With oil selling for around $100 a barrel and the price in the United States of gasoline at the pump having increased 20% in two weeks, Americans have been thrust back into a 1970s-style mix of oil and insecurity in the Persian Gulf.

The crises of the 1970s began with an oil embargo resulting from Arab anger over heavy U.S. support to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Then, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the United States proclaimed what became known as the Carter Doctrine, with President Jimmy Carter declaring that “vital interests” of the United States were at stake in the Persian Gulf region.

The Carter Doctrine was originally aimed primarily at the Soviet Union, amid fears that the Soviet operation in Afghanistan was a step toward realizing the old Russian imperialist dream of acquiring warm-water ports. The Carter administration’s military response included its creation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF). The Carter Doctrine evolved under subsequent administrations to focus more on perceived threats within the region. The RDJTF evolved into Central Command (CENTCOM), the U.S. command most heavily involved in executing the current war against Iran.

As of February 27, the day before the United States and Israel launched that war, the situation in the Persian Gulf was not all sweetness and light. But it was much less alarming than when Carter proclaimed his doctrine and certainly did not provide a plausible excuse for starting a war.

The oil price hovered in the low-to-mid $60s throughout February, and the market for crude oil was stable, notwithstanding continuing U.S. efforts to inhibit Iranian participation in that market. The Iranian nuclear issue provided no need for urgency, with Iran conducting no uranium enrichment and being nowhere close to the development of a possible nuclear weapon, let alone the means to deliver it. U.S.-Iranian talks centered on nuclear matters were making “significant progress,” according to the Omani mediator. There was no threat of an imminent Iranian attack on anybody.

Perhaps most encouraging regarding security in this region was a continuously developing detente between Iran and the Arab states on the other side of the Persian Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia. This détente was cooling a major source of heat in the region; regimes on both sides of the Gulf had good reason to pursue a modus vivendi as the most promising basis for their own security and prosperity.

Almost everything good in this picture has been destroyed by the war that the U.S. and Israel initiated. One can hope to repair some of the damage after the war ends. But what has been destroyed cannot easily be rebuilt. Whenever and however the war ends, this region will face—for months and probably years—insecurity that will resemble the fears of the 1970s much more than the hopes that prevailed as recently as a month ago.

Iran’s strategy, reaffirmed by its new supreme leader, of responding to the U.S. and Israeli aggression by widening the war into and across the Persian Gulf reflects the limited options of a state that is weaker than the aggressors. The evident Iranian hope is that pressure from Arab leaders seeing their own interests damaged and from Americans seeing their fuel costs rising will induce President Trump to end the war sooner rather than later.

Iranian decisionmakers probably attacked targets in the Gulf Arab states reluctantly, given the strong motives that Iran had for improving relations with those states. The reluctance was reflected in Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s apology for Iran’s retaliatory strikes on its neighbors, with an offer to cease such strikes if the Arab states denied the use of territories to launch attacks on Iran. This opportunity for de-escalation ended when Trump declared “unconditional surrender” of Iran as an objective and the United States allegedly attacked an Iranian desalination plant, leading Iran to strike a desalination plant in Bahrain.

The cross-Gulf attacks have spoiled the atmosphere for renewed Iranian-Arab détente. No matter how rational and perceptive leaders on both sides of the Gulf may be, it will be difficult for them to overcome the inevitable raw emotions in their populations when munitions are fired and fellow citizens are killed or injured. It will take a long time for the atmosphere to return to where it was before this war began.

The Gulf Arab regimes will face difficult decisions on security policy in the months ahead. In the wake of the Iranian strikes, thoughts will naturally turn to deterring such strikes in the future. But the Arab leaders also will not forget that the Iranian strikes were retaliation for U.S. and Israeli aggression and would not have occurred if the United States and Israel had not started their war.

That fact will dampen any enthusiasm for relying on the United States or Israel for security, which already was low after what Saudi leaders regarded as U.S. inaction following a presumed Iranian attack on critical Saudi oil facilities in 2019 and the U.S. failure to prevent an Israeli attack in Qatar last year.

Gulf Arab responses to their new situation can range from the constructive—especially a concerted effort to return to détente in the region—to the dangerous and destabilizing, such as a Saudi move toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Another possibility is represented by bringing Saudi Arabia’s ally, nuclear-armed Pakistan, more extensively into the Persian Gulf equation.

The United States will have to confront this regional security mess after the war ends. No matter which of the multiple and changing war objectives Trump will settle on as a basis for claiming victory, the nation of 90 million people known as Iran is not going away. Whatever a future government in Tehran may look like, when that nation is pressed to the limit, it can and will react with retaliatory moves such as shutting the Strait of Hormuz.

To avoid making the mess worse, the United States needs to return to constructive diplomacy with Iran. Reviving something like the 2015 agreement that strictly limited Iran’s nuclear program would be a big improvement in regional security over the current predicament. Options still exist for Trump to secure a more comprehensive deal, giving him the ability to claim that he did better than his predecessors.

A mistake would be to relapse into reliance on a U.S.-Israeli-Arab alignment based on the so-called “Abraham Accords.” Far from being an improvement in Persian Gulf security, this approach sharpened lines of conflict in the Persian Gulf, with Israel seeing it as the basis for a military alliance perpetually hostile to Iran. The arrangements also reduce any possible Israeli motivation to make peace with the Palestinians.

The carnage that Israel inflicted on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has precluded for now the possibility that Saudi Arabia will fully normalize relations with Israel. But the Trump administration appears to have dropped that as a condition for negotiating a defense pact with Saudi Arabia and offering nuclear assistance to the Saudis that would be alarmingly loose regarding safeguards against weaponization. This trajectory also is a mistake; it increases the risk of the U.S. being sucked into future quarrels involving the Saudis and heightens the threat of nuclear proliferation.

The war has stamped out any remaining chance of the United States “pivoting” away from the Middle East to devote more attention to security concerns in East Asia or the Western Hemisphere. The United States is mired for the foreseeable future in a morass in the Persian Gulf region, every bit as bad as anything seen in the 1970s, and the morass is in large part of its own making.

All this is in addition to how the war has emboldened the administration’s partner in aggression—the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—by giving it the war that it, and Netanyahu personally, have long craved. Thus emboldened, Israel can be expected to initiate periodic “mowing the grass” attacks in the Persian Gulf—not to improve international security there, but to underscore the Israeli message that Iran is forever the greatest threat to everyone in the region.