On Saturday, April 25, explosions and sustained gunfire erupted near the Kati military base outside Bamako, where General Assimi Goïta, leader of Mali's military junta, has installed his residence. Simultaneous strikes followed near the Modibo Keïta International Airport, in Kidal and Gao to the north, and in the central Mopti region.

The assault belongs to a longer trajectory.

Since September 2025, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, JNIM, has imposed an economic blockade upon Bamako and the principal supply routes of the country, a slow strangulation that has produced fuel shortages, intermittent electricity, and the closure of schools.

Understanding Who is Who:

• AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb): The North African affiliate, formed in 2007 from the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, and the parent organization from which the Sahelian jihadist constellation, including JNIM, was generated.

• JNIM: Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Sahel, formed in 2017 through the merger of several Malian and regional jihadist factions such as Macina Liberation Front, Ansar Dine, and al-Mourabitoun.

  The group funds itself by ransoming captives, taxing locals, smuggling weapons, and extorting human and drug traffickers.

• The Tuaregs: A Berber people of the central Sahara whose ancestral territories straddle Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso, and whose history with Bamako has been marked by recurring rebellions over the autonomy of the north, most notable one was in the 1960s. Estimates place their total population at 2–3 million.

• Azawad: The name Tuareg separatists use for the northern half of Mali. It was declared an independent state in April 2012 by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and is being actively claimed by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA).

The instinctive response to this debacle is to reach for the counterterrorism file but that way of framing the problem conceals the deeper geopolitical implications: a major strategic setback for Russia in the Sahel and a direct threat to NATO’s southern flank.

The Origins of the Crisis

The Sahelian crisis traces its proximate origins to the collapse of the Qaddafi regime.

The 2011 NATO-backed fall of Tripoli unleashed consequences that Bamako and the West failed to anticipate, prevent, or counter — chief among them the return of Tuareg fighters previously integrated into Qaddafi’s security apparatus. These men arrived in northern Mali heavily armed and carrying deep-seated resentments over marginalization that had already fueled multiple earlier rebellions against the central Malian state.

By early 2012, Tuareg separatists of the MNLA had already formed tactical alliances with jihadist groups already active in the Sahara. They also declared the independent state of Azawad and rapidly overran the northern half of Mali. Which led to the disintegration of the Malian army and a military coup in Bamako in March 2012 that only deepened the chaos. By January 2013, the jihadist coalition — now dominant over the Tuareg separatists — was advancing southward toward the capital.

It was at this critical juncture that France intervened. Operation Serval (January 2013) shattered the jihadist offensive, retook the northern cities, and prevented the total collapse of the Malian state/government.

Due to the immense structural issues, Operation Serval was later replaced by the broader regional mission Operation Barkhane, which for nearly a decade maintained a fragile equilibrium across the Sahel. That stability rested on three institutional pillars: the sustained presence of French forces, empowering local partner governments, and a regional security architecture built around the G5 Sahel joint force (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) and the UN mission (MINUSMA).

The Russian Intervention

However, that French architecture was already under significant strain when Russia moved to dismantle it. Françafrique had been gradually eroding for years, facing growing domestic and regional criticism. Even when French operations delivered tangible security gains, they encountered increasing political contestation and accusations of overreach.

After the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023, Wagner later rebranded as Africa Corps, accelerated the expulsion of French forces from Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, delivering the final blows to France’s longstanding influence across its former colonies.

At the same time, they fueled tensions between the Sahelian juntas and Washington, which ultimately led to the U.S. withdrawal from Air Base 201 in Niger, a key strategic drone facility that had cost American taxpayers 110 million dollars.

The interesting part regarding Russia’s campaign is that it operated on two parallel tracks: the operational and the informational.

On the informational front, Wagner conducted sustained disinformation operations to delegitimize France as a credible counterterrorism partner. A notorious example took place in April 2022 at the Gossi base. After French forces departed, surveillance drones captured Russian mercenaries digging and staging a mass grave, then attributing the atrocity to the departing French troops. Such episodes exemplified their broader methodology across the region.

France was then forced to retreat. President Emmanuel Macron withdrew 400 special forces from Burkina Faso, 2,400 troops from Mali, and suspended military cooperation with the Central African Republic.

In February 2023, he announced a new security partnership focused on training and support rather than direct security guarantees, diplomatic language that masked a clear drawdown.

Moscow seized then the opportunity and consolidated further its operational gains with the active involvement of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who backed the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) which united Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger as a direct counterweight to ECOWAS and the African Union, institutions long central to Western and NATO-linked regional cooperation against terrorism and other threats.

Mali: Russia's New Afghanistan

However, despite its early successes in the Sahel with a limited number of operators, Russia made costly strategic errors in Mali. The most visible case occurred on 25 July 2024 at Tinzaouaten, near the Algerian border, where Tuareg forces ambushed a joint column of Wagner mercenaries and Malian troops, delivering what remains Wagner’s most significant defeat in Africa to date.

The toll was heavy as roughly 20 Russian mercenaries were killed and around 10 Malian Armed Forces (FAMA) soldiers dead, several armored vehicles destroyed, and at least one helicopter lost.

More importantly, when viewed alongside the rapid expansion of jihadist groups and their growing cooperation with Tuareg factions, the Tinzaouaten defeat revealed early on that Russia is repeating in West Africa the classic doctrinal mistakes of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan. One can argue that it made similar ones in Syria as well, but given the overwhelming historical evidence and archives, I chose to focus on Afghanistan as a template.

Four errors stand out.

The first error is the primacy of total regime preservation over meaningful territorial command, sustained by systematic disinformation campaigns. Much as Soviet strategy in Afghanistan centered on shoring up Kabul's communist leadership while effectively ceding the countryside, Africa Corps today channels its resources into protecting the Malian junta and securing gold extraction corridors — leaving vast interior territories open to JNIM expansion.

Indeed, Russian messaging operations paper over this de facto withdrawal by manufacturing the perception of Malian junta competence and military momentum. In the near term, this posture can appear functional, but it intensifies the vulnerabilities bearing down on the central government. Any perceptible sign of fragility risks triggering an escalatory cycle of jihadist attacks, hastening precisely the systemic breakdown the strategy was designed to forestall.

The second pattern is an institutional refusal to grapple with the genuine ethnic and political grievances that give the insurgency its sociological fuel. Moscow and the Bamako junta have met Tuareg claims with coercion rather than negotiation. The Tuareg are a historically subaltern, predominantly Berber-speaking pastoral-nomadic people whose territoriality and social organization are anchored in the northern Saharan and Sahelian ecozones, and who have long articulated demands for autonomy from a sedentary, south-dominated central state whose administrative logic sits in fundamental tension with their segmentary social structures.

The Soviet parallel is instructive: Moscow systematically bypassed the autochthonous institutional frameworks sustaining Afghan social order, among them the jirga, the deliberative council rooted in tribal and lineage structures, and the qawm, the primordial solidarity group defined by overlapping ties of kinship, locality, and patron-client reciprocity that constituted the foundational unit of political allegiance.

The junta and its Russian patrons have reproduced this failure at large scale in Mali, misrecognizing Tuareg ethno-political identity as a security variable to be neutralized rather than a deeply embedded sociocultural formation requiring genuine interlocution. The consequence has been the progressive and gradual reintegration of Tuareg factions into tactical convergence with JNIM, enlarging the insurgency's ethnic constituency and territorial reach.

The third pattern is the excision of Mali from any broader architecture of legitimacy or multilateral cooperation. Following the coups in Burkina Faso in 2022 and Niger in 2023, the Sahelian juntas made a calculated break with ECOWAS, the regional body that had formally condemned the seizures of power and signaled the possibility of sanctions and military intervention. The Soviet precedent is structurally illuminating. Moscow progressively confined itself to a narrow, deeply illegitimate client government in Kabul, hemorrhaging both domestic Afghan support and international standing in the process.

The Sahelian juntas have traced a comparable trajectory, opting for open confrontation with regional institutions and Western interlocutors rather than seeking multilateral accommodation. The consequences have been predictable. Diplomatic encirclement, economic sanctions from regional bodies, and near-total security dependence on Moscow as the sole patron willing to underwrite their survival have followed in sequence.

What makes this pattern particularly damaging for Mali, however, is that isolation is not symmetrical in its costs.

For Moscow, the severing of Mali’s Western and regional partnerships is strategically rational, as it deepens junta dependency, forecloses alternative patrons, and consolidates Russian leverage.

For Bamako, the calculus is far more punishing. The rupture with Western partners and regional bodies has effectively dismantled the intelligence-sharing architecture that previously provided actionable information on jihadist networks, financing flows, and cross-border movements. JNIM operates across porous Sahelian frontiers, and countering it requires precisely the type of multilateral intelligence cooperation that isolation has rendered unavailable.

Fourth, the chronic underestimation of the adaptive capacity and structural resilience of local insurgent networks. Soviet planners entered Afghanistan with the assumption that a conventionally superior military apparatus could rapidly dismantle a fragmented tribal resistance. The mujahideen confounded that assumption entirely, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for tactical improvisation, terrain exploitation, and the construction of durable decentralized organizational forms that proved highly resistant to attrition.

Russia and the Malian junta have reproduced the same foundational miscalculation. They have operated under the recurring assumption that concentrated firepower, mercenary deployment, and periodically visible operational successes such as the seizure of Kidal would progressively degrade JNIM and Tuareg resistance to the point of collapse.

The insurgents have instead demonstrated a sophisticated repertoire of adaptive strategies by integrating guerrilla tactics with economic strangulation and colonizing governance vacuums left by state absence.

Implications for Europe and NATO South

The unfolding crisis in Mali carries profound strategic consequences for Europe.

The first and most immediate risk is a renewed surge in migration.

Mali lies at the center of the main overland migration corridors from sub-Saharan Africa toward Libya and the Mediterranean. The loss of state control in Bamako and across its northern and central regions is already accelerating irregular migrant flows. These movements are larger in scale than previous waves and arrive in a Europe still politically scarred by the Libyan and Syrian crises.

The second risk is the weakening of NATO’s southern flank and the growing difficulty of effective intervention.

Jihadist groups, particularly JNIM, are actively seeking to replicate in Niger and Burkina Faso the same strategy of territorial expansion, economic blockades, and coordinated attacks that has succeeded in Mali. A contiguous zone of instability stretching across the three Alliance of Sahel States members would grant jihadists strategic depth, operational sanctuaries, and easier access toward coastal West Africa and the Maghreb. This dramatically raises the cost and complexity of any future European military engagement while leaving Europe’s southern frontier increasingly exposed and harder to defend.

In essence, the disintegration of authority in Mali should be seen as the leading edge of a wider process that threatens to destabilize the entire central Sahel and export its consequences directly into Europe.

This piece was originally published in The New York Post

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On Monday, China’s Xi Jinping let the mask slip.

After weeks remaining largely absent from the diplomatic picture as the US conducted Operation Epic Fury against Iran, Xi called Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman to publicly urge a peaceful reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The pressure on Beijing is showing.

At least five Iranian-linked tankers heading from the Gulf of Oman to Malaysia have changed course after the US Navy warned that ships carrying Iranian oil would be intercepted anywhere in the world.

And now, every concession the IRGC withholds costs it more than the one before.

Operation Epic Fury destroyed the military capacity Iran has used to threaten to close the strait, and dismantled the architecture the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps built to survive the decapitation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

What remains is a rump regime without the arsenal, command or finances that lent its threats weight.

President Trump should read this as the strongest card he holds against Beijing.

Xi spent a decade cultivating the Islamic Republic as the armed underwriter of Chinese influence in the Middle East.

Its erosion in this campaign hands Washington immense leverage.

Three fronts establish the stakes.

The first is military.

The US campaign dismantled the arsenal that Chinese industrial networks spent years building.

China had emerged as the principal external supplier of Iran’s ballistic missile program, providing chemical precursors for solid rocket fuel as well as satellite intel and navigation systems.

Indeed, the Treasury Department sanctioned several Chinese entities for supplying the Revolutionary Guard with chemicals used in missile fuel production, and US intelligence documented Iranian cargo ships unloading sodium perchlorate at Bandar Abbas in quantities sufficient to fuel approximately 800 new missiles.

Beijing was also negotiating the sale of CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers.

In December, US special forces raided a merchant vessel in the Indian Ocean carrying Chinese cargo bound for the Revolutionary Guard.

The second front is financial.

Iran served as China’s proving ground for sanctions evasion, the laboratory in which Beijing refined the techniques it expected to deploy at scale against US sanctions.

“Operation Economic Fury” has contested it.

The Trump administration sent letters to financial institutions in Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and China, citing evidence that these institutions moved Iranian funds linked to illicit activity.

The letters are reportedly the first step toward secondary sanctions that would sever those institutions’ ties to the US financial system.

The third front is diplomatic.

Beijing brokered the Iran-Saudi normalization in March 2023 and presented it as evidence of a new Chinese diplomatic order.

The missiles and drones Iran fired at sites throughout the region during the recent conflict exposed the agreement as a paper arrangement that Beijing couldn’t enforce.

The damage deepened when the United Arab Emirates aligned with the US-led coalition and called for the reopening of the strait, while Beijing remained silent on the weaponization of the waterway that carries its own energy imports.

The Gulf monarchies now know what a Chinese security partnership amounts to when Iranian aggression reaches their territory.

The same pattern holds for the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela’s dictatorship has fallen, Nicolás Maduro is in US custody and Beijing’s position in Latin America has collapsed.

Within months, Washington has broken the two regimes through which Xi projects influence into the regions that matter most to the United States.

Washington is already collecting the gains in Asia.

Indonesia signed the Major Defense Cooperation Partnership on April 13, pulling Jakarta into the American security architecture through a framework for military modernization and professional military education.

The Philippines has joined that architecture and will host a 4,000-acre industrial hub anchoring supply chains that Washington intends to build outside Chinese reach.

The geography of those partnerships carries its own message.

Indonesia flanks the Strait of Malacca, through which the bulk of Chinese energy imports travel.

Washington has just demonstrated in the Strait of Hormuz the operational template for denying a chokepoint to a state that depends on it.

Beijing will draw the inference without being told.

Trump postponed his visit to China and refused the supplicant’s role Beijing had prepared.

He’ll travel on his own timetable, with those facts established before the first handshake.

Tehran saw the Strait of Hormuz as its ultimate coercive instrument, yet US power exposed it as a threat it can fairly easily overcome.

Xi Jinping will open the conversation knowing that Washington has broken his proxies, closed his laboratory and reduced to rubble an arsenal he spent a decade underwriting.

The card is in Trump’s hand. The administration has already begun to play it.

Asia is where the greatest returns are landing, and Beijing is where the reckoning comes next.

Always say what you see. Above all — and far harder — always see what you see.

Charles Péguy

Since last October, when I published my piece on Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution, I have received a wide range of reactions. Some have been thoughtful, others less so, and a number of interpretations have been attributed to my argument that bear little resemblance to what I actually wrote. I want to clarify a few points.

I wrote about Third-Worldism because my work focuses on foreign policy, and I am interested in the way foreign conflicts are mobilized for domestic purposes, as well as how domestic tensions shape the interpretation of those conflicts.

In the United States and elsewhere, one repeatedly encounters a fixation on external powers, accompanied by a vocabulary that relies on terms such as “surrogate power” or “settler colonialism.”

My premise is that this type of language doesn’t emerge spontaneously since it’s rooted in a specific intellectual tradition, what was originally called tiers-mondisme.

The term itself is often treated today as a polemical label, but has a precise origin. Alfred Sauvy coined the expression “Third World” in 1952 to describe a category of countries situated outside the dominant Cold War blocs, and from that point an entire body of political thought developed around it.

Islamism as a Third-Worldist Force

I also chose to address this question because the term “Islamism” is used loosely. In the United States and in most Western countries, Islamic movements rarely emerge1 as autonomous political actors. Their expression is mainly indirect, shaped by broader ideological currents that define how they are received and articulated.

First, Islamism in its doctrinal core demands a fully ordered society ruled by religious law — sharia. In Western Europe, especially France, secularism and laïcité set formal limits, but Islamists treat those limits as tools for adaptation and infiltration rather than genuine barriers.

They cleverly mask their ambitions in the language of human rights, minority protections, and anti-discrimination, allowing them to maneuver inside secular systems. They readily align with segments of the radical left around shared enemies, enabling tactical coordination without ever abandoning their ultimate goals. Most dangerously, they provide a ready-made playbook of “resistance” that fuels mobilization and justifies violence.

Second, modern political Islamism maintains a clear direction. It wages a total critique of modernity, liberalism, and the West, all branded as symptoms of Western civilizational decay. This contempt extends to the Westernized individual and to the West itself as a symbol of corruption.

The same judgment falls on Muslim societies that have succumbed to Western influence: they are branded complicit, degenerate, and therefore legitimate targets for destruction. This vision meshes perfectly with the daily practice of radical groups, who devote themselves to hunting down and punishing anyone labeled a collaborator with the United States. Their fury at the Gulf states, routinely denounced as capitalist pigs, gains extra venom from the Islamist verdict that brands them as corrupt, inauthentic, and traitors to true Islam.

Third, this Islamist direction converges perfectly with Third-Worldist thinking. The West is cast as the ultimate adversary and the supreme reference point for all evil, while every local grievance is absorbed into a grand vision of global resistance. Islamism slots neatly into a larger anti-imperialist framework obsessed with delivering absolute historical justice.

This is precisely why Green activists find so much common ground with Hezbollah and openly display affinity for these groups. The shared enemy and the shared narrative make the alliance feel natural.

Most people, unless they spend time engaging with foreign policy analysis, tend to view these ideas as abstract. I think they only become visible when they translate into political action, when movements portray themselves as part of a global decolonial project, when slogans such as “decolonizing a city” enter mainstream discourse, or when policy directions, including the push toward blocs like BRICS, begin to reflect this sort of grievance and resentment.

The mobilization for Gaza among certain segments of European youth also crashed into the June 2024 European elections.

In France, it deepened the fractures within a left already torn between Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) — fiercely anti-Israel and staunchly pro-Gaza — and the Socialist Party, home to many Jewish intellectuals who are radically hostile to Benjamin Netanyahu yet deeply attached to the Hebrew state.

