The pre-smartphone Turkey that Çomak left behind had been dominated by a military determined to tame the religious populism of its politicians. The Instagram-crazed country he re-entered is dominated by the very politician the military failed to tame.

In 1994, Istanbul had half of its present population of 16 million, but was already growing, largely through migration from Anatolia, at the rate of one Newcastle a year. No politician understood that human tide better than Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — street hawker, semi-professional footballer, hard-boiled party boss — who, that year, elbowed his way through a crowded field to become mayor of Istanbul for the pro-Islamic Welfare Party. Erdoğan, too, would see the inside of a Turkish prison: four months in 1999 for reciting a poem at a rally.

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But he and Çomak drew very different lessons from injustice. Çomak taught himself poetry, and the writings he smuggled out of his cell have won him international fame. Erdoğan learned that power punishes weakness, and that victimhood is a potent political tool. Donald Trump said that the only reason he attended July’s Nato summit in Ankara was out of respect for the strongman president who shares his skepticism of the Western alliance. And, even though Turkey was among the last of the G20 to ratify the Paris Agreement, Antalya is now hosting dozens of world leaders at the COP31 climate summit, Andy Burnham among them. But which Turkey will they be visiting? The “New Turkey” that a younger Erdoğan once promised, or merely a stale caricature of the ancien régime he set out to replace?

No longer in a cell, Çomak talks of the marvel of regaining an unobstructed view of the horizon, of being able to lose himself in a crowd. Erdoğan built a 1,150-room palace. That palace has become a monument to an epoch bearing his name. There is little question that Erdoğan’s Turkey has grown in prosperity and self-esteem. In the early aftermath of the Cold War, the country was desperate to join a European Union that didn’t want it, all while promoting a Turkic identity that might win influence (and the odd contract) in former Soviet Central Asia. Today, it is nothing if not confident. A republic founded over a century ago from the ashes of empire is again redefining its region.

Turkish diplomats once cited the country’s “difficult neighborhood” as a shackle on its ambitions, and as a reason to preserve the military’s role in civilian politics. Erdoğan’s great achievement has been to tame the generals and transfer their power to himself. His growing international influence has become a source of national pride but also a useful distraction from his own retreat from democratic accountability.

That neighborhood, though still difficult, has become a kind of portfolio: mediating between Russia and Ukraine, helping to see off the hostile Assad regime in Syria, even locking horns with Israel, albeit in a contest unlikely to draw blood. Turkey once boasted of having Nato’s second-largest army, though large cohorts of conscripts were kept busy whitewashing fences. Now it boasts of drones and a growing defense industry, driven in large part by Baykar, the company chaired by Erdoğan’s son-in-law.

Even so, Turkey has not entirely abandoned the dictum of the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: “Peace at home, peace in the world”— a principle that translates as “don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you”. Turkey has the industrial and scientific base to be a nuclear power but has so far refrained from pursuing one. In the summer, it joined Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan in a mutual defense pact. Yet even after Houthi missile strikes on Riyadh in October, the government seems happier selling arms than sending troops into harm’s way.

When Erdoğan came to national prominence, the great divides in Turkish politics were between Left and Right, civilian and military. Erdoğan exposed a deeper fissure in Turkish society: the resentment of newly urban, pious and provincial Turks towards a Western-facing secular elite. The founding republican settlement subordinated religion to the state. The bureaucracy, courts and universities saw themselves as guardians of secularism, and the generals saw themselves as guardians-in-chief. The ban on devout women wearing headscarves at university became one of the grievances upon which Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) was founded in 2001.

“Erdoğan’s style is very similar to Trump’s,” says Daron Acemoğlu, the Istanbul-born economist and Nobel laureate. “The secular establishment in Turkey made the same mistakes as the liberal establishment in the US or the UK, but without any of its liberalism.” He argues that it’s impossible to understand the AKP without understanding the contempt that the secular establishment has traditionally shown towards conservative provincials. “Erdoğan is good at propaganda, but when he said ‘in this country there are white Turks and black Turks’, that wasn’t just made up.”

The headscarf may have been the most visible grievance, but the deeper one lay in people’s wallets. Erdoğan, running for the Welfare Party, the movement from which the AKP would later emerge, was boosted into the mayoralty by a collapse of the currency in January 1994, followed by an inflation rate of over 100%. An even worse economic crisis brought his newly formed party to national office in 2002. By sticking to an IMF program negotiated by its predecessors, the new government nursed the economy back to health. For the first time, ordinary families could get a credit card, or a loan to buy a house. In 2019, the six minarets of a vast new mosque appeared on Istanbul’s Bosphorus skyline, but shopping malls, highways and sprawling public housing estates became equally prominent symbols of AKP rule.

Yet the machine that built this loyalty is running out of fuel. The liberalization that marked the start of AKP rule in 2002 has long since come unstuck or else has been corrupted. Arguably, the great accomplishment of post-war Turkish politicians was to oversee the mass movement of people from the countryside into the big cities. But that movement also created social fault lines which, a few generations later, are set to shift again. Today’s voters want more than neighborhood-level favors. They aspire to the good life and opportunities once enjoyed by the old urban elite. They also know that to be successful you need to have the right political connections. The A in AKP stands for adalet or “justice”. For a growing number, that letter has gone missing.

That Erdoğan’s AKP fared so badly in the 2024 local elections — coming second with some 35% of the national vote, failing to win back Istanbul and Ankara, and losing a string of other big cities — is a symptom of that disillusionment. Panic that it was losing control is the driving force accelerating the government’s slide into unfettered autocracy. Hence the response to the recent discovery of a Ponzi-like scheme that has left some £13 billion of savers’ money in limbo, was to arrest the messengers. Five journalists were charged over their coverage of a scandal that extended up the ladder to AKP higher-ups. Accused of spreading false information, two are still in custody, joining 23 other journalists behind bars on assorted charges. Yet the fallout of the scandal is proving harder to contain, undermining even further the integrity of the government and eroding individual saving after sharp losses in other financial markets.

And the government still can’t arrest the price of tomatoes. “How happy is the one who says ‘I am a Turk’,” runs another much-quoted Atatürk maxim. But the all-too-common conversation among today’s struggling middle-class parents, throttled by inflation of around 30%, is how to build a life for their children abroad.

While the reforms after the 2001 crisis opened up a new world of consumer credit and mortgages, a disastrous macroeconomic experiment, pairing low interest rates with high inflation, has now left those managing the economy with only one real option: muddling through. The notion that people could put up with the AKP’s brand of autocratic piety because at least it could manage the economy is long gone. The cliché among Istanbul’s chattering classes had always been that, no matter how bad the economy, the restaurants were always full. “They’re not full anymore,” says Ekin Şahin, whose family is in the trade. “People need a handful of reasons to eat out. No one goes out on a whim.”

Just as New York Times leader writers struggled to explain how Trump was elected not once but twice, a large segment of the Turkish population despairs at what it sees as the cognitive dissonance of fellow citizens who still believe Erdoğan is leading the country in the right direction. Increasingly, however, loyalist support is being whittled away. More than half the electorate declined to back Erdoğan in the first round of the 2023 presidential election, and the 2024 local elections confirmed the drift. As in Trump’s America, loyalty is not inexhaustible. The AKP once sold its campaign for Islamic rights as part of a process of democratization. Whether or not that was ever the case, few believe it any more.

Erdoğan has proceeded methodically, transferring an already powerful state apparatus into his own hands. As mayor, he learned how public contracts could be used to build a base. He defanged the military through the high-profile “Ergenekon” trials of senior officers that began in 2008. He also sidelined senior figures in his own party who still regarded him as primus inter pares rather than top dog. The Gezi Park protests of 2013, a vast spontaneous protest to stop a central Istanbul park being turned into a shopping mall, taught him another lesson; he set about systematically capturing not just the legacy media but newly powerful social media too. The attempted coup of 2016 provided an opportunity to move against vocal opponents. The popular Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş was arrested — he remains in jail despite a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights — and the government set about dismantling a rival religious movement, and former ally, led by the exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen. A referendum in 2017 abolished the office of prime minister and completed the transfer of power to a virtually unchecked presidency.

Unlike Trump, Erdoğan has held sway for almost 25 years, long enough to fine-tune a system of censorship and repression. Control of the courts has allowed his government to upend the legal process and divide the opposition. This took on fresh momentum with the arrest in March 2025 of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor of Istanbul, days before he was to be anointed the opposition’s presidential candidate. He now faces charges across several indictments, including bribery, embezzlement, leading a criminal organization, espionage and insulting public officials, which together carry a notional sentence of some 2,400 years. Halk TV — a channel that supported the opposition — was put under the control of a court-appointed trustee as İmamoğlu’s defense in court was about to begin. There is now a long list of mayors and elected officials under threat. It remains to be seen whether the fate of his fellow mayors — over 30 are still in detention — will be raised by another great proponent of devolved government and former mayor, Andy Burnham at this week’s summit. The mayor of Antalya, the host city, is also in jail.

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One explanation for this mounting insecurity is that even paranoiacs have enemies. But while the ruling party may have scored substantial successes in its kulturkampf with the old republican elite, it may now be losing the war. It is not so much that the other side is winning as that Erdogan’s politics of confrontation is wearing thin. Turkish social media hums with clips of schoolchildren, some still in headscarves from after-school Qur’an classes, singing and dancing along to Manifest, a girl band who have just played Wembley Arena after their sentences for obscene behavior at an Istanbul concert were suspended. Survey after survey shows that while the overwhelming majority of Turks identify as Muslim, most agree with Atatürk that religion should be a private affair. Erdoğan set out to mold a pious generation, but young Turks would prefer a decent job.

The possibility, then, is that Turkey is already entering a post-Erdoğan era, even with him firmly in control. As the old sources of popular loyalty weaken, the struggle within the ruling establishment may be less about governing Turkey than about controlling what comes next. One sign of a brewing succession war is that the revolution is now devouring its own. Where repression was once reserved for the regime’s opponents, pro-government pundits and well-connected business cronies are discovering that they, too, can be picked up. Former AKP mayors have been arrested in municipal corruption probes, while the Ponzi scandal has put a former deputy minister and the fund’s AKP-connected chief executive behind bars. These cases look less like a purge than a scramble for position among factions in the presidency, the prosecution service, the security apparatus and the business world. If so, Erdoğan may stay in power long enough to see his own accomplishments unravel.

Where, then, will change come from? Çomak, having given the state 30 years, is not waiting to find out. “I have changed. Life has changed,” he says. “But it cannot be said that there has been any fundamental change in the mentality of power.” Çomak sees little option but to plow his own furrow, to keep writing, and to enjoy the solidarity of a literary community that supported him in prison. He repeats Nietzsche’s old saw that what does not kill you makes you stronger. “Perhaps everyone should spend a month or two in prison,” he adds. “Then they would understand better that there is no room for hopelessness. Just don’t stay as long as I did.”

In the fantasy of Altneuland, the racist Dr Rabbi Geyer’s party is resoundingly “beaten in almost all the districts where it had presumed to set up candidates”. As of this morning, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bloc is at 56 seats, with over 60% of the votes counted, while Gadi Eisenkot’s so-called Change Bloc is on 48 seats, a number expected to rise slightly as its heartlands come in. The remainder of the Knesset’s 120 seats look set to go to a pair of Arab parties.

Every Israeli has woken up knowing the existential question this projected hung Knesset, with Arab parties as kingmakers, is asking of them: what kind of democracy is Israel? But one thing is clear. This election was a referendum on Netanyahu himself, and he seems to have lost that poll. It looks like the Bibi bloc has collapsed from a 68-seat majority in the last Knesset, to a minority this morning. Early numbers suggest most Israeli voters have rejected him and his allies. We will have to wait until Thursday for final results, and these may well prove slightly different.

But either way, it is not clear this morning, despite probably losing his majority, if this removes Bibi from power. Because in the real contest here — the election to form a new government — the four-party opposition bloc itself failed to achieve a majority.

For generations, Israel has prided itself on being a multi-ethnic democracy within its 1967 borders. Around a fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs, and their parties surged in this election. This result is a test of that. It looks like a majority of Jewish voters supported the Bibi bloc despite him likely losing his majority. That means that anti-Bibi parties will probably only have a majority in the Knesset if one combines the Change Bloc, made up of Jewish and Zionist parties, with the Arab parties. The issue is that many of the four-party leaders in the alliance have ruled working with the Arabs out.

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The upshot? Unless these leaders break their promises to reflect the electoral math, there are several ways for Bibi to survive. Should Israel truly have a hung Knesset, the country potentially faces a new election. This offers Netanyahu the opportunity to cling on in a caretaker government until then. This has happened before: in 2019 and 2020, Israel had three elections in under a year, and Bibi remained Prime Minister throughout.

The real politics begins now. For the Israeli opposition, this is not just the usual politics of tensely brokered backroom deals, but something much more fundamental. Can they truly embrace Israel’s promise of multi-ethnic democracy? The opposition has campaigned vociferously that Bibi is to blame for October 7, and remains a danger to Israel’s future. They now face a choice: form a minority government with one Arab party inside the coalition, and supported by another outside it to block Netanyahu, thus relying on Arab-Israeli politicians — or let Bibi’s rule continue by choosing to spurn them.

There is a precedent for collaboration. Before October 7, in the brief Naftali Bennett-led government of 2021-2, the Ra’am party, led by Mansour Abbas, was a member of the ruling coalition. Despite Ra’am being an Islamist-rooted party, albeit one that talks about coexistence with Jews, Netanyahu even flirted with including Abbas in a coalition of his own. But post October 7, with the Bibi bloc pointing to the fact that Ra’am has been evasive about whether or not Hamas is a terrorist organization that needs to be “destroyed”, this is a more fraught task.

To better position himself for government, Abbas has made his number two on his party list a Jewish former Israeli police chief. But it seems unlikely the Change Bloc and Ra’am alone have enough to reach the 61 seats needed to form a majority in the Knesset. They may also need to rely on the votes of the Arab Joint List, a coalition of overtly Palestinian nationalist parties, and Hadash, the old Communist party. These would not want to join any Change coalition, but have explicitly said their votes would be available to ensure a minority government could dispatch Bibi.

What Ra’am wants to see from any deal is urgent action on Arab-Israeli’s main priority: rampant organized crime, dramatically worsened during ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir’s tenure as the minister who oversees the police. Abbas has put Yoav Segalovitch, the former police chief, as his number two precisely with the hope he could take over from Ben-Gvir as a bridge figure between the Jewish and the Arab public. Abbas has also signaled he would want action against racism, and a change in policy towards Israeli authorities being trigger-happy around demolishing illegally built Arab homes. Together with the Joint List, they also want investment in development for their communities and in their educational facilities.

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On the Palestinian issue, looming over everything, Ra’am’s demands are relatively muted, with Abbas avoiding the topic. The moderation of their platform is testament to the Arab sector’s growing participation in Israeli society, with rising rates of integration from university attendance to involvement in the professions, especially healthcare. Both Arab parties as a result have a small Jewish activist base, committed to fostering what they see as an incipient multi-ethnic social partnership.

Overnight, in Israel, pro-opposition voices were calling on Eisenkot to act with absolute confidence and determination, as Netanyahu surely would, to bring this Jewish-Arab partnership about. This is because very few of those supporting the Change Bloc believe that they would fare better in new elections. A confluence of factors — high Arab turnout; disorganization among the ultra-orthodox Haredi Jewish parties; the hyper-mobilization of liberal Israelis, with a Knesset-seat-or-two’s worth flying back from abroad to vote — are all unlikely to repeat.

Eisenkot’s party, too, would certainly lose seats. This time around, he ran a list of former IDF generals who entered politics to oust Netanyahu. But they, in their soldiers’ naivete and unformed expectations about honor, have been found out as not truly political enough. In this, they resemble Benny Gantz, another former officer who nonetheless went from 35 seats to dropping out of this election for lack of even minimal support. His great error was to shore up a Bibi government, as if he were another reliable general, on the promise of a turn as premier that never arrived.

This, then, is the anti-Bibi coalition’s chance. Should the results stay roughly in line as predicted, what happens next will come down to character. Does Eisenkot have it in him? Or is he, like his critics say he sounds, a flat military man, used to giving orders and the army’s square world, up against one of the world’s most ferocious political animals?

For the moment, there seems a path forward for Eisenkot to install an Arab-supported minority government, open a long-promised Commission of Inquiry to expose Netanyahu’s failures on October 7, and then potentially seek to expand his coalition through defectors from the Right, or even build a unity government with a post-Bibi Likud. This would be fragile indeed, and may not last long, but it could be decisive in ending Netanyahu’s career as he faces both a corruption trial and his failings on October 7 without the shield of government at his disposal.

If it is unclear whether the opposition can grasp the nettle, Netanyahu’s strategy going forward is obvious. On the one hand, he will try to do everything possible to delegitimize Arab parties and Arab votes, while fostering an atmosphere of hate and incitement — all to discourage the opposition from embracing the Arab parties and the votes they can offer to push him out of power. His tactic, in particular, is likely to bully and frighten opposition Right-wingers like Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman out a Jewish-Arab partnership for change.

At the same time, Bibi will try what he has done before: “unite the Zionist majority” around him in a government where he remains prime minister. He will offer to drop the extremist religious Zionist parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, detested by the opposition and sanctioned by many Western countries. Expect him to enlist Donald Trump in this effort, and claim it is necessary to restart the war on Iran. There is widespread fear among the opposition that Netanyahu, even as caretaker leader, will leap into a major new confrontation with Tehran to force the military-minded Eisenkot to line up behind him. This could scramble things politically, as IRGC rockets again start to fall.

The utmost priority for Bibi is to avoid losing power, which would entail a serious risk of jail time. This is why the Change politicians are so frightened by what he might pull on Iran: a wounded political animal is at his most dangerous. Netanyahu’s ultimate dream is to pressure enough opposition parties to agree to a unity rotation deal, where he is prime minister first — on the condition that his corruption trial is waived and he is parachuted into the presidency for his 79th birthday, in two years time, when the incumbent’s term is up. To get a deal across the line, he might rule out staying in office for longer. Netanyahu may well get there, along the way evading accountability for October 7 and everything else.

To stop him, the opposition will not only need to hope the final results stay roughly in line with what is currently predicted — but also to show unflinching conviction in itself and what Israeli democracy is supposed to be. “Perhaps you believe that that is to your immediate advantage,” prophesied Herzl through one of his liberal Zionist puppets as he defended Arab rights against the racism of Dr Rabbi Geyer. “But it is not. If you adopt that stupid, narrow-minded policy, the land will go to wrack and ruin.”

There’s every chance, here, that Burnham was familiar with Trotsky’s quip long before he entered No. 10. Like many Labour statesmen — Tony Blair and Keir Starmer among them — he enjoyed a youthful flirtation with the Russian revolutionary’s ideas. That’s three out of the last four Labour PMs confessing to intellectual dalliances with the founder of the Red Army. Blair and Starmer, alas, achieved high office only to strengthen Britain’s nightmare political economy of bloated arms-length regulatory regimes, rampant rentierism, privatized national assets, and tragicomic levels of state incapacity, leaving us doubly vulnerable to today’s global shocks.

Labour’s latest prime minister claims to be different, promising a rupture in this peculiarly British mode of governance. But these kinds of epochal shifts, revolutionary premierships on the level of Gladstone or Attlee, are rare indeed. Burnham’s own Trotskyist fling was experienced via the contemporary protestations of the Eighties political celebrity Derek “Degsy” Hatton — a sharp-suited Scouse firebrand (and fellow Evertonian) with a predilection for gold watches, expensive tailors, personalized number plates and “vulgar Marxism”. Hatton was the larger-than-life de facto leader of Liverpool City Council when it thrust itself daringly into the national spotlight, setting illegal budgets and implementing mass housebuilding initiatives even as its Whitehall grant was slashed. Hatton offered a New Deal-style, localized and limited Keynesian stimulus effort dressed in revolutionary garb.

Yet that garb was important, as Degsy basked in a kind of belligerent, workerist anti-intellectualism, poking fun at the academic, London-based New Left scene. The Scouse Trot was quick to differentiate the kind of Liverpool socialism he was enacting with what he himself called the “Loony Left” — “more concerned,” Hatton said, “about black mayors and gay rights than… about building new homes.”

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A teenaged Andy, fresh-faced and idealistic, would have seen Hatton on TV every night, fighting his birth city’s corner against Thatcherism. And it’s hard not to compare it to Burnham’s own stint as a righteously indignant mayor of Greater Manchester, railing against Covid lockdowns. But where Burnham’s anti-London combativity earned him the moniker “King in the North”, his former hero Degsy eventually became known as “King Rat”. After Hatton and his posse almost bankrupted Liverpool, expelled from Labour, and removed from office, he used his newfound infamy to launch a career in low-rent TV appearances and Christmas pantomimes. Now 78, he’s a successful property developer, albeit one awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit bribery and intimidate witnesses. There’s another instructive lesson for the prime minister: revolutions do have consequences, and often they are not especially positive.

Perhaps that history explains the caution Burnham has shown towards governing so far. To be sure, “resilience” has become the center-left’s economic watchword, overtaking the “efficiency” of the high neoliberal era. And why not? As the economist Wolfgang Streeck has noted, that hyper-global age entailed a “dictatorship of the lowest marginal cost” — all just-in-time supply chains, outsourced production, and highly mobile capital in search of the cheapest possible inputs. Yet if Burnham has imbibed the critique, and talks about a return to public control, reindustrialization, and economic security, his fine words have yet to translate into action. Yes, Burnham seems to have learned from Degsy, be a rebel — but not too much. Yes, embrace socialism — but not yet.

The problem, here, is that Burnham’s party doesn’t necessarily have time for moderation. The era demands a radical rupture because the old order has so palpably failed. As one MP tells  me, the prime minister represents Labour’s “last roll of the dice”, to see if there’s life in the old dog yet. It’s a sentiment you can hear elsewhere too. A thoughtful essay by one of Starmer’s former speechwriters recently pondered whether the party would “go gently into the sociological night”, abandon a diminished working class, and lean into its minoritarian status as an institution for progressive public sector workers and professional urban graduates. The nadir of British social democracy experienced under Starmer required a forceful internal response. Yet if MPs acted to remove one serially unpopular leader and install the man that polls and focus groups deemed most acceptable, it’s unclear, as Burnham prepares to take the podium in an airless glass-and-steel convention center, whether that’ll be enough.

There are reasons to think it won’t be, not least given the looming geopolitical storm clouds. “We’ve all become accustomed to shit economic news over the past 18 years,” says one backbencher. “It’s baked in at this point.” Still, there’s an aching dissonance emerging between the inchoate Burnhamite message of hope and change, and the slow realization that the light at the end of the tunnel may turn out to be an oncoming train. Certainly, most of the public have not registered the implications of Iranian-backed insurgents holding the global economy hostage. The number of people who think they will be worse off next year has decreased from 40% to 33% since April, with 20% now thinking they’ll be doing better. Yet Britain is more exposed than most, especially since successive prime ministers — Hayekian free-marketeers and former Trotskyists alike — have created a service-based, import-dependent economy, one reliant on foreign capital inflows and buoyant international trade.

The irony, of course, is that Burnham always wanted to be a domestic leader, with cost-of-living salves held up as the great unifying totem of his new regime. But as Trotsky also learned — when, for instance, his plans for world revolution were stymied by the Poles in 1920 — exogenous events have a way of intruding on even the best-laid plans. With the Bab al-Mandab blocked, inflation expectations are likely to be adjusted upwards. From there, gilt yields will spike accordingly. John Healey’s first Budget anyway seems unlikely to be cheerful.

Perhaps the best Burnham can hope for in the short term is to borrow from Starmer’s book and act the statesman on the world stage. And, to be sure, sanctioning West Bank settlement goods will play well with sections of Labour’s base, just as action on AI safety does to wavering Lib Dems. But that hardly equals a revised settlement on Britain’s place in the new multipolar order. Nor does it solve the problem of our impotence in the face of a Washington hegemon seemingly intent on causing chaos. Burnham is no Mark Carney or Emmanuel Macron, progressive leaders with their own grand projets on “strategic autonomy” and the future of “middle powers”.

More than any particular policy, though, Burnham should probably take a more general lesson from Degsy and his Trotskyist forebears: if you’re backed into a corner, then fight. Thatcher may have beaten Degsy in the end, but the struggle was just and necessary. As Leon said, revolutions have a way of calcifying, recommending as an antidote a “permanent revolution” more than the settled “socialism in one country” backed by Stalin.

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And there are plenty of candidates that a radicalized Burnham could choose to take on: the OBR and Treasury, which together treat investment as a liability rather than an asset; the Bank of England, which raises the cost of government borrowing by engaging in successive rounds of quantitative tightening; the ECHR, which would launch legal challenges against any moves to bring utilities back into public ownership without eye-watering sums being paid to foreign hedge-fund shareholders. “I think he’s doing well,” as one prominent backbencher puts it, but he “needs to grow in confidence… and generally speak and act with more clout and urgency.”

So rather than backing down against the legalistic instincts of the civil service, the orthodoxies of the Treasury, or the apoplexy of the business pages, perhaps Burnham should return to his roots, embody the tribune-of-the-people persona that served him well in the North West, and declare war against Britain’s established interests. An icepick to the head killed Trotsky’s revolution. Thatcher’s revolution killed Degsy’s in Liverpool. A ballot-box verdict, delivered with rather less drama, is what finishes leaders whose revolutions never even start.

Some 86 years later, Britain is back Arabia, wooing a very different set of rulers. The Government has agreed to send an RAF Voyager tanker from its base in Cyprus to provide in-flight refueling for Saudi aircraft defending the kingdom against Houthi missiles and drones. Unlike Britain’s earlier direct strikes on the Houthis, in which RAF Typhoons took part, the present commitment is described as limited, time-bound and defensive. British support is not, officials insist, intended for Saudi strikes inside Yemen. Yet aerial refueling is never just symbolic. It enables aircraft to remain airborne longer, carrying Britain a little further into a war from which Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to extricate itself.

Britain supposedly withdrew from “east of Suez” more than half a century ago. In practice, though, it never entirely left, retaining close military relations with Jordan and Oman; a naval presence in Bahrain and the Gulf; and a defense industry tied intimately to the Saudi armed forces. As Sir William Patey, the former British ambassador to Riyadh, recently told the BBC, Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest defense export market, while Britain is its leading supplier of advanced fighter aircraft. The relationship includes British-supplied Typhoons and air-defense systems, as well as continuing support for Saudi air operations under existing contracts. When Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, Patey added, Britain helped with the kingdom’s air defenses. The flags came down with the “winds of change”, then, but the infrastructure of influence survived.

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The Voyager’s mission may not be the return of former imperial power so much as the exposure of a continuing relationship normally hidden behind contracts, advisers and joint exercises. The Saudis, having been turned down by the United States, asked Britain to demonstrate that it remained a reliable partner. Andy Burnham then put the national-interest case more directly. “I go back to the point I made about cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region,” he said, “because of course Saudi Arabia has been experiencing attacks, is looking at potential further disruption, and we need to keep those pathways open.” The Houthis have seized the port of Mocha, and strategic Red Sea islands, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab, through which roughly a tenth of global trade normally passes. Their missiles have also reached Saudi territory, while attacks on energy infrastructure threaten pipelines designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Altogether, that creates the possibility of a pincer squeeze on the world economy. What happens in the Gulf and Red Sea enters British and European politics through petrol prices, inflation and the cost of borrowing.

The crisis represents not simply the return of Mohammed bin Salman’s disastrous Yemeni war, but also the re-emergence in revolutionary form of Yemen’s ancient Zaidi political tradition. To treat the Houthis merely as an Iranian appendage threatening Western commerce is to misunderstand why bombing has repeatedly failed to subdue them. Iranian technology, components, training and revolutionary language have increased their power, and tied them to the so-called “axis of resistance”. Yet Tehran did not invent the movement and probably does not issue its daily orders. Its strength rests on the religious memory and political dispossession of Yemen’s northern highlands.

Zaidism differs significantly from the Twelver Shi’ism of Iran. Its name derives from Zayd ibn Ali, who died in revolt against the Umayyads in 740. In classical Zaidi doctrine, an imam did not inherit office automatically through an unbroken, divinely designated line. Rather, he had to be a qualified descendant of the Prophet through Hasan or Husayn, as well as learned, just, and also courageous enough to “come forth” against unlawful rule. The choice was elective only within this restricted sacred lineage. Armed resistance was not an accidental feature of legitimacy; it helped constitute it.

Zaidi imams ruled varying portions of the Yemeni highlands from the 9th century. Imam Yahya, who fought the Ottomans and consolidated an independent kingdom after 1918, was the last truly formidable representative of his order. His state was isolated and administratively thin, but he balanced tribes, including the Sunnis of the Tihama lowlands, dynastic claims, and foreign powers with considerable skill, including flirtation with Mussolini in the Horn of Africa. Italian connections alarmed the British in Aden, hence Freya Stark’s films and her appeal to the aristocratic pride of Yahya’s court. She contrasted Yemen’s hereditary religious hierarchy with a rampant appeal to dynastic snobbery, explaining that Hitler had been a paperhanger and that Mussolini’s father had been a blacksmith. Such details, she told her husband, “carry unexpected weight”.

The monarchy survived Yahya’s assassination in 1948, but not the republican coup of September 1962. Nasser sent an Egyptian army to defend the new republic. In one of the region’s more instructive confessional paradoxes, Saudi Arabia supported the Zaidi royalists. Wahhabi hostility to Shia belief mattered less than fear of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Britain also played a characteristically deniable role. Colonel David Smiley, an SOE veteran who had commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces, advised Imam al-Badr’s royalists, and from 1964 directed a band of foreign soldiers that included former SAS men.

