnight.

That makes the SCO summit an important political moment.

Not necessarily because its members can defeat the sanctions regime, but because they can collectively signal where they stand on unilateral pressure.

When you speak to delegates from the global south, there is also a broader message: that the SCO is becoming a forum where countries that do not necessarily agree on everything can nevertheless agree on one principle: they want room to manoeuvre.

Putin calls that the emergence of a multipolar world,  Pezeshkian is using the forum to keep diplomacy with Washington alive on Iran’s terms,  China is defending its economic relationships, India is pursuing its own strategic interests, and Kyrgyzstan is trying to make sure none of these relationships closes the door to another.

But there is a second question confronting Kyrgyzstan — and it is not sitting around the summit table. How much of its rise belongs to Kyrgyzstan itself?

As transit trade has risen, the economy has been growing rapidly, wages have increased, construction has accelerated and exports have increased.

There is visible momentum in Bishkek, with new roads and buildings appearing to fill the empty spaces. Extraordinary circumstances have generated a lot, such as the war in Ukraine, which has altered regional trade and expanded Chinese investment. When trade routes shifted, money and demand moved across borders. The government is proud that much of the recent development has been undertaken without the external borrowing that characterised earlier periods. But buildings alone do not create a productive economy. External momentum can be a dangerous foundation for long-term growth, as Dzhuraev points out. “Productivity is growing. Exports are rising. More goods are being produced domestically. But much of the momentum remains connected to external factors — particularly the Russia-Ukraine war and Chinese investment. One of the biggest drivers of poverty reduction has been rising salaries.”

The harder question is what comes next? Where are the productive sectors that will sustain those incomes? Agriculture could be an obvious answer as Kyrgyzstan is an agricultural country. But glaciers are melting and climate change is having an impact. Plus, its long-term capacity to generate higher-value growth remains uncertain. That may ultimately be the more important story behind this summit. Not the speeches, the flags, nor the declaration.

Kyrgyzstan wants to convert geography into leverage and its vulnerabilities into options. But the wider questions remain, whether Central Asia can move from being the space between Russia, China, Iran and Europe to becoming a centre of its own? As well as whether today’s economic growth can survive when the external forces driving it inevitably change?

Kyrgyzstan finds itself at the centre of a changing region that brings opportunity but also pressure. Between the giants, keeping every door open may be the most important strategy of all.