This war between two lefts — the “decolonial” against the “colonial,” in the words of LFI’s lead candidate, MEP Manon Aubry — was further inflamed by the promotion of Franco-Palestinian jurist Rima Hassan, who is now set to take her seat in Strasbourg. Instead of focusing on social issues, the election became fixated on identity politics, with the Palestinian cause serving as the central theme for the Insoumis. This strategy allowed them to secure votes from both working-class Muslim immigrant communities and a segment of middle-class university students.

Le Bouleversement du monde: L'après-7 Octobre
Gilles Kepel

Third-Worldism in the U.S. Context

While trying to explain the attitude of intellectuals — merciless toward the failings of democracies, indulgent toward the greatest crimes, provided they are committed in the name of the right doctrines — I first encountered the sacred words: the Left, Revolution, Proletariat.

Raymond Aron, L'Opium des intellectuels, 1955

What’s striking today is that foreign conflicts now crash across borders in real time, carried by an unrelenting flood of images, commentary, and instant interpretation. They are devoured, processed, and forcibly reframed through a single ideological lens that imposes artificial order on events that would otherwise look chaotic and remote.

In this process, Third-Worldism supplies the crucial direction. It resurrects the old Marxist scaffolding of center versus periphery, recasting every distant war as part of an eternal global struggle between the exploiting core and the oppressed margins.

In the United States, several dynamics explain the reemergence of this:

The first is the institutionalization of Third-Worldist ideology within universities. The study of decolonization remains essential to understanding global history. Civilizations rise and fall, populations move, cultures intermingle, and every society carries traces of conquest and exchange. Within much of the contemporary academy, this inquiry has taken on a moral function. This is damaging to a genuine understanding of power dynamics and history.

The second is the exhaustion of domestic progressive politics. Political campaigns centered on identity have reached a point of fatigue in the United States. They continue to shape discourse, while their capacity to mobilize has weakened. This is where Third-Worldism introduces a different register. Political energy moves from the individual to the global, and a structural reading of power regains prominence.

The third is the expansion of anti-Israelism within a wider ideological field. Israel appears as the place where American power becomes nakedly visible, a concentrated symbol of global hierarchies and domination. It becomes a fixation. This reading rests on the conviction that every political conflict is merely a surface expression of deeper economic and political structures. The question of Israel thus becomes inseparable from the question of American empire itself, and the entire conflict is swallowed into a single, sweeping narrative of global struggle against oppression.

A fourth dynamic can be found in the weakening of national political reference points. Public debate shows a growing tendency to interpret domestic issues through external categories and conflicts. The language of international struggle is migrating inward, reshaping how political life in the United States is even understood. The old distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is collapsing. Only global narratives now supply the master frame through which every local issue is interpreted and judged. One can perhaps look at what podcasters are talking about today to gain a sense of it.

A World Read Through Global Struggle

It is far easier to condemn the world than to justify it.

Raymond Aron

I do not claim that Third-Worldism explains all the problems of the United States or of any other country. That would be an overreach. My aim is more limited. I am trying to understand the drivers behind certain patterns of thought, the belief systems that give them structure, and the energy that sustains them.

The United States, as a major power, inevitably becomes the object of competing interpretations, and some of these systems organize themselves primarily in opposition to it. Each country, in turn, develops its own variant of Third-Worldist thinking, shaped by its history and political traditions. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, France, Italy, Argentina... All have their Third-Worldists.

But what is even more striking is that, within this broader pattern, the rise of antisemitism in the West serves as a clear indicator of how far this mode of thinking has spread. As global conflicts are increasingly read through categories of domination and oppression, complex political realities are compressed into blunt hierarchies of power.

Within that ordering, Jews and Israel are placed on the side identified with dominance, stripped of historical specificity and recast as symbols. In its current forms, this depiction goes further, presenting Jews as the embodiment of a cosmopolitan American project, rootless, powerful, aligned with capital and empire, a convenient stand-in for everything associated with Western hegemony. And worse, they have Israel.

This translation gives hostility a political language and allows it to circulate within a thought process that appears legitimate, even established.

Most people will miss what is happening entirely. It is far too easy to dismiss this intellectual current as marginal noise and remain comfortably absorbed in small causes, campaigns, and personal projects. That comfortable habit belongs to a dead era. In the United States, the conditions have fundamentally changed. Public life will now unfold under an unrelenting stream of global exposure and interpretation.

In this new environment, Third-Worldism will not dominate as an official doctrine. Instead, it will function as a ruthless organizing machine for political mobilization.

It will weld disparate tensions together, force them into a single broader horizon, and discipline them through the familiar categories of class, domination, exploitation, and imperial hierarchy. Every local actor will be stripped of individuality and recast as a mere expression of larger historical forces, locked inside a sweeping narrative of capital and dependency.

Third-Worldism drew its raw power in the 1960s and 1970s from the Cold War’s rigid bipolar frame, which fused scattered conflicts into one grand narrative and transformed isolated events into a single intelligible global struggle.

It’s reemerging now in the United States under radically new conditions. The instant circulation of information, of hot takes, the visibility of distant wars, and the desperate hunger for a unifying political language are once again stitching separate events into one continuous, unforgiving fight against the West and its friends.

Something unprecedented is stirring in the Arab world. Beyond the expected discussion of the war and of Iran’s long record as an aggressor, one now hears a different register altogether, a growing conviction that the regime itself may actually fall because its revolutionary aim is being exhausted.

I believe this shift has no precedent in living memory.

Before turning to the two interviews, it is worth dwelling on the theological dimension in which the IRGC operates. Most American observers remain unfamiliar with how the Revolutionary Guard sees itself and the world, and that unfamiliarity matters, because it is the only lens through which Trump's threats, erratic and occasionally frightening to Western ears, can be properly understood from the inside.

The Eschatological Machine

Whatever clerics and Revolutionary Guards commanders remain standing in Iran are actually men who have spent their entire lives inside an edifice that explicitly defined this moment for them, and that has nevertheless failed to prepare them for Trump’s modus operandi.

To grasp how they read it, one must first understand what they believe the world fundamentally to be.

In 2006, Bernard Lewis, writing in a piece titled “August 22,” identified the roots of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons with considerable precision.

“There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers. This worldview and expectation, vividly expressed in speeches, articles, and even schoolbooks, clearly shape the perception and therefore the policies of Ahmadinejad and his disciples.”

Lewis wrote those words nearly two decades ago, and the worldview he described has never required updating. It remains what it has always been, the foundation upon which an entire revolutionary state gets built. In a certain sense, the Islamic Republic runs an eschatological project that happens to possess a government. What it actually builds toward, always, is Qiyamah, the Day of Judgment.

That project rests on a specific theological architecture, one that begins with Twelver Shia Islam’s singular orientation toward the end of history. The entire tradition converges on Akhir az-Zaman, when the hidden Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, emerges from his divine occultation. He remains in concealment, awaiting the appointed hour.

When that hour arrives, the Mahdi emerges to confront and defeat the Dajjal (The False Messiah) and the Sufyani, a tyrant from the Levant whose wars and massacres figure among the major signs of Qiyamah. The tradition holds something considerably more nuanced, for the Mahdi arrives at the lowest point of the human condition, summoned by the world’s complete exhaustion of its capacity for suffering.

Obviously, no eschatological matrix, however elaborate, suspends itself in abstraction. It requires an originary wound, a historical moment so charged with injustice that it ruptures the boundary between the temporal and the sacred, and becomes, permanently, both. For Shia Islam, that moment is the Battle of Karbala.

In 680 A.D., Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, was surrounded and killed on the plains of southern Iraq, abandoned by a passive world. The event underwent an immense metaphysical transfiguration, becoming the prism par excellence through which all subsequent suffering gets refracted.

There is an almost cyclical quality to this arrangement since every generation re-enacts Karbala. For Khomeini, Karbala and Qiyamah formed a single continuous arc, a battlefield that time never closed, still accumulating its martyrs, still moving toward its predetermined conclusion.

The evil genius of Khomeini lies precisely in this, in his grasp of this horizon’s governing potential. In his fatwas, he addressed Iranians during the revolution in the register of a man for whom the plain of Qiyamah had already begun to fill. “O nation, wake up! O government, wake up! Everybody wake up! You are all in the Presence of God. Tomorrow, you will be called to account. Do not ignore the blood of our martyrs, and do not quarrel over position or status.”

What the Arab World Sees

One must pause here and reckon with what this kind of certitude actually does inside a revolutionary and militaristic state, because its function rarely gets understood from the outside.

In ideologies centered on the end of the world, believers discover a profound certainty that removes all doubt about the future. This conviction serves as a divine promise. History does not remain truly open-ended, since God has already determined its final outcome.

A normal Western politician carefully weighs risks and adapts to changing circumstances. But the true committed IRGC revolutionary, driven by this unshakable faith, inhabits an entirely different relationship with time. For him, the final victory is already secured. The present does not create the future, and merely confirms what was always destined to occur.

Raymond Aron once observed that “foreknowledge of the future makes it possible to manipulate both enemies and supporters.” The IRGC not only believes in its eschatological vision, but it also uses it, and the difference matters enormously.

Indeed, eschatological certainty possesses the capacity to mobilize populations; it’s almost a hypnotic force and grants its believers an enormous power to erode political constraints and manufacture sacrificial commitment on a vast scale. Which is why what distinguishes the IRGC from the ordinary zealot is their simultaneous mastery of genuine belief and its calculated instrumentalization, a combination that renders them considerably more formidable.

But this orientation collides at every point with the mainstream Sunni worldview, which treats Judgment Day as a matter of divine concealment rather than political schedule. Sunni tradition forbids the forcing of providence and regards any state organized around accelerating the end of history as a deviation from Islam rather than its fulfillment. The Arab world reads the IRGC through this very lens, and what it sees is not a pious republic being tested, but a heterodox project masquerading as the fulfillment of faith, structurally incapable of assessing its strategic failures.

As a matter of fact, Arab media today surfaces an ideological skepticism toward the Islamic Republic that years of resistance mythology had long kept buried. That skepticism coalesces around two core claims:

First, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are executing generational modernization projects anchored in post-hydrocarbon economies oriented toward the future. Iran’s governing vision moves in the opposite direction entirely, organizing state power around an apocalyptic theology that treats modernity as a Dajjalic corruption and positions regional destabilization as a sacred instrument for hastening the end of history. For Arab capitals investing hundreds of billions into the next century, a neighbor whose ideological horizon terminates at the Mahdi's return represents a civilizational incompatibility, one that IRGC strikes on Gulf territory have now made impossible to manage through diplomacy alone.

Second, Iran's revolutionary theology teaches that adversity confirms the righteousness of believers and that enemies validate prophecy, which means eschatological conviction has entirely consumed the space where strategic analysis would otherwise operate. Arabs are watching a regime facing institutional collapse before the promised fulfillment arrives, one that has no doctrinal mechanism to absorb that failure and no capacity to assess it, because in Iranian doctrinal terms, the United States was never a potential negotiating partner but a Dajjalic force of deception and corruption. What Arab observers find most damning is precisely this, that a regime organizing an entire region around its prophetic vision cannot explain, even to itself, why the prophecy is unraveling.

The theological and revolutionary mindset described above may seem dense to the uninitiated, but it is precisely the background in which the Arab world is now processing Iran's institutional and religious disintegration.

The two interviews below, one with Iraqi researcher Ghaith al-Tamimi, a former Shia cleric, and one a panel debate between Arab intellectuals and analysts, speak directly to that moment.

Ghaith al-Tamimi: Iran Lost the War, and This Is What Awaits Iraq

Watch Interview

Host: You were criticizing then, and you still criticize Iran today. Khamenei was killed. How did you feel when Khamenei was killed by American and Israeli hands last February?

Tamimi: Oh my God, what a question, Your Eminence. Look, I faced this feeling when Saddam was executed. I faced this feeling on the ninth of April when the American army entered Baghdad as occupiers and liberators. I faced this question when Zarqawi was killed, when Bin Laden was killed, when Baghdadi, Sinwar, and Nasrallah were killed, all the way to Khamenei.

A complex ladder of personalities that I am influenced by, whose thought I engage with, whose ideology I engage with. This is the environment I breathe. Each one of these personalities is a deep narrative. I see before me a stage, and his death is the death of a scene in this play. We are facing a real and grand scene of ideology.

That is why I wrote about Khamenei’s death before his assassination. I wrote about the death of narratives, the death of a person.

Host: Why did you feel this way? You still have not described to me the exact state you were in.

Tamimi: The feeling is that this man chose this path, so he died an ideal death according to his methodology. As an opponent of Khamenei, it is not fitting for him to die less than al-Baghdadi, less than Saddam, less than Guevara, less than any of the great leaders who lead liberation revolutions, even if they are insane. They say that a person often resembles the way he dies.

I met Khamenei three times in my life. He is a charismatic man, an educated man, fluent in Arabic, a skilled translator of Sayyid Qutb’s In the Shade of the Qur’an. He is a man fluent in the language, deeply immersed in Arab and Islamic culture, the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb, literature, and a religious scholar.

You are facing a man who has been a judge for fifty years, a politician who has ruled Iran as president and as Supreme Leader. He is a man who is historically, physically, and in substance, the Shia religious scholar who wears a black turban and delivers his speech. His name is Ali, his tribe is Husseini, and his approach. You will notice all of this is rooted in the charisma of this person.

His death was precisely the kind of death that Sunnis who sympathized with the concept of the caliphate at the expense of the modern nation-state, or the way Baghdadi and Bin Laden were killed, this narrative needs. This is the ideal death for them. Sinwar is the same.

But on the other hand, in order for a state society to be established, in order to raise a generation whose culture is the culture of the state, when you tell them about the Islamic caliphate or the Islamic state with the rule of the jurist, they know that Islam is beliefs, behavior, and faith, not a system of states in life. The state needs a system built on laws, citizenship, investment, development, international relations, and interests.

This generation needs a great symbol to be raised, but Khamenei, whoever he is, is against everything you tell him about. Against citizenship, against the culture of coexistence and tolerance.

Host: He hates Arabs, right?

Tamimi: Look, to be clear, Khamenei does not hate Arabs. Yes, the Iranian regime is hostile to Arab regimes, but Khamenei, as an individual, is accused by Persians of being Arabized in Iranian culture and Persian in language. He is the most Arabized of them, unlike Khomeini.

Khomeini did not have a single instance of teaching in Arabic, not even in his classes in Najaf. Our teacher, Sayyid al-Sadr, may God have mercy on him, said, “I studied with Sayyid Khomeini in Najaf. He gave the lessons in Persian, and I wrote the report in Arabic.” Meanwhile Khamenei, in his Friday sermons in Tehran, addresses Arabs in Arabic, recites Iraqi and Arabic poetry, and is well-versed in Arabic.

He is like Erdogan, but he supports an expansionist ideological project. The proof is that as soon as he was killed, the Iranian war began against countries that have no connection to this war.

Host: For you, it has no connection to Khamenei’s project.

Tamimi: He says it many times, my dear lady. Khamenei clearly says, “We aspire to Islamic unity in this region that will expel the United States and its Western allies.” They slaughter the Jews, liberate Jerusalem, and overthrow the Arab regimes, which they consider infidel and tyrannical in terms of the religious doctrine of the Revolutionary Guard.

The political and military doctrine of the Revolutionary Guard and those associated with them considers these regimes pagan, infidel, and polytheistic. Therefore, they are like al-Qaeda and ISIS in this respect.

Host: Khamenei is gone for good. Where is his son?

Tamimi: He is under suspicion. In my opinion, I do not have tangible evidence, and if I did, I would have sent it to Trump. But my opinion is based on data and personal observation, considering that I am a religious man and that I have relationships with the Iranians, specifically the system of Sayyid Khamenei.

In my opinion, Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei was present at the incident when his father was killed. He and his mother were taken to the hospital. His condition was critical. He was admitted to the hospital, and there he disappeared. He disappeared, meaning he was in a severe coma, severely injured, and hidden for the benefit of the Revolutionary Guard.

Perhaps he died. I believe he died, or he is in a coma with his hands cut off, or disfigured to the point that he is unfit for anything and cannot write or give his opinion on anything. It is not even appropriate to photograph him or record his voice. The theory that he is still alive is completely out of the question.

Host: Why is there another jurist who is the Supreme Leader now in Iran?

Tamimi: Apart from who I believe is Ayatollah Arafi.

Host: Who is Ayatollah Arafi? Who is this person?

Tamimi: Ayatollah Arafi is close to Sayyid Khamenei, a Shia jurist, a religious authority within the system of the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, close to the Revolutionary Guard. I believe Ayatollah Arafi or someone like him is the real Supreme Leader. Because the Revolutionary Guard is at war, and deception in war is necessary, they have fabricated a story about a dead man to mislead the United States, Israel, and international public opinion, and to save the life of the real Supreme Leader.

All that is required of us is to give legitimacy to the Guard in the war. Nothing else is required.

Host: Do you think this information is widespread among American intelligence, Mossad, and others?

Tamimi: Honestly, I have not read a detailed analysis of this. Let me say that I am personally interested in this topic. As a researcher, I am interested in the marja’iyya, the religious authority. Khamenei, who comes after him, Sistani, who comes after him. This is my work, and I have been interested in it for years. I am involved in managing such matters.

I believe, according to the theory of the “righteous believers” and considering that they are in a state of war, they chose Ayatollah Arafi as the Supreme Leader and obtained his religious authorization to lead the war.

You might ask, “Is Sheikh Tamimi more extreme than Mojtaba Khamenei and Ali Khamenei?” The issue is not extremism. It is the ability to lead, influence, and shape events. These extremists can sometimes be useful because they are foolish. Arafi possesses this ability. I believe Ayatollah Arafi will only provide the religious cover.

You need to understand this. I am using a religious and jurisprudential term that those connected to this system understand. They need a virtuous figure. They need religious cover to lead. They are the “righteous believers” according to their jurisprudential system. They need a marja’ who says it is permissible to do so, that is all they need. Like Khamenei, he does not get into details.

Even with the killing of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader’s regime did not kill the Revolutionary Guard, which carries the Khomeini and Khamenei doctrine and the ideology of General Qassem Soleimani. They have been mobilized and trained for forty years, and they are still mobilized with everything you can and cannot imagine.