Britain is thus again assisting Saudi Arabia in a Yemeni war: but this time against Zaidi power rather than in its defense. The republic abolished the imamate but not the society that had sustained it. Zaidi scholars and descendents of Muhammad lost authority; Saudi-backed Salafi teaching expanded into the northern province of Saada; central government brought neglect, manipulation and intermittent repression. The “Believing Youth” movement began as a cultural and educational revival. Under the eponymous Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, however, it acquired a fiercely political theology and the now notorious slogan against America, Israel and the Jews. When President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to crush it, Hussein was killed, and six wars followed between 2004 and 2010. Saleh, the master tactician who boasted of dancing on the heads of snakes, later allied with the enemies he had persecuted. Forces loyal to him helped the Houthis seize Sana’a in 2014. When, in 2017, he changed sides again, and sought an accommodation with the Saudis, they killed him. The movement had swallowed the snake-charmer.

Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015 expecting a short campaign. Years of air strikes devastated Yemen — without dislodging the Houthis. Yet it would be their attacks on Red Sea shipping following the Gaza war that brought a local movement and international stage. Sympathy for Palestinians is genuine and consistent with Houthi ideology. It is also politically useful. Palestine lets the movement mobilize a war-weary population, humiliate Arab governments and claim a stature beyond Yemen’s borders. A missile need not hit its target to work. The credible threat alone diverts ships, raises insurance costs, and turns a sectarian militia into an actor capable of taxing the global economy.

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Britain therefore confronts a genuine danger. But it also risks repeating an old error: mistaking superior machinery for political control. Freya Stark’s projector succeeded because it formed part of diplomacy. It flattered, persuaded and communicated. The Saudi air campaign, by contrast, showed the limits of firepower, especially when there is no plausible Yemeni order waiting to replace the people being bombed. As the Yemen specialist Elisabeth Kendall has warned, air strikes may degrade Houthi capabilities while increasing their popularity. Britain can help intercept drones; it cannot refuel its way to a legitimate government in Sana’a. Nor is the alternative to the Houthis a single coherent state. The internationally recognized camp contains Saudi clients, former Saleh loyalists, Islamists, southern separatists and competing tribal and regional forces. The UAE has sponsored secessionist allies, especially in the south, while Saudi Arabia has generally insisted on formal unity. The regions of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah have their own identities and patrons. Oman, with its long experience of discreet mediation and its own British military history, fears disorder on its frontier.

In short, an east-of-Suez strategy built on royal relationships may preserve regimes more readily than it creates states. The Government’s distinction between refueling defensive Saudi missions and enabling offensive operations is therefore crucial but fragile. Patey assumed that Riyadh had not asked Britain to join direct strikes on the Houthis. Saudi oil and civilian installations were being attacked, he argued, and helping the kingdom defend them was legitimate. That is persuasive as far as it goes. But tankers do not decide the purposes for which an alliance is used; ministers do. The record of the earlier Saudi campaign gives little cause for confidence. Jeremy Hunt, then foreign secretary, spoke of his “frank conversations” with Saudi counterparts about human rights, while the Government defended British arms sales by citing the “extensive British training” given to Saudi pilots and the programmers of its “smart bombs” to limit civilian casualties. RAF liaison officers worked in the Saudi air operations center, ostensibly to help the kingdom comply with international humanitarian law. A former British official who had worked with the Saudis dismissed that claim in a single word: “bollocks.”

Britain now needs transparent rules, parliamentary scrutiny and an answer to the obvious question of what happens if the aircraft sustained by the RAF Voyager move from intercepting missiles to striking targets inside Yemen. Humanitarian law cannot be outsourced to the adjective “defensive”. In 1940, British power appeared in Sana’a as flickering images; today it arrives as invisible fuel. All the while, the Houthis warn that east of Suez, history never stays offshore for long.

But for how long can his reverie last? After all, rumors of diminishing stockpiles only confirm what a lot of folks, though perhaps not the President, have known for weeks: the US will shortly run out of crucial missiles, drastically impairing its offensive and defensive capacities. The senior brass in the Pentagon have made it clear through leaks that they want an “off-ramp” from this conflict. As for Iran, and despite the considerable damage done to its missile and drone capabilities, it seems able to keep Hormuz effectively closed and its Arab neighbors burning for however long is needed.

Little wonder, then, that an ever-more-mocking regime insists there will be no deal that doesn’t recognize its right to levy tolls on ships passing through the Strait. To highlight its belligerence yet further, it now also wants to deny passage of any US warship into the Persian Gulf. Tehran further claims it’s negotiating directly with Oman to establish new rules of navigation, cutting Washington out. That last part probably isn’t literally true. Oman has exuberantly played both sides: working with Washington, sometimes sincerely and secretly, to hurt the clerical regime, even as it helps Iran evade American sanctions. Given the way the wind is blowing, however, the Sultanate will now surely listen more attentively to what the Islamic Republic wants.

All the while, Tehran is gleefully making it impossible for the White House to withdraw from this war — barring a flat-out surrender in the Persian Gulf, which would also inevitably weaken, if not flat-out demolish, the US sanctions regime. Certainly, Iran’s leaders believe they’ve got both the military high-ground and sufficient economic resilience to outlast the American blockade.

That matters: for it’s the blockade and sanctions, not more US bombing, that worries them most. The fact is that Islamic Republic is an economic basket-case. The regime is well aware that its abysmal management of the country’s statist economy, to say nothing of rampant corruption, has sparked small protests that can quickly accelerate into big ones. Now add war damage. If Tehran actually envisions the blockade lasting, then it’s certainly in its interest to goad Trump into a more intense conflict now. This could well create the pressure needed — from missile shortages; the Gulf Arab states; and, perhaps most consequentially, from Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who thinks a lot about financing the US debt and bond markets — for Trump to give up. Iran closely follows American commentary on the war, and knows all about how it’s making the President, and the Republicans, less popular by the day.

If Trump wants out of this duel — if he has neither the intention of waging a battle for the Strait of Hormuz, nor the stamina for a protracted blockade of the Persian Gulf — then he will have to find a means to give Tehran its tolls. In practice, that might mean a few more bombs before letting the Gulf Arabs, the Iranians, and everyone else who lives off Gulf oil and gas to figure it out among themselves.

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Trump says now he’s putting his chips on the blockade, which could last until the clerical regime cracks, or until a Democratic Congress or market forces dictate otherwise. Certainly, if Bessent believes that important energy factors are enough to keep energy markets and inflation relatively stable, then Iran’s assessment of Trump’s economic patience may prove incorrect. There are reasons for American optimism here, from an increase in US natural-gas exports, which lessen the damage done elsewhere, to the fact that  upwards of eight million barrels of oil are still coming through the Strait each day.

Not that America’s Middle Eastern destiny is really its own to decide. It’s increasingly clear that the Gulfies, despite Saudi Arabia’s new defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey, and for all the chatter about a revitalized Sunni Gulf Arab alliance, are prepared to pay Iran to stop the war. To Trump’s great dismay, Riyadh even prevented the use of its bases and air space when Trump last seriously tried to open the Strait in May. This highlighted what had been clear about Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman since 2019, when Trump failed to respond to an Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities: he no longer views the President as a reliable guarantor of his kingdom’s security. MBS, then, has become like the cautious Saudis of yesteryear. In 1996, after the Iranians blew up Americans at the Khobar Towers housing complex, they initially hid the intelligence from Washington for fear that even the détente-seeking Bill Clinton might bomb Iran in reprisal — and Saudi Arabia would suffer the blowback.

A protracted blockade can only work if Washington can keep Iran and its Houthi allies from launching damaging missile and drone barrages against Gulf energy infrastructure, including pipelines, and oil tankers in the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia is using to offset the decline in shipments through Hormuz. The more the blockade squeezes the regime, the more inclined it will be to escalate into missiles and drones against the Gulf Arabs.

Much to Iran’s displeasure, however, tribute-paying Arabs might not shred American sanctions. After all, the Gulfies are unlikely to completely dump Washington. Facing Iran with no US backup is likely still scarier than facing the Islamic Republic with a humiliated, retrenching superpower behind them. Old habits die hard, and so too does the hope that America might somehow recover. Like Oman, the other Gulfies might well be discreet: paying Iran through opaque credit mechanisms and barter via trans-Gulf shipping. In this scenario, Tehran would let oil or LNG tankers pass in exchange for much-needed civilian and military supplies. A wounded sanctions-regime that significantly increases Iranian business costs might still linger on.

That still leaves the perplexing, insufficiently highlighted nuclear problem. The Israelis have emphasized their worries about Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facility beneath Pickaxe Mountain south of Tehran. Trump has mentioned the site, and threatened to bomb it. What’s in no doubt is that examining what’s happened at the mountain recently calls into question Israel-American narratives about damage to Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

Somehow, the Iranians installed thousands of centrifuges, either assembled or in parts, after the 12-Day War last June. No one in the White House or Israel has yet publicly explained how this could have happened. Did the CIA or Mossad know that the regime was transporting thousands of centrifuges into Pickaxe? Trump has said this site was being watched around the clock. Israel, too, has its own surveillance. So if Washington and Jerusalem only learned about these activities after the fact, they have an alarming intelligence gap.

Whatever the truth, all these centrifuges must have come from somewhere, suggesting the Iranians might have thousands more hidden away. For that matter, they might also have the parts to quickly rebuild a plant for making uranium metal from uranium hexafluoride gas. To make a bomb from there, all they’d need to do is build a sphere and a trigger, something we know they had workable plans for as far back as 2003.

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Among the many deficiencies of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal was that we had no accounting of Iran’s hidden stockpiles, which we nonetheless knew existed. A wide array of paperwork, normally given to the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, was never turned over. Critical interviews of key personnel, again normal for the IAEA, weren’t done either. Pickaxe may anyway mean that the 12-Day War didn’t actually set Iran’s nuclear program back very far. Besides, if the regime really did get thousands of centrifuges into a closely surveilled mountain undisturbed, how can Washington possibly know that it also didn’t get generators down there to power them? Certainly, closed-door hearings of Congressional intelligence oversight committees are surely urgently in order.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Bernard Lewis, the great Anglo-American historian of the Muslim world, started speculating what the Middle East would look like if Western powers withdrew and only Israel remained as an outpost. Lewis thought the past would probably repeat itself: Iran and Turkey, the two heavyweights of the “gunpowder age” of Islamic history, would likely hold sway once again. In the early Nineties, Turkey was already rediscovering its Ottoman Muslim identity, reanimating its Middle-Eastern appetites. Iran as the Islamic Republic hadn’t yet exhausted its revolutionary potential, despite the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. As for the Arabs, Lewis thought they were unlikely to coalesce into a competitive military force, leaving them to align themselves with either Turkey or Iran, as they had once chosen the US or the Soviet Union.

Thirty-five years on, this seems like a decent prognostication. Neither Turkey nor Iran has the power to dominate the Middle East as they once did. But they can fill a vacuum. And more than Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose grand Islamist-cum-nationalist ambitions may not have a successor, the Islamic Republic has shown it has staying power and a lot of young men willing to kill thousands of their own people, as well as foreigners, to keep the dream of a new Islamic Middle East alive. It’s a blessing for the region that the Iranian regime’s internal resources don’t match its foreign ambitions. But Tehran may well have what it takes to humble the Arab side of the Persian Gulf. If it can do that, and gain the revenues that will flow from these tributaries, then a lot of other things will become possible, especially if the United States won’t be there to stop it.

This, then, is Middle Eastern London, part of an influx of wealth that has transformed the West End and cities right across Britain. It is all generated by the Middle East’s energy exports, which have created the fortunes of Gulf State sovereign wealth funds and the private wealth of ruling dynasties whose family offices expand their property empires. Yet it might not last forever. With the US-Iran war persisting unabated, and the Strait of Hormuz still closed, the Gulf’s black gold is no longer such a safe bet. And, as my walk round Mayfair hints, a red line on an accountant’s laptop in Doha can have profound consequences here at home. That’s true in the cars on the streets and the restaurants and the clubs — but also in the influence that foreign money can buy.

Middle Eastern London has been decades in the making. After the 1973 oil crisis, Gulf money made inroads into London’s property scene, with Saudi Arabian and Lebanese investors buying up the Dorchester Hotel two years later. These days, the scale of Gulf oil money in Britain is truly bewildering. Alrayan, a Sharia-compliant bank, estimates that $112.45 million landed on London real estate between March 2024 and March 2025 alone, a significant increase on the previous year. Spears magazine used data compiled by estate agent Frank Knight to suggest that private Gulf investors last year deposited £245 million into UK commercial real estate.

These estimates aren’t particularly reliable considering how much money is routinely hidden offshore. But they nonetheless hint at the scope of Gulf wealth and also imply a striking resilience. Of course, the rise and rise of private wealth is global. But the fact that Gulf assets are currently battered by war — yet still continue their march from the Middle East — neatly evokes the affluence of oil royalty.

This is clearest in the London property market. Qatari Diar, the country’s eponymous property development business, is behind a string of prestigious London hotels, including the Ritz and Claridge’s. Luxury stores like Harrods, the iconic Shard building, and the Canary Wharf Group that operates London’s Docklands — all these are part of Qatar Diar’s portfolio too. So too are some of the most prestigious residential properties in the city, including the spectacularly redeveloped Chelsea Barracks.

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It’s striking, too, that the footprint of Qatari investment now extends far beyond London. Qatari Diar is behind multi-billion pound urban developments in Glasgow, Manchester and Leeds. When it comes to private individuals, meanwhile, the Guardian discovered that Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family hold more than 4,000 land titles throughout Britain: from luxury mansions and hotels to industrial estates and ordinary terraced houses. Other Gulf monarchies have similarly vast holdings, with the Saudi royal family owning a portfolio of West End properties which dwarfs that relative pauper, the Duke of Westminster.

Not that you need Companies House to understand the Arab impact on London. For that you can just walk the streets of somewhere like Knightsbridge. With Harrods as its commercial center, the area is notorious for its “dark” streets and partly empty blocks, giving the neighborhood a ghostly under-occupied feel. Knightsbridge is part of the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which has the highest concentration of vacant, underused and second homes in the UK. Many of these apartments are used by their Middle Eastern owners for only a few weeks a year, when the weather in the Gulf is at its hottest. These dead streets are not a London asset. On the contrary, they look a bit abandoned.

Or else there are the luxury hotels, shops and art galleries, where displays of wealth and entitlement play out on a daily basis. Especially during the annual summer migration, young men fly their luxury cars to London from Riyadh or Muscat, speeding about in noisy displays of wealth. This too can cause problems: late-night races keep residents up, while eye-watering insurance bills result when crashes inevitably occur. There are also questions of accountability when foreign nationals are involved in accidents; Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Britain.

Not that these screw-ups are really a problem: there just are so many incentives for foreign plutocrats to park their cash in Britain. Last year, Alrayan Bank reported that Gulf investors told them that they like the diversity of UK property, from modern blocks with concierges to period mansions like the Saudi embassy. They also like the favorable terms of purchase and the well-developed infrastructure in banking, accounting and legal services that supports international investment. The UK’s political stability, legal structures and relative financial transparency make it a good place to store their money.

None of this really helps the Treasury, as visitors and foreign investors add little to the UK’s tax take or collective prosperity. And what’s bad for Knightsbridge ear drums can also cause more profound tensions. The Qatari-funded redevelopment of Elephant and Castle resulted in the demolition of social housing, with residents relocated to more distant parts of London and beyond. Gulf money in Britain has other second-order consequences too. Housing shortages keep property prices and rental yields high, benefiting Gulf investors who can’t grow their money as effectively at home. None of this helps hard-up British professionals forced to commute to central London from Zone 5.

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What, though, might change in London and other British cities if the Hormuz crisis continues — and the financial and symbolic power of the Gulf States erodes? What if investments slow, stop, or are withdrawn altogether? In the first place, it’s likely that a drop in Gulf money would shrink displays of conspicuous consumption in places like Knightsbridge. Considering the various downsides, that might not be such a bad thing, allowing these West End neighborhoods to open up to more than property speculation and the super-rich.

In a sense, we don’t have to speculate what this might look like. All wars are different, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, the symbolic, political and financial authority of Russian oligarchs living in London quickly ebbed away. Roman Abramovich, Oleg Derpaska, Igor Sechin and their compatriots left the city — once dubbed “Moscow-on-Thames” — as government sanctions froze their assets and imposed travel bans. Today, their mansions are empty and their yachts motionless. Evgeny Lebedev, Boris Johnson’s friend, media baron and member of the House of Lords, may still live in London’s Regent’s Park. But his celebrity parties are no longer high-profile society events.

Of course, wealthy Middle Eastern investors aren’t the only international plutocrats in cities like London — though, like the Chinese, they are significant contributors in making the city what it is. All the same, might a decline in Middle Eastern clout lead to a rethink of the importance placed on international investment and wealthy foreigners in making these places special? Alongside iconic skyscrapers, Middle Eastern contributions to British cities are often seen as signs of vitality, a way of creating exciting city life, and a pathway to underscoring a certain global panache.

But allowing overseas investors to dump money in Britain also makes life painfully expensive for the rest of us. Nor does it have to be like this. After all, Canada, Denmark and New Zealand are just three of several countries that ban international investors from buying property. The UK, though, lets anyone with money to buy whatever they like. To that extent, the Iran war might be a good moment in which to pause and reconsider the impact of the oil money parked on British streets. In the end, does this wealth embellish people’s everyday lives? Or does it just make spots like Berkeley Square unlivable?

***

A previous version of this piece incorrectly named the President of the UAE. We apologise for the error.

Their reasoning was that Turkey, which has the second largest standing army in Nato, was not to be trifled with. More to the point, they saw the attacks as a category error. Turkey was just not the enemy. Ankara’s official self-image is of a natural mediator, a regional heavyweight whose cultural understanding of its neighborhood is deeply rooted in a 600-year Ottoman past. It had loudly denounced the US-Israeli strikes while working its back channels to bring them to a halt. In other words, the missiles targeted Turkish self-esteem. For all its condemnation of US action, and despite saber-rattling at Israel, Turkey was being lumped into the imperial camp it had so loudly refused to join. It was a cruel blow that when talks between the Trump administration and the mullahs in Tehran finally took place, they happened in Islamabad and not Istanbul.

Even before the fog of this conflict lifts, Turkey, like countries elsewhere, is busy calculating who comes out on top. The cui bono matrix is not difficult to run. By most calculations, as Iran goes down, Turkey goes up. Of course, the current high price of oil is a spanner in Turkey’s disinflation policy, and risks undoing three years of sacrifice that dragged inflation down from a high of 75% per annum to (a still staggering) 32%. Yet as with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, a weakened Iran increases Turkey’s strategic and commercial clout. In the long term, it reinforces Turkey’s effort to be an energy and transport hub, and allows it to compete with Dubai as the regional commercial center. That’s shadowed by opportunities further afield: just last week, Turkey’s foreign minister signed a “strategic partnership” on trade and security with Britain.

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As that last deal implies, all this is also good for the Turkish defense industries — not just drones but warships and even fighter jets. Israel views this with some alarm, and Benjamin Netanyahu has warned against an “emerging radical Sunni axis” in which Turkey is, presumably, the crucial pivot. In truth, the danger of a confrontation between a US ally and a fully paid-up member of Nato is slim. Ankara’s greater fear is that a badly wounded and unstable Iran will be a running sore even greater than the Syrian civil war — prompting a refugee crisis along a common 534-kilometer border, or else fueling Kurdish irredentism.

Thumbing back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Turkey may have been suspicious of the Shah’s ambitions to turn Iran into a dominant Middle Eastern power, but relations were largely cooperative. While there was no direct causal link, it is not fanciful to think that the rise of a Shiite theocratic regime in Tehran gave confidence to the Sunni religious Right in Turkey, which was gathering strength in those years. That Turkey was in danger of becoming “another Iran” was the newspaper cliché of the day. It is now ironic to think that a preferred solution for the pious government ruling in Ankara would be a stable but weakened secular regime in Iran. The worst option would be for Iran to emerge from the current conflict as master of the Strait of Hormuz, emboldened and unbowed.

Whatever the outcome, the people of Iran may well conclude that they are classic victims of “the curse of oil”, a rueful malediction preventing nations from converting natural resources into the well-being of their citizens. The Turkish people might conclude that they suffer from a different sort of hex: “strategic significance”. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been at the helm of his country for well over two decades, pioneering the art of transactional international relations while Donald Trump was chasing starlets and Viktor Orbán was still Brussels’ idea of a model democrat. His governments have managed to leverage geography and regional importance to insulate Turkey from external pressures and democratic accountability at home. The question now is whether the war will finally strip away that insulation, exposing Ankara to pressures it has long managed to arbitrage. The answer lies in understanding how profoundly Turkey has changed under Erdoğan’s rule — and whether that change can still work in his favor.

It might be a stretch to say that Turkey underwent a form of regime change in the 2002 elections that brought Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power. But it is fair to say that those elections obliterated a whole generation of politicians. No party in the previous parliament managed to gain a single seat. In a result reminiscent of Hungary under Orbán, and under a system that rewards the largest party, the AKP won two-thirds of MPs with barely a third of the popular vote. Erdoğan, a former mayor of Istanbul, was still a banned politician at the time, having served a brief prison sentence for “exploiting religion to political ends” by reciting a nationalist poem at a political rally — a blatant form of judicial casuistry which he was later to apply to his own political rivals.

Erdoğan’s political instincts and impassioned rhetoric peppered with references to Islam spoke to the concerns of first- and second-generation urban migrants. His party portrayed a greater acceptance of religion in public life as part of a wider struggle to make Turkey more democratic. Until recently, an aggressively secular Turkish military was a controlling presence in political life. Still, it is important to remember that what brought the AKP to power was not so much a tide of Islamic feeling as an economic crisis. A decade averaging 70% inflation was followed in 2001 by the collapse of the Turkish lira.

Today, it is again inflation, much more than Iranian Kheibar Shekan missiles, that most threatens the Erdoğan government. The parallel with Orbán is inexact — the GDP of Istanbul alone is roughly 1.5 times larger than all of Hungary. Yet like the jobless Hungarian premier, Erdoğan faces the predicament of a populist leader who now strains to be popular. And, like autocrats everywhere, Turkey’s leader has cultivated a patronage network and a praetorian guard of cronies who will do anything to keep their champion in power. The result is an increasingly disillusioned society that watches its country drop like a stone in international indices of democratic rights and press freedoms. A common reckoning is that 90% of Turkish media is under direct government control. But here’s the rub. The AKP still suffered its worst defeat since coming to power in the 2024 municipal elections, not just failing in the big cities but losing conservative heartland strongholds such as Bursa, Kütahya and Adıyaman.

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A year after Ekrem İmamoğlu — the popular Istanbul mayor widely seen as the most credible presidential challenger for the 2028 elections — won a second term by 10 percentage points in 2024, the government moved to arrest him on corruption charges. The tactic was familiar: Selahattin Demirtaş, the charismatic leader of the pro-Kurdish party, has spent years in prison despite the European Court of Human Rights repeatedly ruling his detention was politically motivated. The court issued a similar ruling for the philanthropist Osman Kavala, imprisoned since 2017. Kavala’s offense was to support civil society activism, his aggravated life sentence now a warning pour décourager les autres, or in this case other businesspeople tempted to support a dissident cause.

As the constitution stands, Erdoğan is not eligible for another presidential term, but few doubt he will overcome that obstacle. And though current polls show him unable to beat a CHP opponent, his current strategy is to use the courts to run that party into the ground. Mayor after CHP mayor is now being arrested, while the party leadership may be legally disbanded. Turkey, once a viable candidate for EU membership, has long ceased to be the poster child for how democracy can flourish in a Muslim-majority society.

The Antalya Diplomacy Forum, Turkey’s annual showcase conference held earlier this month, offered a revealing snapshot of where Erdoğan’s transactional model now stands. Dozens of heads of state attended. American and Iranian officials circled the same rooms without meeting. The mood was less about solving the Hormuz crisis than recalibrating for a world in which Washington is, to put it mildly, unpredictable. In such a world, Erdoğan’s strongman politics finds a ready audience. Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Ankara, was explicit about the new dispensation at the public forum. “This part of the world,” he said, “respects only one thing: power. And if you don’t reflect power, if you reflect weakness, you are on your heels.” To hammer his point home, Barrack even lauded Erdoğan by name.

But as the price of food rises, as the middle classes try to send their children abroad, and as elected leaders go to jail, Turkish citizens may not be quite so sanguine about the cost to their civil liberties. Turkey pundits used to describe the country’s fault lines as lying between military and democratic politics, between secular and pious — but these binaries may have been more symbiotic than they appeared. Think of the Victorian optical toy, the thaumatrope: a bird painted on one side, a cage on the other. Spin the disc fast enough and the bird appears inside the cage. The question, as Turkey navigates the turbulence of its neighborhood’s most dangerous war in a generation, is whether the disc is finally slowing down — and whether, when it does, the bird will still be there.

The Easter Rising of 1916 and the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala more than 12 centuries earlier may belong to radically different historical worlds. One was an abortive insurrection in the capital of “West Britain”; the other a 7th-century massacre on the plains of Iraq, when Husayn, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, was slaughtered with his family by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. Both, however, acquired their enduring force from the afterlife of sacrifice. In each case, bloodshed was transfigured into drama, defeat became moral victory, and death became a claim upon the living. Patrick Pearse, architect of the Rising, understood this instinctively. His language of “blood sacrifice” was not just a metaphorical flourish — but a statement of political theology. 

In their stupidity, the British supplied the necessary martyrs. What might have remained a failed rebellion became the founding narrative of the Irish state — a drama replayed in commemorations, monuments, and even the naming of railway stations after the dead heroes. The molding of martyrdom into nationhood also opens avenues for satire, when the language of redemption, once detached from lived suffering, becomes performance. Seán O’Casey saw this with pitiless clarity in Juno and the Paycock. His Captain Boyle, a man sustained by bluster and fantasy, converts St Paul’s grave defiance — “O death, where is thy sting?” — into music-hall bathos: “Death, where is thy sting-a-ling?” The line gets a laugh, but it should also give pause.

In Shia Islam, the paradigm is older, deeper, and more systematically ritualized. The martyrdom of Husayn is not simply remembered; it is re-enacted. Through the commemorations of Ashura — with processions, lamentations, ritual self-flagellations and passion plays — Karbala is made permanently present. It furnishes what might be called a “grammar of endurance”: oppression confirms rather than negates the moral order; suffering anticipates vindication. The parallel with Ireland is not exact, yet in both cases geography is secondary to narrative. What matters is the structuring idea: that unjust death generates authority, that sacrifice binds community, and that loss can be converted into a durable political resource.

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This grammar acquired a specifically national form in Iran with the Safavid revolution of the 16th century. Here the new ruler Shah Ismail shifted from being the awaited imam or messianic figure of his Turkoman followers and adopted Twelver Shiism as the state religion. In Twelver Shiism, the true imam in the line of Ali and Husayn remains in “occultation”. This means that his awaited return, at which point he will bring about universal peace and prosperity, is deferred indefinitely. In adopting this theology, Shah Ismail did more than enforce a doctrinal shift. He also marked out a civilizational boundary. Iran came to define itself not only against its immediate rivals but against the Sunni ecumene dominated by the Ottoman Empire, whose legal and institutional life was shaped by Hanafi legal orthodoxy. The adoption of Shiism thus functioned as a form of geopolitical differentiation: a way of inscribing religious distinctiveness into the fabric of statehood, not dissimilar to the way Ireland resisted the imposition of Anglican Protestantism by embracing Roman Catholicism, a doctrine imposed on the ancient Irish church by enthusiastic Vatican appointees. 

Over time, Persian historical consciousness became fused in part with a sacred history whose emotional center, like that of Ireland, lay outside the nation’s borders, at Karbala, while its eschatological horizon pointed toward the return of the Hidden Imam — one whose return will signal the end of the world — in the line of Ali and Husayn. The result was a national identity underpinned by a narrative in which injustice, suffering and deferred redemption were not contingencies — but structuring principles.

Seen in this light, the resilience of the Islamic Republic — which has both confounded and annoyed Trump — is hardly surprising. What sustains it is not simply repression, nor even ideology in the narrow sense, but a historically sedimented fusion of religion, memory and nationhood. External pressure, instead of weakening resolve, risks activating precisely those symbolic frameworks that transform adversity into confirmation of purpose. This is not confined to Iran. Across the Gulf, in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, Shia communities remain politically marginalized. In Lebanon, their more activist community faces obliteration by Israel. The 2016 execution of the cleric Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia was intended as deterrence. Instead, it functioned as martyrdom — a contemporary re-enactment of the Karbala paradigm, especially with its transnational resonance. Pressure on Iran cannot be neatly contained within its borders. It touches a wider theater in which sacrifice remains a potent political force.

The Irish comparison is illuminating precisely because it is asymmetrical. Irish Catholicism formed part of a universal Church extending far beyond the island, while Twelver Shiism was historically a minority tradition that became nationalized. Yet both sustained identity under pressure through narratives of suffering and perseverance. In Ireland, after all, Catholicism functioned as a carrier of national identity under Protestant domination; in Iran, Twelve Shiism performed a comparable role vis-à-vis a wider Sunni world. In both cases, martyrdom provides a language through which political weakness can become the catalyst for moral agency.

The complementarities are not total. Irish national identity, articulated largely in the English language after the erosion of Gaelic, and the Vatican’s historic preference for Latin over the vernacular, lacked the linguistic distinctiveness that often anchors nationalism. It therefore required symbolic intensification. The cult of 1916 compensates for that absence. Martyrdom, in this sense, becomes a substitute for language: a means of binding community through shared acts of remembrance rather than through linguistic difference.

Yet there are instructive parallels when it comes to education. In mid-20th-century Ireland, the Catholic Church exercised a form of soft theocracy, controlling schools, shaping curricula, and supplying a moral intelligentsia through institutions such as the famous Maynooth seminary. If the language of sacrifice helped sustain Irish Catholic identity under external domination, it was the later exposure of clerical abuse that corroded its moral authority from within. From the Nineties onwards, a succession of official inquiries — most notably the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report — laid bare a pattern that was not merely episodic but systemic: the abuse of unmarried mothers and their children by clergy and religious orders, compounded by institutional habits of concealment, transfer, and denial. What shocked Irish society was not only the scale of the wrongdoing, but the disjunction between the Church’s historic role as guardian of national virtue and its failure to protect the most vulnerable within its care.

