Opinion

Iran's cold war has a cost. At Évian, the G7 must cut it.

Regime change has not happened yet, and the West cannot impose it; what Évian must compel is a change in the regime's behaviour.

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Menali Mirkhan
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Iran's cold war has a cost. At Évian, the G7 must cut it.

Menali Mirkhan
last update on

The G7 returned to Évian on 15 June 2026, 23 years after the same town, under the same French presidency, first placed Iran's nuclear file on the international agenda at the G8 of June 2003. But this time, the file returns transformed.

What was managed in 2003 as a question of non-proliferation has, by 2026, become the structural confrontation of an era. The confrontation predates the Israeli-American war of 28 February to the end of May 2026 by 20 years. What the war did was strip from the West the discursive cover under which the cost of that confrontation had been absorbed for two decades without being named. The cost has been paid by Europe and by the global order. Évian decides whether the next decade is paid on the same terms.

The Islamic Republic is waging a cold war whose architecture mirrors the structural confrontation the West sustained against the Soviet Union for half a century: A nuclear and ballistic programme that defies the non-proliferation order, and whose ballistic component now strikes Western territory (on 1 March 2026, an Iranian Shahed drone hit the British base of Akrotiri on Cypriot soil, the first direct Iranian strike on EU territory). A regional proxy network—from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen to the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq—engineered for the destabilisation of partners and the projection of deniable pressure onto global shipping. A state criminal economy whose sanctions-evasion architecture drains the global financial system. An infiltration apparatus on Western soil, documented by eight European intelligence services in convergent reports between 2023 and 2026. And the permanent hostage-taking of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandab.

Economic front

In August 2024, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Zedcex, a London-registered entity that had processed more than $94bn in transactions linked to sanctioned Iranian entities. Over the past decade, four European banks have paid more than €12bn in fines for Iran-related violations. Both are the visible portion of an evasion architecture running through hundreds of intermediaries across the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, the Gulf, and beyond.

The cost is borne by the European financial system that supplies the compliance, by the Gulf jurisdictions that absorb the regulatory pressure, and by the regional economies whose sanctions framework is structurally undermined. This is the economic front of the cold war that the Iranian regime has imposed for years.

Over the past decade, four European banks have paid more than €12bn in fines for Iran-related violations.

Security front

On the security front, a Shahed-136 drone, manufactured in Iran and supplied to the Russian Federation for use against Ukrainian cities, costs approximately $50,000.The Patriot interceptor that can shoot it down costs over $1mn. The asymmetry is a factor of 20, and it operates at the strategic level: each Western battery committed to one theatre becomes unavailable for another, and each interception consumes 20 times its own value in munitions.

The same asymmetry extends to the nuclear file. The acceleration that brought the Islamic Republic within weeks of a usable threshold by early 2026 has forced Saudi, Turkish, and Egyptian officials to reassess the regional balance that the original non-proliferation framework was meant to preserve.

The Soleimani doctrine of defence in depth through proxy theatres has, over 20 years, externalised the cost of the Iranian confrontation onto regional neighbours: Hezbollah in Lebanon since 1982, Hamas in Palestine since 1992, the Iraqi militias since 2003, the Houthis in Yemen since 2009, the Assad regime sustained from 2012 until its fall in 2024.

Each theatre has produced a regional bill absorbed across Gulf and European economies through humanitarian aid, reconstruction calls, displaced populations and disrupted trade. Saudi Vision 2030 has absorbed Iranian regional pressure into a programme designed for the opposite trajectory. Egypt has seen Suez Canal revenues fall sharply since the Houthi campaign began.

The maritime expression of this regional front is the most visible: the Strait of Hormuz carries 30% of the world's seaborne crude, and Bab el-Mandab has forced a substantial share of Asia-Europe container traffic around the Cape of Good Hope. The geographical front line of this cold war extends through the Gulf, ahead of Europe.

Internal front

The G7 must also recognise the internal front of this war. Between 2023 and 2026, eight European intelligence services published convergent reports on Islamic Republic activity inside EU territory and the United Kingdom. They document five coordinated dispositifs: transrepression against opposition in exile, intelligence collection against European institutions, political influence through associative and academic relays, cyber operations attributed to IRGC-linked groups, and the use of criminal intermediaries for deniable operations.

Eight European intelligence services published convergent reports on Islamic Republic activity inside EU territory and the United Kingdom.

The same architecture extends into the Gulf, where Iranian operations against opposition figures, journalists, and diaspora networks have produced cases documented in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Istanbul. What appears as separate incidents in separate jurisdictions is, in operational terms, a single architecture absorbed across separate budgets.

Coordinated alignment

The cost was built by a state-scale strategic doctrine operating across borders. It can be cut only by a coordinated Western alignment at the same scale. The Group of Seven has produced exactly this kind of structural alignment at moments when a cost the West could no longer absorb had to be cut.

In Tokyo in May 1986, after the American strike on Libya, the heads of state named Tripoli a state sponsor of terrorism and adopted concrete measures against arms sales and Libyan diplomatic personnel. At The Hague in March 2014, in 72 hours, they refounded the architecture of Western sanctions against Russia after the annexation of Crimea. At Elmau in June 2022, they designed the price cap on Russian oil from scratch, an instrument that did not exist in any manual before they invented it. Tokyo decided. The Hague refounded. Elmau invented. Each set the Western doctrine for the decade that followed.

Évian 2026 must produce the fourth alignment, and its substance is already named by the four fronts. A joint declaration recognising that the Islamic Republic is waging war on the global order, analogous in structure to the half-century contest with the Soviet Union. A coordinated enforcement framework that dismantles the evasion architecture across the transatlantic and Gulf perimeter. A coordinated maritime mechanism for Hormuz and Bab el-Mandab that lifts the chokepoint premium from the global economy. A coordinated counter-influence response to the infiltration apparatus, of a scale commensurate with the convergent evidence that the European services have produced. The town that opened the file in 2003 as a question of non-proliferation can, in 2026, reopen it as the question of the cost the present demands.

One distinction must hold throughout, in language and in policy. The Iranian regime and the Iranian people are different actors. The cold war the Islamic Republic has imposed on the world is also the cold war it has imposed on the Iranian population, which has, in five cycles of mobilisation since 2009, expressed by every available measure its determination to be done with the regime. Regime change has not happened yet, and the West cannot impose it; what Évian must compel is a change in the regime's behaviour.

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