They cannot give it up so easily. The Iranians have a religious principle that says preserving order is the most important duty. What order? I am talking about the Revolutionary Guard’s system, not the state. They do not believe in the state.

Host: Okay, Sheikh Ghaith al-Tamimi, please excuse me. You said about two weeks ago that the Iranian regime had lost the war militarily and politically. What is your proof? Iran and the Revolutionary Guard are still capable of responding and influencing, still attacking Arab capitals and cities, still striking deep inside Israel. How can a regime that is finished and has lost the war politically and militarily continue to influence and respond?

Tamimi: It is very simple, Your Eminence, without complicating things. Any foolish teenage boy in any upscale neighborhood could break the windows of ten of the most beautiful houses. The fact that someone in the area might start a fire, might take a knife and kill children or commit an assault, does not mean they are strong, does not mean they are victorious, and does not even mean they exist.

The Iranians, the Revolutionary Guard, are committing suicide without any vision. Can you imagine them attacking Iraq? I cannot understand this. The Revolutionary Guard is attacking oil in Majnoon, meaning in Qurna, Basra. This is the strategic depth of the Shia who are linked to the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, who have been smuggling oil to Khamenei for twenty years and funding the Revolutionary Guard.

They go and attack Amarah, Basra, and Nasiriyah, attacking Iraqi army bases that Abu Fadak and the Popular Mobilization Forces use daily for movement and operations. Do you see such a thing? Imagine them attacking Camp Victoria in Baghdad, the one the Prime Minister, the Chiefs of Staff, the Popular Mobilization Forces, and the militia leaders use daily, and they call it an American base.

My friend, what is happening? And yet the Popular Mobilization Forces still support them, still take orders from them.

Host: Will the war end with the fall of this regime?

Tamimi: Yes, but they will continue to strike and weaken it until it disintegrates. It will not just fall in a normal way. It will disintegrate, meaning it will begin to fade away, fragment, and split internally over money, interests, and decision-making.

Host: What will happen after the cessation of operations, in your opinion, or during the coming weeks?

Tamimi: Before now, they are focusing on three types of targets. The Israelis are killing people, targeting individuals and command centers. The Americans have been striking strategic infrastructure and facilities. What they have in common is operations against camps, locations, and sites.

If we study this, they are dismantling command and control centers, and whenever they see them being reactivated somewhere or in some way, they eliminate them. Trump and Israel are working to rid Iran of weapons that affect the security of the region for a long period.

Host: You heard Trump, and even the Secretary of Defense, have always talked about a new regime. Do you really feel that there is a new regime in Iran, or is it a kind of counting of gains?

Tamimi: Trump is trying to say that this war ultimately produced a new regime. The problem is that we think ultimately. Who said that the American mind believes that there is an end, or that there should be an end? America is not going to disappear, and the region is not going to disappear.

Host: I am talking about military operations.

Tamimi: Military operations, my friend. What America and Israel are practically doing is destroying major strategic infrastructure that has had forty years spent on it. What good will the Revolutionary Guard do if it remains? It will remain, it will not matter. This is an illusion, an illusion of the left and the leftist media, who have been dreaming the same dream since October 7th. They do not want to wake up.

This war will not end except with a new Middle East. Let me tell you about Iran. Iran will enter a coma, just like Iraq entered a twenty-year coma. Iran will enter a coma like Libya is in a coma now, just like Yemen is in a coma.

Host: The difference, if you will allow me, is that when Iraq entered a coma, it was satisfied, meaning it withdrew into itself. Iran, with its missiles, you saw what it is doing.

Tamimi: My friend, give it two weeks, and everything will be finished. Missile farms, missile platforms, missile depots, missile production facilities, and missile carriers. All of this will be destroyed.

Panel on Iran Negotiations

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Al-Ahmari on the Gulf’s Security Concerns and the Militia Question

Al-Ahmari: Thank you, and thank you to Al Arabiya again. Yes, I believe they are, and the proof is the question of the militias and the proxies, the abandonment of the proxies. This is the most important point, and it is the real security concern, not the targeting that has occurred during this war. The strikes have a separate legal discussion regarding compensation and regarding the conversation with the Chinese guarantor, who had been the guarantor of the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, among others.

The reality is that the Gulf states’ demands reflected in these negotiations concern the abandonment of the militias and the proxies.

The strange coincidence is that the militias and proxies had their real expansion in the region under former President Obama during the negotiations of 2013, 2014, and 2015. Those negotiations expanded Iran’s footprint, tied to their famous statements about controlling the four Arab capitals. You can trace this back to statements by American officials of that period, including former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who said that there were semi-direct or indirect instructions not to confront Qassem Soleimani and the IRGC, because of the fear.

Host: Look at the deception. There was a fear in Obama’s mind that the Iranians would withdraw from the nuclear negotiations.

Al-Ahmari: Let them expand however they wish, but let us finish this agreement. Today, the militias and the proxies are one of the essential conditions in the negotiations, not just uranium enrichment. President Trump says we will not give up on any condition. One of the American items is the abandonment of the proxies. I believe this is a very clear Gulf concern, whether it involves support for the Houthis in Yemen, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and we have seen the missiles and drones launched which prompted the Saudi Foreign Ministry over the past two days to summon the Iraqi ambassador and issue a strongly worded statement condemning the aggressions that were launched from Iraq.

Where did these drones and missiles come from? From Iran, to the proxies in Iraq and the armed factions. Of the four militia networks that existed across the Arab world, the one in Syria has fallen. The Houthis today are in a truce and a security agreement with the legitimate government in Yemen, and they are respecting previous agreements. Nothing has been launched at the Gulf states by the Houthis, and they have not entered this battle.

Host: We have also seen Hezbollah today, with Lebanon in Washington, Lebanese officials in Washington. The unity of the fronts that Iran clung to no longer exists. Syria is out of the fold. Today Lebanon is negotiating directly with Israel.

Al-Ahmari: Iran itself, they say, has abandoned this principle when it went to negotiate with the Americans, regardless of what is happening on the ground.

Host: Iran uses these militias as a card.

Al-Ahmari: And abandons them at the right moment.

Host: Dr. Sadeqian, according to the latest from the Americans, there may be a new round of negotiations in the coming two days. What will the Iranians offer in your view to move the negotiations forward and avoid the deadlock we saw in Islamabad a few days ago?

Sadeqian: Greetings to you, your guest, and your viewers. When the Islamabad negotiations ended and the two delegations, the Iranian and the American, returned to their countries, there was initial information from the Iranian side that they had reached about seventy percent of a resolution, or had managed to resolve seventy percent of the pending problems and files between the two sides.

It appears there was a phone call with JD Vance, and based on that call he left Islamabad, despite the fact that the Pakistani Prime Minister tried to salvage the failure of the negotiations and proposed extending them to Sunday. The negotiations were on Saturday, and the American side accepted, as did the Iranian side, to continue the discussions on Sunday. It appears there was a decision for a press conference by Vance, in which he said the negotiations had failed, and there was a document given to the Pakistani side on a “take it or leave it” basis.

He boarded the plane, and that was that. We heard notable statements, especially yesterday, from JD Vance, who said the negotiations had been good to a large extent and that there are issues that can be addressed. The American tone differs from what it was in Islamabad. The Iranian side now says it is ready to address the remaining problems, but it seems there is a very deteriorated trust, a lost trust, if I may use that expression, between Tehran and Washington, and that is casting a shadow over everything.

Host: Addressing files like what, Dr. Sadeqian? Which files will be addressed in your view, and from which angle?

Sadeqian: There are clearly pending issues. The files that have been addressed are, first, the nuclear file, second, the sanctions file, and third, the file of Iran’s relations with its friends or allies in the region. This covers the Iranian regional role.

It seems to me there were many initiatives and proposals from the Iranian side and the Pakistani side, but it appears JD Vance came to deliver a document. He said we will not negotiate on it. Either you accept this document or you do not. The Iranian side does not accept such things.

This document came against the backdrop of the ten points submitted by the Iranians, and there was great confusion about them, and the American side disavowed them, according to the information available.

Host: The American side disavowed them after having accepted the ten points?

Sadeqian: When Vance came to Islamabad, he said no, he was not negotiating on the ten points. He had these points that must be discussed. Either you accept them or leave them.

Al-Ahmari Pushes Back on the Ten Points Narrative

Host: Let me give space to Mr. Adwan al-Ahmari, because it seems he has things he wants to respond to. Mr. Adwan, it appears the Iranians want to say that what is being disputed and agreed upon are the ten points they originally presented.

Al-Ahmari: No, that is not correct. If you are facing the President of the United States who spoke clearly and frankly and said there are two essential points, the first being that they said, “Give us five years only for Iranian enrichment, not twenty.”

Host: He even said twenty years, not even twenty years, he would not accept.

Al-Ahmari: You are facing a president who sees himself as victorious, and the reality says that the losses and missiles fired by cars are on the Gulf states, not on Iran, not on Israel, and not on the United States. I also believe that President Donald Trump is coming from a position of strength. If we go back in time, the Iranians did not agree to go to Islamabad except after the famous statement, “We will wipe out an entire civilization tonight.”

They agreed immediately afterward. If Iran had negotiating solutions, it would not have agreed immediately after that threat, because there was genuine intent to target energy, water, and electricity facilities in Iran.

Let us move to the other point. When did Iran agree to go to Islamabad? Immediately after Trump announced the naval blockade. If you go back to the news timeline, you will find that four or five hours after the announcement of the naval blockade, Trump said he received calls that the Iranians were open to a second round of negotiations.

Each of these parties is making the other believe it has the posture of the victor, but the reality by the numbers on the ground says Iran today will suffocate economically. It will not be able to support what Dr. Sadeqian calls its allies and friends in the region. Iran does not have state alliances.

The truth is, if you asked Dr. Sadeqian who the allies are, is it the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam or Hezbollah, he would tell you Hezbollah. If you asked him who the real ally in Iraq is, is it the Iraqi government or the Popular Mobilization Forces, he would tell you the Popular Mobilization Forces. He is talking about proxies, not real regional allies. Syria is out of this equation. Yemen will be out of this equation.

This is what Iran must think about. How can it, let us say, win everyone over? We saw the contact between the Iranian foreign minister and the Saudi foreign minister. We also saw the welcome by the Gulf states and the states of the region for the negotiations in Islamabad, and the welcome of their outcome, the truce and the ceasefire. I believe that today after the naval blockade, things are not as they were before the naval blockade.

I believe the Arab viewer, and Dr. Sadeqian from Tehran among them, will see in the coming days that Iran’s tone will abandon much of the arrogance on the matter of the negotiations, which made everyone believe it was victorious.

Iran has suffered enormous destruction. The casualties are in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. Today the losses are between 290 and 400 million dollars per day, not per month, in oil exports and the closure of the ports. You are talking about a state that planted mines along the Gulf of Oman and in the Omani maritime borders, which is an ally of Iran, to force ships to pass through its waters so that it could then impose fees and make a show of saying it will impose fees. This cannot be enforced.

The whole world sees such rhetorical theater, and it is Iran’s right, of course, to do all this to sell to the Iranian interior, which has not yet come out against the government, out of fear of repression, because there is activation of the emergency law. At any moment, Iran may be strangled economically, and it will surrender and meet all the demands, just give us at least 100 million dollars so we can breathe daily.

The exaggerations that deluded Iran into thinking it was able, I believe they thought that JD Vance was John Kerry. They thought Obama was Trump. They stalled in the negotiations. Vance gave them a clear request, left the plane, and said we gave them a “take it or leave it” offer. This is what will actually happen. Take it or leave it. After that, the naval blockade began, which Iran did not think would be implemented.

This is a smart move by the United States, the least costly for them. The ships are there, the warships are there. I simply inspect and prevent instead of firing missiles and shells daily and launching sorties. I am out at sea. If Iran were able to win and truly able to make the world and its regional allies believe, as Dr. Sadeqian says, that it is a strong state, it should launch missiles and drones at the American warships and the ships that are there.

This piece was originally published in The Free Press

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Iran Spent Its Last Card

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced a full U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to destroy “the little that is left of Iran.” In a pair of Truth Social posts, Trump declared that the U.S. military would begin blocking ships from entering or leaving the strait, intercept any vessel that had paid tolls to Iran to transit it safely, and warned that any Iranian who fires on U.S. or peaceful vessels would be “BLOWN TO HELL” while the Navy works to demine the strait. The announcement came as ceasefire negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan, broke down and the U.S. delegation led by Vice President J.D. Vance returned home. In effect, Washington has moved to strip Tehran of the one coercive instrument it believed it held in reserve.

Wars usually shut doors for American foreign policy. But this episode has revealed that Operation Epic Fury has opened them with uncommon force. To understand why requires an honest reckoning with Iran’s biggest mistake in this war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) decision to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz ranks among the most consequential miscalculations in the regime’s history.

Following the American and Israeli strikes, the Revolutionary Guard pursued two anticipated outcomes from its Hormuz strategy.

The first was a global economic shock severe enough to force Washington to back down. Iran hoped it could cause a disruption so costly to oil markets and allied supply chains that the United States would be compelled to return to the negotiating table on Iranian terms. The strait carries roughly 20 percent of global oil trade and a similar amount of the world’s liquefied natural gas. A genuine closure would send energy prices soaring across Europe, Asia, and the gulf alike.

The second objective was political. Iran sought to use disruption in the Strait to fracture the alignment between Washington and its Gulf partners, demonstrating that American military operations imposed an unbearable cost on regional stability, pressuring Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha to demand a stand-down.

The Arab World Was Always Keeping Score

What the IRGC failed to account for was the weight of the political debt it had accumulated across the Arab world. For decades, Tehran positioned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the sacred center of Arab political life, consecrating every Iranian intervention and branding every Arab government that resisted as a traitor to Islam. The goal was to hijack Arab grievances and convert them into cover for the Islamic Republic’s conquest.

The Revolutionary Guard was the instrument of that conquest, deployed across the region to construct parallel states, capture financial systems, and install political figures whose survival depended entirely on Iranian patronage.

In Iraq, 67 armed factions tied to the Popular Mobilization Forces, collectively claiming some 230,000 personnel, consumed roughly $3.5 billion annually from the national treasury while Iraqi prime ministers governed with Tehran’s permission rather than a popular mandate.

In Syria, Iran poured billions into the Bashar al-Assad regime and transformed a once-sovereign Arab state into a forward operating base for revolutionary power projection. In 2013, Mehdi Taeb, the head of the Iranian regime’s Ammar Base think tank, called Syria “Iran’s 35th province.”

Farther south, Houthi commanders answering directly to the IRGC held the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which 10 percent of global seaborne trade passes, perpetually hostage.

Every theater followed the same logic: subordinate Arab sovereignty to the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ambition, then present the occupation as resistance.

Arab populations ground down under this revolutionary machinery had long recognized the enterprise for what it was. As far back as 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman described Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, as “the new Hitler of the Middle East.” During Operation Epic Fury, Faiq al-Sheikh Ali, a former member of the Iraqi parliament, stated that “I am Arab. I see humiliation from the Iranians. I do not see any humiliation from any Israeli.” The Arab world had been keeping score for years, and the IRGC had given it no shortage of reasons to reach that judgment.

This is why the second objective, fracturing Gulf alignment, failed. To make matters worse for Tehran, the regime had spent the weeks before the talks in Islamabad striking the very states on whose neutrality the strategy required, hitting desalination plants and oil facilities across the Gulf and curdling any residual sympathy in those countries into open hostility. Sultan Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) minister of industry and advanced technology, stated that the strait has never been under Iranian control in any manner that would permit Tehran to legally close or restrict international shipping. The Gulf States reinforced the American posture directly, and the political dividend Tehran had assumed would follow from economic disruption never materialized.

In other words, the IRGC shot itself in the foot. Iran’s available alternatives outside the strait can replace less than 10 percent of Gulf throughput. Before the war, inflation was running above 40 percent, the currency had lost more than 80 percent of its value over the preceding decade, and the shadow fleet Tehran had assembled to smuggle oil and fund IRGC operations was already straining under accumulated sanctions enforcement. Recruitment had collapsed so severely under the weight of unpaid salaries and economic asphyxiation that the IRGC was reportedly pulling 12-year-olds into its ranks. A sustained U.S. naval blockade renders continued resistance economically impossible.

By blockading the strait that Iran is trying to toll, America has called Tehran’s bluff, revealing that the Islamic Republic needs Hormuz commerce at least as much as the rest of the world.

The lesson for all has been that Iran cannot be worked with or relied upon. And Gulf States have since moved to make the lesson permanent. After Trump’s declarations, Saudi Arabia announced the full restoration of oil pumping capacity through its East-West pipeline to approximately seven million barrels per day, days after providing an assessment of damage to its energy sector from attacks during the conflict. By doing so, Riyadh has demonstrated that the region can route energy flows entirely around the strait. In trying to turn Hormuz into leverage, Iran accelerated the very investment the strategy was designed to prevent. The choke point Tehran sought to weaponize is being engineered out of strategic relevance by the states whose alignment Tehran had hoped to shatter.

Washington's Rare Door

But in the IRGC’s misery there is Washington’s opportunity, and opportunities of this magnitude do not repeat themselves. Properly leveraged, Trump’s blockade could unlock a broader regional consolidation.

The first opportunity lies in expanding the Abraham Accords into a robust regional architecture. The Accords signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco have already delivered measurable cooperation in trade, technology, and security. During Operation Epic Fury, Gulf States coordinated with U.S. Central Command at a level of intimacy unimaginable a decade ago, sharing intelligence, opening airspace, and integrating into a defense posture that functioned as a coherent whole. Bringing additional Gulf partners into a structured framework would convert that wartime alignment into a durable order, with the India-Middle East-Europe corridor providing the economic spine around which the broader architecture could take shape.

The second opportunity is more consequential over time. For two decades, the United States attempted to suppress Iranian-backed networks through direct military engagement in states too weak or too captured to act as genuine partners, a model that proved strategically exhausting and produced no durable result.

The degradation of Iran’s proxy architecture changes the underlying condition entirely. An Iraq reclaiming sovereignty over its own security sector, a Syria freed from Iranian entrenchment, and Gulf States that absorbed sustained attack without political fracture are better positioned to police their own territory. Strong sovereign states are the only counterterrorism infrastructure capable of producing lasting outcomes, and Washington now has a genuine opportunity to help build them through security cooperation and diplomatic engagement, freeing up American strategic bandwidth for the Indo-Pacific.