The consequences were profound. A Church that had once exercised near-hegemonic influence over education, welfare, and the moral imagination of the state found its authority abruptly relativized. Attendance at Mass declined, vocations dwindled, and the deference that had long insulated clerical authority gave way to scrutiny, anger, and, in many cases, indifference. The symbolic economy of sacrifice — so central to both Catholic devotion and nationalist memory — was inverted. No longer did suffering signify redemption; it testified instead to betrayal.

For now, the Irish case may diverge from the Iranian one. After all, while the Islamic Republic has certainly faced its own crises of legitimacy, its clerical establishment has not been discredited by a comparably documented pattern of abuse against children within religious institutions. The persecution of gay behaviors, however obnoxious, may not yet be seen as conflicting with mainstream Islamic values. The erosion of authority in Iran proceeds along different lines — political repression, economic mismanagement, generational estrangement — rather than the moral implosion triggered in Ireland by revelations of clerical wrongdoing. But the crash may yet come: if and when the horrors of the brutal repressions earlier this year come to light. 

Perhaps Ireland will point the way. Maybe O’Casey’s instinct about the fragility of sacred language is instructive. Here the idiom of martyrdom that once underpinned national cohesion now carries a more ambivalent charge: still potent as memory, but no longer sustained by an unquestioned ecclesiastical authority. Once the credibility of the institution that utters it is compromised, the rhetoric of sacrifice risks tipping into parody. The distance between “thy sting” and “sting-a-ling” is not merely comic. It marks the point at which a culture ceases to believe its own consolations.

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There’s an irony here. The educational system overseen by the Church proved unexpectedly effective. The rigor of the Leaving Certificate, often contrasted favorably with the British A-level system, helped produce a highly literate and analytically capable population. The same structures that enforced conformity also cultivated habits of critical judgment. When the Church’s moral authority collapsed in the wake of abuse scandals, those habits enabled a remarkably swift cultural shift. Within a generation, Ireland moved from one of the most observant societies in Europe to one of the most secularized.

A comparable paradox may become visible in Iran. The Islamic Republic has invested heavily in education, expanding literacy and higher education to levels that place Iranian students in competitive global standing, particularly in science and engineering. Despite rules forcing them to adopt the headscarf, women have achieved striking levels of educational attainment. As the researcher Rasmus Nielsen has noted in his global survey of secondary science education, the teaching of science, including evolution, in Iran is on a par with that of most Western countries. 

The comparison with the Sunni world is instructive here. Even in relatively secular countries such as Turkey the teaching of evolution — a prerequisite for basic science education — has been marred by culture wars similar to those raging in parts of America. In Saudi Arabia, Iran’s principal Sunni rival, evolution is barely mentioned in secondary education texts except in advanced biology courses, where it is introduced as “a fallacious and blasphemous theory derived by the Englishman Charles Darwin, who denied Allah’s creation of humanity”. 

As in Ireland, Iran’s educational attainment carries an inherent tension. A system designed to reproduce ideological conformity has helped create a population capable of questioning the very structures that govern it. The protests that erupted with the 2009 Green Movement, and after the death of Mahsa Amini 13 years later, were not only about patriarchal rules and clerical authority. Instead, they revealed a deeper contradiction between clerical governance and an educational agenda oriented toward modernization.

The contradiction has intellectual and theological roots. Ernest Gellner’s distinction between Islam as a “cult of the Book” and Christianity as a “cult of the Person” requires modification in this context. It applies most neatly to Sunni Islam and Protestantism. But Shiism, with its focus on the Hidden Imam and its eschatological expectation of return, introduces a principle of personal mediation closer to Catholicism. Its theology, like Catholic Thomism, contains rationalistic elements that can assist the advancement of science. Authority is not confined to text; it is embodied, transmitted, and anticipated. This eschatological horizon intensifies the dramaturgy of sacrifice. Karbala is not merely remembered; it is unfinished. Its resolution lies in the future. 

The Iranian intellectual tradition reinforces this dynamic. Shia thinkers from the Ismaili tradition that holds to a Living Imam — that is, a living, present spiritual leader rather than a hidden one — articulated a vision in which reason and revelation were intertwined, and in which truth possessed dimensions that could not be reduced to text alone. One might call this “pre-verbal” revelation. Such frameworks facilitated Islam’s expansion into non-Arab intellectual milieus — from Gujarat to the High Pamirs — where conversion required philosophical depth as well as legal adherence. They also helped embed belief in a structure where adversity itself is meaningful, where suffering confirms rather than undermines the moral order.

What emerges from this comparison is not a simple analogy, but a warning. When sacrifice becomes foundational, politics is tempted to follow suit. The dead acquire authority over the living; compromise begins to resemble betrayal. Pearse’s rhetoric of blood sacrifice has long made Irish liberals uneasy for that reason. The revolutionary deployment of Karbala in modern Iran has similarly enabled the mobilization of grief as a political resource.

Predictions of imminent collapse in Tehran, whether issued from Washington or Jerusalem, have often proved misplaced. You can bomb bridges and clinics, assassinate leaders, tighten sanctions — or even blockade ports and take over ships. But what you cannot easily dissolve is a solidarity rooted in a narrative that interprets suffering as moral, even ontological, vindication. The retreat of the Church in Ireland shows that such structures can eventually unravel, but only from within, and often through the unintended consequences of the very institutions that sustained them. Iran may yet follow a similar path, but not by bombs.

Almost 18 months after Bashar al-Assad fled into exile, such frantic improvisation is unsurprising. It’s also necessary. For if, by its end, his Baathist regime had transformed the country into a virtual narco-state, whose products surfaced in ports from Rotterdam and Genoa, the Syrian drug trade is alive and kicking. Indeed, one of the civil war’s most enduring legacies is that Assad’s former country has now become a major transit and drug hub, not just in Europe but across Asia and Africa too, encompassing narcotics as varied as crystal meth and liquid cocaine.

Yet it’s Captagon that truly keeps Syria’s drug empire afloat. Offering a blend of euphoria and detachment, the stimulant is popular among young Gulf club-goers and overstretched medical students seeking an edge in their exams. Over time, it’s become one of the country’s most lucrative exports. As he visits London for the first time today, President Ahmed al-Sharaa will doubtless parade a new Syria, one primed for investment and revived Western contact. The truth, though, is that Syria has become a legal black hole, a place where drugs can disappear, before reappearing elsewhere with little law enforcement scrutiny. That matters: not only for Syria and its own fragile future, but also for the region, Europe and the wider world.

Before the revolution, drugs weren’t really part of Syria’s story. There was cannabis, of course, grown in pockets around Baalbek, Homs and Latakia, and peddled by small-time gangsters and Hezbollah. But overall, Syria wasn’t known as a drug-exporting state, while dealers themselves were dealt with harshly. I remember living in a Damascus suburb and seeing funerals for local dealers who’d been killed in shootouts with police. Then, young men would smoke cigarettes like chimneys (they still do), and might have the odd drink, but it was rare to hear of drug-taking. There was a special stigma attached to its use. Captagon, for its part, was virtually unheard of. Syria did not present itself, to its neighbours, to Europe, or to its own citizens, as a country whose most lucrative export was narcotics.

Then came the war, and it turned Bashar al-Assad into a narco boss with a country attached. Captagon’s appeal isn’t hard to grasp. Over the past decade, parts of the Middle East — particularly the Gulf — have experienced a gradual loosening of social and religious restrictions. Among a young, affluent population with disposable income, ample free time, and a growing appetite for entertainment, the inexpensive stimulant has found a ready market. Easy to manufacture, easy to package, easy to move, it requires no fields, seasons or harvests.

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All a would-be kingpin needs are chemical precursors —  usually a mixture of amphetamines, caffeine and various fillers — alongside machinery and protection. As Assad was crushed by sanctions and the demands of an insatiable war machine, Captagon production proved to be an invaluable financial lifeline. By this stage, the regime boasted a growing ecosystem of militias and businessmen who propped up what remained of the hollowed-out state. Only trouble was, they all needed paying, and Captagon was the answer. And since the regime was now involved, they could manufacture most of those chemicals themselves, or else import them under official cover, attracting little scrutiny about their intended use. Importers like Eyad Lahham and former MPs like Amer Tayseer Kheiti were in on the racket, as was Assad’s brother Maher, who added drug running to his list of dubious accolades. Reports suggest that the Assads legally imported chemicals from India before producing Captagon from a disused potato-chip factory in the Damascus suburb of Douma.

At first, the Assad regime denied any connection to the drug. Its appearance was instead blamed on ISIS, with the “jihadi drug” supposedly used by fighters to remain calm in battle. On 1 July 2020, Italian police seized 14 tons of Captagon in Salerno, a port south of Naples, and initially seemed inclined to believe the shipment was indeed intended to fund ISIS. The Italians also explored links between the Islamists and the Neapolitan Camorra. No Camorra-ISIS connection was ever substantiated. What is known, though, is that one of Europe’s biggest drug traffickers, with Camorra ties, was arrested by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — al-Sharaa’s former outfit — while attempting to cross into regime-held territory in 2022.

Assad-linked networks were, by then, the drug’s main manufacturers and exporters. Maher al-Assad is again a case in point: his notorious Fourth Armored Division got so rich of Captagon that it reportedly maintained an $80 million cash reserve at a time when the average Syrian was surviving on just $2 a day. Maher and his associates meanwhile flaunted their wealth — supercars, watches, funds parked safely abroad — embodying the stark inequality that Assad’s narco-economy had created. All the while, this bonanza offered opportunities for ordinary Syrians. A young soldier might supplement his poor salary; a Bedouin school kid, instead of going to school, could smuggle Captagon and earn $1,000 a day.

The profits, then, were simply too hard to ignore. But so too is the social impact it’s wrought. Some weeks ago, while visiting friends in the war-scarred city of Raqqa — the former de facto capital of ISIS — my host warned me not to leave belongings in the car. Anything left behind, he said, would likely be stolen and sold to finance an addict’s drug habit. A UN employee from the city, speaking on condition of anonymity, describes the situation as an epidemic. Things are exacerbated, he adds, by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group of mostly Kurdish fighters, whose personnel turn a blind eye to trafficking — and allegedly take a cut of the action.

In this, al-Sharaa is surely an improvement. His new government celebrated the end of the trade, partly for propaganda reasons but also sincerely. For Muslims in general, and Islamists in particular, drugs aren’t just criminal but impious. Mere weeks after his victory, in the grand setting of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus no less, al-Sharaa announced the end of “the largest Captagon factory in the world” to a rapt audience.

All that was ultimately dismantled, however, was the regime-era infrastructure; a decentralized “cottage” industry of smaller players remain. Logistics is on their side. From there, consignments are moved towards Jordan using smuggling tactics that sound like folklore until you meet the men tasked with stopping them, with everything from livestock to drones used to hide the drugs. The real key, though, is to secure the networks through which you can move your goods — and those criminal networks didn’t go away when Assad fell.

The point, here, is that Syria’s narco-state didn’t disappear. Rather, it decentralized, its remnants scattering and grouping in enclaves where government control was weakest. Many former regime producers, as analyst Charles Lister has noted, fled to join the area controlled by Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, the de facto ruler and spiritual head of the Druze community in Suwayda. From 2018, the Assad regime allowed the province, not far from the Jordanian border, a degree of self-rule and a free hand in Captagon. For Hijri, handing over power to Damascus would effectively cut off the trade that funded both his militias and the autonomy they implied. Following his split from Damascus last year, and the creation of an independent enclave closely aligned to Israel, Hijri has emerged leader of what one expert calls a “narco-statelet” — one far closer to cartel-run corners of Mexico than any imagined Druze utopia.

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The Damascus authorities are hardly blind to this reality. But the fact remains that anti-drug campaigns are overstretched, under-resourced and often improvisational. Yet again, this can partly be explained by the 2024 revolution. Many experienced law-enforcement officers fled after Assad’s fall. In some areas, policing has since fallen to young local men, often without much training. Responsibility for counter-narcotics rests largely with the Interior Ministry and a security apparatus still being built, all while confronting more immediate threats. The result is a nationwide game of whack-a-mole, with raids, seizures, shootouts and occasional successes — followed by the reappearance of dealers elsewhere.

Meanwhile, officials I speak to describe increasingly sophisticated smuggling methods, from hidden tunnels to the sea route via Latakia. Scarcity has driven up prices; tighter restrictions have paradoxically made Captagon more lucrative. The trade adapts because, once more, its incentives are structural. According to the World Bank, extreme poverty still affects one in four Syrians, and with basic services like electricity eye-wateringly expensive, drugs remain a tempting option. That’s clear enough online. In forums I follow, there’s a lively trade between punters and traders, discussing prices, routes and volumes with the casual tone of men selling spare parts. Sometimes an odd request for a gun or cocaine is thrown in with a picture, and the trader asks for the buyer to DM him. Users sometimes upload images to show they’ve picked up their stashes, their dealer responding with a jaunty thumbs-up emoji.

What becomes evident from these conversations is that Captagon’s reach extends far beyond the Levant or even Europe, and now encompasses far-off East Africa and the Ivory Coast. One network, operating laboratory facilities in Turkey, shared wholesale prices that illustrate this reach. A million pills were apparently sold for around $150,000, with smaller batches priced in neat increments.

And if the Syrian trade was made by Captagon, there are ominous signs that diversification is the order of the day. That Turkish network doesn’t only deal in Captagon, but also heroin, Tramadol, Ritalin, Modafinil, Lyrica, hashish and crystal meth. Of course, not every claim made online is necessarily true. But that matters less than what these claims reveal: traffickers now think globally, because the market itself is global.

Given all this, how can the authorities respond? Beyond ad hoc raids — officials recently seized a major shipment of liquid cocaine from the port at Latakia — one senior Syrian official I speak to is skeptical. Dismantling an industry built over a decade and a half, he suggests, would take two or three years of sustained effort. What with its global spread, even that estimate may be optimistic. To be fair, there are now signs of cross-border cooperation, like when the Jordanian airforce recently bombed Captagon supply lines in Suwayda. More than that, though, the Syrians themselves need help: both technical support and investment.

After all, places like Suwayda rely on Captagon because of political or militia power — but also because of poverty. And if Syria and the international community aren’t careful, this small pill may yet prove more destabilizing than anything the region has seen, like a modern Pied Piper, luring its youth with the promise of oblivion. Add the networks expanding across Europe and we may soon find Captagon on the streets of Britain. Whatever al-Sharaa might claim, Syria’s civil war isn’t over yet.

Yet when Asian markets opened later in the night, the search for oil and gas resumed and prices came back off their lows. With traffic through the Strait of Hormuz still at a virtual standstill — and the Islamic Republic warning “the end of the war is in Iran’s hands” — the President is learning that it’s easier to start wars than finish them. Trump may now have to confront an unpleasant dilemma: either stand down US forces and allow a murderous regime its victory parade, or save face and risk derailing the world economy. 

Yet despite chatter to the contrary, such a downturn wouldn’t reprise the Seventies. Then, an oil-price spike triggered by a Middle East war caused inflation to skyrocket. Now, the impacts will be considerably more muted, for several reasons. 

First off, the world economy is much less carbon-intensive than it was back then. On average, it takes half the energy to produce a dollar of output than it did when the Yom Kippur War began, with the productivity gains most pronounced in Western economies where the shift from manufacturing to services and more efficient technologies have greatly reduced dependence on imported energy. Second, the US has gone from being dependent on the Middle East for its energy to being a net exporter of oil and gas: making it less vulnerable to external shocks. Third, many countries are well into an energy transition towards renewable energy, and so are more able to withstand a surge in oil and gas prices.

All the same, while the world is more resilient to an energy shock than it was 50 years ago, in other ways it is actually more vulnerable to the impact of an oil shock right now. To begin with, the interruption of oil flow is bigger than it was then, with one prominent industry analyst arguing that the supply removed from the market has been twice the size of any previous shock. That’s unsurprising: this time, the entire Gulf supply has been cut, representing 30% of the world’s output.

This price shock hits the world economy at a delicate time. All three of the world’s biggest economies are already showing signs of weakness. China just downgraded its growth target, recognizing that its economy is slowing, and that boosting domestic consumption will be harder and more time-consuming than hoped. Europe, for its part, is still in a funk and is being hit hard by the price rises — especially when it’s so dependent on oil and gas imports.

As for America, there are already signs that its economy has also been softening. As last week’s employment report revealed, the job market is in bad shape – 90,000 jobs lost last month and revisions to previous reports that reveal the economy hasn’t created any new jobs since last spring. Meanwhile, the GDP report for the final quarter of 2025 came in much weaker than expected, and while most economists have anticipated a bounceback once new tax cuts kick in, higher oil prices would neutralize their effects. 

While the oil shock will be less severe in the US than in Europe, meanwhile, it will nonetheless encourage inflation if oil prices stay on their current path. Even though futures markets indicate traders expect oil prices to start falling soon, they also expect them to finish the year some 25% higher than was expected just a few months ago. In other words, even in the optimistic scenario, higher prices may be here for a while.

Nor is oil the only inflationary challenge here. Because such a large share of the world’s fertilizer supply comes from the Gulf, prices here have shot up too. This will feed straight through to food prices — and because the northern hemisphere has already begun its spring planting season, these increases are already informing production costs. Farmers could adjust by using less fertilizer, particularly in developing countries, but given the tight correlation between fertilizer input and crop yield, this pretty much guarantees production shortfalls and so higher food prices later in the year.

For their part, aluminum prices have shot up too, with shipping costs rising by about a fifth. If the war lasts for more than a few weeks, supply chains may take months to re-establish, and backlogs will persist for a while, just as they did after the Covid  lockdowns. Aluminum, for example, is widely used in construction and in the production of cars, consumer electronics and packaging. Its increased cost will ripple quickly through the economy.

All this is happening as inflationary pressures rise across the US economy. Last month’s Producer Price Index came in much hotter than expected, suggesting inflation was looming. That’s as a recent report from the Institute for Supply Management found that manufacturers are expecting substantial price increases this year. At worst, then, this oil shock will raise inflation; at best, inflation won’t come down, possibly for the rest of the year. 

Either way, it will now be harder for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, which will provide a headwind to the stock market. Wall Street has traded sideways for four months, and is now down slightly since the start of the war. So far there’s been little sign of panic, and stocks are far from bearish. Even so, that may not offer much solace to investors. With the job market now so weak, and American consumers having run down their savings, the so-called “k-shaped” economy has been kept afloat by rich Americans spending their stock market gains.

Any interruption could therefore slow consumption in the top half of the economy, contributing to a wider slowdown. But it could also store up some even bigger problems. In particular, private equity firms were looking to a positive 2026 to finally unclog the pipeline of IPOs they need to generate the cash for shareholders. A weak stock market may affect their cash flow negatively, which could in turn force their owners, including big institutional investors like pension funds, to sell other shares to generate income. Already, we’re seeing strains in the credit part of the private equity industry, where Goldman Sachs is now pitching funds that will short corporate loans, pointing to what could be a difficult year.

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All told, the US economy, like most of the world, can ill afford a protracted shock. And while global markets won’t follow the plotlines drawn in the Seventies, they’re still at risk of decelerating if Trump’s war doesn’t end soon. 

For the moment, we must see where oil prices go. If they keep falling through the week, it may suggest that traders genuinely see an end to the war. But if they keep rising, or even stay where they are, the global economy faces a grim 2026.

To be sure, a global downturn wouldn’t necessarily mean a global recession; many economies would continue growing, albeit more slowly than before. But for developed economies, the risk of outright recessions would be high. And, given the debt burdens already accumulated by Western governments, their space for fiscal stimulus could be constrained, meaning any recession could prove quite stubborn.

In short, we must hope for peace — and soon. Unfortunately, those prosecuting this war don’t appear to have a clear idea of how to end it. Part of Trump’s challenge now is that even if he cuts and runs, the Gulf will remain volatile, which could prevent normal traffic. Israel, for its part, may continue its strikes even if the Americans step back. Without a definitive defeat for Iran, the Islamic Republic may opt to keep the Strait closed in order to secure better peace terms.

Worse for Trump personally, meanwhile, is that he’d lined up several investment commitments from regional governments, which were to benefit both the US economy and his own family. With Gulf governments understandably distracted, these plans may be put on hold.  Already, governments which had pledged hundreds of billions of dollars of US investment and offered to fund Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace are reconsidering their plans. So even if Trump wants to believe he’s exempt from the old Pottery Barn Rule — if you break it, you own it — he may now be stuck with a hell of a bill: whatever he does next.

Perhaps it’s simpler: we’re just out the other side of the experiment with mass-media democracy, and mass-mobilization warfare. In other words, this is the West’s first fully post-liberal war. And in this new age, politicians have simply stopped feeling they need to give electorates an explanation.

The liberal order was supposed to be a global utopia of rules. Under this optimistic regime, states would avert open conflict by adhering to international norms — and even, latterly, spread the norms at gunpoint in order to globalize their adoption. Starmer’s stubborn adherence to this disintegrating raft of proceduralism has been greeted with Trumpian contempt. And perhaps we might also note that these rules are, themselves, a historical anomaly. Until the 20th century, leaders gave little thought to what ordinary people wanted, when weighing the necessity of conflict. For most of history before mass-casualty munitions, such decisions were seen as the preserve of specially educated elites.

But over the mass-broadcast age that began with radio, and continued until the digital revolution, it came to be accepted that the general public ought to have a say. In his account of the run-up to the Second World War, the historian AJP Taylor describes a dynamic in which “public opinion” became, for the first time, a meaningful factor for politicians in their decision-making, even on war. It’s not a coincidence that over the same era a new type of official communications — more colloquially, mass propaganda — also emerged, to shape “public opinion” in the desired direction.

This was genuinely necessary, for over the same industrial period, war itself also became a mass phenomenon: both mass-mobilization, and mass-casualty. If you’re going to ask all your citizens to mobilize either for combat or the war effort, you do need some form of general public consent. The climax of “total war” in this style came between 1914 and 1945: an orgy of industrialized weapons-manufacture, death, and destruction, that only ended with the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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After this cataclysm, the world lived for decades in the comparative hush of Mutually Assured Destruction. Meanwhile, the broadcast-media legacy of “total war” entrenched a belief that electorates should be involved in any decision to fight. Especially in the USA after Vietnam and Watergate, the “third estate” came increasingly to understand itself as an indispensable component in the democratic settlement: both speaking truth to power, and at times cutting power back down to size.

In time, this also had a reciprocal effect on the way war itself came to be mediated. I vividly recall the considerable effort, after 9/11, to present the invasion of Iraq as legal and democratically mandated. By contrast, what feels strange about the current conflict in Iran is that it is just as real — real deaths, real refugees, real flames, real international economic chaos — but no one seems to have paid any attention to rules, or indeed “public opinion”, before embarking on it. And now here we are.

But perhaps this is fitting. Over the past two decades, both warfare and communications have mutated at warp speed. And one of the key characteristics of this revolution, which has happened through digital innovation, is a paradoxical mix of apparent decentralization covering real centralization. Think of the way social media “disintermediated” local newspapers in theory, in favor of “citizen journalism”, while in practice handing overall control to a handful of platforms and their oligarchs.

The same now seems to go, too, for war. Especially since the frenzy of drone innovation catalyzed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, combat has been “disintermediated” away from human-manned artillery or soldiers, toward partially or fully autonomous weapons. Since Trump’s “major combat operation” began, for example, the Gulf states surrounding Iran have undergone heavy attack by drones and guided missiles, most of which has been repelled by equally high-tech automated interceptor systems. All of this is controlled by a comparatively small battery of experts, and supplied by a small number of firms.

Meanwhile, the field of domestic war communications also feels increasingly swarm-like, computer-generated — and indifferent to interference by the masses. The White House X account broadcasts grainy explosion footage mixed with high-gloss edits drawn from video gaming, action movies, and (really) Spongebob Squarepants, adding to the sense of high-tech unreality with AI-animated “Founding Fathers” imagery. Blaze Media founder Glenn Beck, too, has trotted out his “George AI”, a CGI rendition of George Washington dressed as a tech bro and trained on data “writings from the founding era”, to explain the importance of what the White House trumpets as “peace through strength”.

This is perhaps also the context in which to understand the recent standoff between Trump and Anthropic. The CEO of the AI firm, Dario Amodei, objected to his system being deployed by the US military to power fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. Trump retaliated by threatening to designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk”. Negotiations are ongoing; but the clear impression is of a US Department of War leaning full-tilt into the new high-tech arms race, and that will brook no dissent. Online, too, just as Amodei’s objections to the weaponization of Claude have been dismissed, so too have protests from Ben Stiller, over the use of his cinematic work for war propaganda. The White House “Epic Fury” movie edit is still live.

This indifference to older norms, and seeming preference for vibes-based comms over clear messaging, has prompted a cacophony of secondary debate. This now occupies everyone’s newsfeeds; meanwhile, the “major combat operation” rumbles on. And who knows: perhaps there really is a robust national-interest rationale for the attacks, from an American leadership perspective, and those in the know simply aren’t saying. But whatever prompted the attack, it’s clear that the broadcast-media machine is increasingly irrelevant to such decisions.

Much as heavy artillery now takes second place to nimbler, cheaper drone swarms, so has mass media been disintermediated by a maelstrom of CGI edits, AI propagandists, bot-farms, and “citizen journalism”. And perhaps that’s the point: the aim is not clear messaging but a debate so hyperreal that messaging as such is impossible. Above the din, meanwhile, the postwar fiction of “the people” having any kind of democratic say in warmaking has been quietly shelved.

In the premodern era, war was for elites, with ordinary peasants only mobilized in extremis. Of course, the consequences of war were frequently devastating for those peasants; but by and large such decisions were taken over their heads. We seem now to be approaching a post-industrial retread of the same dynamic, in which warmaking is once again an elite choice, and everyone just has to live with it.

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Some reports are now suggesting that Trump expected a quick operation, comparable with Venezuela, and not Iran’s determination to make it a regional war. And yet networked warfare will tend in that direction: the arrest of two self-radicalized “Islamic State” fighters in New York City last Saturday, for trying to detonate a nail-bomb at a Right-wing protest, is a harbinger of the vectors by which high-tech warfare, energized by memes, is likely to metastasize.

For the internet’s other core characteristic, along with centralizing real power, is dissolving physical distance. Social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have become both advertising channels and organizational tools for the global people-trafficking industry; meanwhile studies suggest that the internet’s power to connect people instantly across distance inhibits migrants’ assimilation in host countries.

Scaled up, the picture this presents is of increasingly diffuse, unassimilated, intermingled, and digitally networked populations across the globe, who hold (putting it mildly) a range of views about any given war, in any given place. In such a world, where communications are instantaneous, and populations linked more by ideology or ethno-religious affinity than geography, every battlefield is also potentially everywhere.

So we’ve exited the age of utopian globalism. But not (as Trump seemed to promise) for a return to moderate nationalism. Even if (as we all now hope) Trump is planning to end the war soon, what’s emerging as the post-liberal new normal is instead a volatile, hypermobile, high-tech and radically post-democratic form of global networked tribalism — but with sleeper cells, and autonomous suicide drones. God help us all.

And why did the two powers strike in broad daylight on Saturday 28 February? Was it because Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, or the CIA tipped them off that Khamenei and his entourage would be above ground in their compound rather than in their night-time bunkers? Did the Israelis in effect “bounce” the Americans into attacking Iran on that day?

Historians will no doubt debate these questions if, as seems likely, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump fail to unseat the authoritative institutions of the Islamic Republic. Given the lack of a coherent opposition in Iran, there is a real possibility that forces loyal to the regime — the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militias — will simply unite under a new Supreme Leader and maintain the momentum that saw thousands slaughtered after the street protests in January, meanwhile unleashing the kind of bloody “forever war” that Trump has pledged to avoid.

But the uncertainties raised by this war also lead to a more immediate question. Given the chaos triggered by the attack — canceled flights through three of the world’s largest airport hubs; thousands of tourists stranded in Dubai; the closing of the Hormuz Straits; punishing hikes in oil and gas prices — what can the Gulf states have been thinking?

Before the February attack, the conventional wisdom held that the petrodollar monarchies — including Saudi Arabia — were urging restraint on Washington and (more distantly) Tel Aviv. What they feared were precisely the consequences that have now come to pass: Iran — the wounded animal — launching missile and drone attacks against targets across the Gulf that host US forces. Strikes or attempted strikes have hit the United Arab Emirates (including the Al Dhafra air base and sites in Dubai), Bahrain (near the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama), Kuwait (Ali Al-Salem air base and Shuaiba port), Qatar (areas around Doha and US facilities), and Saudi Arabia (notably the Ras Tanura oil hub). Civilian infrastructure has also been affected, including Dubai airport, hotels, and port facilities, largely as a result of missile impacts or debris from interceptions.

The pattern suggests that Iran’s strategy is to target US military infrastructure and energy nodes across the Gulf while signaling that the region’s economic lifelines are exposed in the event of escalation. The Gulf energy infrastructure remains vulnerable — as was dramatically demonstrated in September 2019, when drones and cruise missiles struck the Abqaiq processing facility and the Khurais oil field in Saudi Arabia. The attack temporarily knocked out roughly 5.7 million barrels per day of production — about half of Saudi output and nearly 5% of global supply — making it the largest sudden disruption in oil market history. Although Iran’s allies, the Yemeni Houthis, claimed responsibility, Western intelligence agencies concluded that the weapons and planning bore the Islamic Republic’s hallmarks. Production was restored within weeks, but the strike exposed the extraordinary fragility of Gulf energy infrastructure and the global economy’s continuing dependence on it.

