[Salon] The Global Consequences of the War in West Asia

https://chasfreeman.net/the-global-consequences-of-the-war-in-west-asia/

The Global Consequences of the War in West Asia

Remarks to an Emergency Roundtable of the Executive Intelligence Review

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)

By Video, 6 April 2026

It’s an honor to join this gathering. I regret that I cannot do so in person.

The war in West Asia is hammering the final nail into the coffin of the Western-dominated world order. It also marks the collapse of the Pax America that followed the Cold War. The pattern of warfare pioneered in the Ukraine War has replaced that developed in the wars of the 20^th century. The war in West Asia is once again demonstrating both the limited utility of the use of force and the imperative of professional diplomacy.

In a world in which international law no longer inhibits aggression or the commission of war crimes, middle-ranking powers have no choice but to develop strategies that will enable them to survive attacks by the more powerful. Iran’s response to the Israeli-sponsored war my country has launched against it is showing the world how this can be done. This war has failed to achieve any of its muddled objectives. It has demonstrated the prohibitively high cost of treating diplomacy as a cover for military surprise attack, rather than as a measure short of war by which to resolve differences between nations. And it is providing a textbook example of how not to use force. Wars can be justified only if they are aimed at producing something more than an orgy of death and destruction.

This war is leaving both its victims and its perpetrators with no choice other than mutual accommodation in the interest of peace and development – in other words, diplomacy.

In response to the Israeli and American aggression against it, Iran has seized control of the Strait of Hormuz. Since the United States has belatedly recognized that the U.S. military cannot use force to open the Strait, President Trump has advised countries dependent on hydrocarbon exports from the Persian Gulf to make their own efforts to open it rather than to depend on the U.S. to do this for them.

In practice, the only way ships can pass through the Strait is with the permission of Iran and the payment of transit fees to it. President Trump has inadvertently incentivized both America’s allies in Europe and Asia and its Arab partners in the Persian Gulf to seek peace and covenants with Iran, rather than to join Israel and the United States in aggression against it. Some oil- and gas-importing countries have already done this. The continued prosperity of the oil and gas exporting countries of the Persian Gulf now depends on their doing the same.

Israel and the United States justified their aggression against Iran in part as necessary to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Instead, they have eliminated Iranian leaders who opposed building a bomb and replaced them with proponents of doing so. The war has vindicated the arguments of those in Iran that Israel could only be deterred by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. When Iran now fields nuclear weapons, which it will, others in its region and beyond it will do the same. The world is about to enter the “darkening prospect of mass destruction” that President Kennedy cited as justifying the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This war has made that fifty-six year-old treaty moot.

U.S. power projection to West Asia depends on bases in Europe. The United States is now engaged in a war of aggression beyond Europe. This has demonstrated the irrelevance of NATO to anything but the defense of Europe against external aggression. President Trump has repeatedly demanded that the European members of NATO as well as other U.S. allies join the United States in attacking Iran. In response, we are hearing the first credible demands by European publics and political parties for the removal of U.S. forces and their bases from Europe. Ever more European governments have banned the United States from using their air space to support a war that is not theirs. President Trump has angrily threatened to pull the United States out of NATO. But some in NATO now seem to be considering whether to push the United States out of Europe. Either way, the transatlantic alliance is on life support, if not dead.

Israel sought this war to remove Iran as an obstacle to territorial expansion in West Asia to fulfill its vision of a “Greater Israel.” In accord with the Greater Israel project, it is using the war as cover for an attempt to annex southern Lebanon. It has de facto U.S. support for this. What began as a US-backed Israeli war with Iran has become a widening regional war with devastating geoeconomic and geopolitical consequences. These include the decimation of the global economy amidst windfall profits for Russian and American oil and gas companies, the rearrangement of global geopolitics to the advantage of Russia and China, the disappearance of all deference to international law, and the prospect that many more countries will rely on nuclear weapons for their defense.

It is hard to find a silver lining in this. But it is said that it is always darkest before the dawn. The multiple crises this war of aggression in West Asia has created may be an opportunity to imagine and organize a new and better world order.

In the tradition of Greece and Rome, the phoenix self-immolates only to be reborn from its own ashes. In the comparable Chinese tradition, the phoenix is a symbol of harmony, prosperity, and peaceful coexistence. Might we not combine these visions to create a zone of peace in war-torn West Asia?

This gathering is discussing the Oasis Plan, which envisages a peace in West Asia achieved through the cooperative development of its region’s water, energy, and economic integration. Perhaps, like the phoenix, such peace can yet be born from the ashes of an unjust and disastrously counterproductive war. If that opportunity exists, we must surely grasp it while we can.