The Middle East is already reordering itself around Iran’s diminishment. Washington’s opportunity is to consolidate what the region has begun.

This piece was originally published in The New York Post

Read in NY Post

Following President Trump’s announcement of a cease-fire, US Central Command (CENTCOM) commander Admiral Brad Cooper stated: “Iran has suffered a generational military defeat.”

Tehran’s response has been a single counterargument: the Islamic Republic still stands.

That argument mistakes the question. The survival of the Islamic Republic is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the surviving entity retains the capacity to direct the forces operating in its name.

Iran developed its mosaic military doctrine by drawing direct lessons from Saddam Hussein’s collapse in just twenty-six days. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iranian Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Jafari reorganized the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in 2008 into thirty-one provincial commands, each with its own weapons stockpiles, logistics chains and pre-delegated authority.

Asymmetric warfare is the recourse of states that cannot prevail conventionally. Dispersion and concealment are the tools of a military that has already conceded the conventional battlefield.

Israel, operating alongside the United States in Operation Epic Fury, mastered asymmetric tactics and turned Iran’s own doctrine against it, employing intelligence penetration, targeted eliminations and network disruption with superior precision.

The clearest demonstration came before the operation began.

In July 2024, Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh inside a Revolutionary Guard guesthouse in Tehran. Iran’s security services must now operate under the assumption that they do not know the extent of the compromise — and that uncertainty is the most debilitating condition an intelligence service can face.

Operation Epic Fury then pushed that penetration to its extreme.

The killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the elimination of hundreds of senior IRGC commanders and the degradation of the Quds Force’s extraterritorial capacity together constituted a decapitation campaign of unprecedented precision.

More importantly, fractures between Iran’s political leadership and its military have already surfaced publicly. On March 7, 2026, President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a televised apology to Arab Gulf states for missile and drone strikes conducted during the conflict, pledging that further attacks would cease.

That a sitting president apologized for his own military’s actions within minutes of their execution illustrates precisely what pre-delegated authority has produced: a military that the political leadership must answer for rather than control.

Three vulnerabilities now compound one another.

The first is the mosaic doctrine’s foundational limitation under sustained pressure.

The doctrine solved the problem that Saddam could not, preventing decapitation from producing immediate collapse. It never solved attrition. The mosaic delays the timeline of dissolution but leaves the dissolution itself intact.

The cease-fire arrived at a moment of Iranian weakness, and the pressure that produced that weakness remains available to Washington. The Islamic Republic knows that each day the cease-fire holds, it does so on terms that Washington can revise.

The second vulnerability is structural.

The mosaic doctrine distributed resilience horizontally across provincial land commands, but the IRGC’s functional branches — its navy, air force, missile corps and cyber and intelligence directorates — each represent a distinct accumulation of “tiles” with separate supply chains and command structures.

The United States has dismantled these branches sequentially rather than simultaneously, degrading each functional pillar while removing leadership at the center.

The result is a system weakening from two directions at once: horizontal provincial networks loses coherence as the vertical command spine collapses, and neither compensates for the deterioration of the other.

The third vulnerability is financial, and the most immediately exposing. The IRGC’s ability to sustain operations and evade sanctions has depended on Hezbollah and the broader proxy network to move money and provide the transactional infrastructure linking the center to the periphery. That system has been degraded.

Iran’s shadow fleet — the network of vessels moving sanctioned oil through falsified documentation and ship-to-ship transfers — has faced intensified US interdiction. China-linked front companies that provided financial cover to the IRGC have been sanctioned in successive rounds by the US Treasury.

On March 31, dozens of money changers linked to the IRGC were arrested across the United Arab Emirates following the escalation of Gulf tensions after Iranian strikes, severing one of the regime’s most critical cash arteries. A network that cannot pay its operators does not remain in a network for long.

Washington enters the cease-fire holding all the cards: military dominance, financial strangulation and a regional architecture that has isolated Tehran from the Arab world it once sought to mobilize.

Iran’s response has been to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, the final lever a regime reaches for when it has exhausted all others. That threat is a measure of desperation, not strength.

The operation has not concluded, but the conditions for Iranian defeat are in place.

The entity that emerges from what comes next will bear little resemblance to the Islamic Republic that launched its doctrine of resistance four decades ago. What remains depends entirely on whether Tehran meets Trump’s terms.

Read in NY Post

Western coverage of Operation Epic Fury has unfolded almost entirely on Iran’s own terms.

The dominant frame across European and American commentary treats the Islamic Republic as the aggrieved party narrating its resistance, and the discussion in mainstream outlets and across social media platforms has largely been organized around what Iran claims, what Iran endures, and what Iran dares to threaten.

This frame leaves an enormous gap in the picture, and the gap is the Arab world — a civilization that has spent forty years watching the Islamic Republic erode its institutional, theological, and cultural foundations.

To grasp what is actually happening in the Middle East, a Western observer needs to hold three dimensions simultaneously, and the architecture of Western political debate makes this structurally difficult, if not in certain cases impossible.

Three Things the West Cannot See

The first is the Arab relationship with Iran. From the vantage point of Brussels or London, Iran presents itself as a resistance movement with a grievance against American hegemony and Israeli occupation, and this presentation maps comfortably onto familiar Western anticolonial frameworks.

What it does not map onto is the lived experience of Arab populations in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and across the Gulf. In those countries, Iran's presence meant Hezbollah holding the Lebanese state hostage to Tehran's decisions, thirty-five armed factions in Iraq drawing salaries from Iranian funds channeled through the Iraqi national treasury, and Houthi commanders answering to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while firing on Arab civilians from Yemeni soil. Freedom is not the word any serious Arab observer would use for what Iran brought.

Indeed, the Arab world's quarrel with Iran runs far deeper than American bases or Israeli airstrikes. What drives it is the systematic subversion of Arab sovereignty by a foreign power that uses the language of Islamic solidarity as cover for an imperial project conducted through proxies.

The second dimension is the proxy question itself, where Western analysis fails most comprehensively. Iran goes far beyond supporting armed groups. Parallel state structures get built inside Arab countries, financial systems get captured, and political figures get installed who owe their existence and survival entirely to Tehran.

The Iranians who have administered this project understand it as the export of a revolution, but what Arab populations have experienced is closer to a colonial occupation conducted through intermediaries, and as of now, they’re not mourning the Islamic Republic.

When Westerners treat these proxy networks as instruments of legitimate resistance rather than as mechanisms of subjugation, they endorse an imperial project while believing themselves to be opposing one, and as a matter of fact, make themselves the legitimizing force behind Iran’s war against the Arab world.

The third dimension is the most counterintuitive for a Western audience, and it is the one most consequential for how the current war is understood and misunderstood. For Arab nationalists, including secular nationalists and even those with deep reservations about Israeli policy, Iran represents a greater and more immediate threat than Israel does.

This is a position that Western media are structurally ill-equipped to render intelligible, because Western discourse on the Middle East has been organized for decades around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the primary axis of regional injustice.

The result is that when Western governments and Western publics take strong positions against Israel’s actions against Iran’s operations, they believe themselves to be standing with the Arab world. In reality, they are advancing a position that the Arab world does not share and has not asked for, while ignoring the threat that Arab governments and Arab populations actually live with.

The rhetorical use of Israel as a perpetual alibi for Iranian aggression has been one of the Islamic Republic’s most durable tools, and Western opinion has served as the unwitting amplifier of that tool across the entire duration of the Islamic Republic’s existence.

The War the Arab World Is Watching

What makes this moment significant is that Operation Epic Fury has accelerated a reckoning that was already underway. The Arab world is watching the proxy architecture Iran spent decades constructing get dismantled, and it is processing the implications for its own political future.

The first thing that has emerged from this is a demonstration of capability that no one predicted. Gulf states that absorbed thousands of rockets and drones while maintaining full civilian life and political composure have revealed a military steadiness that decades of condescension from Western and Arab nationalist commentators had written off as impossible.

The second is a region at a genuine inflection point, one where the destruction of Iran’s proxy architecture opens a real possibility of Arab states governing themselves without external interference for the first time in a generation.

Western observers who followed this war through the lens of Iranian social media accounts have been watching a carefully produced performance. The Arab world has been watching something else entirely, the first serious challenge to an ideology that was never democratically adopted, never welcomed, and imposed through violence and subversion from the moment of its founding.

The United States and Israel, long cast in Arab political culture as the twin engines of regional oppression, are being processed by a significant and growing portion of Arab opinion as something closer to liberators, not in the language of gratitude, which Arab dignity would resist, but in the language of relief.

Two interviews have proven especially illuminating in this regard. One features an Egyptian writer, the other a former Iraqi parliamentarian, both speaking on a Saudi-sponsored Arab channel with the kind of frankness that the Western media landscape rarely produces and rarely amplifies. Each, in his own way, says the same thing: Iran is the enemy.

I hope that reading them gives serious observers of international affairs a flavor of what the real debate looks like inside the Arab world, conducted in Arabic, on Arab terms, and almost entirely out of Western view.

Ibrahim Issa, Egyptian Writer, speaking from Cairo with host Nayef

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Host: When someone from Iran or from the pro-Iranians listens to you, they will say: in 38 days, the United States and Israel could not destroy the regime, could not change it, could not enter Iran by land, could not force Iran to surrender, and Trump went to a truce because he had no other option. What is your response?

Issa: Look, if these are the arguments that convince them, good — they satisfy themselves. You cannot convince a madman that he is mad. No matter how skilled a psychiatrist you are, there is no mentally disturbed person on earth who admits his disturbance. Let alone someone who is both mentally disturbed and ideologically driven at the same time.

But all of this raises the question about the war’s own objectives. This same argument was repeated to the point of tedium about Gaza — as Hamas’s presence was being crushed in Gaza, they said “Hamas hasn’t been defeated, Hamas exists, Hamas is negotiating, Hamas forced the enemy to the negotiating table” — the same nonsense repeated again.

The regime hasn’t fallen — and who said a regime can fall from the air alone? Saddam Hussein, in 1991, after the liberation of Kuwait and the massive defeat of Iraq and its army, remained in power from 1991 to 2003, twelve years. Does that mean he wasn’t defeated in 1991? The regime may have survived, but it is hollow, rotted, penetrated, decrepit, and now it will face its own people face to face after this truce — in a week, two weeks, a month, two months, a year, two years — with enormous challenges.

Let us assume the opposite, Professor Nayef: if the Iranian regime had managed to assassinate Netanyahu, the defense minister, the head of intelligence, the head of Mossad — what would they say then? That we were defeated? When the scene reaches this level of political decay and political delirium, we should not chase the arguments of madmen. We are not going to sit and talk about self-evident truths with them, to convince the pro-Iranians or the Mullah regime that it has been defeated. I am not going to convince him because he is like a man afflicted with color blindness — he sees green as red, and no matter how hard you try to convince him that what he sees as green is actually red, he will not believe you.

Host: Why did you describe everyone who supports Iran in its aggressive attacks against Gulf states, or even those who stay silent about it — as if they saw nothing — as legitimizing treason and collaboration? Convince the viewer that this description is deserved.

Issa: 1000%. Let me say first: the purpose of dialogue, debate, and presenting evidence is to enlighten people, to enlighten public opinion, to enlighten the Arab masses — not to convince the pro-Iranians, the Iranian regime, or the Mullah system that it has been defeated. That is outside my concerns, not on my list of priorities.

But when I say that everyone who has openly and clearly sympathized with, supported, or stayed silent about the savage, blatant, and despicable Iranian aggression against Arab countries in the Gulf, they are supporting and endorsing treason and collaboration. Why?

Because when Hezbollah exists in Lebanon, when you support Iran and its infiltration of Arab societies and Arab states — whether we take the example of Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces, or the Houthis — what does it mean when you, an ordinary Arab citizen subjected to massive media and cultural coercion from political Islam and Arab nationalist movements, support Hezbollah? It means you are supporting a party that describes itself as the party of Velayat-e Faqih in the heart of an Arab state.

You are supporting a party whose loyalty to Iran is declared. You are supporting an armed organization inside a state — meaning you are supporting secession from the army, supporting rebellion against the army, supporting the proliferation of military forces inside any country.

Apply this to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Iraq, to Egypt, to Tunisia. When you tell me that an organization, merely because it raises the banner of fighting Israel and being “with the resistance,” and you accept it as an agent paid and funded by a foreign power, a traitor whose loyalty is to another state, a military rebel against his country and its sovereignty — fragmenting and splitting the state, as we saw in Yemen and as we see today with Hezbollah in Lebanon — hijacking the decision of the state, hijacking the decision of the people — is this not treason and collaboration? What else would you call it?

Treason and collaboration with a foreign organization with foreign loyalty inside this homeland, receiving money and support, acting on orders from outside, and receiving funds from abroad. If this is not collaboration, what is? If this is not treason to the homeland, what is?

When we say the organization “Bayt al-Maqdis” in Sinai — when it was from ISIS and al-Qaeda — if you fund an organization that raises its banners and rebels against its army, its country, its sovereignty, receiving external support — what is its name? I think Egyptian patriots, nationalists, and Nasserists would not tell us that those organizations are patriotic. They must be treasonous organizations. Every terrorist organization is necessarily treasonous and collaborationist. But if ISIS raises the banner of fighting Israel, should we be like ISIS?

Host: Professor Ibrahim, you mentioned important points we will return to. But you came a moment ago to the positions of some of these politicians, thinkers, and Arab elites — nationalists, leftists — who agreed with the Islamists, whether from Shia or Sunni militias or otherwise. They are all in the same trench. But can one say today that these elites and thought leaders in the Arab world — the leftists and nationalists — are the reason some Arabs, even citizens of the countries targeted by Iranian aggression, would celebrate and cheer their own targeting by Iran with rockets, drones, and spy cells? Do you hold them responsible?

Issa: I hold the Arab political culture responsible since the 1950s and ‘60s until now — the hegemony of the political Islam project and the Nasserist and leftist ideas that dominate Arab culture, control its keys, and reign over it. That is the real problem.

We are in an inheritance — the dung inheritance, the mental and intellectual dung that dominates and controls the Arab mind.

Many have escaped it; I cannot say at all that Arab society and Arab peoples have not stood with the Gulf states, or that they stand with Israel, or stand with Iran. I do not think that. The problem belongs to those affiliated with the Islamist and nationalist currents and those influenced by their ideas. And this is natural, because they see it in school curricula, in mosque sermons, in religious instruction, in the media, and in social media. These are large, not trivial forces — dominant over the Arab mind since the 1950s.

Then came the post-Islamic Awakening phase and Islamist dominance over the Arab scene. So you are facing a Nasserist-nationalist thought onto which Islamist thought was grafted, creating a terrifying rigidity and paralysis of Arab mentality, to the point of glorifying and magnifying Gamal Abdel Nasser the defeated, while attacking and accusing Anwar Sadat the victor.

I speak militarily, not about peace or anything else. The one who won the battle and the war — Anwar Sadat — is the object of hatred and attack from both Islamists, who also killed him, and Nasserists and nationalists who to this day say we did not win in ‘73.

So it is perfectly natural that someone who believes Egypt and the Arabs did not win in ‘73 would now consider himself victorious. He sees through a completely different lens: the one who crossed and liberated the land is the one who was defeated, and the one who was struck to the bone, whose military power was crushed, who has nothing left but remnants of rockets stockpiled for decades at the expense of the Iranian people’s wealth, capacities, and freedom — these nationalists, Nasserists, human rights advocates, and Islamists who speak about Arab regimes and attack them and consider them producers of human rights violations are conspiring and falsifying in a way that no sound mind can follow — about what Iran commits daily in human rights violations against its own people since the first moment of the accursed revolution, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which was an Iranian revolution and turned into an Islamic revolution through blood, killing, and executions.

This left that now supports Iran — Iran, by the way, kills your leftists inside Iran. The Mullah regime suppresses the left and suppresses all freedom. The left can have demonstrators beaten and killed by the thousands, while you, in your own country, want the right to demonstrate and accuse your state of suppressing demonstrators, yet you approve of the crushing of Iranian demonstrators.

These people have schizophrenic personalities. Their behavior can only be explained psychologically, not politically — it belongs to psychology, not political science.

Former Iraqi Member of Parliament Faiq al-Sheikh Ali, with host Rasha

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Host: Has the regime fallen or not, Professor Faiq?

Faiq: Rasha, before I answer whether the regime has fallen or not — you know, the peoples of the Gulf, like the Iraqi people and Gulf peoples, contain a proportion of Iranians — old Iranians, 200, 150, 120 years settled there, holding citizenship of these countries. These Iranians are now among the greatest haters of Iran and the turbans. You have lost a high proportion of your original citizens who used to live in the Gulf states and even Iraq — you have lost their loyalty and love. They now hate you, hate Iran, hate the regime and its conduct, because you attacked them. They did not know at what moment a rocket might fall on them. Because the rocket launched — the girl who fell in Kuwait — the rocket coming from Iran does not distinguish between an Iranian and a non-Iranian. I mean, all people now hate the regime.

Host: I will return to the question of people, but has the regime in Iran fallen, politically and practically?

Faiq: The regime is finished. Any regime in the world, especially a dictatorial one, consists of a head and those surrounding the head. Fine — where is the head? Ali Khamenei is gone. Those surrounding the head — would that the first, second, and third fundamental lines had all been eliminated. Everything at the level of the Revolutionary Guard and at the level of senior politicians we knew for 40 or more years — all gone, all killed.

Host: They say the Revolutionary Guard still exists, and as long as it withstood this war, Iran is still strong.

Faiq: True, the Revolutionary Guard still exists, but I am talking about the leadership, the senior figures. The current commanders of the Revolutionary Guard are low-level — fourth tier, not third, not second, not first. These have had standing orders from long ago: if something happens to Iran, you act on your own, you make your own decisions — no longer a supreme head controlling you or a specific commander telling you what to do. You act as you see fit.

Our enemies are the Gulf, our enemies are America and Israel. These people are fighting now, so you, Revolutionary Guard soldier holding the rank of first lieutenant, captain, or major, act as you please, make your own judgment; the important thing is enmity toward all these countries.

Host: Is the survival of these people in the interest of the region and its stability, or against it?