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Why is Prince William cosying up to MBS?

By Malise Ruthven

Given the damage predicted — and already inflicted — on Gulf oil production, not to mention the tourism industry, the voices urging caution sounded eminently reasonable. It was therefore surprising to learn from the Washington Post and other sources that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) played a behind-the-scenes role in encouraging Trump to attack Iran.

According to several officials familiar with the discussions, the crown prince held multiple private phone conversations with Trump in the weeks preceding the US-Israeli strikes. In these calls, he reportedly urged Washington to act quickly, warning that Iran would become “stronger and more dangerous” if decisive action were delayed. There may have been other links as well. As I reported in my book Unholy Kingdom, MBS formed a personal bond with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew with close links to the Netanyahu family. During Trump’s first term, when the scandal over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was in the headlines, MBS and Kushner were reported to have been in contact via WhatsApp, with Kushner acting as the crown prince’s most important defender in the White House. As the late Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel and a leading Middle East expert, told The New York Times at the time; “the relationship between Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman constitutes the foundation of the Trump policy not just toward Saudi Arabia but toward the region”. There has been no suggestion since Trump’s return to power that the “WhatsApp bromance” has been fractured.

The Post reported that MBS’s behind-the-scenes lobbying contrasts sharply with Saudi Arabia’s public emphasis on dialog with Tehran. Saudi officials have repeatedly stated that they do not want a regional war and would not allow Saudi territory or airspace to be used for an attack. Privately, however, the crown prince and other Saudi officials, including his brother, the defense minister Khaled bin Salman, reportedly argued that the moment was strategically favorable for confronting Iran and degrading its missile and military infrastructure.

These communications occurred amid a broader effort by regional allies to influence Washington’s decision. Kushner’s friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long advocated US strikes on Iran, with Israeli officials also pressing the White House to act. The Post reported that the combined pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia helped shape Trump’s final decision to authorize large-scale attacks despite US intelligence assessments that Iran did not pose an imminent direct threat to them.

One of the most destabilizing developments in contemporary Middle Eastern politics has been the sectarianization of geopolitical rivalry; this is what happens when strategic competition between states becomes reframed as a religious confrontation between communities. The current war risks accelerating that process dramatically. What began as a campaign to neutralize a nuclear program could easily be interpreted across the Muslim world as a coalition of Israel, the United States, and Sunni monarchies against a Shi’a sovereign state. If that perception spreads, the conflict may mobilize actors far beyond Iran’s borders: militias, religious movements, and sectarian networks whose motivations extend beyond conventional state interests. Once political conflicts acquire sacred meaning, they become far harder to resolve.

Supporters of the strike argue that decisive action will destabilize Iran’s regime and perhaps open the way for a more pragmatic leadership. Intelligence analysts have reportedly even considered scenarios in which factions within the Revolutionary Guard might assume power and pursue accommodation with the West.

History suggests caution. Regimes built around revolutionary ideologies rarely moderate under external pressure. Stalin’s regime, for example, was strengthened by Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union; its collapse in 1990–91 came only after a prolonged period of declining Cold War tensions. More often than not, external conflict — especially aerial bombardment — serves to radicalize. If this conflict becomes widely interpreted as a struggle between rival religious visions of history, it could ignite precisely the kind of sectarian confrontation that has repeatedly destabilized the region over the past two decades, when Sunni leaders such as Jordan’s King Abdullah saw themselves facing a “Shi’a crescent” following the fall of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. At that point the arc of Shi’a influence stretching from Iran via revitalized Shi’as in Iraq and Alawite-dominated Syria to the Mediterranean.

The departure of the Assad regime from Damascus, the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now, the attacks on Iran, might suggest to Sunni rulers that Shi’ism is on the retreat globally. However, revolutionary activism inspired by Khamenei’s “martyrdom” among Shi’a populations in Bahrain or the oil-bearing  province of Saudi Arabia may present a more menacing challenge. The Saudi kingdom’s clerical establishment are quiescent but not “defanged” as MBS pursues his program of social modernization and they could remobilize if a Shi’ite revolutionary menace was perceived as emerging from within the confines of the state. Then, short of the kind of quick, decisive strike that Trump might have envisaged after his actions in Venezuela, we are into something far more intractable: a contest of sacred narratives among the three great Abrahamic traditions.

When a conflict becomes framed through religious narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice, defeats can easily be transformed into moral victories. Geopolitical calculations and theological narratives have converged. Netanyahu’s need for political triumph, Saudi Arabia’s strategic rivalry with Iran, American evangelical support for Israel, and Iranian revolutionary theology have all contributed to the atmosphere in which war has broken out. When strategic rivalry between states becomes entangled with domestic political incentives, ideological movements and religious expectations, volatility increases.

The centrality of martyrdom to Shi’a political theology only exacerbates that risk. The death of Imam Husayn at Karbala in 680AD has long provided the Islamic Republic with a powerful symbolic language through which suffering can be transformed into moral vindication. The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader risks reinforcing precisely this narrative, helping the regime to present itself as the victim of unjust aggression, with the anti-government protesters dismissed as treacherous agents inspired by Mossad and victims of Western manipulation.

At the same time, Israeli politics has been undergoing a profound ideological shift. The coalition sustaining Netanyahu’s government includes figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Their outlook is shaped by currents of religious Zionism that see the modern state of Israel as part of a redemptive historical process. Within this worldview, the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the biblical lands is not simply a political development but a step in the unfolding of sacred history. Conflict with Israel’s enemies therefore acquires a metaphysical significance.

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America itself appears to be increasingly under the sway of extreme religious ideology, with a parallel narrative existing between American evangelical Christianity and Jewish messianism. (The denouements of these end-times scenarios may differ radically, with Jews expecting redemption while their evangelical supporters expecting Jewish conversions to Christianity, but this doesn’t affect contemporary theo-political forces). Millions of evangelical voters interpret Middle Eastern politics through a dispensationalist reading of biblical prophecy in which the modern state of Israel plays a central role in an unfolding divine plan. The US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee frames Israel’s conflicts not merely as geopolitical struggles but as episodes within a larger biblical drama. Within the MAGA political coalition, this constituency carries enormous influence, reinforcing support for Israel not only through strategic calculations but also through theological conviction.

It bears repeating: when wars acquire eschatological meaning, they rarely end quickly — or predictably.

There is, however, another possible perspective. One geopolitical objective of Washington’s confrontation with Iran may be to weaken a state that has become an important partner for both Russia and China. Yet the Chinese leadership has previously demonstrated that diplomacy in the region need not follow the logic of confrontation. In 2023, President Xi Jinping’s government brokered the unexpected rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, reopening diplomatic relations after years of hostility.

That episode suggests that even in a region long defined by rivalry and proxy conflict, political imagination can sometimes achieve what military force cannot. Whether the current crisis will leave room for such diplomacy remains the unanswered question.

The Saudis, backed by President Donald Trump, have of course denied that the murder was officially sanctioned, claiming that a rogue outfit was responsible after an argument got out of hand. However, the killing and dismemberment by the infamous bone saw were recorded in brutal detail by Turkish intelligence; and credible authorities, including senior intelligence officials such as Agnès Callamard, former UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, have been unequivocal in their verdicts. Callamard’s report into the “execution” is damning: “Evidence points to the 15-person mission to execute Mr Khashoggi requiring significant government coordination, resources and finances… Every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr Khashoggi, was being launched.” Just in case Prince William is in need of some small talk.

Of course, a visit by a senior member of the Royal Family is never just ceremonial. It is an act of diplomacy, and symbolism too. The moral endorsement of the British crown will be cherished by the Saudi regime, which likes to think of itself as “royal” in the grand tradition of the Western monarchies, despite its parvenu origins. But Prince William’s visit raises uncomfortable questions — not only about Middle Eastern realpolitik in an era of shifting alliances, but about the values that the United Kingdom claims to uphold.

These questions have become especially acute in the wake of a recent High Court judgment against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It concerned Ghanem al-Masarir, a Saudi dissident living in Britain since 2003. Through his popular YouTube channel, The Ghanem Show, recorded in Wembley, al-Masarir uses satire to expose corruption and human rights abuses within Saudi Arabia. His reach is vast, amassing over 300 million views, primarily from audiences inside Saudi Arabia who seek alternatives to state-controlled narratives and pro-regime bots.

But the authorities are aware of him too. Al-Masarir has been under constant harassment since 2004. He claims that a large check was forged in an effort to break him financially; that his phones were infiltrated with Israeli-manufactured Pegasus spyware; that he was followed and assaulted in broad daylight; and that he received explicit death threats from individuals linked to the Saudi royal court. The most violent incident, al-Masarir says, occurred in August 2018 he was followed from a cafe and assaulted by two men near the Brompton Road entrance of Harrods. Al-Masarir alleged that during the beating, the attackers repeatedly shouted: “Who are you to talk about the family of al-Saud?” and “How dare you curse Prince Salman, we won’t allow it!” They called him a “slave of Qatar” and threatened to “teach him a lesson”. When an English friend who was with al-Masarir told them they were protected by the Queen and British police, the attackers retorted: “Fuck London — their queen is our slave and their police are our dogs.”

In 2010, al-Masarir was befriended by an individual claiming to be a Master’s student in the UK who repeatedly attempted to persuade him to travel to Italy or Egypt. He later discovered this man’s true identity: Rajeh al-Baqmi, the head of Saudi intelligence at the Saudi embassy in London. He also encountered Maher Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer at the embassy, who made an explicit warning that he should never leave the UK. This might have been a back-handed threat with a hint of protection, suggesting that unlike their Russian counterparts who were prepared to murder co-nationals in London or Salisbury, Saudi mafiosi are more comfortable conducting their nefarious operations outside the UK, in countries such as Turkey.

Mutreb is clearly not to be messed with. A brigadier general commanding the Saudi hit squad or “Rapid Intervention Force”, it was he who led the team charged with killing and dismembering Khashoggi, assisted by Dr Salah al-Tubaigy, a forensic pathologist who is thought to have wielded the bone saw. In the audio recordings revealed by Turkish intelligence — the Saudis had failed to sweep the consulate for bugs — it is Mutreb’s voice that dominates. “Keep pushing, don’t remove your hand!”, followed by: “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over,” with the sounds of plastic sheets and the whine of an electric saw. While there is no audio directly linking the Crown Prince to the Khashoggi murder, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. In a separate audio, leaked by the CIA, the phrase “tell your boss” occurs in a conversation between Mutreb and the Crown Prince’s de facto chief of staff, Saud al-Qahtani. As Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, told The New York Times: “A phone call like that… is as close to a smoking gun as you’re going to get.”

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The disclosures implicating MBS in the murder will certainly be ignored in the current White House — whose incumbents include the Crown Prince’s close friend, Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law. But is it really always necessary for the UK to toe the US line? At the very least, the High Court ruling in the Ghanem al-Masarir case should give the Palace — and the Foreign Office — pause for thought. Saudi Arabia initially attempted to claim immunity under the 1978 State Immunity Act. However, the court ruled in 2022 that the Kingdom was not immune to these claims. After the Saudi state failed to pay court costs and its appeal was struck out, the final judgment was delivered on 26 January. Judge Pushpinder Saini found that on the balance of probabilities the Kingdom had been responsible for the physical attack on al-Masarir and for hacking his phone: “The KSA had a clear interest and motivation to shut down the claimant’s public criticism of the Saudi government.”

In its ruling, the court awarded al-Masarir more than £3 million in compensation for the psychiatric harm caused by hacking his phone as well as the physical assault. This marks a significant benchmark in the defense of human rights — though, given its refusal to take part in the legal proceedings, there is no certainty that the Saudi government will actually pay.

Nevertheless, any concerns that the British state has about criminality are outweighed by realpolitik. As David Hearst, an astute Middle East observer, has argued, a profound realignment is underway in the Arab world. It is not driven by palace intrigues, tribal rivalries, or the usual contests between regional proxies. Nor is it about Iran or political Islam — the two habitual anxieties of Sunni Arab rulers. And unlike the Arab Spring, it has not emerged from popular uprisings or mass protests. Yet its consequences could be just as far-reaching.

What has changed, according to Hearst, is that the region’s most populous Arab states — above all Saudi Arabia and Algeria, and potentially Egypt — have begun to recognize the threat of a shared project of Israel and the United Arab Emirates to reshape the Middle East. Their fear is that Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi intend to fragment Arab-majority or Arab-leaning states. This would enable the Israelis and Emiratis to control key maritime chokepoints, such as the Straits of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, and entrench military and economic dominance across the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and beyond.

This strategy is already explicit in Israel’s actions: in its efforts to create de facto enclaves in Syria protecting the Druzes and Kurds; in its recognition of Somaliland, which gives it a foothold in the Horn of Africa; and in its general efforts to weaken Arab polities where national unity tends to be problematic. For the UAE, fragmentation has been a long-running method of power projection. It’s visible in Libya, where the UAE has provided military support to General Khalifa Haftar against the UN-supported government in Tripoli; in Sudan, where the UAE backs the genocidal Rapid Support Forces against the central government; and in southern Yemen, where the UAE armed and empowered the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in pursuit of a separatist state aligned with Emirati interests and open to ties with Israel.

Indeed, Yemen is the decisive fault line in the plan for regional fragmentation. What began as a campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood-linked al-Islah movement evolved into a broader attempt to carve out an Emirati client state in the south, centered on the port of Aden and extending east into the Hadhramaut valley. The separatists’ attempt to take over the port of al Mukalla in the Hadhramaut region at the end of last year proved a turning point. Saudi Arabia, now encircled on its southern frontier, felt that Emirati ambitions were now threatening its security — and duly responded with force. Backing official Yemeni government troops, it bombed STC positions in Mukalla, reversing much of Abu Dhabi’s decade-long project in a matter of days. Almost simultaneously, Israel’s recognition of the separatist government of Somaliland (it is the only UN state to formally do so) confirmed Saudi fears that these were not isolated moves but elements of a coordinated strategy across both sides of the Bab el-Mandeb.

The rift between Mohammed bin Salman and his former mentor, the Emirati president Mohammed bin Zayed, was now gaping. The pair were once close partners in resisting the Muslim Brotherhood and allied movements. Now, Riyadh has not only confronted Emirati proxies militarily but also publicly reframed Abu Dhabi as a destabilizing actor. The Saudi media attacks on Mohammed bin Zayed have been blistering, depicting the UAE’s president as a disruptive force rather than the trusted ally of yore.

And the break reflects a deeper recalculation. Saudi Arabia understands that its strategic weight — in terms of population, territory, and oil power — far exceeds that of the UAE. Once you remove the expat community living in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, there are barely one million Emirati citizens. Abu Dhabi may specialize in covert action and proxy warfare, but it cannot prevail against Riyadh when vital Saudi interests are at stake.

Meanwhile, Washington under Donald Trump has intensified Saudi unease by treating global energy resources as prizes to be seized and threatening to depress oil prices, undermining the kingdom’s fiscal stability. Riyadh has concluded that US military power does not equate to responsible governance, and that American adventurism routinely generates chaos it cannot manage.

So the Saudi turn is not moral but strategic. By resisting Emirati-Israeli plans for regional fragmentation, Riyadh is positioning itself as an autonomous Arab power, potentially aligning more closely with Turkey, Egypt, Algeria — and perhaps, even long-term, with Iran. What it favors is a regional security order independent of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Given the emerging regional configurations, the British government — and the Palace — would be right in thinking that Britain’s interests align more closely with the Saudi Kingdom which, like it or not, is emerging as a leading player in the region and a potential source of stability rather than with the disruptive UAE. But does all this mean that the heir to the throne must cosy up to his murderous Saudi counterpart?

Prince William has cultivated an image as a thoughtful, socially conscious public figure — engaged with environmental issues, interfaith dialogue, and the responsibilities of leadership. It does not befit that persona for him to associate himself too closely with a regime implicated in surveillance, murderous violence, and repression. If William proceeds with the visit, he will need to find ways of expressing a certain distance from his hosts. He should certainly decline any invitations to inspect MBS’s yacht, Serena. According to the anonymous Saudi activist who goes by the name Mujtahid, Jamal Khashoggi’s fingers are kept on board as a trophy.

Such assumptions have seen Khamenei and his acolytes in the Revolutionary Guard, the clerical establishment and the Basij militia ride out crisis after crisis, starting with the Green Movement led by Mousavi in 2009, extending through the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-3 and climaxing in the battering that the country received last summer at the hands of Israeli and US aircraft. Then, calls by Benjamin Netanyahu and Pahlavi himself for ordinary citizens to take advantage of the regime’s military disarray, by going out and toppling it, went conspicuously unanswered.

Now all has changed. Initially sparked by economic collapse, two weeks of protests have coalesced into a national movement, one whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. Along the way, the regime’s tenaciously-held assumptions have become obsolete. The authorities have been caught unawares, and seem unable or unwilling to change course. On the contrary, the Islamic Republic remains fatally wedded to the old assumptions while the country enters an unpredictable and explosive new phase.

The scene was set by a summer of chronic water shortages and electricity outages. In December, the riyal collapsed and inflation touched 50%, the consequence of mismanagement, corruption and sanctions that the revolutionary oligarchy has knowingly courted and in some cases profited from. Tellingly, the initial protests, on 28 December, were staged not by the hijab-discarding young women, the sort who spearheaded the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rather, the discontent was sparked by the revolution’s traditional supporters: grizzled, pious traders in the bazaar. They were soon joined by youthful members of the country’s dispossessed middle class: nouveaux pauvres with a Jacobin rage in their hearts and supportive compatriots by their side.

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By David Patrikarakos

The solidarity that is currently being shown between Iranians of different ages, classes and ethnicities is a far cry from the scenes I observed during the 2009 agitation, when bystanders watched with studied neutrality as protesters were dragged away to police torture chambers. Gone, too, is the inviolability of public property. These days, bystanders wade in with fists and kicks to save protesters from the security forces, while police stations and police cars are torched and — according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency — officers are killed. From the province of Kurdistan in the west to Baluchistan in the east and as far south as the refinery town of Abadan, no part of Iran is untouched. At least one small town, in the western province of Kermanshah, has been seized by rebels.

The regime has responded by killing dozens of protesters before cutting the internet on Thursday night. Behind the blackout, as is clear from video and audio files that continue to trickle out, more protesters are dying, more public buildings are being attacked and more hospitals are becoming war zones as parents smash down mortuary doors and remove the bodies of their dead children before the authorities can surreptitiously bury them. Such confrontations are a throwback to the 1979 revolution, which advanced to the rhythm of Shia mourning ceremonies, each funeral being a magnet for more protests and more deaths.

Only a few government services — notably regime propaganda conducted through social media — have been exempted from the blackout. Card transactions, on which the economy depends, have not. With shops shuttered, the protests seem to be growing. In one video clip of a huge nocturnal gathering, a voice is heard: “They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”

On Friday, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence wing warned against “any refusal to act” on the part of other organs of the state, a rare public admission of concern on the subject of regime cohesion. The following day the regular army, which usually takes no role in maintaining law and order, announced that it would safeguard strategic infrastructure and public property, also urging Iranians to thwart “enemy plots”.

But such warnings, and Khamenei’s own denunciation of the protesters as “rioters” whose motivation is to curry favor with Donald Trump, derive from the old reasoning that equates any call by Iranians for foreign intervention with unpatriotic betrayal. The country has a long history of such interventions, not least the 1953 coup in which MI6 and the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s legitimate prime minister. Yet judging by the protesters’ cheerful calls for further attacks by the US and Israel, it is clear that they have rejected their parents’ squeamishness. According to the logic on the streets, another Western aerial campaign would be welcome if it advances the goal of toppling the Islamic Republic.

The main political beneficiary of the growing appetite for outside action is Pahlavi, who on Friday exhorted Trump to “be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran”. And, for the first time, the self-styled crown prince is regarded as a serious contender for leadership of a new regime whose main attribute would be its good relations with Tel Aviv and Washington.

It is a remarkable transformation for the diffident 65-year-old who left Iran for Lubbock, Texas as an air force cadet in 1978, and was for years dismissed by liberal and Leftist opponents of the regime as an embarrassing reminder of his father’s corrupt and authoritarian rule. Pahlavi’s support for the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran this summer, furthermore, in which more than 1,000 Iranians were killed, appeared to put him at odds with his compatriots. No longer. On the burning streets of Tehran calls of “Long live the Shah!” ring insistently while Pahlavi’s former Leftist critics, in the words of one veteran Iranian analyst, “have started treating him with respect”.

Pahlavi rises, Khamenei falls. As recently as three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s will was unchallenged and his authority total; since then, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” he had built up across the Middle East has been obliterated by Israel, with his own intelligence services clearly compromised. Most significant, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer removed any possibility of an Iranian bomb, in the short term at least.

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The Middle East doomsday scenario

By Christopher de Bellaigue

“Rat Ali”, as Khamenei has been known since his scurrying departure for an underground bunker during the war last summer, looks every day of his 86 years. His death, preferably violent and painful, is being loudly petitioned. No one knows what conversations are going on between the Supreme Leader and his inner circle, which includes his son Mojtaba, for some time seen as a possible successor. But it is utterly implausible that Khamenei would, as The Times recently claimed, “flee to Moscow” if the regime looks close to falling.

Khamenei lost the use of an arm when he was blown up early in the revolution. He is not a quitter but a quietly stolid fanatic who will leave the Islamic Republic horizontally or not at all. And he has yet to turn the full force of his killing machine on the protesters. Observing all this, and fanning his tail feathers after his exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, is the US president — who, by immediately reimposing his policy of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic following his election last year, has, it is now clear, helped bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump declared on Saturday, “we’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.” By that time, of course, the slaughter of protesters was well underway.

Trump has so far avoided meeting Pahlavi, perhaps judging that the regime remains a long way from collapse, or because, if the time comes, he favors a Venezuela-style decapitation and Khamenei’s replacement from within the current set-up. Hassan Rouhani, a former president known both for his moderation and his toughness, might be a candidate.

As if by providential design, the ousting of Maduro lends an aura of inevitability to the demise of the Islamic Republic. And yet regimes are not toppled by auras. They are not toppled because Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, who was born into a good family in Iran in 1969, says that he is looking forward to “investing aggressively” in his homeland in the “first 100 days” after liberation. They are toppled because the men with guns are killed or lose their stomach for the fight. And of that, so far as we know, there is no sign.

A lot has happened since the summer. Iranians have got over their horror of foreign interventions and have adopted the closest figurehead to hand. A people out of time, they are fighting for a liberal democracy, or — quainter still — a constitutional monarchy, just as the brand seems defunct. Behind the penumbra of the communications blackout, a country of 90 million, an ancient culture dishonored by its leaders, goes to work on itself.

Yet the deal also provides Ukraine with a security guarantee modeled after NATO’s Article 5. It doesn’t recognize Moscow’s territorial claims as a legal matter. And it stipulates Russian withdrawal from several territories that it claims to control. Under the plan, some $100 billion in expropriated Russian assets will be used to fund Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. President Trump has given Ukraine a week to accept this deal; it is unclear which of its 28 points can be negotiated, if any.

Capitals in Western and Northern Europe are irate, feeling cut out of the process and confused by an apparently dovish turn in Washington’s approach after a few weeks during which Trump had ratcheted up pressure on the Kremlin. They shouldn’t be surprised: The Ukraine settlement is part of Trump’s broader effort to free America from its strategic entanglements in Europe (and the Middle East) to focus on more strategically crucial — and politically rewarding — regions.

The hawks and Atlanticists still operate on the assumption that America’s and Europe’s strategic interests are deeply aligned. Trump, like many ordinary Americans and Europeans, understands that the age of alignment is over, and that a fundamental break with the 20th-century arrangements was long overdue.

Since the end of World War II, the pursuit of three core interests has defined American grand strategy. First was the security of postwar Western Europe. Through military alliances like NATO and economic programs such as the Marshall Plan, Washington provided an effective bulwark against both the forward expansion of the Soviet Union and the threat of revolution within the war-shattered European societies. 

Second, the United States has maintained a considerable presence in the Persian Gulf region, assuming Britain’s former role as the principal outside power to ensure continued Western access to the region’s oil. Third, America has viewed the East Asia-Pacific region as a core strategic interest, ever since the seizure of the Philippines by President William McKinley during the Spanish-American War in 1898, which protected US commercial entry into Asia and signaled Washington’s ambitions as a global power.

The three regions of interests formed a hierarchy of sorts: Europe first, the Middle East second, and Asia third. And despite runaway globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China, this hierarchy of priorities has largely remained consistent. The past several US administrations doubled down on toppling regimes in the Middle East while acting as though Western Europe requires the same amount of US assistance that was needed to remedy the destruction of WWII and fend off Communism.

Despite President Barack Obama’s promises to “pivot to Asia” in response to China’s rise, Washington launched interventions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, while expanding military aid to support the actions of other states in Mozambique, Ukraine, and Gaza, among others. President Joe Biden likewise maintained the priority of Europe and the Middle East, notwithstanding his withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Now, a quarter century into the new century and an additional decade since the end of the Cold War, the second Trump administration is finally giving shape to a new, post-Cold War framework of American grand strategy.

This Trump Doctrine appears to be a reorientation of American strategic interests for the 21st century. While media critics initially framed Trump as an “isolationist,” his record has unambiguously disproved that allegation. This doctrine is best understood not through universal principles, but by examining how Trump is diverging from America’s traditional priorities and interests. 

At the heart of the president’s vision is a desire to devolve European security back to European states and to disengage from the sands of the Middle East. Reducing American commitments in those two regions is paired with an activist approach to the Western Hemisphere, while playing hardball economic statecraft with Beijing. While the execution of this reorientation has been mixed and, in several cases, dangerously flawed, the Trump Doctrine is a much needed update to last century’s strategic status quo.

Start with Europe. American presence in Europe has been consistent since World War I. After assisting the European allies in two world wars, Washington turned its attention to the long-term containment, and later “rollback,” of Soviet Communism. The United States stationed troops throughout Europe, and granted institutionalized security guarantees to NATO allies, all under the shadow of nuclear war.  

America paired this projection of military power with the largest foreign-aid program in global history: the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952, the United States supplied more than $13 billion in economic assistance to Western Europe, equivalent to approximately $160 billion today. The Marshall Plan acted as a mass subsidy for postwar social and Christian democracy, thus staving off revolution and realignment with the Communist sphere.

While the Soviet threat is no more, and the Continent has long since recovered from the destruction of World War II, Europe has continued to stay at the forefront of American foreign policy. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration sounded Cold War-era civilizational rhetoric. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine,” Biden claimed in his 2024 State of the Union Address, “I assure you he will not.” 

Vladimir Putin’s Russia came to serve as a substitute for Stalin’s USSR in the minds of hawks in Brussels, London, and Washington. This, despite contemporary Russia’s weakness relative to a Soviet Union that had just defeated the Nazi war machine, occupied most of Central Europe, and installed puppet governments in multiple states. While Soviets steamrolled through half the Continent, today’s Russia has gotten stuck in an embarrassing war of attrition with one of the poorest countries in Europe, experiencing casualties that dwarf those of the Soviet-Afghan War. Despite Cold Warrior fantasies to the contrary, the conquest of Europe is not on the agenda for a country that can’t manage the conquest of eastern Ukraine.

That said, Russia’s resolve in Ukraine shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Putin has stated that he considers Ukrainian accession to be an existential threat to Russia: whether or not you believe him, it is clear that the Russians are not about to retreat empty-handed. Despite a massive Western sanctions regime, considerable aid to Ukraine, and a coup attempt, there has been little evidence that Russian military efforts are on the brink of collapse.

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Having borne high costs, Putin’s behavior reveals his belief that the costs of surrender are still higher. The last three and a half years have shown that Putin is committed to this conflict for the long haul, and that Moscow will continue expending the resources necessary to pursue its objectives in Donbas. Biden’s strategy was to lean into that resolve, running down Russian resources in the hopes that Putin would withdraw from Ukraine or lose domestic support at home. Neither outcome came to pass, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives were destroyed in the bargain.

Trump, by contrast, has long disdained — and now explicitly broken with — the postwar status quo in Europe. Yet rather than abandoning Ukraine, his approach has involved consistent efforts to pressure both Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to the bargaining table, while passing responsibility for European security to the likes of Germany, France, and Poland.  

Trump hasn’t been soft on Russia — he has continued to provide considerable aid to Ukraine, granted permission to use Western weapons on targets within Russian territory, and imposed a new set of extremely harsh sanctions on Russian oil following the cancellation of peace talks in Budapest this autumn. However, these actions aren’t instruments of attrition, but rather intended to pressure Putin to negotiate. Biden’s policies were intended to extend the war by keeping Ukraine in the fight. Trump’s approach, in contrast, has been focused on ending the conflict altogether.

The new 28-point peace plan comes at a moment when the United States has started deporting Ukrainian refugees so that they can be drafted into the Ukrainian military, with Zelensky saying of the deportees, “We’ll find good use for them.” If this is what Ukraine’s defense now relies on, a deal is best approved sooner rather than later. The plan’s core features are consistent with what smarter analysts have been saying for multiple years now. Ukraine is denied NATO accession but is granted a non-NATO security guarantee and a pathway to EU membership, while Russia keeps the territory it has held behind a line of conflict that continues to creep westward. While it remains to be seen if the proposal will be adopted, it offers the opportunity to stop Ukraine’s continued bleeding. Zelensky would be wise to accept it and focus on his country’s recovery and opportunities as a member of the European Union.

In the meantime, the administration has maintained a consistent message that the days of European “dependency” on Washington are coming to a close. While this initially sparked a panic that Trump was about to withdraw from NATO, this has not happened. Instead, European leaders have now agreed to a new distribution of burden-sharing by committing to invest 5% of GDP annually on their own security by 2035. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the responsibility for European security is being handed back to Europe in a fraught but measured transition.

