A crime and a tragedy: the Iran war
You pounce when the enemy is weak and that is what Israel and the US did. There was no immediate security threat from Iran. Rather the opposite. The threat had never been smaller or more negligible. But the absence of a threat also made the possibility of war a lot more attractive.
The disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan taught one lesson: don’t try to rebuild a country after toppling its government. So this time, the goal is simpler — just bring down the Iranian regime and walk away. No nation-building, no replacement plan. Trump doesn’t know or care what comes after the clerics lose power. He has no roadmap for Iran — and frankly, not much of one for America either. In a comical interview on March 1, he explained that his administration had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the attack.
But here’s the catch: you can’t really have a purely “destructive” or “negative” goal in war. The moment you knock something down, something else fills the void — whether you planned for it or not. Destruction always creates consequences, and those consequences become the new situation. In the case of the current conflict with Iran, there are already several forces and factions lining up to reshape the region in a major way. History is on the move, making up for lost time.
I would not exclude that large elements of Iranian society might be destroyed after weeks of relentless bombing — Trump has said that he foresees his campaign lasting four weeks — but something will emerge from the ashes and it won’t be a regime that looks favourably to the countries that brought about such destruction. A new regime would be less conservative, more attuned to the nature of modern society and modern war, and certainly more nationalistic. A military dictatorship is possible. New alignments with China and Türkiye might become feasible once the current emphasis on going it alone against the whole world is abandoned. Israel would prefer a Syrian scenario of civil war and state collapse, but Iran boasts a long history as a unitary state and looks likely to survive the coming troubles.
Until then there will be other consequences and not all confined to Iran. Indeed what stood out during the first 48 hours of the war is how quickly those consequences expanded beyond its borders. Gulf states were attacked following the strategic consideration that they are especially vulnerable but also influential before a venal Trump and his court. If the situation in the United Arab Emirates becomes unsustainable there will be many phone calls asking Trump to put an end to the chaos, and not only from the ruler in Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zayed.
Oil prices will go up, potentially above $100 a barrel. Flows through the Strait of Hormuz are impaired and insurance premiums have exploded. The next step in the escalation ladder will be a series of attacks against energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates. Indeed, on February 2, Qatar was forced to halt production following attacks from Iran, sending prices soaring. Saudi Arabia also shut its oil-refining facility of Ras Tanura. Russia will have reasons to celebrate the spiking oil prices and peace in Ukraine will be more distant. Europe will pay the bill.
Massive protests over the killing of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei erupted across Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and India, mostly but not only among the large Shia communities in these countries. Dozens of protestors were reportedly killed in Pakistan after a crowd attempted to storm the American consulate in Karachi. The large protests in Bangalore, India’s tech hub, gave us a sense of how global the conflict quickly became. In Kashmir, with Indian authorities increasingly nervous, schools and colleges closed for two days. It’s still too early to predict how the rage will be channeled, but we already know it will be in ways the US will not like or even understand.
In fact a former Trump official messaged me to ask why people were protesting in the Indian city of Lucknow. Almost no one in a position of power in Washington today is capable of understanding an abstract concept. An assassination fits the model. Structures, institutions, history, and the laws of power do not. The world becomes an adrenaline-charged movie with a plausibly sketched bad guy and all the good guys flying fighter jets with some killing and explosions. These are usually the people who like quoting Thucydides on how “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” but forget that the megalomania expressed in that line led directly to the stunning Athenian defeat the following year in the disastrous Sicilian Expedition.
A hegemon should prize order and stability. Maybe even try to put an end to historical disruption so as to better preserve its position and the status quo. Even the Iraq War in 2003 was at times presented as capable of bringing about an era of universal harmony, with the Middle East joining the liberal order. Today America is very far from these ideas. If there is any theme in its actions, it is that of the pyromaniac, launching a war or an attack here and there or conducting an assassination just to see what happens next.
Will Trump “chicken out” when he realises things are starting to spiral out of control? Some investors with whom I spoke to over the weekend are waiting for the habitual retreat. It may happen, but the idea that “Trump always chickens out” remains defective. The point is not that Trump always retreats from his boldest political aims but that he never takes them seriously to begin with. He loves the spectacle of decisive strength but hates the risks of genuine political action in the real world. This time, however, it may be too late. Trump made the fatal error of believing in his own bluster and now the chaos he unleashed threatens to swallow him whole.