Faiq: Against. First, against the Iranian people, because this regime is built on repression. All Iranian revolutions were suppressed by the Revolutionary Guard. I hear that at the beginning, the number of martyrs of the latest revolution — just a day or two before the war — Iran announced 3,000, or the globally circulating figure is 32,000, and now Trump is talking about 45,000.

Those who speak of these numbers do not know Iran or the Iranian people. I can say with a clear conscience: more than 100,000. Because in 2009, during the Green Revolution, when 60% of the Iranian people rose up, the Revolutionary Guard alone killed a quarter of a million people. Not to mention the prisons, the arrests, and so on. These are criminals who use a policy of extermination — immediately and without discussion: you are an Israeli agent, a Zionist, an American agent, an infidel — they kill their own people, they slaughter them. They slaughtered a quarter of a million.

Host: So, after this war that lasted more than a month, what version of the Iranian regime did the Americans leave us in the region?

Faiq: The war has not ended, Rasha.

(…)

Faiq: This is a given. And now I address the Arab citizen: what do you have to say in sympathy with Iran? You know what my wish is? I should not say this — it is not politically appropriate. But my wish may be that two people govern you: my wish in this life and even in the next — one of them is named Saddam Hussein. Even if you sympathize with Iran, I wish he would slaughter you. I wish he would slaughter you right now because you sympathize with Iran — slaughter your family, your relatives, your neighbors, because you sympathize with Iran. Even if you tell him a million times, he would slaughter them all. That is one. My wish is that this would rule you until you come to understand what Iran is.

The second thing I wish — that Iran governs you as it governs me now, and you see the humiliation, hunger, degradation, abuse, contempt — and an Iranian comes to visit Karbala while the great Iraqi, who stood fighting Iran for eight years and brought it to its knees, kneels and washes the Iranian’s feet — and his feet are covered in mud and filth — and drinks the water used to wash those feet, on the pretext that this person is coming from Iran to walk to Imam Hussein, peace be upon him. I wish this kind of state ruled you, so you understand — how can you, an Arab, accept this? This is what Iran is doing to an Arab country. How can you be ruled like this? How can you sympathize with them?

Do you understand what kind of superstition and ignorance they spread among us in Iraq? I am coming to tell you — I am afraid you might say “what is this?” — or accuse me of being an extremist, maybe al-Qaeda, maybe ISIS.

I don’t know. You need to know I am a son of Najaf and of the religious establishment; my grandfather was a senior religious authority, and I am a son of the Hawza seminary. So, understand who I am and what I am telling you. How are you thinking? I am not like you — I differ from you in thinking. You are now taken over by sympathy, under the pretext that these are Muslims coming to fight Jews. What about the Jews? Let’s get to that point — that is the killer point.

I am Iraqi — the proportion of Jews in Iraq at the beginning of the twentieth century in Baghdad — half of Baghdad’s population was Jewish, and the other half was Muslim. The finest, most beautiful, greatest, best, and most refined community in Iraq was the Jews, not others. They attacked no one — here are the court records and police station files.

Host: Yes, but you are talking about an image that differs from today’s reality. Look at what they are doing in Gaza. Look at what they are doing in the West Bank. Look at the settlements, look at the law to execute the original owner —

Faiq: Look at what they are doing in southern Lebanon.

Host: Yes, yes.

Faiq: Yes, correct. They are now committing all these crimes and doing the worst things — in order to secure themselves, to eliminate something called “resistance,” to secure their lives. But — and this is a very important point — those Jews who lived in our Arab countries, especially Iraq, we expelled them, we displaced them, we sent them to Israel, we uprooted them from their roots, we stole their movable and immovable property. This Jew whom we are now talking about — when he does what he does now, or rather the Zionist — yes, he wants to protect himself because at night you cross his border, you violate his land. Yes, I know — you violated his land while he was sleeping.

Host: And he killed and continues to kill and violate —

Faiq: And you shell him from southern Lebanon. He tells you: I want to make a treaty with you, let’s agree, we both live safely — you in southern Lebanon, I in Israel. You refuse — you want to fight him. Of course, he retaliates.

Host: That is not correct — Israel to this day has not withdrawn from the five points in Lebanon.

Faiq: I congratulate you, it has been ten days.

Host: Fine.

Faiq: What five points?

Host: If Israel does not want to leave — if there are those who see that the primary enemy around which all regional countries must unite is Israel, not Iran —

Faiq: Who are the Arabs who say that?

Host: Some say this view.

Faiq: No — the first, primary, and fundamental enemy is Iran, not Israel. Because, as an Iraqi, speaking for myself, what brought me to Israel? I have no border with Israel. I am not near Israel. Israel is not interfering in my affairs or my politics. Iran — 1,400 years — is the one inside Iraq.

Host: Yes, you are Iraqi, but you are also Arab, and you see what is being done —

Faiq: I am Arab. I see humiliation from the Iranians. I do not see any humiliation from any Israeli — not near me, not seeing him, not dealing with him, not occupying my country, not coming to Iraq.

Host: This judgment may result from what you, or Iraqis, suffered from Iran in the recent crisis. It is said that Iraq fell into the trap —

Faiq: Yes, of course. Now I will answer you: we suffered, but these Arabs who now sympathize with Iran have not suffered from Iran. Iran is not close to them on their borders. The Iranians are not entering and governing them. Qasem Soleimani was not controlling their politics, so they sympathize with and love the Iranians, love the turbans. And the strange thing is that they are Arab — what brought you to the turban, to love it and follow it?

Host: Because the turban is directing itself against Israel, from their point of view.

Faiq: Fine — now you are telling me that Iraq fell into a trap. What trap? Iran built militias. Just as it supported Hezbollah, just as it supported Hamas, just as it supported the Houthis, it supported 35 Iraqi factions loyal to Iran. The funding comes from Iran, but from Iraq — from the Iraqi treasury, from oil money. Iran takes it and gives it to these 35 factions. The weapons come from Iran. The political support comes from Iran. When elections happen, these 35 factions win — they have MPs in parliament. The entire state is controlled by Iran. These are slaves, Rasha.

And this is a very important point — let me tell you. The Iranians occupied Iraq and governed it through people they understood with — not through honorable Iraqis with history, struggle, and principle, with whom they said: “We are your neighbors and a big country, let us cooperate in governance.” That would have been fine — I can deal with Turkey, deal with Saudi Arabia, deal with Iran. I have no problem. But what did they do? They went and brought someone you do not know, never heard of, never seen — this man was starving, did not have a dinar — and they handed him a treasury of billions. What kind of person is that? What do I expect from such a person? What does he do? He is a slave of Iran until he dies, because the one who created and made him —

Host: But there were government and state institutions in Iraq that should have stood up to that.

Faiq: The government is brought by the militias, brought by Iran. If Iran does not approve, there is no government.

Host: So Iraq is in Iran’s grip.

Faiq: In Iran’s grip. And let me also criticize America and Israel at the same time. America and Israel were looking the other way — in fact, they agreed. When Iran agreed on a prime minister and a government, they also agreed. They supported all governments from 2003 onward — from Bremer to this day. All governments in Iraq — America and Israel approved of what Iran brought. So in a country governed like this — the Iranian, whom I fought for eight years, whom I defeated and destroyed — how is he now governing me, taking his revenge, stealing my country, killing my people, entering sectarian strife into my country through Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, bombing sacred shrines?

The sympathy you mentioned may exist because some Arab people have not seen this image of Iran. They see the image of Iran confronting Israel. No — they see and hear and know. At a high cultural level, what is wrong with them? The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood and others — they see nothing, hear nothing, they don’t meet with politicians, they don’t know why they sympathize with Iran. Out of spite toward the Arabs and Gulf states.

There is absolutely no Arab person sympathizing with Iran who does not carry a hidden hatred inside him against the Gulf states, because he looks down on them and sees they have money, they have resources, they built their countries, and built their people. He does not want you to build the person because, if you do, he becomes aware and knows how. And if you build the country, afterward he does not need anything — he will not go to Iran, he will not go to any other country. He will live in his own country, living the best life. They do not want this.

These Arabs — I am astonished. At this time of calamity, destruction, and death, you sympathize with Iran? How do you sympathize with Iran? I ask God Almighty — those of you who sympathize with Iran — to truly set Iran upon you, so you feel its fire and see what Iran is. You who sympathize do not understand Iran. If you understood Iran, you would not sympathize with it.

Host: I can certainly appreciate your feelings. You are a seasoned politician who has lived through many years and eras, who has read history well in the region and in Iraq, and who has lived through the moments you speak of with great passion. Thank you, Professor Faiq al-Sheik Ali.

This piece was originally published in The Free Press

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This weekend, somewhere in the mountains of southwestern Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was hunting an American. They were chasing the most intoxicating image: a soldier of the “Great Satan,” bloodied and captured, paraded before the cameras on the very soil his country had come to destroy, the living fulfillment of every chant of vengeance that had echoed through Iranian streets since 1979. The IRGC held all the advantages a force could ask for: home terrain, local informant networks, and within its grasp the single most valuable propaganda asset of the entire war—a prisoner whose image alone could have rewritten the narrative of a campaign that has been catastrophic for the Islamic Republic from the first strike.

But American special operations forces got there first. And when Trump announced the rescue on Truth Social in three words, “WE GOT HIM!,” the IRGC walked away with nothing but the abandoned underwear of a man they never caught.

The episode revealed three things: complete American military superiority over the Islamic Republic on its own soil; the catastrophic failure of a surveillance architecture that Beijing had spent years and billions of dollars constructing; and the increasingly inescapable conclusion that the IRGC’s viability as a military institution is approaching its terminal phase.

And something else, too: the degree to which Iranian aggression had been functioning as the principal obstacle to the Middle East’s regional order. A senior Emirati military official has confirmed that the UAE has not ruled out joining the U.S. directly in the war against Iran. Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are more committed to the campaign than at any point since it began. Qatar has broken entirely from any residual sympathy toward the IRGC.

Operation Epic Fury has made visible what Iranian pressure had long suppressed: that the Abraham Accords were not a diplomatic anomaly. Rather, they were the architectural expression of a regional consensus that Iran’s model of power projection, energy coercion, and ideological subversion had been systematically depriving the Middle East of the economic integration and security cooperation that its geography and resources would otherwise permit. The war has not created that consensus. It has confirmed it.

The IRGC entered this campaign with a strategic playbook refined across four decades of asymmetric confrontation, and it is losing on every front simultaneously. Seven strategic mistakes, each rooted in a fundamental misreading of American behavior, regional politics, and its own capabilities, have compounded into a situation with no coherent exit.

The first strategic mistake was the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s logic was that sustained pressure on global energy flows would ignite the markets and force Trump to recalculate, withdraw, or watch the Gulf states turn against American operations out of economic self-preservation. But Trump has publicly declared that opening the strait is “not for us,” instead calling on European allies who rely on the strait to “go get your own oil.” His threat on Sunday to bomb Iranian power plants made it even more clear that the strait’s closure will not cause an American retreat.

These declarations carried a meaning beyond the immediate military context. Trump is running two operations simultaneously: one against the IRGC, and one against the assumption that the United States will indefinitely underwrite regional security at its own expense. His threats to leave NATO, vow to send the IRGC back to the stone age, and triumphalist mid-operation address thanking Gulf partners for their support are not the improvisations of an undisciplined communicator. They are the deliberate signaling of a strategic repositioning, designed to press allies into assuming greater responsibility abroad. The operation itself is a demonstration of what American military power can accomplish when it decides to act without hesitation.

Trump is also using the Strait of Hormuz crisis to accelerate something the administration has sought from the beginning: a Middle East in which American allies assume primary responsibility for their own neighborhood, freeing Washington to concentrate its strategic attention on the Western Hemisphere. Burden sharing was long treated as a European conversation about defense spending. The Strait of Hormuz has just expanded the terms of that project to the entire Eastern hemisphere by including Gulf countries as well.

The Hormuz gambit has also alienated Beijing, which is losing patience with Iran’s active disruptions to Chinese energy supply lines. The purpose of any military operation is to improve your own posture or degrade the enemy’s calculus in your favor. The IRGC achieved neither, and in the attempt, accelerated its own isolation on every front simultaneously.

The second strategic mistake was time. The IRGC likely assumed that Trump’s stated desire for speed signaled an appetite for a fast exit, and that the organization could survive by dragging out negotiations, delaying any serious accommodation, and outlasting American political resolve through attrition. But time cannot be purchased in a war where American strikes are hitting command and control infrastructure at its foundations and frontline units are receiving no meaningful replenishment. The IRGC has made a career of mistaking American restraint for American weakness, and the cost of that error is now being denominated in destroyed batteries, dead commanders, and a command architecture that grows less coherent with each successive wave of strikes.

The third strategic mistake was tempo. In nearly every crisis in the past two decades, the IRGC’s strategy has been to control the pace of escalation with its adversaries, calibrate pressure, and determine when and how confrontations would intensify or recede. But that model depends on a predictable opponent. Trump has demolished that predictability, and the range of American military options—from additional carrier groups and Marine landing forces to airborne troops and an ever-expanding list of targets—have multiplied more quickly than the IRGC can adapt. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said last week, “Our adversary right now thinks there are 15 different ways we could come at them with boots on the ground. And guess what? There are.” The IRGC now finds itself reactive, off-balance, and unable to dictate the terms of the next exchange.

The fourth strategic mistake was overestimating its capacity to reinvigorate the Arab world against a joint American and Israeli operation. The IRGC’s regional theory of legitimacy rested on the proposition that Arab populations in the Middle East could be mobilized against American and Israeli military action in ways that would constrain Gulf rulers and force them to distance themselves from Washington. But the Abraham Accords architecture has proven more durable than Tehran anticipated, and the Arab street has failed to materialize as a meaningful strategic variable in any theater that mattered.

The fifth strategic mistake was information warfare. We’ve seen this play out before. After October 7, Hamas and Hezbollah seeded social media with fabricated footage, manufacturing narratives of resistance among Western audiences. But the illusion of battlefield success became an internal liability, feeding a leadership culture in which accurate damage assessments were suppressed in favor of narratives that preserved morale at the expense of strategic clarity. The IRGC is repeating the pattern, trying to win the battle of public opinion even as it loses the one on the ground.

The stakes are considerably higher this time, because the propaganda apparatus is operating against a backdrop of acute domestic crisis: runaway inflation, capital flight, water scarcity, and an economy in structural collapse. An organization that cannot accurately assess its own battlefield losses is even less equipped to reckon with the degree to which the Iranian population it claims to protect has already stopped believing in the institution meant to govern them.

The sixth strategic mistake was the assumption that China would serve as a meaningful backstop when the pressure became acute. Intelligence reporting indicates that Beijing has continued to provide data support to the IRGC, and Chinese technology remains embedded in what survives of Iran’s surveillance architecture. But this cannot compensate for the IRGC’s structural deterioration, and China appears unwilling to escalate its material support to a level that invites direct American economic retaliation. Thus, the IRGC is accumulating losses faster than any external partner is willing or able to replace them.

The seventh strategic mistake, and the one most structurally irreversible, was Iran’s decadeslong strategy to build its offensive and defensive architecture almost entirely around a proxy network that the U.S.-Israeli campaign has systematically dismantled. Hezbollah entered the current war already severely diminished from its 2024 confrontation with Israel, its leadership decimated and its southern Lebanon infrastructure severely damaged. The Syrian buffer that Iran spent years and billions of dollars constructing has collapsed entirely, and American and Israeli forces have degraded the Houthi operation in Yemen past the point of meaningful military utility.

The IRGC was designed to project power through others rather than absorb direct confrontation itself. But the U.S.-Israeli campaign has forced upon it precisely the direct confrontation its entire architecture was constructed to avoid, leaving the organization exposed, stripped of the layered proxy depth that previously allowed it to absorb punishment at a distance, and facing an adversary that has correctly identified this exposure as the central vulnerability of the entire Iranian strategic posture.

What stands before Trump today is an IRGC stripped of its mystique, its command structure gutted, its proxies dismantled, and its vulnerabilities laid bare on its own soil in ways that decades of institutional construction were designed to prevent.

Trump and Netanyahu have already addressed the Iranian people directly, instructing them to stay home and stay clear of further attacks. The regime responded by shutting down the internet, a measure that speaks less to operational security than to the elemental fear of a government that cannot afford for its own population to watch what is happening.

There is no third option, no face-saving arrangement, no regional patron positioned to alter the terms. The choice for Iran is either compliance or collapse, and the distance between those two destinations is shorter than Tehran has ever been willing to admit.

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“I think we’ve had regime change” in Iran, President Donald Trump declared Sunday.

In his prime-time address Wednesday night, he repeated it: “Regime change has occurred.”

Critics dismissed Trump’s claim out of hand.

They’re wrong — because they’re measuring regime change by the wrong standard.

“Regime change” doesn’t necessarily mean an invasion, a decapitation strike, a new flag over the capital.

That was Iraq and Afghanistan, where American power underwrote both the military campaign and the political reconstruction that followed.

Iran is a different problem, and Trump is running a different playbook.

Start with a basic fact: Iran is a revolutionary state.

Its survival depends on three pillars — an ideology, a patronage network and a coercive apparatus drawing legitimacy from a founding idea.

To bring such a system down, all three must fail simultaneously.

And Iran was already decomposing when Operation Epic Fury began.

Regionally, the regime had been losing grip for two years, from the humiliating Hezbollah pager attack in 2024 to the 12-day war that exposed its hollow air defenses.

The deterrent Tehran spent decades building turned out to be largely performative.

At home, the economy had already collapsed after Trump-era sanctions effectively cut Iran off from the global financial system.

When the government announced plans for a steep tax increase, widely understood to fund the repressive and growing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iranians erupted.

The January 2026 protests marked the second major uprising in four years.

Each crackdown grew more brutal, and people flooded the streets anyway.

Revolutionary systems survive by continuously reproducing their founding idea across generations, and the Islamic Republic has lost that capacity.

Even during wartime, young Iranians are not joining.

The coercive apparatus was weakening because the ideology had failed.

So the US and Israel struck a regime already coming apart.

The bombs didn’t start the collapse, but accelerated two crises that are now beyond recovery.

The first is legitimacy: When the IRGC selected Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father, it violated the Islamic Republic’s own founding principles, which bar hereditary succession.