Which brings us to the Middle East. American strategy in that region has also largely been determined by the postwar status quo, with a considerably more imperial bent than in Europe.  US involvement began with treaties ensuring American access to oil in 1928 and 1944, coinciding with the handoff of Western hegemony from the declining British Empire to the rising American imperium. 

The struggle to control access to the region’s natural resources persisted throughout the Cold War, with ambiguous CIA involvement in the 1949 Syrian coup d’état followed by the CIA-led operation to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran after he nationalized Iranian oil. Efforts to prevent Soviet capture of the Persian Gulf region led to numerous interventions, proxy wars, and covert operations, a habit that wasn’t broken when the Soviet Union fell.

Here, too, Trump has departed from the status quo. Beginning in the 2016 Republican primary, when he described the Iraq War as a “big fat mistake,” Trump has consistently expressed a desire to get the United States out of the Middle East. The result has been a significant shift in both policy and public discourse. While Trump received some criticism for negotiating with the Taliban, his goal of ending the American occupation of Afghanistan after 20 years of continuous and counterproductive military presence has been one of his chief achievements — even if it was Biden who pulled the final Bandaid.

Trump’s second term has involved new challenges, above all the war in Gaza. While Trump has followed an approach similar to the policy pursued in Ukraine — supplying significant aid to Israel while pressuring both sides to reach a negotiated settlement — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently derailed American attempts at diplomacy. The Israeli attack on Iran scuttled US efforts to negotiate a new treaty governing the Iranian nuclear program and ultimately pulled America into military action, albeit in a manner designed to limit escalation.

The Jewish state’s strike on Iran — and similar attacks on targets within the sovereign borders of Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar, and Yemen — severely undermine the strategic interests of the United States, both in the region and globally. At a moment when Trump is attempting to turn the ship of American policy around, Israel continues to sow chaos among its neighbors. While “mowing the lawn” in the region may (or may not) be in the best interests of Israel’s security, it is destabilizing, and impels Washington to deploy back to a region Americans across the political spectrum are resolved to leave behind.

Furthermore, Israel’s incommensurate response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack has been a disaster for American legitimacy abroad in increasingly multipolar times. Israeli impunity has fueled claims of Western hypocrisy, pushing states out of reach of American influence as its material supremacy is increasingly eroded. The peace plan currently in place for Gaza — potentially the crowning achievement of Trump’s presidency and recently adopted by the United Nations — rests on an extremely fragile ceasefire which has already been violated a number of times.  

If Trump wants to pacify and deprioritize the Gulf region, he will need to ensure that Netanyahu does not derail his strategy to extricate America from the Middle East. He has, so far, failed on that count.

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Then there is the Asia-Pacific region.  Here, Trump has maintained the greatest strategic continuity with his predecessors. Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, advocated for what he called “a foreign policy for the middle class,” focusing on industrial renewal at home and measured economic competition with China, undergirded by stable security commitments to allies in the Indo-Pacific. 

At the macro level, Trump’s approach to Asia has emphasized the same points: self-sufficiency in the tech domain, coercive economic statecraft, and secure trans-Pacific commerce, while attempting to revive American industry. While avoiding the previous administration’s direct provocations of China and apocalyptic rhetoric concerning global democracy, Trump has again made some missteps in execution that have undermined America’s position in the Pacific.

Trump’s affinity for tariffs has been the distinguishing characteristic of his foreign policy. As an instrument of statecraft, tariffs have a few different logics. First, a regime of broad, long-term tariffs on imports are designed to protect domestic industry from being undercut by foreign producers, a key concern among Trump’s base. 

Second, tariffs can be used in a way similar to sanctions, as an instrument of economic coercion, imposing costs on a specific state until it cedes to American demands. This use of tariffs involves sanctions targeted at a specific country, with clear conditions for their removal. Finally, tariffs have historically been used as a revenue source, requiring a broad, continuous application while maintaining significant trade relationships to keep the revenue flowing.

The issue is that the Trump administration has claimed all three of these logics at one time or another, despite that they are mutually exclusive. Protectionist policies would not involve the on-again, off-again application of coercive tariffs, which should not be broadly applied to loyal trading partners; and tariffs as a source of revenue boost consumer prices in the long run, without the revitalization of domestic industry. For tariffs to be an effective instrument of policy, there needs to be a clear strategic objective guiding their use. Trump’s tariff policy has been strategically incoherent.

While the tariffs levied against stalwart American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Thailand have allowed Trump to extract some marginal concessions on trade policy, raising trade barriers against these countries is deleterious to American interests for two reasons. First, it renders trade with the United States more difficult, costly, and unpredictable, goading allies to find more dependable trading partners (hint: like China). If these policies are meant to help America compete economically with Beijing through cutting better deals, they have been counterproductive. The long-run effects of playing economic hardball will be a decreased reliance on trade with America.

Second, tariffs on military allies undercut their ability to invest in their own security. Trump’s demands of Asian allies have been similar to the demands he has made of Europe — America will help those who help themselves. Encouraging allies to raise their own defense spending has been a core component of Trump’s approach to foreign relations. Such demands are difficult to fulfill, however, when facing a punitive tariff regime imposed by the global hegemon. 

Antagonizing allies in the Pacific undermines the American security architecture, drives Asian states into closer economic ties with China, and places the costs of these missteps on American consumers. While macro-level strategy in the Pacific has been conventional, its execution requires a reevaluation.

Finally, there is Latin America. The true revisionism in Trump’s strategic orientation is taking place here, much closer to home. American engagement in the Western Hemisphere has historically oscillated between neglect and heavy-handed intervention. From the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary, which endorsed US intervention into unstable or uncooperative South American countries, successive administrations justified US dominance over Latin America as a means to protect its own backyard. 

Today, Trump’s foreign policy marks a return to that logic after decades of relative neglect during the post-Cold War focus on the Middle East. Trump, it seems, is staging something of a sequel to the Roosevelt Corollary. His administration has revived a muscular and interventionist approach to the Americas — justified in the language of law enforcement and border control, rather than the old rhetoric of hemispheric solidarity. 

Washington has used coercive diplomacy, sanctions, and military threats, including moving an aircraft carrier group to waters just off Venezuela’s shores, under the pretext of deterring narco-traffickers. Trump’s turn to South America suggests an updated form of gunboat diplomacy aimed at maintaining dominance of the hemisphere and curbing the influence of rivals like China.

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Yet the pursuit of regime change and coercive diplomacy in Latin America risks deepening the very crises it purports to solve. In countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, US pressure has hardened authoritarian resolve, without producing stable alternatives. Interventions framed as humanitarian or anti-narcotics operations will create disorder in Latin America, destabilize local economies, empower non-state armed groups (primarily the established cartels), and push displaced populations northward, fueling the very migration surges that Trump has pledged to stop.  

The expansion of US involvement in regional politics has also provided new openings for Chinese influence. As Washington relies on sanctions and pressure, Beijing offers a menu of loans, infrastructure, and trade that pulls Latin American states further into its economic orbit. The outcome is a paradoxical weakening of US influence in its own hemisphere.

Trump’s Western Hemisphere strategy, then, reflects both regression and innovation: a reassertion of American primacy through coercion, but couched in the language of sovereignty and border control. Whether this revived “gunboat diplomacy” can secure American interests without repeating the errors of past interventions remains an open question. What is clear is that the Western Hemisphere, once peripheral to US grand strategy, has again become a central concern of foreign policy.

Taken together, these regional realignments suggest not a retreat of American power, but its reorganization. The Trump Doctrine doesn’t mark an abdication of global leadership so much as a recalibration of it — an attempt to convert sprawling, open-ended commitments into a more contained and transactional system of influence. Europe and the Middle East are being nudged toward self-sufficiency, the Pacific remains the primary arena of great-power competition, and the Western Hemisphere has reemerged as a laboratory for coercive diplomacy and border-focused security politics. 

The underlying logic is one of consolidation: a recognition that America’s resources, attention, and legitimacy are finite, and that sustaining primacy requires pruning rather than perpetual expansion.

Trump’s style has suggested a desire to cut America’s losses in peripheral regions and an experimental exercise of alternative modes of power in Asia and South America. For all its inconsistencies and failures of execution, the Trump Doctrine represents an effort to realign America’s commitments with its interests. The resulting strategy is untidy, often improvised, and occasionally self-defeating, yet it gestures toward a long-delayed reckoning with the limits of American reach.  

After decades spent expanding a liberal order now fraying at its edges, Washington is beginning to ask what can — and what should — be preserved. The answer, imperfect as it may be, is the outline of a humbler but more deliberate kind of primacy: a United States that still seeks to shape the world, but finally on terms it can sustain.

So far, he has said the right things, apparently trying to govern with pragmatism. But the reality is that the future of Syria does not lie with him — and his fellow Sunnis — alone. Syria’s minorities will help decide the nation’s fate as well, and none is as large or powerful as its Kurds. They, after all, are the only real force in the country outside Damascus that can put a disciplined army in the field: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which was built in alliance with the United States to destroy ISIS. No less important, they control about 70% of Syria’s oil and gas reserves.

That blend of military and economic neatly explains why, if Syria is to survive as a viable state, Sharaa must find a way to accommodate its Kurdish minority, which even amid the upheavals of war and displacement represent roughly a tenth of the country’s total population. Combined with a gaggle of other minorities — Christians, Alawites, Druze — Syria simply cannot be the Sunni Caliphate that Sharaa once sought.

Still, many Kurds remain wary. In the cafés of Qamishli, the main city of the Syrian Kurdish region popularly known as Rojava, people joke that Sharaa’s beard may be shorter — but his prayers are the same. They want Syria to work. They need it to. But behind the dark humor lies genuine fear: that a man defined by jihad can never build the pluralist state necessary to keep Syria together.

No one understands these tensions better than Aldar Khalil. Officially, he is a senior member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic Society Movement in Rojava — the Kurdish-run autonomous region in Syria’s northeast — and its most powerful figure. In reality, he is its de facto leader. Whether or not the Syrian state can hold together will come down, in large part, to the decisions he and a few others around him take.

To meet Khalil, I leave Qamishli and travel through pale emptiness to the town of Hasakah. At checkpoints, Kurdish fighters in faded fatigues wave me through. We enter the city and eat. Night falls and we wait for news. It’s time: follow the black car, we are told. We end up in a municipal building of some kind. Prominently displayed on a wall is a photo of Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who’s been in a Turkish prison since 1999, and whose picture you see everywhere in Rojava. We sit in a large room with Kurdish carpets on the wall. Coffee and bottles of water are laid out for us.

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Khalil enters with his security detail. He wears beige trousers and a checked shirt. I notice that his left hand is missing. Later I ask why, but nobody really knows. One of my guides ventures that it might have something to do with a grenade, but that’s just speculation.

Khalil’s manner is polite, controlled, his voice almost soft. “People in Syria began the revolution hoping for a democratic system,” he says. “But after the regime collapsed, what came was in total opposition to that: a government that wants to take us back 1,400 years.” He means Sharaa. “This is someone with a very restrictive mind,” Khalil continues flatly. “You cannot expect someone like that to change. Maybe he changes his name or city, maybe he speaks differently for the media — but his beliefs stay the same.”

So can the Kurds deal with such a man? “We are Syrians,” Khalil replies. “Either we cede from Syria — and we have no plans for that — or we need to work with whoever is in Damascus, we have to deal with him. We are forced to negotiate.” What about clashes with Alawites on the coast, and with the Druze in Suweyda earlier this year, which both led to brief revivals of Syria’s sectarian slaughter? Does Khalil blame the government for those? “Of course we blame the government.”

Khalil’s own vision is simple: a decentralized Syria, each community managing itself, united by loose federal ties. Fail, he warns, and the country will slide back into civil war, not just in Rojava but “everywhere in Syria”. Not that Damascus is the only threat to Rojava’s future. It was Turkey, after all, that armed and bankrolled Sharaa’s overthrow of Assad at the end of last year, and which has considerable sway with Damascus now. This also poses a considerable problem for Rojava, whose Kurdish forces President Erdogan sees simply as the Syrian version of the PKK — which it considers to be a terror group responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in its mountainous southeast.

“Recently we have had several meetings in Damascus with the Syrian government,” Khalil tells me. “But unfortunately, after every meeting, Damascus promises to form committees to work on integration and then, immediately afterwards, Turkey steps in to impede the process. At the moment, we have two delegations waiting to see what will happen next, because Turkey keeps undermining the negotiations.”

I leave Khalil and step into the night. The traffic is heavy. Concrete minarets stand tall in the gloom. The next morning I’m back on the road again. The sun is climbing high, flattening everything into gold and white. I drive near Qamishli airport, and, to my right, the Turkish border scars the horizon. Every few kilometers, a watchtower stands looking across. To my left, a Russian flag flaps limply over an armored compound.

It’s a physical reminder of the perennial role of outsiders here. Before I arrived, a regional expert explained the situation to me by way of analogy. “Think of Syria as a condominium,” he said. “Russia owns the walls, America the roof, and Turkey has the keys. Everyone else rents the space inside.”

He was exaggerating for effect, but I now see what he means. Everywhere I look in Rojava, there are signs of this uneasy balance: Russian soldiers buy bread from Kurdish stalls; American engineers fix irrigation pumps; Turkish drones strike sporadically. It’s a useful reminder of how crucial this region remains: Moscow still needs Damascus to keep its port on the Mediterranean, while Iran wants a corridor to the sea once more and the United States, half-hearted and weary, stays only to contain the remnants of ISIS.

To understand what this might mean for the Kurds, I meet Fawza Yusuf, co-chair of the Autonomous Administration’s Executive Council. Composed and cheerful, she heads the delegation that meets with Damascus, which is to say she’s the woman now negotiating the fate of Syria for the Kurds. Like Khalil, meanwhile, she stresses the importance of negotiating with the new regime in Damascus. “From the start we believed the only way is peace, dialogue, and negotiation,” she explains. “We must talk to Damascus directly — there is no other path.”

It is the language of a negotiator who understands both the limits and the possibilities of her position. “We have fought enough wars,” Yusuf continues, sipping black tea. “Now we need a country where our children can live.” Yet — and again like Khalil — she’s skeptical of Sharaa’s intentions. “Their policy is anti-democratic,” she says. “They still don’t recognize others. But we continue working.”

What she means by “working” is critical, both to the Kurds and Damascus, and it includes the slow-motion integration of the SDF into the national army. You cannot run an effective state unless you have a monopoly on the use of force, which comes through having sole control of its only army. The Kurds, for their part, accept this, albeit on their own terms. “We agreed with Damascus that we will join the Syrian army — but not as individuals,” she says. “We will join as brigades: the SDF will become three brigades in the national army and remain stationed here.”

The SDF gives Rojava leverage — up to a point. The force numbers roughly perhaps 70,000 fighters, most of them veterans hardened by years of war with ISIS. They’re battle-tested, and disciplined in light-infantry and counterinsurgency tactics, but lack heavy armor, air defense, and artillery. In open battle, then, they’d be little match for Damascus’s army or Russian airpower. Yet in their own territory – the plains and towns of the northeast – they could bleed any invading force through guerrilla warfare and local support.

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It is a clever sort of compromise: ostensible unity, but without surrender, even as Yusuf herself evokes a “decentralized” Syria going forward. Yet with many in Damascus seeing federalism as the short end of a secessionist wedge, optimism is perhaps harder in practice. Rhetorically, certainly, Sharaa is unequivocal about the need for a united Syria. “We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible,” he said on 25 February, during the opening speech of the Syrian National Dialogue Conference in Damascus.

And if a Turkish-backed Sharaa is one worry for Yusuf, another foreign power looms large over Syria too. Israeli aircraft have long been a presence in the night skies, striking weapons depots from Damascus to Deir ez-Zor, sometimes near the oil fields the Kurds control. A weak, divided Syria suits Israel’s security. While Iran’s land bridge to Hezbollah fell with Assad, the Israelis want to ensure that Iranian militias cannot burrow their way into the nascent post-Assad state.

But Israel and the Kurds have much in common. Both perennial outsiders in a largely Sunni Arab Middle East, they have survived by living on the edge, sustained by vigilance. They have collaborated in the past, and, for many of the Kurds here, Israel is a model of the type of muscular independence they seek.

Yet the Israeli model the Kurds quietly admire – a small, embattled state that survived by building institutions, intelligence networks and deterrent power – offers both inspiration and illusion. Israel’s strength came from coherent leadership, outside backing, and a shared national narrative. The Kurds, by contrast, remain divided between rival parties and foreign patrons. Emulating Israel’s vigilance is one thing; reproducing its fortress statehood in the middle of Arab Syria is quite another.

There are other dangers in being seen as Israel’s proxy. The Druze of southern Syria learned that lesson when their perceived ties to Tel Aviv turned them into targets for both foreign jihadists and the Damascus regime. For the Kurds, then, any open alignment with Israel risks uniting Ankara, Tehran, and Damascus against them: a trinity of enemies they can hardly afford. Their survival, as ever, depends on balancing between powers without becoming the pawn of any.

And if Syria’s future depends on Rojava — secession would certainly wreck the country’s economy, and perhaps even rekindle the civil war’s ethnic butchery — the whole region hinges on it too. If Rojava unravels, after all, Lebanon’s sectarian truce could collapse; Iraq’s Kurdish-Arab balance might crack; Turkey would face renewed insurgency; Iran would push its militias deeper west. If Syria’s fate still depends on foreign powers, then, those same foreign powers are bound to Syria too — whether at the White House or closer to home.

Contrary to the way this agreement has been sold by the White House and Benjamin Netanyahu, then, it offers Hamas an opportunity to assess, while not being bombed, the ways and means for it to continue its rule over Gaza. Given the carnage, the Islamist outfit will likely remain on a tightrope, playing Palestinian hatred of Israel off against the desolation it has provoked. Islamic history offers a long record of martyrdom losing its appeal when the unrighteous prove stronger and more fierce than expected. Hamas is calculating that with both Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners safely exchanged, fear of a long-lasting insurgency will keep it in power. It’s a decent bet.

With any luck, the 250 Palestinians in jail for life, and who are now being released, might also reenergize the resistance. Hamas’ stubborn fearsomeness, fortified by all those tunnels, has certainly guaranteed that outsiders will approach Trump’s indispensable idea of an “international stabilization force” for post-war Gaza as a worthy recommendation best staffed by others. Are American, Emirati, Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, European, or, least likely of all, Palestinian Authority (PA), forces really going to patrol the Strip if Hamas fighters remain there to ambush them?

If Trump can finally get a stabilization force into the Strip — and that’s a big if — a slow but bloody harassment would likely be enough to keep the force’s effectiveness similar to that of a typical UN peacekeeping mission: basically useless. If Qatar calls off Al Jazeera, and the Saudis tell their myriad press outlets to limit Gazan reporting, Hamas may find it hard to show the world that other Arabs are thumping on Palestinians. But that potential advantage is nonetheless unlikely to convince them from jumping into the Gaza morass, especially when everyone from the Gulfies to Egypt held their distance from the Palestinian imbroglio.

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The biggest beneficiary of such a force, at least in the short term, would be the Israelis. The burden of policing Gaza would be lightened. Lots of Arabs now deal with the Jewish state, those within the Abraham Accords pretty publicly. The Gaza conflict may not have changed those exchanges much: given the private distaste that many Arab leaders have for Palestinians. The recent leaked Pentagon documents about regional cooperation against Iran and other threats since October 2023 surely reflect what’s been true since at least the First Iraq War in 1991, when many Palestinians sided with Saddam Hussein. But no Arab ruler has ever asked their soldiers to bleed for the Israelis — or the Palestinians. Across each of their four wars with Israel, Arab rulers definitely weren’t vying to create a Palestinian state. So unless the Gazans bring down Hamas from the inside, the group will likely rule the Strip’s rubble since no one else is going to volunteer.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) obviously need a break from two years of constant combat. Even among the most hawkish of Israelis who believe the Palestinians — not just Hamas — share the guilt for what happened on October 7, war weariness is almost universal. In Gaza and on the West Bank, Israel hit the ceiling of how much manpower it can continuously deploy. It’s now crystal clear that most Israelis adamantly don’t want to reoccupy Gaza. Most Israelis would probably love to see an international stabilization force move in, even if such a deployment curtailed Israeli actions. Jerusalem obviously can’t trust Cairo to keep arms from crossing over the Egyptian-Gaza border. The Israelis might trust the Americans to stop arms from flowing through Hamas tunnels, but that would mean turning US troops, who would have to build a substantial security perimeter, into both an occupying force and a target for Hamas.

Limited Israeli occupation therefore still seems inevitable. Walling off the Palestinians in Gaza didn’t work brilliantly before. Rebuilding the Strip will offer ample opportunity to Hamas, or indeed other militants, to divert materials for underground bunkers. Unless the Israelis can check everything that comes into the Strip, Hamas or others could also begin to reconstitute crude but deadly missiles and mortars. The opportunities here for corruption and anti-Israeli sympathies, especially if Arab forces given policing duties, would surely be more than Israel could bear. Jerusalem might accept Americans, maybe Europeans, to verify Palestinian behavior. But if Hamas regains freedom of movement throughout all of Gaza — if Israel doesn’t have internal checkpoints from which to launch rapid operations — the IDF could once again find itself committing much larger forces later: with all the death and destruction that’ll inevitably entail. Without a Western-led stabilization force, willing to commit to years in Gaza, the Israelis will somehow need to fill the void.

All the while, Israelis hope the cessation of hostilities will make their country less of a pariah. They have traditionally had a close relationship with Europe, and would eagerly welcome less hostility. Images of Gaza in rubble likely won’t animate as much anger as those of active urban warfare. All Israelis would like to see the erosion of American support stopped; Netanyahu has no interest in bushwhacking the President’s peace-making. Trump’s current Gaza plans, as vague as they are, seem to be less delusional than his first-draft, “Las-Vegas-by-the-Sea” dreamscape. The harsh realities of postwar Gaza will tax Trump’s attention span, however, especially once it becomes obvious the stabilization force has zero chance of working without US troops entering harm’s way. Nor will a ceasefire resuscitate the lost affection on the American Left for Israel, especially worrying when their critiques increasingly cut to the very heart of the Zionist project. Pro-Israeli sympathies on the American Right may be somewhat safer — unless Trump actually sends US troops off on yet another Middle Eastern adventure.

For the moment, then, all Trump has actually achieved so far is the hostage-prisoner exchange. Netanyahu has agreed to the release of several stone-cold killers, though drew a red line at Marwan Barghouti, a significant player in the Second Intifada whom an Israeli court found guilty of the murder of five Israelis. Politically talented even behind bars, and fluent in Hebrew, Barghouti is undeniably charismatic. Since he’s been in jail for 23 years, he’s also untouched by the rampant malversation that defines the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat’s successor.

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Were Barghouti freed, he might try to force new presidential and legislative elections. Palestinian democracy died in 2006, when Fatah, the most powerful member of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, refused to recognize Hamas’s victory in legislative elections: something Fatah achieved with the approval of both Israel and the United States. Today, though, Barghouti might well triumph in a similar vote.

With more access to the press, Barghouti could make a lot of noise in favor of a two-state solution; unlike a growing number of Palestinians, and just about all Israelis, he still seems to like the idea. Israelis surely fear his disruptive potential: even without an election victory, Barghouti might be able to engineer a third intifada on the West Bank, especially when violence by Jewish settlers only ever seems to worsen. The IDF and the internal security service, Shin Bet, have deployed a lot of manpower to the far side of the Jordan to ensure that another insurrection doesn’t happen.

Most Israelis and Palestinians, let alone all those in the West who’ve watched the Gaza war with horror, will surely cheer if the bloodletting truly ceases. It’s likely, however, that what’s left of the Hamas leadership and Netanyahu, the IDF, and Shin Bet are all looking down the road, trying to figure out how “peace” might reward the enemy. In his peacenik aspirations, President Trump appears well-intentioned. But good intentions really don’t matter, least of all in the Holy Land. Money doesn’t actually matter that much either, once the fighting actually starts. If it did, the Sunni Arab Gulf states would be powerhouses, easily a match for Iran and capable of suppressing Yemen’s ragtag Houthis.

As for Gaza and the West Bank, the preeminent question today is whether the Palestinians’ physical and emotional exhaustion leads them to recalculate the costs of their beliefs and actions. They have by far lost the most since October 7, 2023. If they have changed, and that finally depletes Hamas’s reserves of manpower, then Trump’s diplomacy might actually be the start of something positive, far-Right Israeli intransigence notwithstanding. Then again, optimism is usually a very bad bet in the Middle East.

Long the dominant force in parliament, successive national governments, and on the streets, Hezbollah is now adrift, its organization shattered, its surviving leaders fearful of the next Israeli airstrike. Lebanon’s civilian leaders, for their part, are keen to seize the moment, defanging the militants while finally building a truly viable Lebanese state. But if Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun are ready to make their move after years of political deadlock, the schedule is hardly in Lebanon’s best interest — while any miscalculation could soon bring chaos.

As I wrote last month, Hezbollah understands that it’s no longer the formidable, hegemonic force it once was. In this new Lebanon, its options are few and far between. To that end, the group has itself considered shrinking its once-renowned arsenal in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the border regions they continue to occupy in southern Lebanon. But in a sign of just how earth-shattering the latest cabinet resolution was, Hezbollah and its allies abandoned the meeting in question, stating it would “deal with it as if it does not exist.”

As things stand, a renewed civil war in Lebanon remains unlikely, at least for the time being. Despite its recent battering, Hezbollah is still part of the Lebanese government and retains a great deal of bargaining power within the state. It is therefore more likely that, for the moment, the current dispute will remain confined to behind-the-scenes dealings. But if the US continues to push the Lebanese cabinet to go on the offensive — without respecting the delicate political dynamics at play in the country — that may well change.

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Of course, it is now quite obvious that the Trump administration’s agenda in Lebanon is about much more than just Hezbollah’s weapons: it’s about a fundamental realignment that includes Iran, Syria, Gaza, and more, and which will serve to put the finishing touches on the new Middle East envisioned by Benjamin Netanyahu. Tom Barrack, the US envoy who had been facilitating the Trump administration’s contacts with Beirut over the last few months, made this abundantly clear in comments in mid-July. “If Lebanon doesn’t hurry up and get in line,” he warned, “everyone around them will.”

In a sense, of course, that’s already happening — the region’s epochal transformation holds great promise for people from Damascus to Tehran. But as the recent massacres in Syria vividly prove, this transition can only succeed with forethought and care, and that any mistake can quickly spiral. Consider, for instance, that Hezbollah supporters lately took to the streets across Lebanon, both a show of force and warning of what would happen if the army took action. Even more worryingly, meanwhile, groups of protestors have gathered in front of a church in Beirut’s southern suburbs. That openly sectarian tinge is not necessarily new, but it still raises eyebrows, as does the fact that the Lebanese Armed Forces were deployed to confront pro-Hezbollah demonstrators in the Beqaa Valley town of Brital.

In the event, the Brital confrontation fizzled out. Tires were burned and car horns honked, but the protesters had dispersed by the following day. For its part, a senior Hezbollah official said the group would use only peaceful methods to deal with the cabinet decision, claiming it would “not be dragged into internal strife with the army or any Lebanese side.”

That all makes sense. Hezbollah’s position today is a world away from when it last engaged in armed clashes — violence sparked by the port blast investigation — let alone when it sparked a 2008 mini-civil war after the government tried to curb its communications network. Today, Hezbollah is a shadow of the behemoth it once was. Since the start of last year’s war with Israel, it has lost five of its most important leaders, notably its iconic Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. More than that, it has suffered over 10,000 total casualties and has seen perhaps half its arsenal destroyed. As a result, working within the state is the only realistic option Hezbollah has left. Even so, that doesn’t mean it would unilaterally lay down its arms without a fight, or at least without first securing some sort of politically advantageous deal.

The problem with the government’s gung-ho approach is that the Trump administration isn’t interested in the kind of dealmaking this situation requires. If the last six months have taught the world anything about the President’s approach to international diplomacy, it’s that he cares first and foremost about optics, securing wins for America, and making sure he is viewed as a kingmaker by allies and foes alike. And though Trump has recently had his fair share of spats with Netanyahu, his administration has been nonchalant about Israel’s latest plan to (temporarily) take control of the entire Gaza Strip, making it clear that it wants the entire Middle East to establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel.

In this context, then, American policy toward Lebanon is not about the well-being of the Lebanese people or their political system — just as in need of reform as Hezbollah — but about stamping the new Middle East with Trump’s personal trademark. The same can be seen in neighboring Syria, where less than a year after Islamist rebels overthrew the Assad dictatorship, the White House has mostly been concerned with the country’s relationship with Israel, even as Syria itself continues to face political and sectarian upheaval.

Despite removing sanctions on Damascus, the White House has placed 41% tariffs on Syria, the highest in the world, for no apparent reason — other than to blackmail the new government into making peace with the Jewish State. That’s despite the fact that Israel has occupied portions of southern Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, something also true of southern Lebanon, and that it has become deeply embroiled in the Syrian government’s conflict with the Druze minority, among other things striking government targets around Damascus. While Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has signaled his willingness to join the Abraham Accords in exchange for carrots from the West, Trump’s unsubtle arm-twisting ignores the other, much more existential battles Syria is currently facing, including the role of non-Sunni Arab minorities.

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Like in Lebanon, therefore, the US could well have a constructive role to play in Syria, but as long as it remains focused solely on advancing its own, and Israel’s, narrow objectives in both cases, it might as well kiss that role goodbye. These days, and as the recent church protest implies, sectarian tensions lurk down every street in Lebanon. Though the Lebanese themselves often downplay such divisions in everyday life, the threat of communitarian strife remains a tool of politics, especially in moments of instability. Certainly, Hezbollah has previously invoked the possibility of sectarian warfare as a cudgel to protect its powerbase during protests. Now, facing another existential crisis, it’s happy to play the sectarian card once more, knowing that its war-ravaged Shi’a support base, feeling disenfranchised and marginalized, may well be desperate enough to erupt into populist anger — especially if it fears being locked out of the political process altogether.

In other words, then, pushing too hard on Hezbollah without a requisite plan to support its base may yet again turn the country’s religious communities against each other. In Syria, for its part, the post-war sectarian balance remains incredibly delicate, and could yet be derailed altogether.

There is no question that Hezbollah’s weapons are a detriment to Lebanon’s stability and the health of its civil state. But contrary to conventional wisdom, the US is both speaking loudly and carrying a big stick, leaving no room for the Beirut government to find a genuine path toward disarmament. If Trump really was serious about helping the embattled Lebanese state, he might allow them to disarm Hezbollah in a way that is suitable to Lebanon’s incredibly sensitive political realities.

This could take a variety of forms, including a gradual, step-by-step reduction of Hezbollah’s arsenal that would be coupled with reciprocal withdrawals by Israel. Or else, the group might agree to de facto disarmament without giving up all its weapons, allowing it to maintain its mantle of defiance in a more ceremonial fashion. Details aside, though, the central facet of any workable solution must be giving the Lebanese government, as beleaguered as it is, the chance to define the conversation.

As it is, the great powers are once again using Lebanon as a pawn in their regional chess games, believing they’re better placed to handle the country’s problems than its own people. That’s frustrating, not least given the US is actually quite close to getting things right. All it needs to do is step back and let the Lebanese work out the details. Sadly for the Middle East, however, patience is not a word that often appears in Donald Trump’s vocabulary.

Yet the ceasefire, for now, is holding. And that means that a rare window of opportunity remains open — an opportunity for transformative diplomacy. After all, the devastating US-Israeli attacks and the retaliatory Iranian missile barrages showed both the power and the limitations of military action. There was no clear winner. But as the fog of that war recedes, a bigger prize could be on offer. If stability in the Middle East is truly the objective, the United States must seize this moment to broker a comprehensive diplomatic settlement with Iran.

To do so, it will need to recognize that the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East has shifted fundamentally. Ever since the 1979 revolution, dialogue between Washington and Tehran has been impeded by myths, biases, and outdated frameworks. Whether or not the West has noticed, though, the chances of rapprochement are becoming more favorable.

Within Iran, the culture has gradually transitioned from ideological fervor to pragmatic nationalism. Decades of economic sanctions and international isolation, combined with generational shifts among Iran’s youth and elites, have tempered the regime’s revolutionary zeal and increased the strategic emphasis on national interests. The Persian civilization, with its rich historical continuity, has reasserted itself, taming the isolationist and confrontational impulses that marked Iran as a pariah state in the late 20th century.

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More broadly, the Great Transition — that is, the end of a period of history marked by unchallenged American global dominance — has redirected American priorities and given the middle powers a better hand in negotiations. Despite taking serious damage from Israeli and US bombing during the 12-day war, Iran remains a civilizational state with a population of 90 million, regional reach, and historical longevity, marking it a resilient middle power. In that brief conflict, Iran launched strikes of its own, overwhelming Israeli and US defenses. The much-touted and expensive US THAAD and Israeli Arrow air defense system together shot down only 201 of Iran’s 574 ballistic missiles, depleting around a quarter of US global stockpiles in twelve days and costing US taxpayers $ 2 billion.

Those missiles will take years to replenish. It is another inconvenience of a conflict that distracts from America’s foremost strategic priority: competing with China. From the prism of national interest, the Middle East is no longer a priority for Washington. Successive US administrations — from Obama to Trump via Biden — have sought to reduce American military commitments in West Asia, reflecting a structural shift in US strategic priorities towards East Asia and China. This strategic retrenchment necessitates a sustainable regional balance. And this balance can be achieved not by isolating and excluding Iran, but by incorporating Tehran as a focal point of a new West Asian security order. Already, Iran has embraced its erstwhile rivals in the Persian Gulf, attempting, with the help of Saudi Arabia, to contain the rise of an expansionist, neo-Ottoman Turkey led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Traditional alliances, in other words, are in a state of flux due to changing regional and global dynamics.

Such geopolitical circumstances recall the diplomatic opportunities seized by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Then, rapprochement with China fundamentally altered the global order, setting in motion a series of events that culminated in the end of the Cold War. President Trump, facing a similar historical juncture, now has the unique chance to reset and mend relations with Iran after 46 years of hostility, potentially reshaping the region’s security architecture for decades to come. It is already the case, as I have argued, that structural changes, and shared interests, have made improved US-Iran relations more likely. But proactive American diplomacy could accelerate this trajectory, allowing Trump to secure a significant legacy for himself: not just international recognition, but even the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets.

Nonetheless, considerable obstacles remain. Chief among them is Israel’s staunch opposition to US normalization with Iran. Note the timing of Israel’s surprise attack against Iran: 13 June, two days before a pivotal round of talks between Washington and Tehran, which analysts expected could result in a major breakthrough. While Tehran’s revolutionary ideological fervor has waned, Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu has increasingly mirrored zealotry of the early Islamic Republic.

The Netanyahu government has adopted an ideological, Manichean worldview that defines security exclusively through confrontation and perpetual militarization. This worldview has shifted Israel away from the pragmatic and defensive policies championed by past Israeli leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin. It is a profound change. The United States’ unconditional support for Israel has been a major cause for the systematic radicalization of Israeli society, promoting hubris, recklessness, and overreach while protecting the country from the consequences of its unrestrained behavior. Within this strategic context, Netanyahu’s neoconservative approach — emphasizing Jewish exceptionalism, religious fundamentalism, and hegemonic expansion — has produced a state perpetually at war, undermining Israel’s long-term security and diplomatic flexibility in pursuit of the quixotic dream of turning Israel into a regional hegemon.

And it is hardly the case that Netanyahu has been, in that respect, successful. Despite repeated tactical victories, Israel’s leadership has failed to convert short-term military successes into lasting peace and regional stability. Rather, the new Israeli establishment uses the spectre of war as fuel for its existential threat narratives, spun to further securitize Israeli domestic politics. In becoming akin to ancient Assyria — an imperial state perpetually at war with its neighbors and driven by militant extremism — Israel risks strategic overstretch, exhausting its resources and threatening its future viability.

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The first Trump administration, motivated partly by its desire to “solve” the Middle East and finally extricate the US by bolstering Israeli power, attempted to form an anti-Iran regional bloc, via the Abraham Accords, that brought Israel together with the Sunni Arab states. Although they brought some level of diplomatic normalization to US allies in the region, the Accords ultimately fell short of addressing the region’s structural imbalances. Iran remains an indispensable regional power, possessing civilizational continuity, a substantial population, significant indigenous technological and industrial capacity, and the resolve to assert its interests. Its exclusion from the regional order perpetuates instability, undermining American strategic objectives and increasing regional insecurity.

Recognizing this, Washington must now pivot towards a diplomatic strategy that integrates Iran within a broader regional security framework. Tehran, pragmatically recognizing the limits of confrontation, has indicated openness to diplomacy that respects its sovereignty, dignity, and core strategic interests. Despite their rhetorical and performative chants against Israel and Western hegemony, Iranian leaders have signaled a willingness to quietly abandon aggressive strategic postures, including dissolving the expensive and geopolitically contentious “axis of resistance” in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean — forsaking its regional allies and proxies like the Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis. In exchange, Tehran seeks political normalization based on the full recognition of its sovereignty, including its right to domestic enrichment and conventional military capabilities, and economic reintegration with Washington and its regional allies.

This emerging diplomatic consensus could take the form of a comprehensive Perso-Abraham Accord, ending entrenched hostility between Iran and Israel and redefining regional security through mutual recognition, diplomatic normalization, and shared economic interests. Such an accord would significantly reduce the US military footprint in the Middle East, aligning with America’s broader strategic reorientation towards Asia. Simultaneously, it would curtail the ambitions of regional powers such as Turkey, whose neo-Ottoman expansionism has alarmed Arab states and Israel alike.

For such an accord to materialize, however, the United States must practice strategic empathy and prioritize sustained diplomatic engagement over coercion. Rather than continuing a counterproductive cycle of sanctions and intimidation, Washington could offer tangible incentives, such as American investment in Iran’s civilian nuclear technology. These incentives would be accompanied by stringent monitoring mechanisms managed through US firms and a regional consortium, whose inspections would replace those of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which Iran now views with suspicion. This approach would simultaneously demonstrate US goodwill and ensure transparency in Iran’s nuclear activities, effectively addressing international proliferation concerns.

Equally critical is the role of Israel, which must acknowledge the strategic folly of perpetual confrontation and sabotage. A reset in regional relations offers Israel a unique opportunity to redefine its security through diplomacy rather than continuous militarization. The alternative — a perpetuation of escalation cycles — not only incentivizes Iran to nuclearize as a means of deterrence, but also risks embroiling the region in a broader war. It is a war that neither Washington nor Tehran desires, and one Israel itself cannot ultimately afford.

Looking at the bigger picture, the recent conflict between Israel and Iran, despite its immediate devastation, has clarified a crucial geopolitical reality: military force alone cannot secure lasting peace or dismantle Iran’s nuclear program permanently. The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” War is never an end in itself, but must have clear strategic objectives that advance core state interests. The Twelve-Day War, and the shaky ceasefire that has followed, have done the opposite. They have destabilized the region, pushed Iran closer into the Chinese orbit, and further entangled the United States in Middle Eastern quagmires — all while signaling to Iran that if it wants to avoid the harrowing fates of Libya and Syria, then it must try to end the Israeli monopoly on nuclear weapons.

A better path to regional stability lies through strategic diplomacy, respect for mutual interests, and the careful incorporation of Iran into a renewed regional security architecture. The time is ripe for such a diplomatic reset, a comprehensive agreement that could not only redefine relations between the US and Iran, but also fundamentally reshape the broader region. Donald Trump, uniquely positioned by history and circumstance, holds the key to this transformative opportunity to midwife the birth of a new Middle East. Choosing diplomacy over perpetual conflict could become the defining act of his presidency, establishing a legacy of statesmanship and peacemaking that not only resonates with his base but also reverberates far beyond his tenure in office.

Yet despite ongoing conflict and instability, the Arab state system has made a hard-earned comeback in recent years. Iraq has crafted the foundations of a functional state. In fits and starts, the monarchies in the Persian Gulf region have fashioned modern bureaucracies and a measure of mutual security cooperation. Autocrats spurned popular demands for democracy and good governance. But the same Arab regimes succeeded at rebuilding state capacity — a necessary if insufficient ingredient of regional stability.

Now, however, that glimmer of possibility has come under threat from Israel’s spiraling, maximalist regional war. With a mostly blank check from Washington, the Jewish state has challenged the viability of states across the region, threatening to undermine the Middle East’s only recently rebounding, fragile state order. The Trump administration gets the importance of stable states, but its response is limited to off-the-record or background seething. “Bibi acted like a madman,” a White House official told Axios this week. “He bombs everything all the time. This could undermine what Trump is trying to do.”

Those remarks concerned Israel’s intervention in Syria, ostensibly carried out to protect the country’s Druze minority. The U.S. government has its own concerns about whether Syria’s new leader can control their security forces or want to protect minorities — but Washington does not support Israel’s approach, of bombing government targets, occupying Syrian territory, and arming proxies, supposedly under the guise of a humanitarian aid mission.

These gripes summon memories of Biden advisers leaking that Biden called Netanyahu an “asshole” while doing nothing to limit the Israeli premier’s recklessness. Under Trump, however, Israel’s adventurism has grown more extreme and destabilizing, and Trump has at times directly contradicted leaders in Jerusalem and expressed irritation. On occasion Trump has even reined in Israel. That’s understandable; the present-day tableau is alarming. Israel is causing famine in Gaza, igniting sectarian tensions and attacking the government in Syria (in direct contravention of US interests and policy in that country), and keeping up a steady patter of threats and strikes against Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon.

In a war without limits or clear goals, Israel has directly targeted Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and now Iran, while also undermining the popular credibility of those Arab monarchs in the Gulf who have quietly sided with the Jewish state. These open-ended conflicts could wreak the same kind of generational ruin that America inflicted on Iraq — the kind of unraveling that leaves a trail of hard-to-govern spaces undermined by broken states, institutions, and societies.

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Conspiracy theorists in the Middle East have long bemoaned the Israeli and American plots to weaken their governments and fragment their political communities — a Machiavellian divide-and-rule strategy to keep a strategically critical oil-rich region off balance and easier to manipulate. Often, these fevered Arab visions were just that: scaremongering used by Arab elites to fend off domestic challenges to their misrule. But these days, the notion that Western powers, especially Israel, seek chaos for its own sake is hard to dismiss as a conspiracy.

Historians and policymakers often treat the Arab state system as a unit of analysis, because of the shared language and grouping within the Arab League. Today, in assessing the damage to states caused by Israel’s wars since Oct. 7, it’s probably more useful to look at the entire geography of the Middle East and distinguish states by their longevity, unity, and capacity, rather than their language group.

A small cadre of states have operated in their current form for centuries, with political communities that have remained cohesive across multiple eras and regime types. That group includes Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. A second category includes an array of post-colonial states, most of them monarchies, that have acquired some ability to project regional power. These include Gulf Cooperation Council powers like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The final group includes the rest of the Middle Eastern states, some of them republics and some monarchies, but all vulnerable to destabilizing conflict and general precarity.

To be sure, states in the region, especially the Arab states, have often exemplified brittle personalistic or securitized rule (what Daniel Brumberg calls the “pillared state,” more concerned with regime survival than with good governance). But the answer isn’t to shatter state capacity in such places, but rather to direct that state capacity to serve the interests of the nation rather than the regime.

Some policymakers in the United States have belatedly come to understand that without functional states, the Middle East will never stabilize. Constant conflict, displacement, and human suffering, along with failed governance, have driven decades of perpetual emergency: wars, refugees, and failure to respond to climate change are just a few of the burning crises.

Over the last decade, successive US administrations have, with one hand, encouraged a necessary state revival. They helped mend the rift between the GCC states. They provided economic lifelines to Jordan and Egypt, and helped pay salaries to the Lebanese army when the state went bankrupt. They’ve made critical decisions to support Syria’s transition from Bashar Assad, recognizing the new government and lifting some sanctions. They’ve invested in the problematic, sectarian, but burgeoning Iraqi state, and they’ve negotiated with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program.

The problem is the other hand, which sometimes undoes the work of the first. In his first administration, Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement and gave space to regime-change enthusiasts. Biden gave Israel a free hand to destroy Gaza and consolidate Israeli steps to annex the West Bank. And in his second term, Trump directly joined Israel’s wars in Iran and Yemen, and backed the Israeli military campaigns that threaten state survival in Syria and Lebanon (even as administration officials grumble about Bibi’s adventurism to the press).

Israel has clearly stated its strategic aim — to keep rival states so weak that they can’t strategically threaten Israel. Recent history makes clear what fool’s errand this approach is. Power vacuums and weak states generate far greater security threats — for everyone involved, including their own populations, Israel, the United States, and the international community. Groups like Islamic State and Al Qaeda thrive in ungoverned hinterlands.

But the Israelis, emboldened by what they see as an unbroken string of military triumphs after the Oct 7 Hamas terror assault, have embraced a strategy that seeks to expand the zones of chaos in the Middle East. Confident that they have coopted or irreversibly weakened their Arab neighbors, they are now cultivating enduring disorder in a wider ring: Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and, most consequentially, Iran. Some of Israel’s leaders, along with a few like-minded American officials, dream of a regime-change war against the Islamic Republic. But they’ve publicly expressed that they’d be equally satisfied to simply hobble the Iranian state, making its people suffer and its government struggle. Publicly Netanyahu has mused about regime change but emphasized that Israeli wanted to make sure Iran would lose its nuclear capacities. “They may be more comfortable with destroying the country than we are,” an American official told Axios, speaking about the Israelis.

So what can or should Washington do in response? The United States is conflicted about how much it wants to get involved in the Middle East. In some instances, American leaders appear determined to stay out of regional disputes and avoid new wars. At the same time, US troops are still deployed in numerous declared and undeclared wars, and Washington continually enables Israel’s regional bombing bonanza.

When the United States intervenes, as Trump did by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, it resolutely wants to stay at arm’s length — simultaneously in and out. There is no regional hegemon or collective order effective enough to calm the roiling waters. The most powerful states in the region are Israel, Iran, the Gulf monarchies, and Turkey. Egypt is too weak to play much of a stabilizing role. Against this backdrop, America’s paramount interest lies in ensuring stability and balance in this system.

A Middle East at war and chaos is good for nobody, even if leaders in Jerusalem mistakenly believe that such disorder will benefit Israeli security. Another era of regional conflict certainly harms US interests. America’s leaders increasingly tilt populist and isolationist, but as a global superpower, the US government finds time and time again that it cannot ignore global conflicts, especially in the Middle East, which has proven of enduring strategic interest. A succession of US presidents has hopefully insisted that they’re pivoting away from the Middle East, before inevitably turning the lion’s share of their policy bandwidth to the region.

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Only functional states can deliver basic governance, uphold rights, and protect their populations — the minimum ingredients of stability. The Middle East needs states with basic competence: functional institutions, some authority over militias, an economic plan, and access to international support. Even bad or ambiguous states with some capabilities are better than chaos and power vacuums.

There are a few hopeful signs. Gulf powers have avoided new fissures, despite their considerable differences over how to deal with Israel, Yemen, and Iran. Notwithstanding internal pressures from militias and external pressure from Israel, Iran, and others, Iraq has maintained its hybrid authoritarian system, built some effective institutions, and cultivated stable relations with Middle Eastern regional powers from whom Baghdad was historically estranged. Lebanon’s new government wants to place Hezbollah’s militia under state control. The Assad dictatorship is gone, and Syria has at least a theoretical prospect of enjoying legitimate national governance.

All those gains are tentative, however. Without enumerating all the many caveats, major risks overshadow every small prospect for good in the region, from the ongoing proxy wars in Yemen and Libya, to the spoiler activities of Iran and its Axis of Resistance network, to the authoritarianism and sectarianism of the region’s leaders.

The biggest threat of all to the region right now, however, comes from Israel’s unfettered and ever-expanding war. Israel’s bombings near and far have no strategic logic beyond sowing disorder and weakening authority. Strikes on Syria might upend the transition there, but can’t possibly engender security or good governance for Syrians. The war on Iran won’t engender a peaceful democracy there, but it already has sabotaged diplomacy — which was working — and appears near certain to accelerate fragmentation and disorder. Terrorism, proxy war, and many of the Middle East’s worst ills are weapons of the weak, spawned by ideologues and accelerated in weak or failing states.

Israel’s gains from the gyre of war are likely to prove illusory or, at best, brief. But the campaign to erode states and the region’s state system will cause enduring harm to the Middle East — and to US interests. The most damning lesson of America’s failed interventions after 9/11 is that it’s far easier to break a state than to build one. And without functioning states, the United States faces another generation of neglecting its own prosperity and security while it manages conflict in the Middle East.

As the most organized and militant opposition within Iran, the Kurds might dream of forging a coalition with the country’s other minorities and playing a determinant role in any future civil conflict, just like their Syrian Kurdish counterparts during that country’s civil war. More pragmatically, they recognize that continued Israeli attacks will only bring fresh hardship to their long-suffering people, who are now being targeted by the Islamic regime even as Israel seeks to exploit their cause. This impasse was underscored during Israel’s bombing campaign, as IDF airstrikes hit a hospital in Iran’s largest Kurdish-majority city, while Iran executed three Kurdish men as part of a wider crackdown.

Iran’s Kurds are long used to losing out when great powers clash. The Kurdish and Persian languages have common roots, and the two peoples’ histories are deeply entwined. Iran’s foundational Safavid order even has its roots in a mystic, millenarian Kurdish Sufi order. Thereafter, wherever Kurdish principalities and vassal states bubbled up, they were overrun, as the Ottomans and Persians engaged in scorched-earth battles across their territory.

More recently, the first modern, independent Kurdish polity was established by Iranian Kurds. But the Soviet-sponsored Republic of Mahabad was soon abandoned by Moscow, then crushed by the Western-backed Shah.

This betrayal set the tone for subsequent decades. The 1979 Islamic Revolution brought no respite to the Kurds, who had generally backed the overthrow of the Shah’s repressive apparatus but soon launched their own insurgency to oppose the new, Islamist regime. Thousands of them were killed and 1,200 political prisoners were executed as forces loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini once again suppressed their bid for sovereignty.

During the brutal trench combat of the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran backed Iraqi Kurds and Baghdad backed Iranian Kurds, each side then taking revenge on their domestic Kurdish populations. Iran kept executing Kurds, while Iraqi Kurdistan suffered the Anfal genocide perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, and marked by the use of chemical weapons. Once again, neither East nor West was interested in alleviating Kurdish suffering — except insofar as it could be exploited to suit other regional agendas.

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Given these limitations, Iran’s complex constellation of Leftist and nationalist Kurdish opposition forces have unsurprisingly been driven into exile. The PKK itself has long had an ambiguous relationship with Tehran, generally preferring to concentrate its firepower on Turkey, even if its affiliates have fought a waning battle against Iranian forces. Iran’s strong repressive apparatus means there’s presently little room for any of these parties to maneuver.

Meanwhile, the Kurdish political movement is not only exiled and fragmented, but also isolated within Iran itself. This vast, diverse country is also home to tens of millions of Turkic-speaking Azeris, plus a restive Baloch population on the Pakistani border, and an Arab minority at the strategic chokepoint where Iran, Iraq and Kuwait meet the Persian Gulf. These groups have distinct agendas and ideologies and have historically struggled to forge meaningful links — regardless of their shared experiences of repression.

Compared to the darkest days of the Eighties, the current situation is nonetheless slightly improved. Iran recognizes Kurdish as a regional language, with the country’s Kurdish-speaking President Masoud Pezeshkian recently addressing Kurds in their mother tongue. Reformist politicians are now apt to make (generally unfulfilled) overtures towards the Iranian Kurds. But for the most part, they still suffer discrimination, poverty, and brutal repression. Many eke out a living as illegal porters, laboring across the inhospitable mountains dividing Iranian Kurdistan from Turkey, carrying smuggled goods on their backs. Otherwise, little escapes the region save grainy clips of abuse by the Revolutionary Guards and Guidance Patrol, better known as the morality police.

Given this long-term repression, many Iranian Kurds would welcome a change of government, potentially even one brought about by Israeli intervention. But past and present experience suggest that Israeli exploitation is unlikely to further the Kurdish cause. With Israel’s “12-Day War” on Iran apparently over, at least for the moment, the question now is what role Iran’s Kurds will play in future phases of the conflict.

Despite the challenges they face, Iranian Kurdish armed groups are the country’s strongest opposition. In their statement responding to Israel’s strikes, the PKK’s Iranian affiliates somewhat hopefully envisage a rejuvenated “Women, Life, Freedom” protest movement, backed by a rainbow coalition of women, minority movements and pro-democratic forces. Meanwhile, a recent détente between the PKK and Turkey could pave the way for a surge of manpower and matériel to the PKK’s Iranian affiliates, even as the PKK remains included on global terror lists and is unlikely to pursue Western policy goals. A smaller, less radical Iranian Kurdish group called Komala is busy in Washington, openly touting for military aid by promising a “nuclear-free Iran”. It’s therefore possible to imagine a future in which Tehran’s grip on power slackens and diverse Kurdish forces overcome ideological differences to establish de facto autonomy in their home regions.

But this scenario remains an outside possibility. As demonstrated by the ongoing crackdown, which has seen Tehran arrest hundreds of people in Kurdish regions and throughout Iran, Israel’s assault is more likely to entrench the militarization and centralization of Iranian society. Any path towards a reformed Iran will be long and bloody, and it’s difficult to imagine how any such domestic movement could avoid being exploited or fractured by the sponsorship of foreign powers. Notably, Turkey would likely benefit from any such breakdown to enter the Iranian arena as a sponsor of the Azeri population, to the inevitable detriment of the Kurds. For its part, Israel has long sought to find individual Kurdish leaders or groups to exploit as part of its so-called “periphery doctrine”, forging alliances and proxy relationships with non-Muslims and non-Arabs excluded from Middle Eastern politics.

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By Matt Broomfield

To be fair, there is a significant degree of sympathy for both the US and Israel on the Kurdish street. But even less ideologically motivated Iraqi Kurdish leaders, who have long benefited from a steady oil trade through Turkey to Israel, have condemned Israel’s latest round of strikes. They recognize that Netanyahu’s rhetorical manipulation of the Kurdish cause endangers Kurds, aligning them with Israeli interests and further isolating the minority from their neighbors throughout the Muslim world. The Kurds are thus transformed into low-hanging fruit, enabling Iran to claim victorious “retaliation” against Israel by striking random Iraqi Kurdish targets and executing Kurdish political prisoners on spurious, unproven claims of Mossad links.

As for the Kurds themselves, anti-imperialist and Islamic solidarity, plus shared experiences of genocide, inspire sympathy with Palestinians. The PKK itself began life training with Palestinian militants in Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley, and remains vocally opposed to Nato imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism. As Israeli bombs fell around Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, the female Kurdish political prisoners detained there released an open letter calling for an end to the assault and warning that “foreign powers” could not bring liberation to their people.

This explains why many Kurds are angered by Netanyahu’s appropriation of the originally-Kurdish “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan. The phrase became a famous rallying-cry for Kurdish-led anti-regime protests after Iran’s morality police killed a young Kurdish woman following an alleged hijab infraction. It then spread around the world in a campaign backed by Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, divorced from its radical roots and adopted by the conservative, nationalistic, anti-Kurdish mainstream of the Iranian opposition.

None of this helped Kurdish protesters, who were executed in their hundreds. On the contrary, Netanyahu’s lip-service only endangered the Kurds by enabling Iranian authorities to present any and all Kurdish opposition as Israeli stooges. Rather than suggesting any forthcoming material support, Netanyahu’s latest speech is the Iranian edition of an Israeli tactic long familiar from Turkey and Syria — using rhetorical appeals over the Kurds to deflect criticism of Israel’s own, genocidal war in Gaza.

For now, exiled Kurdish militants continue to mull their options in the event of full-scale war, while urging a path beyond both Israel’s genocidal war and Iran’s repressive regime. Between retributive Iranian violence on the one hand, and cynical exploitation by Israel on the other, that path may prove hard to find.

In another twist to the 20th-century tale of foreign exploitation, Henry Kissinger once plotted a Kurdish uprising against Saddam in cahoots with the Iranian Shah, only to cancel the operation and abandon America’s Kurdish allies once more. In Kissinger’s own telling, the Kurds had to recognise that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work”. As great-power conflict continues to rage across their homeland, the Kurds forget this ugly, realist lesson at their peril.

Lying a mere six miles north of Jerusalem, Ramallah is a perennial strategic vulnerability for the State of Israel. It is also caught between two powers who dominate the lives of the people here. The Israelis occupy their land, and the Iranians seek any opportunity to enlist the Palestinians in their 40-year battle against the Jewish state.

Ramallah is the largest city in the West Bank, and it is ruled by Fatah, the largest faction in the multi-party Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO has a violent past, but is secular and more moderate than its rival, Hamas, which is trained and funded by Iran, and (despite its base being Gaza) also has a long history in Ramallah. Also operating the area, more clandestinely, are Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, as well the even more psychotic terror group Islamic Jihad.

And now, if the Iranians have their way, these groups will turn the West Bank into an active front in their decades-long proxy war against Israel. Already there are signs of a stepping-up of terror activity. On Sunday, Israel’s General Security Service (Shin Bet) announced that it had thwarted a large-scale Hamas operation in Hebron, a city on the other side of Jerusalem. It was one of the largest cells uncovered in recent years, said Shin Bet, and its members were planning to carry out shooting and bombing attacks against Israeli targets. “They conducted training, gathered intelligence, and assembled explosive devices to carry out attacks in the West Bank and inside Israel.”

It was startling news. After almost two weeks of tit-for-tat missile exchanges with Iran, Israelis are now having to worry about Iranian proxies once again.

Ramallah is unique. Superficially, it’s like so many other Arab cities: crowded streets, pungent wafts of gasoline and food, variegated shop fronts and dangling electricity cables, all amid a din of shrieks, roaring engines and incessant honking.

But it is no traditional Arab city. As I drive 10 or so miles east from King David Street, near Jerusalem’s old city, the wide, smooth boulevards narrow and the roads get rougher. For a while, Hebrew intermingles with Arabic on the signage and then it disappears altogether. This, though, is an area encased within Israeli control. The currency is the Israeli shekel, and thousands of Ramallah’s people — and far more before the atrocities of October 7th — work in Israel.

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Along with Israel’s Arabs, though, the people here have typically preferred to stay out of the Iran-Israel War. And it’s not like they aren’t provoked. With around 450,000 Israeli settlers (excluding East Jerusalem) and over 100 Israeli illegal outposts in the West Bank, tensions here are constant.

Worse, many of the more vicious settlers have used Gaza as a distraction to steal more land and get yet more violent. Here, in December 2023, I found a city that even Palestinian Authority figures told me was ripe for another Intifada (uprising). But a sullen peace has held.

Now, though, with Hamas and Hezbollah crippled, Assad mouldering in Moscow, and much of Iran’s command-and-control military and nuclear infrastructure no more, the Mullahs are battered and humiliated. They need a win — and, no longer flush with proxies to ululate and lob ordnance at Tel Aviv, they need alternatives. The West Bank, and its capital Ramallah, offers an almost ideal solution. Over the past six months Iran-backed terror groups in the West Bank, particularly Islamic Jihad, have become yet more active, with the IDF carrying out intense operations in response. These include drone strikes and ground missions, during which, in some cases, large swathes of people have been displaced which has caused yet more anger.

There is opportunity for the Iranians here. The only question is: will they take it?