A regime built on rejecting dynastic rule reached for a dynasty the moment it came under real pressure.

The second crisis is regional isolation: The “Arab Street” mobilization Iran long counted on never materialized — and in fact, Arab states that once tolerated Tehran’s reach are now coordinating with Trump to eliminate the threat.

Trump does not need a deal to persuade the IRGC that its regional ambitions have been amputated.

He is making that a reality before their eyes — without American boots on the ground, while keeping that option visibly on the table.

An IRGC confronting a president unafraid of escalation is an IRGC that cannot dictate the terms of its own survival.

It has chosen, for now, to fight back, but its strikes, however damaging to Gulf infrastructure, have not made Trump reconsider his calculus.

And as long as Tehran’s leaders conduct themselves as heads of a terror state, the threat of targeted elimination remains.

Meanwhile, the regime has waged an aggressive information warfare campaign, seeking to project resilience and shape perceptions of the damage.

It’s succeeded in pushing its narrative in Western mainstream media, but the targeting record tells a different story.

American and Israeli strikes have reached the core of the IRGC’s command and control structure, and no volume of social-media output changes what those commanders can no longer do.

And a third front may prove the most consequential: The Iranian people.

The regime has maintained a full internet shutdown, showing that its leaders understand information travels faster than bombs.

Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump have addressed the Iranian people directly, telling them to stay home — but once the regime signals defeat, a population that rejected the Islamic Republic across successive waves of protest will become an accelerant.

Encouraging that spark requires more than military pressure: The United Sates must close every remaining corridor of IRGC survival.

Financial pressure is the most effective instrument, and Washington should directly press the United Arab Emirates to shut down the shadow banking infrastructure in Dubai that has long allowed the IRGC to circumvent sanctions.

The work is not finished, and the operation is still underway, but the IRGC that emerges from Operation Epic Fury will bear little resemblance to what it once was.

Its command structure has been shattered, its missile arsenal degraded, its regional network dismantled.

It can still retaliate, but it can no longer dominate.

Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s US ambassador, captured with precision what must come next: “We need boots on the ground, but they have got to be Iranian boots, and I think they’re coming.”

Trump has a window, and windows close.

The pressure and precision that brought Iran to this point must now be sustained long enough to make the coming popular uprising irreversible.

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The Financial Times published an opinion piece today that I found genuinely thought-provoking, and worth engaging with given that I have argued, since the start of the operation, that its strategic consequences are weakening China.

The piece advances the claim that Operation Epic Fury ultimately advantages Beijing, arguing that China’s industrial prowess positions it to reap substantial economic and diplomatic gains from the conflict.

I want to walk through that argument carefully and explain why it falls short of establishing that the Iran war will cement China’s superpower status.

Financial Times Piece

1- The Energy Question

Absorbing a shock and converting a crisis into a lasting strategic advantage are two very different propositions, and the distinction matters enormously here:

Before Operation Epic Fury, China enjoyed a tolerant and permissive sanctions environment in which Washington looked the other way as Beijing bought Iranian oil at discounts below market price.

That pricing advantage lowered the cost of Chinese production across every energy-intensive industry, giving Beijing's manufacturers a built-in edge over competitors who paid full market rates.

In fact, even the threat of U.S. sanctions turned out to not be useful: It was reported by the the Congressional Research Service in 2024 that “China's increasing imports of Iranian petroleum may demonstrate that PRC-based buyers believe that the economic benefits of buying Iranian petroleum exceed the risks of U.S. sanctions for several reasons.”

Washington had already begun closing that gap by tightening enforcement on Venezuelan oil, sanctioning the shadow tanker networks through which China imported roughly 389,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan crude at also steep discounts (roughly 4% of China’s total seaborne crude imports, according to Kpler data).

In this sense the Iran operation represents the same policy applied in a different theater. For China, replacing that supply through conventional channels means, once again, paying conventional prices.

“As part of Operation Southern Spear, the United States enacted a blockade on sanctioned oil tankers traveling in and out of Venezuela on 17 December 2025, after placing additional sanctions affecting oil trade with the country. A week before announcing the blockade, the US seized the oil tanker Skipperin the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela on 10 December, and then focused its military efforts on intercepting and pursuing other tankers trading with Venezuela.” Read More

As for China’s contracts with Russia and Turkmenistan, they deserve some scrutiny:

Russia recorded a budget deficit of 5.6 trillion roubles ($72.12 billion) equivalent to 2.6% of GDP in 2025 and with Moscow now attempting to sell $35 billion in seized assets simply to keep its budget functioning.

Beijing will grow increasingly dependent on a partner that is running out of money to honor its commitments. Russia's fiscal position is deteriorating under the combined weight of cascading sanctions and wartime spending, and that deterioration directly threatens its ability to maintain the infrastructure and export volumes that Chinese supply contracts depend on.

Regarding Turkmenistan in particular, the structural problem for Beijing is one of diminishing leverage over a supplier that is actively working to reduce its dependence on a single customer.

Turkmenistan holds the world's fourth largest gas reserves, and its leadership has made export diversification an explicit national priority, pursuing new pipeline routes toward Turkey and Europe precisely to escape the market concentration that has historically forced Ashgabat to accept unfavorable terms from Beijing.

China already pays a premium for Turkmen gas compared to what it pays for Russian supplies, and as Turkmenistan succeeds in attracting alternative buyers and building alternative routes, Beijing's ability to negotiate volume and price from a position of strength will erode further.

The supply from Turkmenistan will likely continue, but at progressively higher cost, which compounds rather than offsets the pricing pressure China is already absorbing from the loss of discounted Iranian and Venezuelan crude.

2- Cleantech and Other Commodities

Superpower status requires the ability to set the terms of both international and financial order, provide security guarantees other states rely on, and absorb economic shocks without rationing your own exports. China’s industrial capacity and usage of strategic reserves deliver none of those things.

China's dominance in electric vehicles, batteries, and solar panels reflects manufacturing scale and cost advantages. However that does not constitute geopolitical leverage because true leverage requires sustained dependency. The largest markets capable of generating such dependency are actively working to eliminate it.

Worth adding is that China's clean energy dominance was itself built on access to Western technology and export demand, the very channels now being systematically restricted, meaning the industrial base and the geopolitical returns it was supposed to generate are both under pressure simultaneously.

The United States, European Union, India, and Turkey (for antidumping duties on Chinese solar modules) have all raised tariff barriers against Chinese clean energy exports. China’s response has been to route production through third countries, but the EU is already tightening local content requirements that make third-country assembly insufficient to qualify for tariff exemptions, and the US has imposed anti-dumping duties on solar cells from Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia for doing exactly that.

“The U.S. Department of Commerce (Commerce) determines that, except as noted below, imports of certain crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells, whether or not assembled into modules (solar cells and modules), that have been completed in the Kingdom of Cambodia (Cambodia), Malaysia, the Kingdom of Thailand (Thailand), or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam), using parts and components produced in the People's Republic of China (China), as specified below, that are then subsequently exported from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, or Vietnam to the United States are circumventing the antidumping duty (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) orders on solar cells and modules from China.” Read More

In this case, the arbitrage window is closing faster than Beijing can exploit it. Also, stock market gains in Chinese battery companies following a geopolitical shock reflect investor sentiment, not a durable shift in competitive or geostrategic position, and the two shouldn’t be conflated.

Moreover, the claim that China can act as a supplier of last resort for fertilizer, sulphur, and helium does not hold up against the basic facts of each market.

On fertilizer, China has halted its own exports precisely because Operation Epic Fury has disrupted its domestic supply chains, meaning Beijing is managing a shortage at home while the argument requires it to be potentially solving one abroad.

On sulphur, China imported nearly 9.9 million tons in 2024 and depends on foreign sources for its supply despite strong domestic production. That makes Beijing a net importer of the very material being presented as a Chinese strategic asset, which is a straightforward factual problem with the claim.

On helium, Beijing has announced a domestic discovery and reported breakthroughs in purification technology, but announcing a discovery and producing commercially viable volumes at scale are separated by years of capital investment that haven’t yet happened and it’s not happening now which is the most important part.

In each case a real industrial development is being treated as a deployable geopolitical asset when the domestic conditions required to deploy it don’t yet exist.

3- Petroyuan, China, and Gulf Countries

The petroyuan argument is more fragile than it appears.

Iran settles its oil sales through a shadow banking system of front companies, small regional banks, and Dubai or Hong Kong-based entities using false invoices and fictitious transaction details, with roughly $9 billion flowing through this network in 2024 according FinCEN. That’s the financial infrastructure of a sanctioned state that is out of the dollar system, not a credible monetary alternative. It’s key to know the difference.

Moreover, the renminbi accounts for 8.5 percent of global foreign exchange, the US dollar, by contrast, remains overwhelmingly dominant, appearing on one side of 89.2% of all FX trades, and the yuan remains not yet fully convertible, meaning the petroyuan thesis requires Gulf states to anchor their fiscal systems to a currency they cannot freely trade on global markets, a proposition Riyadh has shown no serious appetite for. Saudi Arabia and the UAE together hold approximately $250 billion in US Treasuries, with GCC sovereign wealth funds managing more than $6 trillion overall, much of it dollar-denominated.

“Because the renminbi is not fully convertible for investment, it lacks the liquidity and accessibility required by international central banks. Central banks prefer safe, freely traded assets like the U.S. dollar, euro, Japanese yen, and British pound sterling.” Read More

It’s also important to highlight that Beijing brokered the 2023 Iran-Saudi normalization agreement and presented it as proof of its maturity as a reliable power, while simultaneously enabling Iran's access to export-controlled dual-use technology for its drone and missile programs through networks of transshipment companies. It was a level of involvement serious enough that 366 China and Hong Kong-based entities were placed on the US Specially Designated Nationals list for Iran-related sanctions programs.

Indeed, prior to Operation Epic Fury US special forces boarded a vessel in the Indian Ocean and removed components that were traveling from China to Iran to help IRGC rebuild its ballistic missile capabilities following the 12-day war.

In other words, the weapons architecture Beijing helped construct is the same one now implicated in Iranian strikes on Saudi territory. And Gulf capitals have drawn their own conclusions about what Chinese partnership delivers under pressure, and those conclusions are visible in where they are placing their security bets right now.

As a matter of fact, Riyadh is coordinating with Washington, not Beijing, on how to contain Iranian aggression. Similarly, the UAE, which signed the Abraham Accords and has spent the years since deepening its defense architecture with Washington, is consolidating its alignment.

Again, superpower status in practical terms means other states call you when the missiles start flying, denominate their reserves in your currency, and trust your diplomatic channels to hold when the pressure is on. On every one of those measures, the Gulf is turning to Washington, not Beijing.

This piece was originally published in Mosaic Magazine

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The Islamic Republic’s anti-Western posture gave China the ideological atmosphere it needed to present itself as a neutral arbiter in a region hungry for alternatives to American stewardship. Beijing gained tangible diplomatic capital from this situation in 2023 when it brokered a Saudi-Iranian normalization agreement, positioning itself as the indispensable dealmaker in a region the U.S. had long treated as its exclusive domain.

The Islamic Republic was, therefore, not merely a regional power pursuing its own ambitions but a key participant in a broader coalition assembled to erode the American-led order, with Israel being the prime target. But, although Tehran was tasked with holding a great deal of the alliance’s strategic weight on its shoulders, Operation Epic Fury has exposed Iran as weak and unsteady.

What made that exposure so striking was how thoroughly Washington had refused to see what was being assembled around it. Chinese firms have over the past few years rebuilt the Islamic Republic’s surveillance infrastructure, transferring the tools of population control that Beijing had refined at home into the hands of a government that needed them to manage its own people. Chinese suppliers furnished the components and precursor chemicals that kept Iran’s weapons programs viable despite years of Western pressure. Tehran’s defiance ran on a Chinese subsidy, and Washington’s permissiveness toward one compounded its tolerance of the other. While Washington is now paying a price for that permissiveness, the price Iran is paying for its defiance is much higher.

Now that the bill has come due for Iran, the logic of its empire by proxy is starting to collapse. Tehran’s regional strategy drew on grievances too local, too accumulated, and too genuine to be manufactured from outside. What it contributed was not the grievance but the apparatus around it. The Islamic Republic’s genius lay not in creating reactionary movements so much as finding them.

The Houthis, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and Hizballah in its earliest form all arrived with their own grievances, their own tribal memory, and their own theological fury. Tehran did not manufacture that energy, but directed it. Khamenei grasped that movements of that kind need a sponsor, a strategic horizon, and above all a narrative capable of converting local resentment into something that looks, from a distance, like a coherent cause. He identified these movements, nurtured them, and brought them under the mantle of “resistance.” For decades, that narrative coalesced around a central idea: that the Palestinian question is the only question that matters in the Middle East, overriding every other calculation and folding every other grievance into itself.

The ideology of resistance relied on a program of information warfare, sustained through satellite networks, religious institutions, and a proxy apparatus designed to keep the region’s attention fixed on the confrontation with Israel. For a generation, it worked. What broke it was not a countervailing argument but the IRGC’s own conduct in Syria, where Arab publics watched the resistance proposition applied to Arab populations in Arab cities. The Iranian narrative did not survive contact with its own practice. Wanting investment, mobility, and a future their children can inhabit, people across the region have seen clearly what Tehran means by resistance. The audiences Iran spent decades cultivating are now the ones looking elsewhere.

The outbreak of war on October 7, 2023, might have reversed this pattern, refocusing attention away from the plight of Syrians and toward the plight of Gazans. Instead, it had the opposite effect. Israel’s display of technological superiority over Hizballah and the Iranian military has hastened a long-awaited reckoning. Every advance in Israeli aerospace, intelligence, medicine, and computing had widened a gap that revolutionary Islamism preferred to explain as the product of a Western conspiracy. The moral verdict Islamism issued against modernity proved more comfortable than the practical reckoning it displaced. In an ironic reversal, the civilization that produced Averroes and Avicenna, whose scholars carried ancient knowledge across continents, found itself organized around the proposition that engagement with the West represented a form of defeat.

But more importantly, Operation Epic Fury is also preparing the ground for a realignment that the resistance spent decades trying to prevent. The rapprochement between Washington and the Gulf states, whose alliance had been fraying under years of American ambivalence and strategic distraction, is finding new impetus in the wreckage of Khamenei’s regional order.

The lesson Gulf governments are drawing from this campaign is one Iran taught them directly. Every country that moved toward normalization with Israel has found itself targeted by a Tehran willing to threaten oil infrastructure, destabilize neighbors, and deploy missiles against capitals that had chosen a different future. Rather than demonstrate—as some Western commentators have predicted a little too eagerly—that an alliance with Israel was a risk not worth taking, the experience clarified, with considerable force, where Gulf security actually comes from and who is willing to provide it. Operation Epic Fury has been proof of concept for the strategic and economic calculations behind the Abraham Accords, and the Gulf is drawing the appropriate conclusions.

As Mansour himself acknowledges, revolutionary Islamism will not disappear from the Middle East. The movements Tehran found and sponsored will persist, rooted in grievances that no military campaign can resolve. What will be different is the proposition those movements carry. The era in which defiance of American power functioned as a self-sufficient political program, requiring neither a positive vision of governance nor an account of consequences, has closed. Whatever emerges next in the region will inherit a different calculus: defiance of American power is no longer a cost-free foundation for political ambition.

The question of where the ideology of resistance goes from here is not really a question about the Middle East alone. The most fervent support for Khamenei’s doctrine during Operation Epic Fury came not from Cairo, Amman, or Casablanca but from London, Paris, and Berlin. European cities produced the protests, the vigils, and the political pressure that Tehran had wagered the Arab street would generate.

That displacement is significant. The resistance doctrine is losing its audience in the Middle East and finding a different kind of host in the West, among populations with their own grievances against the Western order, their own suspicions of American power, and institutions sufficiently open to make the resistance proposition feel like dissent. The next phase of this confrontation may unfold less in the streets of Tehran or Sanaa than in the parliamentary debates and cultural institutions of Europe, where the ideas that the Middle East is already moving past are still gaining ground. While that shift bodes ill for Europe and for the West, it nonetheless is a sign of resounding defeat for the ideology of the Islamic Revolution.

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The Asset That Did Not Move

Most of the analysis surrounding Operation Epic Fury has concentrated on the battlefield. On the strikes, the damage assessments, the Iranian military’s capacity to absorb and respond. That focus is understandable. What has received far less attention is what the operation is failing to produce, and what it is failing to produce is the one asset the Islamic Republic has spent four decades treating as its ultimate strategic reserve: the Muslim and Arab street.

To appreciate the full weight of that failure, one must first understand what kind of state Iran is. The Islamic Republic was never a conventional government that occasionally dabbles in propaganda. Fundamentally a revolutionary regime, its entire institutional identity rests on the perpetual production of ideological energy, on the broadcasting of grievance, the choreography of rage, and the transformation of foreign policy into a continuous performance addressed simultaneously to domestic audiences and to the wider Muslim world.

Information warfare and psychological operations stand among the Iranian state’s primary functions. The clerical establishment has worked with considerable sophistication to shape how populations across the Muslim world understand American power, Israeli policy, and the obligations of Muslim solidarity.

As a matter of fact, the Islamic Republic wagered very early on a deceptively simple premise: the Muslim world can be reliably activated against American power and Israeli existence whenever Tehran needs cover, leverage, or time. Iran cultivated that resource through an estimated 700 million dollars in annual spending on satellite broadcasting across the Arab world, the financing of religious seminaries stretching across three continents, and the inflation of the Palestinian cause into an all-purpose mobilization myth. The Arab street, in this conception, serves as a permanent force in reserve, one that no Arab government can entirely ignore and that Washington must always price into its calculations.

Operation Epic Fury was always going to test that assumption and Tehran’s response was never conceived as purely military. It wanted images, wanted the streets of Cairo and Casablanca filled with crowds chanting for the resistance, wanted the spectacle of Muslim solidarity to flood Western television screens and force an American president to hesitate, to calculate the political cost of continuing, to flinch. Hitting Gulf targets was one lever. Triggering a civilizational parade was the other. Neither produces what Tehran needs.

The Compounding Miscalculations

To understand why that premise is collapsing, one must return to October 7.