I arrive as the city is on strike. Settlers have killed three Palestinians, and the people, understandably enraged, are refusing to work. If Iran wants to exploit discontent here, Israel’s settlers are doing its work for it. Streets are deserted; occasionally groups of young men stroll by smoking and talking on their phones.

I drive up through a series of winding roads. In Ramallah, class is delineated by height. The city sits on the Judaean Mountains and the higher up the slope you live, the richer and more powerful you are.

Major General Akram Rajoub’s apartment gazes down over the city. The space is a delineation of power; the style is Soho House meets Mukhabarat. We sit around a hexagonal glass table with gold-colored inlay. A long dark wood dining table

takes up half the room. Framed photographs of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas gaze down at us. Rajoub was 16 years old in 1980 when the IDF arrested him on charges of membership in the Fatah movement, possessing a weapon, and shooting at an Israeli police station in the West Bank. He served 14 years. After the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, he joined its intelligence unit and became a brigadier general, then the director of the Preventative Security Apparatus (essentially the FBI of Palestine). He cracked down on Hamas, liaised with Israel, and was responsible for training Palestinian commanders in cooperation with the US and UK. No one knows more about the threat of pro-Iranian terror groups in the West Bank than him. Not least because he then went on to become governor of Nablus and Jenin, which are the West Bank’s Hamas and Islamic Jihad strongholds. A major challenge for him was dealing with these violent Iran-backed militias who were loyal to Iran not Palestine. The result is of course chaos. “When militias are armed and funded by foreign backing, two parallel power structures emerge, and the security situation deteriorates,” he says wearily.

He’s not wrong. In Jenin, the Palestinian Authority is supposedly in charge. But when Hamas and Islamic Jihad militias launch attacks from there, Israel’s response is swift and unforgiving. All Palestinians in the area pay the price for Iran’s meddling.

I ask him directly: “Do you think Iran has Palestine’s best interests at heart?”

His response is equally direct. “Iran has never cared about Palestine’s liberation. They see Palestinian groups as a tool, not a cause. By supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they use Palestinian blood to keep Israel occupied and distracted from their nuclear program.”

Rajoub argues that to end the Iranian threat in the West Bank, Israel must end its occupation there. Without occupation, he argues, there’s no justification for armed resistance. Right now, the Palestinian people have lost hope of a state and stability. This makes them ripe for Iranian exploitation.

Looking at Ramallah’s deserted streets, it’s notable that people are willing to go on strike and forgo opening their businesses in already desperate times, and so I can’t help but agree.

Since 7 October, the Israelis have had the West Bank under even more onerous security measures, essentially dividing it into cantons. With its high unemployment, power shortages, and a general sense of despair, is is now fertile ground for Iranian-backed terror groups.

Be that as it may, polling suggests that West Bank residents, reluctant to see the conflict worsen, are gravitating toward Fatah rather than Hamas – but, according to a May 2025 poll conducted in the West Bank, the vote for Hamas stands at 38% and Fatah at 27%. Hamas’s vote has dropped over the past year and Fatah’s has risen, suggesting that the population doesn’t want more conflict. That said, Hamas is the popular choice in Fatah’s stronghold. It’s terrible news for the PLO, and great news for Iran.

Rajoub understandably sees danger. “There’s been a decrease in activity due to the crackdowns, but the ideology remains,” he tells me. “People still believe in Iran’s cause. It’s a dangerous seed that could sprout again when the time is right.”

If the seed remains, what about the practicalities?

For Iran to cause chaos for Israel here it needs a reliable weapons pipeline — and it used to have one, relying on Hezbollah’s smuggling network to move arms from Lebanon through Syria, across Jordan, and into the West Bank. According to Israeli expert Jonathan Spyer, weapons were first transported to Hezbollah’s base in Qusayr, Syria, then to farms in Homs and Damascus, before being smuggled into Jordan and the West Bank by local families like the al-Saeeds and al-Ramthans. In the past, it was small arms — pistols and AKs. By the summer of last year, it had become C-4 explosives, anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades, and advanced missiles.

But Israel’s pager operation put Hezbollah, and then as a result Assad, out of the game — for now. There are already signs that the “Army of God” is starting to regroup. “Never count these bastards out,” a security source told me last week. “Sure, they’re weak right now. But they’ve been weak before and they came back.”

There is also danger closer to home for the Israelis. Outside a fried chicken shop in central Ramallah I speak to Mohammed, a local investigative journalist. “It’s odd,” he says. “While the Palestinian Authority uses AK-47s, Iranian-backed groups are armed with M16s, a weapon typical of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Some versions even resemble Israeli sniper rifles.”

These, Mohammed explains, come in via the Israeli black market. Here the journey is much easier — all you must do is cross the checkpoints from Israel into the West Bank.

And it’s striking how easy it could be. No one checked my vehicle as I entered or left the West Bank. Generally, there is a rigorous process on the way out. But that wouldn’t stop a smuggler entering with weapons, dispersing them and coming out clean. The Israelis are almost certainly aware of a lot of this. They know that a lot of pro-Iranian terrorists are probably walking around here with weapons.

Even if they don’t always use them. With a mischievous glint in his eye, Mohammed tells me that, with cash in the West Bank so tight, and the Iranians so rich, sometimes pro-Iran terrorists happily take Iranian cash with no intention of doing any actual terrorism. To satisfy their paymasters, they merely film themselves screaming “Allahu Akbar!” while firing a few rounds (often with weapons they already owned) close to Israeli observation towers. This grabs Israeli attention without any bloodshed. The would-be terrorists then send the videos to the Iranians (who are apparently happy with what they see) and pocket the cash. “These guys know the IDF will come after them,” says Mohammed, “but a lot less hard than if they’d killed anyone.”

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Palestinians often gather to protest against Israel at Aladdin Cafe, close to the City Inn Square. Here, I meet Yusuf Paraka, who was a field officer in the Preventive Security Apparatus (one of the West Bank’s internal intelligence agencies) in Ramallah for 30 years until he asked for retirement three months ago. Pro-Iranian terror groups were a big part of his job. They were also its biggest frustration as he attempted to hunt them down only to see them escape from a Palestinian controlled area into another where he had no jurisdiction.

I ask him about the recent Iran-Israel conflict. Whose side are the Palestinians on? “When Iranian missiles flew over from Jordan, people were cheering from the rooftops,” he tells me. “They were happy about it. But does that mean they’re happy with Iran? No. We are not persuaded that Iran will not destroy Israel with its missiles. Once again, Iran is bringing chaos to the Palestinians, leaving them to deal with the destruction of Gaza.”

Following the combined Israeli and US strikes last month, Tehran is in trouble. But it’s wounded, not dead. While the Mullahs are in greater danger than ever since the 1979 revolution, they still hold a monopoly on violence inside Iran. Their war with Israel and the West remains a core ideological and strategic objective, and there has been no Waterloo. The war continues, and with their capabilities in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza diminished, the Mullahs need options more than ever.

“In the end, Iran is so dangerous not because of the money it gives. Palestinians can buy guns without Iranian money. But Iran changes the mentality,” says Mohammed. “They make this a religious war. And a religious war never ends.”

So while Israel refuses to improve life for Palestinians and continues to enable the worst impulses of the settlers, Iran will continue to find weakness and opportunity in the West Bank.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the American strikes on Iran on Israel’s behalf were stunningly successful. None of the many things gravely warned about by the “restrainer” voices in the MAGA coalition materialized: no American fatalities; no Iranian attacks on American ships; no attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz; no oil war.

Trump has managed to square a circle, pleasing both his administration’s hawks and doves. He returned home from the NATO summit with extra spending commitments and “Daddy” ringing in his ears, thanks to NATO’s secretary general. He will surely sleep soundly in Mar-a-Lago this weekend.

I put this version of events to Fiona Hill, a British-American academic who was Trump’s security advisor during his first term, and an advisor to George W. Bush and Obama before that. Now she’s back in Britain, advising the Ministry of Defense and serving as Chancellor of Durham University. Unlike many in the European establishment, Hill doesn’t agitate against her former boss, although she is critical. But what does she make of this slam-dunk war narrative?

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“It certainly seems like a win for Trump,” she starts — an initial concession, before a lengthy list of caveats. “He seems to have actually bullied both Israel and Iran into a ceasefire at the moment. But it’s also clear that he thinks of a ceasefire as peace. Rather than a long, negotiated agreement — and he’s even saying now that he doesn’t really care if there is an agreement with Iran.” The idea that the President has a knack for short, sharp, dramatic action is a theme that crops up often during our conversation. He has, she says, a short attention span and is unwilling to follow up with the long slog of careful diplomacy. Hill is quick to reference Trump’s efforts for a peace deal in Ukraine, which after an initial push were discarded as too difficult. But without putting in an effort, Hill suspects, the truce in the Middle East will not endure either.

For one thing, she says, it’s not clear how much damage the raids have done to Iran’s nuclear facilities: intelligence reports differ, and now that Iran has suspended cooperation with the IAEA we may not know any time soon. Israel may well conclude that further military action is needed. For another, the Iranian regime is intact, and very likely to renew efforts on its nuclear program and extinguish any domestic unrest. “Look at what happened in Russia after the insurgency by Prigozhin,” she says. “We were all wondering what it meant for Putin and the stability of the Russian regime. Of course it just meant that Putin doubled down and took down Prigozhin in a rather dramatic fashion by exploding his plane. It led to the strengthening of the regime’s defenses and Putin tightening up his inner circle. That’s the kind of thing you could see in Iran.”

As a demonstration of American power, does she think it was also meant to sound a warning to other governments in the region? “Yes it might have a sobering effect on others.” But there could be unintended consequences. “He may have inspired other authoritarian leaders to contemplate what they could do… particularly as Trump keeps referencing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and saying this will end the war. Whether those bombs really ended the war in the Pacific is itself debatable, but his framing also suggests to others — Russia, Ukraine, China and Taiwan — that taking that kind of dramatic military action is the way they might want to proceed in their own conflicts.” So there’s a second-order effect of taking unilateral military action in this way. It sets a precedent.

But it is on the question of nuclear proliferation that Hill is most persuasive — and prepared to say the quiet part out loud. The aggregate lesson to middle-tier powers is that, in this new world, you’d better have a nuclear bomb. “We are in a phase now where a lot of countries are thinking long and hard about acquiring nuclear capability because frankly they see what Russia did to Ukraine. And Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal… We pushed them to give them up in 1993-94 along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, and the message now is that as a result of that they were invaded. You can take the same message from Libya, what happened to Muammar Gaddafi after giving up nuclear weapons.”

So it was a mistake for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons? “I thought it was a mistake at the time, to be frank. In terms of giving up their leverage — I’m on the record for saying that, which wasn’t very popular at the time… That’s the message to everyone else, the would-be nuclear powers in the world. You have guarantees from having nuclear weapons of not being attacked. We saw from India and Pakistan that there was a quick move to quickly calm down that conflict because both of them are nuclear powers.”

The extension of this principle is sobering. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia will follow. And Hill believes that the proliferation will go far beyond the Middle East. “The Turks, seeing themselves as a regional power with global aspirations, would certainly like to have a nuclear weapon; South Korea has had to be talked out of developing one for the obvious reason of what North Korea might do; Japan, the country that actually had nuclear weapons used against it during the Second World War, has often fretted about its own security and the reliability of the US nuclear umbrella. And of course in Europe there’s been a lot of discussion about developing a European nuclear umbrella if the United States is no longer a reliable ally.” This week’s announcement by Keir Starmer, she says, of a fleet of UK nuclear-capable planes should be seen in this context. “This is a new world that we’re in. It’s no longer the United States and the Soviet Union dominating the nuclear discussion.”

To extrapolate, then, might we find ourselves, in 20 years’ time, in a world with 20 nuclear powers? Hill’s answer is unsettling. “That’s highly likely at this particular moment,” she responds. “We’ve got this breakdown of the global order that was established by the United States after the Second World War. We’ve had 80 years of the US playing that very important role… Trump is basically saying, sorry, this system no longer works for us, we don’t want any part of it. And that leads to others thinking: how do we establish other orders that we find beneficial?” And meanwhile, China is rapidly headed towards becoming a nuclear superpower on a level with Russia. If they decided to act together, then, she says it would be “very troubling”. Quite the understatement.

Meanwhile, easily lost amid the maelstrom of the past week’s news, there was a Nato summit. It went off without calamity, culminated in a communique that re-affirmed Article 5, and even set an ambitious new target of 5% of GDP to be spent on defense. Surely that’s another success, I suggest. Isn’t it more proof that the old security architecture is still standing?

“Nato absolutely still is a useful organization but it’s only reliable if we have built up the European pillar. That requires real dedication and political will among European powers. We already had Spain basically saying, sorry, we can’t afford to build up our spending, and we’ve had a lot of fudging on this issue of 5%. I jokingly call it ‘article 5%’ — unless you pay 5% of GDP, there’ll be no opportunity of collective defense. That’s certainly how Trump sees it… He really does believe that the United States is providing a service to European allies in terms of security, and one way or another they need to be remunerating the US for that service. He’s going to take out the payments through trade.”

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Even if these promises are swiftly forgotten, one thing the world will remember about the summit was secretary general Mark Rutte referring to Trump as “Daddy”. Hill laughingly refers to it. “After 80 years of relying on Daddy, or living in Daddy’s basement,” she says, “it’s long past time for Europe to step up.”

And yet, when you drill down, Europe can’t possibly match Putin’s enormous nuclear arsenal. Without America’s help here, then, Russia would inevitably be the dominant military power in Europe. This, then, would leave us incapable of defending ourselves as the outside threat grows. What is Europe’s next move?

What we can do, we should do, is Hill’s message — one that she took into the UK’s Strategic Defense Review. We improve our intelligence networks, invest in public-private partnerships for new war technology and massively speed up our pace of innovation in defense. “We’ve been operating at a snail’s pace. One of the biggest shocks from my experience of the UK SDR was just how long it took from putting out a request for projects to delivery — it’s a minimum of six years. I said that to an American counterpart just the other day who had been in charge of procurement at the Pentagon. And he laughed and said: ‘that’s what it’s like here too’.”

But to get to that “war footing”, according to Hill, means a lot more than military hardware. “You can be attacked in so many different fashions,” she says. “Cyber attacks. Influence attacks. Poisonings. Acts of sabotage. Undersea cables. GPS blocking… We have to admit that we’re very vulnerable. The biggest risk to the UK is the disabling of our critical national infrastructure.”

Such is the threat, she suggests, that each of us should have a plan for our families, including a “preparedness kit” for possible disasters. “We don’t need to gather big arsenals in our bunkers, but we do need to work out how we are going to help each other out in any eventuality.”

The war, according to Fiona Hill, is far from over.

To my left, in the corner, there’s an old couple — he hunches, she has a walker — grumbling quietly to each other. On the floor are some Israeli youths: a tattooed couple in their early twenties. There is a silent middle-aged couple and another huge, hairy man, itching to get out of the shelter.

You can assess a country’s economic health by the state of its air-raid shelters. In Ukraine, they tend to be basic basement rooms. Here in Israel, the fundamental premise is the same — but there is a clear difference. They are better maintained and inspected; there are also more of them. Israel’s superior stock of shelters is a result of the country’s economic power, notwithstanding its far smaller population and largely non-existent natural resources. The Israeli economy has boomed this century, thanks in part to the efforts of the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When Netanyahu became finance minister in 2003, he claimed that the country was “six weeks away from being Argentina”. Later, he would recall a conversation with his young son as the two stood in Tel Aviv looking at the skyline and comparing it to New York. “We’ll never be like them,” the boy said, to which Netanyahu replied: “Your father’s going to be finance minister. Believe me, we’ll be like them.”

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With its grandiosity, its detailing of his implacable belief in his own destiny, and the fact that it’s probably not true, the anecdote is Netanyahu in miniature. But he had a plan — to focus on privatization and liberalization — and its impact was immediate. GDP growth surged from 0.2% in 2001 to 4.2% in 2005. By 2020, Israel’s GDP per capita ranked in the global top 20, surpassing both the US and France.

This speaks to an inescapable fact. For good, and often for ill, “Bibi” gets things done. And this fact is inseparable from the weekend’s strike, the events since October 7, and indeed Israel in the 21st century.

Netanyahu is now a historically consequential figure. Everyone has an opinion on him (usually negative). And if he is going to take his country deeper into war, this time not against a terror group but against a country of 91 million people, he will need his population at least vaguely behind him.

So what do Israelis think? Before the horrors of October 7, Netanyahu’s popularity was already in decline. A Pew Research poll in August 2023 found 52% of Israelis viewed him unfavorably. A July 2023 survey by Israel’s top broadcasters projected his governing coalition would lose its majority.

After the October 7 attack, a poll by Dialog Center revealed 86% of respondents blamed the leadership for the failure. As the war dragged on, Netanyahu’s approval continued to plummet. By April 2024, 58% of Israelis said he should resign immediately. A March 2025 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found 72.5% believed he should step down, with 48% demanding his immediate resignation. Additionally, 87% said he should take responsibility for the October 7 attack.

In the past week, though, Netanyahu’s coalition has received a boost. A Channel 13 poll shows Likud going from 24 to 27 seats, making it the largest party in the Knesset for the first time since October 7. The same poll shows that Israelis support his strikes on Iran — 75% back the campaign and only 17% are opposed. A separate Israel Democracy Institute survey found that 70% of Israelis support the strikes. Crucially, another poll found that 64% of respondents believe Netanyahu’s strikes are aimed at eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat, rather than being driven by domestic political concerns.

This is key. The Israeli public are not foolish. They know how cynical their prime minister is. As a fellow visitor told me amid the sirens and chaos: “This guy would sell not just his mother, but his children’s mother to stay in power.” If, despite this, the public believes he is doing, with conviction, what many Israeli leaders have talked about but held off from, Bibi may well have turned it all around.

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This is partly because the Israeli strike on Iran has boxed in Netanyahu’s political opponents. Straight after Israel’s 13 June attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, Israel’s leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, could only limply say: “Yes, this government needs to be toppled, but not in the midst of an existential fight.” Lapid added: “I think he’s the wrong person to lead the country. But on that” — striking against Iran — “he was right”.

And if he was grudgingly positive then, Lapid was effusive after the US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “I congratulate President Trump and the brave American army for being part of a historical change,” he said unctuously. Later, he claimed that the strike had made the world “a safer place”. Lapid knows he cannot break ranks without being seen to be putting politics above the national interest.

Netanyahu and those around him could be forgiven for thinking that the 2026 elections could return him to power yet again. Next year, though, is a long way off. And there is also a caveat in all this: the polls hold, and the opposition is muted, for as long as the military operations succeed. Right now, those most exercised by Israel and US actions are the usual bolus of social media blowhards, bewildered Corbynistas, Islamic Republic stooges and Lincoln’s Inn human rights lawyers. To most Western observers, it is clear that the surgical neutralization of Iran’s nuclear facilities and its murderous military commanders is, in and of itself, a political and moral good. But what comes next is critical. And it could still all end in disaster.

And that is driving the Tel Aviv mood. This city is Israel’s liberal enclave. It is here that you will find those who most mistrust and despise Netanyahu. “This was probably inevitable,” says one liberal of the US strikes. “We’re glad it happened, but less confident that what comes now will be easy as what has come before. I support Bibi in this. But after this is all over, he will have to account for everything — and that includes the disaster of October 7. No way can that guy ever be prime minister again.”

But you can never say never with Netanyahu. The vagaries of Israel’s politics are unpredictable. As Joshua Hantman, a British-Israeli political consultant who has worked with politicians from both sides of the aisle, observes: “Polling may show Likud going from 24 to 27 seats. But the question is from where Bibi is getting those seats. In our parliamentary system, whereby leaders rule by coalition, if he takes those seats from other Right-wing parties, which seems the case, it is entirely irrelevant in our electoral system. He needs to take seats from the opposition block. Which he shows no signs of doing.”

Hantman adds: “Israelis understand the existential nature of this threat and support Netanyahu’s decision to finally do something about it. An ideal situation for a majority of Israel is, like Churchill, for Netanyahu to win the war — but lose the election.” But for Netanyahu to become Israel’s Churchill, an idea that most of the country would scoff at, he first has to actually win this war. And for that, he will have to do what is most difficult for him: park his ego and understand the limits of what can and cannot be realistically achieved.

It happened. Despite intense advocacy by voices of restraint inside and outside the administration, President Trump has joined Israel’s conflict with Iran by launching targeted air and cruise-missile strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities — at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The move carries immense risks, potentially plunging the United States into yet another costly, dangerous quagmire in a region that is less important to Washington than foreign-policy elites would have you believe. But guided the right way — and with a bit of luck — it is possible to keep this intervention limited.

One key reason we’re here is the perception of Iranian weakness. Since the start of hostilities between Israel and the Islamic Republic, Trump has wavered between diplomacy and the use of force, searching for the best tactic to block Tehran’s path to nuclear weapons. At the same time, ever attuned to optics, the President prefers to align with winners. And in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s initial military operations — marked by the killing of senior commanders and nuclear scientists, and a highly modulated Iranian retaliation — Israeli dominance and Tehran’s vulnerability became the prevailing narrative in the West.

Often, our first impressions of a conflict go a long way to determine how we approach it over time. For instance, despite Israeli strikes on Iranian missile launchers, Tehran’s offensive military capabilities have remained intact. Over the past week, Iran has struck key strategic targets in Haifa and Tel Aviv using fewer missiles with better (and improving) accuracy. Yet Iran’s tactical focus — coupled with its proportional, calibrated response — actually encouraged public perceptions of Iranian weakness. And in such moments, when the fog of war thickens and facts are murky, perception often becomes reality.

“Trump faces two possible scenarios following the US strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

But aligning a perception with prudent statecraft is the real challenge. A false perception almost always distorts decision-making, leading to bad policy. The better path is to game out potential outcomes in the light of the best available information.

Trump faces two possible scenarios following the US strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The first is the ideal outcome: the B-2 and Tomahawk cruise missiles executed against the three Iranian nuclear facilities significantly checks Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, while opening the door to more robust diplomacy.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic limits or forgoes retaliation — or conducts a tightly choreographed and telegraphed counterattack similar to its response to the assassination of Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 — in the hope that Washington won’t pursue regime change. According to this scenario, assuming the US doesn’t fall victim to mission creep or becomes locked in an escalation spiral, Trump could claim victory without entangling America in yet another open-ended Middle-East conflict.

As it is, there are early signs that the Iranians are prepared to treat this as a calibrated mutual dance. On Sunday afternoon local time, IRIB 1, state television’s main channel, broadcast footage of captured US sailors from a 2016 incident, as if to give the Islamic Republic and its people psychological succor. Meanwhile, IRINN, the state news network, took a curiously legalistic line, highlighting what the Iranians see as the illicit nature of Trump’s actions under international law, as well as US congressional Democrats’ outrage at the President for circumventing their legislative role.

Still, success depends on precision, discipline, escalation management, and a willingness to take diplomatic off-ramps that may appear unsatisfying at first — traits not often associated with wars that begin amid great fanfare and inflated expectations.

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By Edward Luttwak

The second and more dangerous scenario is attritional escalation. Even if Trump’s strikes inflict some damage, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure may prove resilient, and the regime’s response — through proxies, missile attacks, or maritime disruption — could spiral into a broader, long-term regional war against the United States.

Unlike other recent adversaries, such as Iraq or Libya, Iran has aggressively prepared for this scenario and adapted its military doctrine based on lessons learned from previous American military operations in the region. And the rally-around-the-flag effect is real, no matter what gleeful regime-changers claim. “Whatever God wants, we are ready,” an old woman told state TV while shopping for groceries the day after the US attacks. “Because we had eight years of war with Iraq, we don’t fear anything.” Anyone who assumes that such sentiments are pure regime propaganda is unfamiliar with Iranian history — recklessly so.

A grinding war would drain American resources, undermine regional stability, and risk turning an operation intended to be a targeted counter-proliferation strike into a failed regime-change war. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan loom large while America’s true global competitor — China — would benefit from America’s continuing distraction in the Middle East.

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How far will Iran go?

By Christopher de Bellaigue

If Trump’s military operation isn’t tightly defined or properly managed, or if actors in the US government or outside of it are allowed to willfully expand the scope of the operation, the second outcome is the most likely — and the most disastrous.

Trump has shown in the past — whether in assassinating Soleimani or targeting Yemen’s Houthis — that he prefers swift Machiavellian decisiveness over lofty adventurism. If he is to uphold his red line against an Iranian bomb while avoiding another disastrous, endless entanglement abroad, he must be ruthlessly pragmatic in pursuit of realistic and effective diplomatic solutions.

Any military operation against Iran must be firmly centered first and foremost on America’s national interests — above all, the avoidance of yet another protracted war in the Middle East that could claim thousands of American lives, cost billions of dollars, and become a further distraction from more urgent priorities. To preserve American power and secure his legacy, President Trump must reject the temptation of unchecked escalation and maximalist goals masked as victory.

That might sound like an odd thing to say about a country with, indisputably, the mightiest military machine on the planet, one that currently allocates about a trillion dollars a year on defense spending, which is more than the next seven biggest spenders combined. But such figures can be deceptive. Material capabilities are at least crudely measurable — you can count tanks, ships, soldiers and planes, among other things — but our understanding of how those assets translate into international political power remains extremely shallow. In 1985, the Soviet Union loomed as a fearsome military titan. In 1992, the Soviet Union did not exist.

The US is not much like the USSR. But it is, discomfortingly, a lot like interwar France: a great power with a glass jaw. Scholars still debate the sources of France’s military collapse in the Second World War, but its internal atrophy (which also contributed to the ease with which it descended into docile, humiliating collaboration), was well understood, then and now. William Shirer, an eyewitness to the catastrophe, shared the widely held view that in 1925 France was “the greatest power on the continent”. Yet, as others would subsequently observe, it would take “just ten years for the leading country in Europe to become a helpless victim”. And though it is exceedingly unlikely that the US will suffer France’s particular fate, the collapse of its international political influence will probably be as sudden, and as wrenchingly consequential.

There is a yawning gap between apparent military capabilities and the ability to apply that power to well-articulated ends. And there are also limits to what the use of force can achieve. Very often, force fails to deliver the political goods. At the turn of this century, the mighty US could not, despite marshalling overwhelming military force, impose its will or secure its desired outcomes in long wars against two very weak states, Afghanistan and Iraq. More generally, the limits to the exercise of military power also include unintended political consequences. Russia’s war on Ukraine (which also exposed a very large gap between Russia’s material military capabilities on paper and its actual prowess), was disastrous for some of its most closely held international political objectives — witness, for example, the ascension of Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance. This isn’t to suggest that the use of military force can never achieve political objectives; it is simply to observe that a massive military machine may be a necessary component of what makes a great power, but it is scarcely sufficient.

Against whom is the US likely to use its military might, and to achieve what? It may be that America will unleash its air force against Iran. If so, it will have been dragged into that conflict, over its previously stated reluctance to do so, by another country, and with uncertain and cascading long-term implications. Such stumbling circumstances are hardly the hallmarks of a great power commanding the grand chessboard of world politics. Moreover, beyond Iran, it is hard to imagine the country against which the US will deploy its vast military power, to bend that adversary to its will. That essential, sobering thought experiment serves as a reminder that political influence is the day-to-day currency of international power — and that the exercise of power, in any form, is only successful if it advances a country’s goals on the world stage. We are, by that metric, witnessing measures in contemporary American foreign policy that are nothing short of geopolitical suicide. And as a result, despite its new obsession with posturing masculinity, the US will be increasingly impotent as a world power, often flexing its large, impressive, and well-oiled muscles — but rarely, if ever, achieving its objectives.

The collapse of American power is due to two interrelated factors that will be difficult to repair. The US is a broken society, riddled with domestic political dysfunction. And those pathologies have led to the election (and, ruinously, the reelection) of a singularly unsuited steward of its foreign policy. Again, though the US is in little danger of foreign conquest, in its domestic political disarray it does eerily resemble interwar France — a troubled and deeply divided society characterized by what one historian described as “the embrace of unreason”. As Raymond Aron recalled in his memoirs, “basically, France didn’t exist any longer.” Instead, “it existed only in the hatred of the French for each other.” Shirer saw a country whose strength was “gradually sapped by dissention and division”, as well as “the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness, and cynicism… of its people”.

America’s political disarray and paralyzing polarization is partially organic (over many issues, it is a sharply divided society), but that polarization has also been exacerbated by its instrumental manipulation. As Martin Wolf argues in his recent book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, soaring inequality and massive concentrations of wealth at the very top presented a political challenge to the Republican Party: “How, after all, does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1% of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy? The answer is pluto-populism.” That is, of plutocrats masquerading as populists, “a specific elite political strategy” that involves the purposeful inflaming of cultural issues to divert attention from their economic plundering. One consequence of this strategy is that it heightens, intensifies and even radicalizes existing domestic divisions.

America’s disfigured political landscape has led its electoral system to produce what would have previously been unthinkable — a personalist autocrat with an utter disdain for the Republic’s core ideals. Where does support for such a figure come from?

As Hans Kohn observed in Revolutions and Dictatorships (1939), “No nation is necessarily Fascist; no nation is entirely immune against Fascism.” In interwar Europe, fascism emerged from disorder, where it found the support of many who craved the restoration of their understanding of “order” — including, crucially, “certain conservative forces” who believed they could harness its power to crush their domestic adversaries, naively thinking they could “control fascism once they had helped it into power”. Or as the filmmaker Paul Schrader succinctly put it a few months ago, “When you vote for a strongman, your assumption is that he’ll ‘take care’ of those other people, and that his strength will benefit you in some way. But you’re just gonna end up on a list. Everyone does.”

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The collateral damage of all this is the end of American power. One part of the broader Trump-tastrophe is that fundamental foreign policy questions no longer have obvious answers. What is the purpose of contemporary American power? Can we still speak of something as general as the American national interest? Personalist regimes tend not to pursue national interest, but the interests of the ruling clan and its intimate affiliates. Worse still, in the case of the Trump administration, is the pursuit of foolish, impulsive, and incoherent policies, which leave in their wake the wreckage of shattered international political partnerships that will create opportunities for others to exploit.