Iran deployed its surrogate militias in the weeks that followed as proof of concept, a living demonstration that the Ummah could be summoned on command. When Hezbollah opened its northern front within 24 hours of the Hamas attack, before any Israeli ground operation had begun, Tehran read that coordination as validation that the architecture it had built was solid, reliable, and frightening. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in the Red Sea corridor served simultaneously as pressure and advertisement, each rocket a signal addressed to the broader Muslim world that Iran retains the power to set the region in motion.

What Tehran fails to reckon with is a compounding series of miscalculations about the region it claims to lead.

First, Arab populations have not forgotten what Iranian power actually looks like when exercised without restraint. The IRGC helped suppress the Iraqi popular uprising of 2019, leaving hundreds of protesters dead in Baghdad and Karbala. Iranian-backed forces reduced whole quarters of Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor to rubble in defense of a Syrian government that had gassed its own people. The humiliation embedded in those episodes runs deep, the spectacle of Arab states weakened by militias answerable to Tehran rather than to any elected government or national interest.

Second, the populations Tehran believes it can mobilize have fundamentally reoriented their aspirations. The Arab world of 2026 bears little resemblance to the Arab world of 1979 or even 2006. Governments across the Gulf have spent a decade building investment corridors and diversifying their economies as the organizing framework of the future. Their populations, exhausted by decades of conflict exported in Tehran’s name, have largely accepted that bargain. People want business, want foreign investment, want precisely what Iranian proxy warfare has consistently destroyed. The revolutionary romantic who once burned American flags in solidarity with Tehran has been replaced, in most Arab capitals, by a generation that associates Iranian influence with militia checkpoints and ruined cities.

Third, and most damaging to Tehran’s self-conception, the ideology underwriting the entire project has lost its purchase even inside Iran itself. The Islamic Revolutionary model commands no genuine popular enthusiasm among Iranians. The protests of 2019 and 2022 made that visible to the world. A governing creed that can no longer inspire the population on whose behalf it claims to rule has no serious prospect of inspiring the Ummah abroad, and the absence of street mobilization across the Muslim world following the American and Israeli campaign confirms as much.

The Geography of a Diminished Cause

More importantly, by casting itself as the guardian of Muslim political and religious authenticity, and by treating Gulf governments as compromised by their ties to Washington and their accommodation of Israel, Iran assumed those governments would absorb direct strikes rather than respond.

Between 2022 and 2025, Tehran dispatched more than 300 Houthi drones and missiles toward Emirati and Saudi territory while sustaining financial pressure on Bahrain’s ruling family through Shia patronage networks. Each action rested on the same calculation: that Arab populations would welcome Iranian assertiveness against governments they had been encouraged to distrust, and that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would absorb the pressure in silence. Saudi Arabia’s declaration of five Iranian diplomats persona non grata in the weeks surrounding Operation Epic Fury, including the military attaché and his assistant, is the answer to that calculation. Riyadh does not issue such answers spontaneously.

But the Arab world’s silence and defiance is not matched elsewhere. Western university campuses produce what passes for solidarity with Iran. London, Paris, and a handful of American cities generate the encampments, the debates over supporting Khamenei, the demonstrations supporting the Resistance Axis, all delivered at a very comfortable distance from what the IRGC has done to the region.

After all, the populations most receptive to Iran’s framing of the conflict as a civilizational assault on Muslim dignity are those furthest from Iranian regional power, Western audiences free to receive Tehran’s propaganda on its own terms. The Islamic Republic forfeits the Arab street and finds, as consolation, the sympathy of a Western progressive milieu that the regime would imprison without hesitation were it ever to encounter them at home.

Operation Epic Fury has not yet produced its final verdict, but one thing is certain: the Arab world has already produced its own. Four decades of Iranian claims to speak in its name, and the streets offer nothing in return.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.

- George Orwell, 1984.

An Old Problem

The internet was supposed to make repression in the 21st century expensive. The problem of control, however, is older than any technology built to exercise it. Jeremy Bentham had designed the original solution two centuries earlier, describing in 1791 a circular prison whose genius resided in uncertainty, a central tower from which guards could observe every cell while remaining invisible to the inmates, producing what Bentham called the sentiment of a sort of "invisible omnipresence."

Michel Foucault ( also a big fan at the time of the IR revolution), writing about the panopticon in 1975, identified precisely what made that architecture so durable as a theory of power — it induced in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power, so that the prisoner, never certain whether he was being watched, began to police himself, internalizing the warden's gaze until the warden no longer needed to be present for control to function.

The internet kind of distorted that type asymmetry, as it is simply giving the prisoner the capacity to watch the warden, document the violence, and broadcast the footage to millions. For a decade it looked as though digital communication would make authoritarian rule structurally unsustainable, and repressive governments from Moscow to Tehran spent the early 2000s treating connectivity as an existential threat manageable only by slowing its spread.

Then the surveillance industry answered the problem.

The panopticon could be rebuilt at national scale with Chinese components, sold under the administrative language of smart-city modernization, and embedded so deeply into telecommunications infrastructure that no citizen documentation could escape it. Nowhere did that reconstruction go further than in Iran, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the People's Republic of China spent 15 years assembling a machine of invisible coercion that only the combined force of American satellite technology and strikes finally broke open.

The IRGC Plugs In

The Islamic Republic arrived in 1979 with a fully formed appetite for silencing, and for two decades the familiar instruments held the line well enough. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance licensed all publications and conditioned access to print on editorial compliance, while the Press Court prosecuted editors and journalists under laws written broadly enough to imprison anyone whose reporting the judiciary chose to call a threat to national security.

The reformist press that briefly flourished under President Khatami disappeared under a coordinated judicial campaign beginning in 2000, when dozens of newspapers shut within weeks and their editors went to prison, a demonstration that the clerical establishment enforced its ceilings on liberalization by force. What those instruments could not survive, however, was the arrival of mass digital connectivity, which ultimately confronted the regime with a challenge that licensing and prosecution were architecturally unsuited to resolve.

In fact, the Green Movement of 2009, the mass protests following the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, showed what open connectivity meant for a government whose authority rested entirely on controlling the flow of information. Protesters coordinated through mobile networks and social media with a range and velocity that overwhelmed the security services' capacity for pre-emptive disruption, and the episode forced a fundamental institutional reassessment inside the Revolutionary Guard whose conclusion was unambiguous — connectivity was a security variable requiring direct command, and any institution intending to maintain authority over Iranian society would need to own the infrastructure through which that society communicated.

The IRGC translated that conclusion into institutional structure without delay, acquiring a majority stake in Iran's state telecommunications company through an IRGC-linked consortium and transforming the nation's largest mobile carrier into a vehicle for political administration.

The IRGC Cyber Army, emerging from the same period, extended the organization's informational reach beyond Iran's borders through harassment campaigns against journalists and opposition figures operating abroad, while the National Information Network expressed the regime's longer ambition — to replace the global internet entirely with a closed sovereign system the IRGC could administer from the center.

By the time Chinese surveillance technology arrived at scale, the Revolutionary Guard had already spent a decade building the two institutional pillars that made absorption possible.

• The first was ownership of the physical network through which Iranians communicated.

• The second was a parallel intelligence apparatus penetrating every workplace, university, and association or society in the country, generating a granular map of Iranian civil society as a permanent institutional output.

Together those two pillars produced an organization that knew where dissent lived and controlled the wire through which dissent moved. Beijing supplied the technology to act on both at speed, and the two organizations recognized in each other something closer to a shared doctrine.

What Beijing Delivered, and How Tehran Used It

China treats control of information as the foundational precondition of political order, and the surveillance architecture Beijing developed reflects a coherent theory of governance built around a conviction Xi Jinping stated without ambiguity in internal documents later published by state media.

"Anti-China forces in the West have always tried to topple China via the internet," Xi explained. "Whether we can hold on and win the fight on the battlefield of the internet matters to our ideological security and regime safety."

The surveillance institutional machinery Xi promoted assembled to fight that battle operates through three main interlocking layers:

1. The Great Firewall eliminates the informational commons through which political opposition organizes, severing the connective tissue between dissidents before they achieve any collective political form.

2. A behavioral compliance architecture conditions citizens through anticipatory consequences, training populations to self-censor before enforcement action occurs and making the internalization of conformity the primary mechanism of discipline.

3. Predictive policing algorithms then aggregate data from facial-recognition feeds, mobile device tracking, financial transactions, and travel records to generate individual risk scores that trigger detention before any act of dissent takes place, giving the state the capacity to suppress opposition that has not yet expressed itself.

The Revolutionary Guard recognized in China's model a structural affinity with its own organizational doctrine for two reasons that had nothing to do with ideology. Indeed, both organizations had concluded that political control required owning the infrastructure of communication rather than merely policing its content, and both had built parallel intelligence networks designed to suppress collective action before it achieved any organized form. The IRGC moved very quickly to acquire the technology required to replicate what Beijing had built at scale.

In 2010, ZTE signed a $130 million contract to overlay a comprehensive surveillance system onto Iran’s state-managed telephone and internet networks, while Huawei established itself concurrently as the country’s largest telecommunications equipment provider, supplying location-tracking services to mobile carriers and presenting Iranian officials with content-censorship tools modeled on systems already deployed inside China.

The deep packet inspection technology these firms supplied allowed security services to monitor encrypted communications in real time, identify the geographic clustering of dissent, and throttle connectivity in targeted areas without any visible indication that an intervention had occurred, giving the IRGC a degree of operational invisibility that no previous instrument of censorship had approached.

By early 2026, a Huawei-supplied internet kill switch project estimated between $700 million and $1 billion neared completion at a fortified data center outside Tehran, engineered to give the IRGC the capacity to sever Iran’s global connectivity.

Above that foundational layer, Tiandy Technologies built the system and structure of street-level suppression, delivering systems designed to flag behavioral anomalies in public spaces, and video-analysis platforms capable of mapping protest networks.

After the 2022 protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini, Iranian officials deployed these technologies as a substitute for the morality police, whose physical visibility had rendered repression politically costly and had accelerated the very mobilization the regime sought to prevent, replacing officers on the street with cameras that identified women without headscarves, issued automated warnings, and triggered arrests without any human presence at the scene.

Iran’s police chief announced in 2023 that “the era of the street patrol is over; we will use technology and cameras” for hijab enforcement.

The operational cement holding this architecture together hardened most visibly in agreements Iranian officials signed in public and defended without embarrassment. In 2024, Iranian Police Chief Ahmad-Reza Radan, sanctioned by the European Union for directing lethal repression, traveled to Beijing and signed a memorandum on law enforcement cooperation with China's minister of public security, committing to upgrade security collaboration under the stated category of counterterrorism.

In December 2025, just days before the uprising that would shake the regime, Iran’s ambassador to China visited the People’s Public Security University and pledged continued practical cooperation in law enforcement and security.

It has also been documented that China’s police training programs for Iranian security personnel served simultaneously as vehicles for exporting Beijing’s stability-maintenance doctrine and as commercial opportunities for Chinese surveillance firms, ensuring that ideological transmission and market expansion advanced through a single institutional channel and that every training cohort returned to Tehran carrying both a political framework and a procurement relationship.

The Day China’s Surveillance Architecture Failed

The January 2026 uprising tested everything the IRGC and Beijing had assembled together, and for a time the machine performed as designed. Authorities severed internet and telephone access as protests spread from Tehran to Ilam, deploying the internet shutdown capability that Chinese firms had spent years engineering for precisely this contingency, while monitoring tools identified organizers, mapped social networks, and enabled mass arrests before demonstrations could consolidate into movements with the organizational depth required to sustain pressure on the government.

With visibility suppressed and outside documentation made impossible, security forces fired into crowds, raided hospitals, and detained the wounded in circumstances the regime had spent a decade and billions of dollars ensuring the world could not observe in real time, and medical networks inside Iran estimate that as many as 16,500 protesters were killed and over 300,000 injured under that information blackout.

What essentially broke it was satellite connectivity the regime could not reach.

In fact, the State Department smuggled roughly 6,000 Starlink terminals into Iranian territory in January 2026, and President Trump, who had according to media reports discussed the operation directly with Elon Musk, wrote publicly that help was on the way, turning a covert infrastructure operation into a political message directed at both the protesters and the regime.

Iranian security forces responded with Chinese and Russian jammers and conducted house-to-house searches in neighborhoods where satellite signals had been detected, but the footage had already escaped, and once footage of hospital raids and crowd shootings cleared the sealed information environment, the political cost of the violence rose sharply enough that the regime found itself performing publicly the repression it had spent years learning to render invisible.

The Starlink operation exposed three important failures in the ultra-surveillance architecture that no technical patch or Chinese software can address.

The Chinese model of control requires an actual physical monopoly over connectivity, and satellite infrastructure, but the kind Washington smuggled into Iran operates outside the layer of the network the state owns, making suppression contingent on jamming equipment that cannot be deployed at national scale without disrupting the same communications the regime depends on to coordinate its own security forces.

The second failure is operational. Data collected without the command capacity to act on it isn’t really intelligence, it’s just a giant inventory, and the Iranian state that emerged from the 12-day war is a state whose decision-making ecosystem can no longer close the distance between what its surveillance apparatus sees and what its security forces do with what they see. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

The third failure is behavioral and strikes at the foundation on which the entire model rests. The system's power derives not from catching every act of dissent but from persuading the population that every act of dissent will be caught, and that persuasion holds only as long as the architecture appears impenetrable. Once tens of thousands of Iranians acquired Starlink terminals, used them openly, and suffered no immediate consequence, the belief in the system's omnipresence as the mechanism of control just completely dissolved, and no quantity of cameras or intercept infrastructure can reconstruct it in a population that has already discovered the gaps. The taboo has been broken.

Why It Matters

It’s worth noting that Chinese firms supply surveillance infrastructure in at least 150 countries, from camera networks in Vietnam to citywide monitoring systems in Kenya, even in Gulf countries, and the failure of that architecture to stabilize the Iranian state under military and informational pressure sends a signal to every government that purchased the same system and the same promise of durable control.

Operation Epic Fury is still underway, and what is happening inside Iran’s information environment at this moment remains largely unknown. What is known is that the operation has targeted the command nodes responsible for activating the connectivity shutdown and the personnel with the administrative authority to order a national blackout, meaning that the technical capacity to seal the information environment may no longer exist in a form the regime can operationalize.

That outcome matters beyond Iran because the connectivity/internet shutdown was the single capability that made every other component of the Chinese surveillance architecture function as designed, built on the assumption that the regime could, at the moment of maximum threat, reduce the information environment to what it controlled and nothing more. But with General License D-2 it positions American companies to move into that opening at commercial speed, and the Starlink terminals already distributed across Iranian territory mean that the population most likely to protest in the weeks ahead is also the population best positioned to document what happens when it does.

Beijing has long argued that the sophistication of its domestic surveillance architecture makes it immune to the class of pressure the United States can apply, a claim the Iranian case has now tested against operational reality. That promise was always a theory. Iran was the proof case, the proof case has now failed, and it was America that broke it.

“Europeans would like to escape from their history, a “great” history written in letters of blood. But others, by the hundreds of millions, are taking it up for the first time, or coming back to it.”

Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, Raymond Aron, 1976

The Obsolete Discourse

There is, as there has always been, a familiar criticism of European power. Everyone knows it. Europe is weak— a continent of impressive wealth, knowledge, and resources whose will to power stands on the brink of total exhaustion, held hostage by those who want more social welfare and by those who want more regulations at the expense of innovation. Yes, Europe is weak. But this conclusion does little to clarify the current geopolitical predicament, especially when we consider Iran.

What a more careful account demands is a reckoning with what European governments actually did in the months before Operation Epic Fury, and with what their public statements since have chosen to conceal.

Chancellor Merz’s suggestion that Iran fell outside NATO’s frame of concern revealed, as a matter of fact, considerably more about political calculation than about any genuine reading of the strategic environment or about Europe’s ability and capability to do anything about the Strait of Hormuz.

When one takes a closer look, the claim itself borders on antinomy. NATO’s own formal assessments identify Iran as a significant threat to Alliance security. A declaration of that kind, made before cameras with the full authority of high office, belongs therefore to the lexicon of domestic audience management, not to that of strategic analysis or assessment. In other words, it was a signal, just not a geopolitical one.

The Reality

That gap matters because the history of the preceding months tells a far more revealing story.

In fact, the first and most consequential of Europe’s contributions was the snapback of international sanctions. When Iran signed the 2015 nuclear agreement with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the deal included a critical provision: if Tehran failed to honor its commitments, any signatory could trigger the automatic restoration of all United Nations sanctions, with no possibility of a Russian or Chinese veto blocking the process.

For years, European governments declined to use it, sustained by the hope that patience would yield a more constrained Iranian posture. That hope was exhausted. On August 28, 2025, the three European powers initiated the snapback, and by its conclusion, six United Nations Security Council Resolutions had been fully reactivated, restoring the comprehensive sanctions architecture that the 2015 agreement had suspended, including arms restrictions and constraints on Tehran's ballistic missile program. The regime found itself returned to the full weight of international pressure it had spent a decade working to escape. If the Islamic Republic regime is today broken, it’s also all thanks to Europe.

The second contribution was the formal designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization and including it in the EU terrorist list. The IRGC had for years treated European territory as operational ground, directing assassination plots against dissidents, opposition figures, and journalists living under European legal protection, and running intelligence networks across the continent that formal diplomatic engagement had done little to curtail. EU member states had long resisted the designation, arguing that it would complicate nuclear negotiations. That argument dissolved as evidence of IRGC operations on European soil accumulated beyond what diplomacy could politely ignore. The designation, more importantly, ended a fantasy that Tehran had exploited for years: that a government sending assassination squads into European cities could simultaneously be treated as a credible negotiating partner.

The third contribution was the least visible and the most structurally important: Filling the vacuum in Syria. When Bashar al-Assad’s government collapsed in December 2024, it severed the central logistics corridor through which Iran had for decades supplied and directed Hezbollah, and it placed in sudden jeopardy Russia’s most consequential military foothold in the Mediterranean, the naval base at Tartus and the Hmeimim air base in Latakia, facilities through which Moscow had projected power across the Middle East and North Africa for years. European governments understood that the Syrian landscape emerging from Assad’s fall represented a unique and rare strategic opening of considerable significance, one in which the simultaneous erosion of Iranian and Russian influence (especially Iranian) created conditions for a serious stabilization effort to take hold. Working in coordination with Washington, they pursued reconstruction and governance with a concrete national interest at the center of their calculation: a stable, sovereign Syria was the only credible condition under which the millions of Syrian refugees who had reshaped European domestic politics for a decade could finally return home.