Trump’s most astonishing foreign policy blunder has taken place closest to home. One of the unique advantages that America has long enjoyed as a great power — it is hard to think of another example in history — is its uncommonly warm relations with its nearest neighbors. Yet Trump has managed to sabotage US relations with Canada, an act of geopolitical self-immolation that is largely without precedent. It is a blunder on the order of Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor, but at least that howler followed an identifiable deductive logic: since rapacious Japanese militarists aspired to take over half the world, they calculated that at some point the effort would finally bring them into conflict with the sluggish, isolationist US, so perhaps it was best to try to seize the initiative with a devastating preventive surprise attack. That turned out to be a very bad bet, but at least its rationale had a sliver of logical plausibility, which is more than can be said for America’s current behavior towards Canada.

Burning bridges with Canada has turned out to be the template, not the exception, of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. It has alienated allies in Europe with the barely contained glee of a child playing with matches. In Asia, where, in theory, the US would be well served to try to limit China’s growing political reach, its trade policies have left natural allies, such as Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, injured by, and necessarily on guard against, American behavior. When it comes to South America, which some would see as falling under the purview of a US “sphere of influence”, Trump’s self-defeating economic policies have once again invited political inroads by others, especially China and the European Union. And beyond a curious concern for a handful of white South Africans, Team Trump recoils from Africa to such an extent that it has withdrawn life-saving humanitarian assistance, achieving little more than sullying the American image.

Ultimately, the only countries in the world that have reason to feel confident in the stability of their ties to the US are the Gulf States, because their relationships are not a function of the American national interest, but rather a reflection of the business interests of the presidential family and their affiliates. (Indeed, any sober assessment of US security guarantees in the region would conclude that, although they may have made sense in the Seventies, they are plainly anachronistic today.)

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Trump’s torching of American power extends to many of his domestic policies as well. His war on America’s elite academic institutions, which are the envy of the world, will eventually come at the cost of US innovation in science and technology, undermining almost every aspect of its domestic economy — as well as jeopardizing future military innovations. There is an auditorium full of foreign-born Nobel Prize winners who eagerly, often desperately, made their way to the US over the years. One shudders to think what would have been if Trumpism had been embraced earlier. That auditorium would be empty. The next auditorium will be empty. This is to the detriment not only of America’s soft power — its global appeal to the best and the brightest — but also its hard power, as crucial scientific breakthroughs increasingly take place beyond the gated community of this xenophobic kingdom.

Students of international relations are properly trained to recite that in world politics, the future is unwritten, and anything is possible. In an anarchic world, countries must ultimately be prepared for the unexpected, and for the worst. But with the second coming of Trump, the US is stretching that wise admonition beyond the breaking point. American foreign policy is now directed by a wildly mercurial and bracingly untutored would-be despot. Worse still, and in contrast to season one of the Trump show, the president is surrounded by sycophants (some of whom actually know better, but, shamelessly lusting for proximity to power, have renounced their own beliefs), unchecked by timid legislators submissively clinging to their seats, and abetted by a monied class seemingly determined to prove that no value is more important than insatiable chase of still more wealth.

The world no longer has the comforting luxury of pretending that Trump 1.0 was some freak aberration. And the world has surely observed that Trump 2.0 — which must be understood as representing what “America” now is — is a much more radical, and dangerous, and unpredictable enterprise. Such a country simply cannot be counted on by others. Its word is meaningless, its values absent, and its interests, beyond enriching the royal family, are indecipherable. Who is the US rooting for in the Russia-Ukraine war? Would the US come to the defense of its NATO allies in Europe? Would the US really care if China comes to dominate all of East Asia? Not so long ago, it would have been absurd to even ask such questions. Now, who knows?

All of this will matter, and it will matter in ways that will undermine American power by the most narrow calculus of its interest: its ability to get what it wants in the international arena. President Trump is known for his reverence of an early mentor, Roy Cohn, the notorious hatchet man for Joseph McCarthy, and one suspects that Hans Morgenthau would describe American foreign policy today as he did McCarthyism: “a fraudulent, stupid and dangerous farce.” It will not be long before the rest of the world reaches that conclusion.

But what a difference a half-century makes. After Israel launched its attack on Iran last week, the oil price rose sharply, but only back to the level at which it spent most of the last three years, merely reclaiming recent lost ground. As for fears of a global recession, stocks briefly fell before regaining most of their ground too. At least initially, the world’s investors regarded this war as an irritant rather than a catastrophe.

It’s a bit surprising, not least because the war lands at a delicate time for the world economy. In the last couple of weeks, both the OECD and World Bank issued their updated economic forecasts for the world economy. Neither is optimistic: global growth is expected to stay below 3% this year. Leading the way downwards are the developed economies, all of which are growing slowly if at all.

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Trump will make China great again

By John Rapley

So, despite the serene sense in markets amid a major war, the risks to the global economy remain high. The tenuous balance of the moment may not last. For now, the world’s major powers are standing by while Israel and Iran slug it out. When US President Donald Trump suddenly left this week’s G7 Summit and tweeted that Tehran should evacuate, speculation was rife that Americans were about to join Israel’s fight. But when the night passed without further incident and Trump subsequently said he was looking for a “real end” to the war, its future course remained as unclear as ever. While Israel enjoys the upper hand, having apparently established complete air dominance, the conventional wisdom is that it does not have the ordnance or air power needed to deliver a decisive blow. To completely destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israel would therefore need the Americans to join their mission. But a rift has opened in the administration between those who want to back Israel’s war, like the US ambassador Mike Huckabee, and those who want to continue the pivot towards containment of China.

This raises the possibility that Israel will be left to continue this war alone and, unable to bring it to a resolution, will succeed mainly in motivating the Iranian leadership to double down on the creation of a nuclear bomb. It’s a safe bet that if the Iranians do that, the Saudis will move to do so quickly as well. The insecurity in the region will then only worsen.

Yet accurate predictions would require knowing the President’s mind, and it’s not clear if anyone does. Although American presidents have enjoyed a great deal of discretion in foreign affairs, there has always been a general predictability to the behavior of American presidents. Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, for instance, could be counted upon to grumble incessantly about Netanyahu but always give him what he wanted, in light of his ideological commitment to Zionism. But with Trump, it seems to come down largely to who he is listening to on any given day.

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During his second presidency he has indicated quite unambiguously that the United States is tired of playing the role of hegemon in global affairs and will thus base its future decisions on its own priorities, as expressed by the President himself. He apparently believes that nimbleness allows him the freedom to do deals and rework the rules of international economics in a way that maximizes American interests.

But if the renunciation of long-standing commitments and alliances gives the President the freedom of maneuver he apparently envies in leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Trump’s approach differs in one crucial respect. Whereas Xi and Putin — and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for that matter — root their decisions in strategies and ideological visions that are identifiable and consistent, Trump’s America First vision remains inchoate and unclear. One day tariffs are on because they’ll restore American manufacturing, the next they’re off because they were only ever intended as bargaining chips in trade negotiations. One day mass deportations are on to protect American jobs, the next they’re off because they’re hurting American farmers and hoteliers. And on it goes.

Amid this uncertainty, long-term planning has become challenging. So far, most American business managers haven’t changed their investment plans for this year, although early signs of an increase in the number of firms aiming to scale back investment amid rising uncertainty are starting to emerge. But more tellingly, the evidence that foreigners are starting to lose faith in America, and are consequently pulling their money out, continues to accumulate.

In this light, the most significant development of this Middle East war is that a decades-old rule of the global economy — that in a geopolitical storm, everyone heads to the safe bastion of the US — appears now to be broken. In the past, amid increased tensions in the region, the oil price rose, the dollar strengthened and US bond yields fell, as global investors rushed to park their money in the safe haven of the US. This time around, the opposite has happened. The oil price has remained in its recent range, the dollar has continued sliding and bond yields haven’t fallen. In the meantime, gold continues its relentless upwards march as the world retreats from the dollar and returns to the ancient metal as a favored reserve currency.

What appears to be unfolding, therefore, is a global economy that resembles that of the period between the last century’s two world wars — a time when a declining empire, the UK, lost its hegemonic role but the rising power, the US, wasn’t ready to replace it. Britain had ceded its place as the world’s biggest economy to the US, but the Americans weren’t yet ready to build a military force to match their status as an economic superpower: on the eve of the Second World War, Douglas MacArthur lamented that the entire US army, which was smaller than Portugal’s, could have fit into Yankee stadium to watch a baseball game. Britain, meanwhile, was desperately trying to avoid conflict at all cost, and could not play the role of world policeman. Equally the pound sterling was gradually weakening, but the US dollar didn’t yet replace it as the world’s reserve currency. Amid that de-centered world economy, there followed an era of volatility — financial crises which were poorly managed, trade relations which worsened — and which climaxed in the Great Depression and the onset of war.

The world economy today may be moving into a similar interregnum. That would make it vulnerable to any kind of major economic shock, of the sort seen in the 2008 global financial crisis or again in the 2020 Covid crash. But those crises occurred at a time when there still existed a broad political consensus among G7 states about the global order, one based on open markets and relatively unhindered flows of money, goods and services. As a result, financial and political leaders were able to manage those crises swiftly and effectively with a high degree of coordination, involving such measures as central bank swap lines, and a widely shared consensus on the basic contours of policy: a blend of loose fiscal and monetary policies and a commitment to keeping global trade flowing.

Faced with a similar economic shock today, it’s possible such harmony will prove elusive. And while the Middle East war may not provide the shock, other tensions are building in the global financial system. Some see private equity headed for a moment of crisis, while the formal financial system’s recent embrace of crypto, despite still not being able to make a use-case for it, has strong late-bubble vibes to it — the sort of vibes which become contagious shortly before a fall.

Barring a dramatic escalation — say a mass casualty event that takes the war into an entirely new phase, the closure of oil shipping lanes, attacks on Western or other regional forces — this Middle East war may not pose a 1973-style shock to the world economy. But it has uncovered the looming problems in the Western economies, and highlighted the growing risks to future growth. The longer the war continues, the worse that will get, so the US — which will ultimately be decisive — will have an interest in bringing the conflict to a rapid conclusion. Whether or not Trump proves able to do that, though, will reveal how far the hegemon has fallen.

Netanyahu’s objective here isn’t simply to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and its ballistic missiles. It is to embarrass and demoralize the Islamic Republic by flaunting Israel’s mastery of sabotage and subterfuge as his pilots roam unimpeded above the Persian plateau. The scope of the Israeli attacks was big, from Tabriz in the far north to Dezful in the south; the intelligence and precision, as with the campaign that decapitated Hezbollah last year, were impressive. Images released by the Israeli military showed shadowy figures, purportedly Israeli commandos, setting devices around Iran’s air defenses that were detonated during the assault. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Air Force, was killed along with other senior officers in an underground command center whose existence should have been a secret.

According to Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations the strikes killed 78 people and wounded 320. This is its biggest loss of senior military leaders since the darkest days of the Iran-Iraq War of the Eighties. A clutch of nuclear scientists were also assassinated. As Netanyahu promised in an unctuous address to “the proud people of Iran”, complete with a snatch of Persian delivered in his guttural Hebrew accent, “More is on the way.”

In return, on Friday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed to show “no mercy” to the “evil, despicable, terrorist, Zionist” enemy. But he no longer has the tool kit to execute such threats. Until last year he would have mobilized Iran’s proxies in its “axis of resistance”, but Hezbollah and Hamas have both been maimed by Israel’s furious response to the attacks of October 7, while his client Bashar al-Assad was last year ousted from power in Syria, the Islamic Republic’s former bridgehead to the eastern Mediterranean.

He cannot lightly target military installations belonging to the US, despite holding it responsible for Israel’s actions, for that would bring Trump down on his wraith-like, 86-year-old head. Only American planes can deliver the biggest “bunker-buster” bombs that are capable of penetrating the mountainside that protects the Iranians’ as-yet impregnable enrichment facility, at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom. It is best to avoid needless provocation.

Netanyahu has no such qualms, claiming to be clearing a path for the Iranian people to achieve “your objective, which is freedom”. In Tehran the roads are full of police guarding against the possibility of the popular insurrection that is the nightmare of dictators in war. Petrol sales have been capped at 20 liters per vehicle. A nation immiserated by sanctions, its once-thriving middle class pummeled back to the bread line, will suffer further. But the dignity of Iranians is resilient and there are few signs of panic among people that have lived with either the promise of war or its fully materialized reality ever since the revolution that swept away the Shah in 1979.

Many Tehranis left the capital when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles during the Iran-Iraq War, and, before then, when Britain and Russia invaded in World War II. But now the old people are staying, doggedly reluctant to up sticks, not, I think, from any particular animus towards Israel, whose precision and fastidious avoidance of mass civilian casualties has aroused their admiration, but a determination, now that the Islamic Republic may have begun its end game, to stay the course.

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Iran’s devastating hubris

By Sohrab Ahmari

On Friday, with the night sky was alive with whizzing ordnance, from the rooftops, scattered female voices came together: “Death to Khamenei! Death to Khamenei!” The regime is a joke. Its most cherished icon, the compulsory hijab, has been smashed and there is nothing the authorities can do to force the women who have thrown off their headscarves to put them on again. Droll social media posts keep up morale. One shows a hairy man in a cocktail dress standing on the balcony of his Tehran apartment toasting the incoming Israeli missiles with what appears to be shots of vodka. Someone has posted a photo of Hossein Salami, the unlamented commander of the Revolutionary Guard, who was killed on Friday, with his hands held far apart and the legend, “I’m telling you, a missile this thick, right up my arse…” In contrast, there is some sympathy for Muhammad Bagheri, the country’s chief of staff, and another victim of the Israeli cull; he was reputedly troubled by the supreme leader’s use of the armed forces as agents of domestic repression and recently, and in stark contrast to his more blood-thirsty colleagues, issued a call for peace.

For its part, America is struggling to hold a consistent line on the attacks. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, called the Israeli strikes a “unilateral action”. But if Donald Trump didn’t approve the attacks, it would hardly strengthen his credibility as leader of the greatest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, would it? “I think it’s been excellent,” the President said of the very attacks he had tried strenuously to dissuade Netanyahu from launching. Offended by a journalist’s implication that he may not have been fully in the loop, he retorted, “Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was…we know what’s going on.”

Trump and Netanyahu seem to have stumbled into a good cop-bad cop routine, with the US President urging the Iranians to come swiftly to terms “before there is nothing left”. Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, had been due to meet in Muscat tomorrow for the sixth round of talks aimed at capping Iran’s uranium enrichment in return for a lifting of sanctions. But the President’s boasting that he was in on the Israeli attacks, the assassination of Shamkhani, who had been overseeing Iran’s negotiators, and Israel’s evident determination not to allow an Iranian enrichment capability of any kind have dampened Iranian enthusiasm. In the words of a foreign ministry spokesman, “You cannot claim to negotiate and at the same time…allow the Zionist regime to target Iran’s territory.”

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By Edward Luttwak

If Trump did approve the Israeli action, as opposed to simply knowing about it, it may be that he thinks Iran will be bounced into accepting a complete cessation of enrichment. In fact, events of recent days, clearly aimed at toppling the regime, are more likely to suggest to Khamenei that only by going for a bomb can the Islamic Republic survive.

Iran’s route to do so is to further enrich its stockpile to weapons grade. Given that Natanz seems to be out of action — according to Rafael Mariano Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has visited the site often, it was “heavily damaged” in the Israeli attacks — the fuel needs to be moved to Fordow. Such a transfer, however, would make it a “sitting duck” for Israeli drones, according to a former US spy quoted in the New York Times, while Trump would presumably unleash his exceptionally heavy bunker busters if he learned that Khamenei had issued orders to go for a bomb. Not that Trump ever utters the name of his adversary, which tells us a lot.

Khamenei’s name is not dissimilar to the name of his predecessor, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. But distinguishing between the two is perfectly manageable if you put your mind to it. You would expect the Iranians to figure out the difference between, say, Thomson and Timpson, wouldn’t you? Furthermore, if you dignify your adversary with a name, a personality, psychological traits, weaknesses and strengths follow naturally; your adversary becomes legible. But the current American administration is not interested in reading its foes. “Khamenei” is too much of a mouthful for them, so they call him, with cartoonish emphasis, “the Ayatollah”.

And so, 46 years since he played a small role in the victory of the Islamic Revolution, this man without a name who is in fact one of the most significant politicians of our age is running out of road. The current crisis is unlikely to end without him conceding the right to enrich uranium, which, to his mind, amounts to surrendering to the enemy he has spent his entire life fighting, and which might not, in any case, save the Islamic Republic. Flight is not an option. Unlike Assad, he would not accept a dacha outside Moscow. He would prefer to die in Iran. The Ayatollah is very old and he is surrounded by men who keep getting killed. To go for a bomb would be the last throw of the dice, and probably suicidal, and we are not quite there yet.

The adults recounted the episode repeatedly as I grew up. I never found it quite that funny, but they did: would that they could be as blissfully oblivious to such a world-historical drama. Many of those watching that night were secular progressives and democrats who had supported the 1979 revolution, only to watch haplessly as Khomeini built a theocracy atop the corpses of their comrades.

Would his croaking trigger a fracturing of that young regime? This was the question — hope, really — roiling them all that night, while millions of the imam’s devotees mourned him in the streets. The answer was no. Instead, the regime consolidated under Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, whose factional cunning and ruthlessness made up for what he lacked in learning as faqih, or Shiite jurisprudent.

The octogenarian Khamenei has been running the Islamic Republic for more than 35 years now — almost my entire life. He has managed this, in large part, by keeping the regime on the anti-American and anti-Israel course that was set for it by Khomeini, driving millions, my family included, into the Persian diaspora along the way. And now, amid Israel’s assault, his strategy — combining brinksmanship with incompetence and underdevelopment — has brought the regime, and maybe the country, to the brink of ruin.

Yet the question that should be roiling Western leaders today, President Trump above all, is whether they are prepared to court an even wider disaster, as Jerusalem presses for maximal military advantage? Or to put it another way: can the West avoid the same hubris that brought Khamenei’s regime to its knees?

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By Sohrab Ahmari

The Iranians told an intricate moral and strategic story to explain their course. They offered a litany of grievances — some real, some not — against the US-led bloc in the Middle East going back decades. And they combined an expansive estimate of Iran’s true civilizational scope with a theological opposition to Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land and old-fashioned conspiracism: the suspicion that behind every internal failure lurks a hidden Jewish hand.

As an energy-rich but isolated middle power, the Islamic Republic adopted a strategy of proxy warfare, funding a chain of mostly (but not only) Shiite proxies from the Levant to Mesopotamia down to the Arabian Peninsula. These provided a defensive buffer, pestered the US bloc, and allowed Tehran to effectively claim territory when Sunni power faltered, just like in Iraq after George Bush’s invasion. As the Arab states more or less abandoned the Palestinian cause, Iran stepped up as its champion, garnering a respect among global Muslim audiences that was denied to it by much of the Iranian populace, especially the secular and the educated.

Through it all, blood-curdling “death-to” chants — Marg Bar Amreeka, Marg Bar Israel — rang out at regime rallies. The chants were soon married to an incipient nuclear program, ostensibly for domestic energy needs. The program almost certainly had a military dimension, but I’m no longer convinced the aim was to “wipe Israel off the map”, as many officials warned. More likely, it was intended as an insurance policy against regime change.

But here’s the thing: if you keep chanting death to a nation of people that survived an attempted genocide within living memory — and build up a nuclear program along the way — you’re taking quite a gamble. You’re raising the stakes to all in, and acting like you’re sitting on pocket aces, when really you’re holding an off-suit Jack-10 at best.

For a good while, Khamenei turned his moderately good hand into decent pots. He bluffed, yes, but he also skillfully exploited the other side’s felicitous errors. America’s post-9/11 wars and the Arab Spring uprisings created power vacuums into which Tehran projected power and presence.

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By Reuel Marc Gerecht

The postwar government that emerged in Iraq after Saddam Hussein fell was an Iranian client protected by US airpower. Syria’s civil war threatened to take out a key proxy, the Assad regime, but the defensive operation led by Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani succeeded well enough. Saudi Arabia waged a brutal, long war against Yemen’s Tehran-backed Houthis but failed to dislodge them.

Then came the October 7 attack. As I noted at the time, citing a Persian proverb, “This ‘I hope you die’ isn’t one of those usual ‘I hope you die’s’.” Meaning: the massacre cast such serious doubt on the Jewish state’s defense capability — it so gravely called into question its entire reason for existence — that the response was bound to be a game-changer. In the immediate aftermath, there were conflicting reports and intelligence assessments about whether Hamas had freelanced the attack, or whether it was planned in coordination with (or at least, notice to) the group’s Iranian patrons.

That was the moment for Khamenei to cash out his chips. Instead, he made a deadly bluff. Instead of backing off, the rational thing to do, Iran activated its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and launched a missile barrage at northern Israel — before the Jewish state had fired a single retaliatory shot at Hamas at Gaza. I remember tuning into Persian-language pro-regime X spaces where the exuberance, and the delusional belief that the end of the Zionist entity was nigh, were palpable.

Since then, what’s been revealed is the astonishing weakness of the Shiite crescent that was supposed to shield the Islamic Republic in such a scenario. Save for the Houthis, one after another fell: Hezbollah, de-testicled and decapitated; Hamas’s leadership, assassinated at the heart of Tehran; Bashar Assad, exiled to Moscow, replaced by an al-Qaeda warrior-turned-besuited member of the Davosie.

Now this: an attack that reportedly involved, among many other daring measures, the Mossad transferring drones into the country to disable air defenses ahead of the bombing raids. As an Iranian-American who cares about the old country’s safety and territorial integrity, I wish I could grab Khamenei by the collar — erm, keffiyeh — to ask: when your defenses are this decrepit, when your intelligence apparatus is this porous to Mossad infiltration, why pick fights with the world’s paramount power and its Holocaust-damaged regional client?

The maddening aspect, from the point of view of Iranian security, is that Khamenei at various points slowed down Tehran’s race to the nuke, but without seeking a broader regional compromise. He could have raced determinedly to the bomb, or he could have meaningfully thrown his weight behind across-the-board talks. But he picked the worst combination: material weakness combined with saber-rattling and provocation. Marg Bar Israel — well, kinda, sorta.

Yet the temptation to hubris isn’t limited to Tehran. It’s possible that the US-Israeli plan (if there is a plan) aims to degrade Khamenei’s capabilities until he reaches the precipice of regime collapse and cries uncle. Maybe it’ll work. Or maybe the Iranian obsession with saving “face”, which isn’t limited to this particular regime, will drag the United States into yet another open-ended, all-out war in the Middle East.

The potential nightmare scenarios are as numerous as they are appalling: regime collapse that leads not to the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty and the ascent to the Peacock Throne of its chubby dauphin, Reza, but warlordism and ethno-sectarian warfare that drives millions of refugees into Europe. Or a Chinese intervention in favor of a crucial energy partner and anchor of the new Eurasian bloc led by Beijing. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on the Persian Gulf monarchies.

For Washington, even being distracted from the pivot to the Pacific region is bad enough. It would give the impression of an American ruling class that is incapable of executing any of its own much-touted strategic plans. For Trump and his Trumpians, meanwhile, the danger lies in discrediting one of the central planks of their appeal to Main Street: namely, a focus on domestic reconsolidation and a determination to keep America out of a region that simply isn’t that important to an energy-rich superpower.

Khamenei’s hubris has already wrought devastation on my native land. I shudder to think that the American response might end up wasting another decade or two in my adopted home.

But the most significant part of Trump’s anti-interventionist speech, delivered on the first evening of a historic three-day trip to the Gulf, was not in its rhetoric but in policy. In a dramatic announcement, he stated that he would be ordering the “cessation of sanctions” against Syria. This, he said, would give the new government in Damascus “a chance at greatness”. From across the region, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief.

Among the most punitive in the world, the sanctions on Syria were introduced during the long reign of the Assad family, starting in the Seventies. But the most debilitating sanctions were imposed in the last years of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, who was ousted in December by Islamist rebels led by the country’s new de facto president Ahmed al-Sharaa. Leaders with a stake in regional stability, including many assembled in Riyadh, had worried that absent sanctions relief, Syria could soon become a failed state — one that could potentially descend into full-scale sectarian civil war and even dissolution, sending more refugees towards Turkey and Europe.

In Syria, where some people haven’t received salaries for months, sanctions have strangled the economy, inhibited foreign investment, hampered the provision of humanitarian aid, and surely placed increased strain on existing fissures within society. As a result, the news boosted Syria’s beleaguered currency, with the pound strengthening against the dollar for the first time in years.

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Sanctions relief, coupled with Trump’s brief meeting with Sharaa yesterday — the first such meeting between a Syrian and American leader in 25 years — mean relations between the two countries have been suddenly transformed. This is due in part to Al-Sharaa’s wise choice to invest heavily in Syria’s relations with Saudi Arabia, and aggressive diplomatic outreach that began immediately after his forces seized power. Indeed, convincing the region and the West to trust him despite his history as a leader of militant Islamist groups has been central to his government’s charm offensive. During the US occupation of Iraq, the new president spent years as an inmate in an American prison infamous for nurturing jihadists. Upon his release, he returned to Syria to fight, first with ISIS and then al-Qaeda, eventually severing ties with both to form his own ostensibly more moderate outfit, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Since his ousting of Assad, Sharaa has embraced the language of inclusivity, meeting many minority leaders and securing cautious support from many corners of the EU. Even so, spasms of sectarian violence have tempered the initial optimism that accompanied Assad’s fall.

In Syria, there has been widespread jubilation at the news of sanction relief. But removing US sanctions will not be as simple or as straightforward as many might wish. As Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow at Defense Priorities, explains, Syria has “multiple sanctions regimes in place” — making their revocation complicated. Some, such as Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) sanctions and Executive Order (EO) sanctions, can be lifted unilaterally by the president or his team. More difficult to remove will be the so-called Caesar sanctions, which require Congressional approval. The president can only waive these for up to 180 days, and even that requires him certifying to various congressional committees that this is in America’s national security interest.

One alternative might be simply to ignore the law once those six months are up — something the administration has proven more than happy to do elsewhere. Yet as Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics, says, not everyone in Washington will be eager to help the new Syrian government. “There are elements in Washington that are very skeptical towards this idea that Sharaa has moved past his extremist past,” Cafiero says. They would want the sanctions to remain in place for longer.

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Beyond the excitement that accompanied Trump’s sanctions announcement, though, there was another, quieter message that received less attention: removing sanctions on Syria would give the United States an exit strategy. Behind all his praise of the Gulf’s leadership for the region’s achievements, and denigration of failed Western nation-building projects, was an unspoken declaration of his administration’s plans for the Middle East: a policy that would swap Western dependence for regional self-reliance and a reduction if not total withdrawal of the US troops on the ground in northeast Syria.

The US military presence supports local forces in countering ISIS, but the specter of withdrawal has been in the air since Trump won the November election. Assad’s fall a few weeks later forced a reassessment in an altered security environment. But before this week, the Trump administration appeared to have no coherent policy on Syria. Certainly, the rest of the administration’s messaging on Sharaa has been skeptical at best. Sebastian Gorka, Director of Counterterrorism at the US National Security Council, expressed reservations in February: “He was a jihadist for a long time,” he said. “Has he reformed himself? Is he a better man now? Does he believe in a representative (democratic) government?… In my 24 years of studying jihadist movements, I have never seen a successful jihadist leader evolve into a democrat or embrace representative government.”

What’s more, during her confirmation hearing earlier this year, Trump’s current Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, denounced Sharaa for “dancing in the streets on 9/11”. And while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not directed such pointed criticism at the Syrian president, there were other, subtler indications that he would not support the new Islamist leadership in Damascus: in March, new photos revealed that Hegseth had the word “kafir” — meaning “infidel” or “non-believer” — tattooed on his arm in Arabic. All this made this week’s developments particularly striking. After meeting President Sharaa, Trump had nothing but praise for him, calling him a “young, attractive guy, a tough guy with a strong past”.

Trump’s new Syria policy, then, seems to put him at odds with top members of his own team. It also suggests that there are other powerful figures who hold considerable sway over his decision-making. Trump has credited Sharaa’s two most ardent backers in the region, Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with convincing him to lift US sanctions on Syria. That they were able to do so suggests that both Riyadh and Ankara now play a preeminent role in shaping Washington’s thinking in the Middle East. It also implies that Trump is not taking all his cues from Israel. Earlier this year, it was reported that Israel had lobbied the US to keep its sanctions on Syria. And, just a few weeks ago, the IDF bombed an area next to the presidential palace in Damascus, only one of the many attacks it has launched against Syria since Assad’s fall. Now, in a dramatic turn of events, Trump is establishing friendly relations with the new Syrian president — on a trip to the Middle East with no scheduled stop in Israel.

Indeed, this week’s trip has exhibited Trump’s predilection for forming alliances with erstwhile foes. Trump emphasized that he was “willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even if our differences may be profound… I have never believed in having permanent enemies.” And in Trump’s world, new relationships are best solidified through dealmaking. This week’s deals have been of a historic size: on Tuesday, Trump secured a $600-million commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States. Sharaa has proven a quick study: though Syria lacks Saudi Arabia’s enormous financial resources, he reportedly offered Trump what he could: a Trump Tower in Damascus. During his meeting with Trump yesterday, Sharaa also invited the United States to invest in Syria’s oil and gas sector.

But, as Cafiero says, American investors will likely remain hesitant, at least initially. Instead, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will be Syria’s most important partners in making investments. The sanctions may soon vanish, but terrorism designations are just one reason why Western governments and companies may be reluctant to invest. With the US looking to reduce its military footprint in the region while strengthening its business partnerships, Trump’s friends in the Gulf appear poised to consolidate their influence in the new Syria.