The Real Question

What these three actions reveal is a European political class very capable of consequential strategic action but deeply reluctant to claim that capacity before its own publics. The reluctance, I believe, is not primarily electoral, though electoral considerations provide its most straightforward explanation. It is also fundamentally civilizational.

To acknowledge what European governments actually did would require confronting a proposition that the dominant assumptions of postwar European political culture have made extraordinarily difficult to absorb: that the Islamic Republic, whose revolutionary theology is organized around the negation of the Western order, had for decades been waging a patient and largely uncontested campaign against European societies from within. That proposition alone would demand a fundamental revision of how European elites have framed the sources of disorder in the world.

The second proposition is still more demanding: that Israeli and American military power, which European political discourse has for a generation assigned the role of provocateur and obstacle to regional peace, was in fact countering the very forces that posed a direct threat to European life and order, doing so with the capability and resolve that European governments conspicuously lacked.

Admitting as much is a price most European leaders have decided not to pay. The other important question is whether their publics would actually refuse to hear that truth, or whether it is the leaders themselves who cannot bring themselves to speak it.

Europe helped against Iran. So why can't it just say so?

This piece was originally published in The Free Press

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“Iran stands alone, and they are badly losing.”

So said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday. The country’s “neighbors, and in some cases former allies in the Gulf,” he added, “have abandoned them, and their proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, [are] either broken, ineffective or on the sidelines.”

The assessment deserves more attention than it has received. Hegseth described Iran’s isolation as a military outcome, but it was in fact a structural inevitability — one confirmed when U.S. Representative to the United Nations Mike Waltz announced that Washington stood with its Gulf Arab allies in a unanimous Security Council vote condemning Iran for its attacks on civilians across the region. By accelerating a regional realignment already underway, Operation Epic Fury has handed Washington a rare strategic opportunity: the consolidation of an Abraham Accords 2.0, one that elevates normalized relations between Israel and the Gulf states from diplomatic symbolism into an integrated security architecture.

To understand why this moment is so consequential, one must first understand that Iran has spent years trying to combat the regional order established by the 2020 Abraham Accords. Those accords—normalization agreements signed between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco—set in motion a Washington-anchored system in which Arab states would work economically and strategically with Israel under American sponsorship.

Each new agreement narrowed Tehran’s room to maneuver in a region where it had long enjoyed influence. Which is why, when the UAE and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel in September 2020, Iranian officials described the agreements as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and a capitulation to Zionist power. The condemnation was designed to shame the signatories and deter others. They were not ideological reactions; they were geopolitical weapons.

Then, in 2023, active negotiations for Saudi-Israeli normalization began. Later that same year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan after years of rupture between the two countries, confirming that the security architecture was closing in on Tehran from multiple directions.

October 7, 2023, was Iran’s answer to this threat. Hamas was the instrument, and the assault was a strategic decision.

Following the Hamas massacre, Tehran moved with unmistakable ambition to assert a new regional order. It positioned itself as the indispensable patron of Palestinian resistance, and the moral center of a Muslim world awakened to injustice. Through Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iraqi militias, it projected the image of a unified Axis of Resistance operating under a single strategic vision. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei terrorized any government contemplating normalization with Israel, declaring that Muslim states pursuing such agreements were “betting on a losing horse,” and that Tehran reserved the authority to determine which nations remained within the fold of the Islamic world and which had surrendered their place in it.

But by taking that posture, Iran blatantly ignored what it had actually been doing to its neighbors for years. The same government presenting itself as the champion of Muslim unity had been arming Houthi forces that had repeatedly struck Saudi oil infrastructure, including the Abqaiq facility in 2019—one of the most consequential attacks on global energy supply in decades. Further, Iranian-backed militias targeted Emirati territory in 2022; Tehran fomented instability in Bahrain in 2011; and Iranian-financed proxies perpetually threatened Gulf governments. Iran has also treated Azerbaijan’s deepening ties with Israel as an existential provocation and worked systematically to frustrate it. Even the China-brokered normalization agreement between Riyadh and Tehran in March 2023 proved to be a diplomatic veneer over deep-seated structural antagonism, rather than a genuine strategic realignment.

In short, prior to the Hamas invasion, Iran had attacked or destabilized every neighbor it now claimed to lead, and destroyed by its own hand the myth of Muslim solidarity it was trying to so carefully construct.

Which is why it’s no surprise that the Gulf states drew their own conclusions about Iran long before the first America and Israel’s strikes began earlier this month. That doesn’t mean they were totally aligned with America, of course; the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, and the Biden administration’s return to nuclear diplomacy in 2021, each signaled to Gulf capitals that Washington’s commitment to their security was negotiable, and that accommodation with Tehran could be pursued at their expense. Several governments responded by cultivating ties with Beijing and attempting to diversify their strategic relationships as insurance against American unreliability. But what they could not escape was Tehran’s fundamental view of them. In Iran’s strategic thinking, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were American outposts by nature. No amount of hedging, no overture to Beijing, no declaration of strategic autonomy altered that judgment.

The events of recent weeks have vindicated that understanding, for intelligence assessments have confirmed what Gulf planners long suspected: Iranian weapons systems were positioned with Gulf targets specifically in mind. The missile-and-drone architecture Tehran constructed across the region was designed not as a deterrent against Israeli power, but as a mechanism to hold Gulf capitals at perpetual risk, limit their policy options, and extract their deference.

The Abraham Accords, viewed through this lens, were never merely diplomatic gestures toward a distant peace process. They were a security imperative rooted in a hard-eyed recognition that the Gulf states and Israel shared a threat environment that demanded a shared response, and that the pretense of neutrality in the face of sustained Iranian aggression had long since ceased to be a viable posture for any government serious about its own survival.

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Operation Epic Fury has translated that shared threat perception into functional cooperation. Even as the campaign continues, the conditions for an Abraham Accords 2.0 are already taking shape. Whether we end up with a chastened Islamic Republic that seeks reintegration into the regional order, or a successor government that charts an entirely different course, the strategic reality will be the same: a Middle East in which the case for deeper Arab-Israeli security cooperation has been made more forcefully than any diplomat could have managed at a negotiating table.

Beyond striking Gulf oil infrastructure, Iran had counted on Operation Epic Fury to do what earlier rounds of Israeli-Iranian confrontation had never quite managed: ignite the Muslim street. Tehran calculated that Gulf populations, watching American and Israeli forces dismantle the Islamic Republic, would pour into the streets in condemnation, that the language of Zionism and resistance would once again animate the Arab world into a posture of solidarity with Iran. None of it materialized. The transnational Muslim constituency Tehran believed it commanded simply did not respond, exposing, perhaps more starkly than any military outcome, the degree to which Iran’s ideological capital had already been spent — squandered not only through decades of hollow revolutionary rhetoric, but through the far more concrete offense of having struck the very countries whose populations it now expected to rise in its defense.

That presents an opportunity Washington cannot afford to squander.

At a moment when the United States is drawing down its direct military presence in Syria, Israeli-Arab coordination against common threats has never been more desirable. The Trump administration’s preference for burden-sharing over open-ended commitment finds its most natural expression in precisely this kind of framework.

The Abraham Accords are also a direct answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing has spent the better part of two decades cultivating Middle Eastern influence through infrastructure finance, arms sales, and diplomatic mediation. An expanded and strengthened Accords would construct a competing network rooted in shared security interests and American sponsorship. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, an infrastructure network launched in the region in 2023, extends that logic further, offering Gulf governments the option to route resources through allied capitals rather than through Beijing.

Iran’s diminished status as a regional power does not dissolve the underlying competition for influence in the Middle East. If anything, it sharpens the urgency of what comes next, because the window now open will not remain so indefinitely. Every normalization agreement is simultaneously an economic choice and a security arrangement. China has understood this from the beginning, and Washington has too long allowed this vacuum to go uncontested.

America can lock in a strategic advantage by brokering normalization agreements with additional Arab states, granting formal security guarantees and defense cooperation agreements, and integrating Israeli capabilities into a Gulf-anchored deterrence framework. With Iran weaker than ever, the present moment demands a Middle East regional order that reflects American interests, sustains Israeli security, and raises the cost of Chinese and Iranian re-entry far beyond what either can presently afford.

Pete Hegseth was right. Iran stands alone. The question before Washington is whether it will recognize the opening for the most consequential strategic consolidation the region has seen in a generation.

I cannot address everything in one article, but my humble attempt is to give a better picture to situate things within their context.

What the Words Are Hiding

In geopolitics, what governments do almost always matters more than what they say. It is obvious, very obvious, but it is worth repeating at moments like this.

Indeed, public statements during a conflict rarely function as transparent windows into operational military plans. More often, they become part of the conflict itself. Leaders speak to signal resolve, reassure allies, manage escalation, and just as importantly, to confuse their enemies. Treating statements from figures such as Rubio, Hegseth, or Trump as straightforward indicators of operational intent, thus, risks producing a deeply misleading picture of events.

It’s a 101 Clausewitz rule: “The deceiver by stratagem leaves it to the person himself whom he is deceiving to commit the errors of understanding,..”

A better approach, I think, is to step back to a moment before the pressures of active conflict began shaping public messaging. In this case, I believe that moment was May 13, 2025, when President Trump addressed the Saudi–United States Investment Forum in Riyadh. The speech did not receive the attention it deserved at the time. Yet in retrospect it stands as one of the most consequential statements delivered by an American president in the region in recent years. One passage in particular was revealing:

“I want to make a deal with Iran. If I can make a deal with Iran, I’ll be very happy. We’re going to make your region and the world a safer place. But if Iran’s leadership rejects this olive branch and continues to attack their neighbors, then we will have no choice but to inflict massive, maximum pressure: drive Iranian oil exports to zero, like I did before. They were a virtually bankrupt country because of what I did. They had no money for terror. They had no money for Hamas or Hizballah. And take all action required to stop the regime from ever having a nuclear weapon. Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The choice is theirs to make. This offer will not last forever. The time is right now. One way or the other, make your move.”

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Trump was transparent about his intentions, and so the real discussion isn’t in what he said or didn’t say, but in what he meant and how the word “deal” is understood.

In Trump’s vocabulary, a deal carries none of the meaning it held under Obama, nor does it resemble the negotiated compromises typically described in “the language of international relations”. For Trump, a deal means the other side accepts the core conditions he has set. Complete surrender. Tehran simply chose otherwise, and that decision was not really the result of miscalculation. Let me explain:

The Islamic Republic possesses a certain tactical and political flexibility. It can negotiate, delay, posture, and maneuver. What it cannot do, however, is concede on the foundations of its regional strategy, because those foundations are not, in any meaningful sense, separable from the regime's own identity.

The cultivation of proxy networks, the sustained pressure on Israel, and the projection of power from the Levant to the Arabian Gulf, all these things, are not bargaining chips the regime can trade away in exchange for sanctions relief. They are the very foundations through which the Islamic Republic justifies its revolutionary purpose, maintains its claim to leadership within political Islam, and sustains relevance beyond its own borders.

A regime that accepts Trump's terms would dismantle the instruments through which it exercises power.

A Region Held Hostage

But that’s not the whole story, the crux of it is that Trump’s own broader Middle East strategy carries ambitions that go well beyond security.

The Middle East, in his conception, is a real estate opportunity for the United States. Not simply a theater to be stabilized but a pivot between continents, a commercial and technological hub through which American-aligned economies would grow more deeply connected.

Gulf sovereign wealth funds would flow into American industry and technology. New corridors would reorder the movement of goods, energy, and data across Asia, Europe, and North America. That transformation, however, presupposes a Middle East in which Iran no longer holds the conditions for integration permanently at risk.

Which is why once Iran continued projecting pressure across the region, managing the status quo for Trump is no longer a viable policy. It is as properly understood a concession, a tacit acceptance that the regional order Washington sought would remain permanently out of reach.

Operation Epic Fury should, therefore, be seen not as a “sudden” or “abrupt” escalation but as the point at which inaction itself became politically the greater risk (militarily I explained it in this article on missiles), and the stakes of that decision can only be measured against the scale of what Trump is attempting to build as it rests on five objectives:

• The first is the gradual reduction of the American military footprint in the region. Trump’s withdrawal of roughly 1,000 troops from Syria reflects a broader judgment that large permanent deployments, once justified by the wars of the previous two decades, had begun to produce diminishing strategic returns at mounting political cost.

• The second objective is the expansion of the Abraham Accords and the consolidation of a regional alignment in which Israel and key Arab states cooperate economically, technologically, and increasingly in matters of security. The pace of that transformation has been notable. Bilateral trade between Israel and its Abraham Accords partners rose from virtually zero in 2020 to roughly $3.4 billion by 2023, an indicator of how quickly political normalization can translate into tangible economic integration.

• The third objective concerns the construction of new economic corridors linking India, the Gulf, Israel, and Europe through the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), an infrastructure project designed to move goods across a network of ports, railways, and logistics hubs connecting economies across three continents.

• The fourth objective concerns Pax Silica. This framework links technology, capital flows, logistics infrastructure, and security cooperation among states whose interests increasingly converge. The aim is to embed the Middle East within the economic and technological corridors connecting the Indo-Pacific and Europe, producing a form of stability grounded technological integration.

Yet such an order cannot take shape in purely economic terms. It would be wishful and fantasy thinking. For it to endure, it must also be politically intelligible to the societies that inhabit the region.

• That is where the fifth objective enters the picture. The stabilization of Gaza under a post-Hamas governing arrangement provides the political condition that makes the other four objectives legible to Arab and Muslim publics.

This is crucial. Since as long as Tehran retains operational control over Palestinian armed factions, it possesses the ability to portray every normalization initiative as a betrayal and to activate its terror proxy network. Breaking that control does not resolve the Palestinian question itself of course, but it removes the mechanism through which Iran transforms Palestinian grievance into a structural veto over the entire regional order.

That mechanism rests on a deep ideological reality because within the political imagination of much of the Muslim world, the Palestinian cause functions simultaneously as a nationalist grievance, a religious obligation, and a civilizational test through which governments and publics measure the “authenticity” of their leaders’ commitments.

Tehran understood this dynamic early on and massively exploited it with exceptional strategic acuity. By positioning itself as the principal armed sponsor of Palestinian resistance through Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Shia, non-Arab regime accomplished something that would otherwise have been structurally difficult: it claimed total moral leadership over a cause whose origins and deepest emotional resonance lie within the Sunni Arab world.

The Decision and Its Design

For all these reasons, Operation Epic Fury reflects an attempt to shift the underlying conditions of Middle Eastern politics. It’s a structural solution to a structural problem for Trump. Because if it succeeds, the constraints described above will loosen.

The Abraham Accords offered, I think, an early indication of what such a region might look like:

Several Arab governments signaled their willingness to normalize relations with Israel and move closer to Washington. What held them back was not a lack of political inclination. The obstacle came from the shadow cast by Iran’s network of armed proxies including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. That network made visible alignment with Israel a potentially dangerous gamble. Trump perhaps understood that incentives alone would not change the region’s calculations. Lowering the costs associated with alignment with the United States was essential.

Seen in this light, the current confrontation carries political and strategic implications, since for Arab nations the choices that once appeared too dangerous to contemplate will start to look far more practical if the operation succeeds.

And it brings Trump closer to the project he has long envisioned: a Middle East no longer constrained by Iran’s disruptive reach, stabilized with a lighter American military footprint and increasingly organized around trade, investment, and large scale infrastructure development.

In other words, Operation Epic Fury is a military campaign that, should it achieve its objectives, may mark the beginning of the end of America’s era of massive military engagement in the region. An attempt for Trump to reorder the strategic landscape of the Middle East in a way no previous administration has attempted, shifting the burden of regional containment toward Israel while freeing American political attention and capital for higher priority theaters.

Absent that outcome, Trump faces the prospect of closing his term with an unbroken Iranian threat, no expansion of Abraham Accords, no IMEC corridor that would benefit U.S. businesses, no Pax Silica that would empower U.S. tech companies, and a legacy indistinguishable from every predecessor who pledged to end American overextension in the Middle East yet never established the strategic conditions that would have made withdrawal possible.

This piece was originally published in National Review

I have added edits given today’s developments.

The men in Zhongnanhai do not rattle easily. Decades of patient statecraft, a foreign policy built on studied ambiguity, and an economy engineered to absorb external shocks have granted Beijing’s leadership a remarkable tolerance for turbulence. Operation Epic Fury, the American-Israeli air campaign now dismantling Iran’s military architecture, has produced something unusual in the corridors of Chinese power: visible confusion.

Xi Jinping is scrambling. The word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, the current moment is acutely dangerous. Not because China faces a direct military threat, but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.

Three Reasons Operation Epic Fury Is Catastrophic for Xi

First, the Iranian counterweight is gone. In 2021, Xi told senior Party officials that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” that America was “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world,” and that China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was central to that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor, and above all, to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of CCP’s dogma of inevitability, which rested on Iran’s ability to endure, and Epic Fury removed the foundation in a single afternoon.

Khamenei was the man who made the thesis feel real. Beijing’s relationship with the Islamic Republic was never really ideological, but Khamenei’s survival was the single most useful fact in Chinese foreign policy. Here was a man Washington had threatened, sanctioned, plotted against, and encircled for over four decades, and he was still giving Friday sermons. Xi personally signed the comprehensive strategic partnership with Khamenei’s government. He personally authorized the weapons transfers. And he personally wielded the Security Council veto. None of it kept Khamenei alive for one additional hour once Washington decided he was finished.

Second, Xi’s own story is collapsing from the inside. The story he told 1.4 billion people, that America is a declining power incapable of decisive force projection, does not match what happened in seventy-two hours over Tehran. State media can suppress the footage and the censors can scrub Weibo, but the ones who matter most, the military planners, the foreign policy professionals, the provincial officials who read between the lines for a living, know what they saw. And if the story is wrong about Iran, the unavoidable next question is whether it was ever right about anything else.

Third, the energy math turns against Beijing. China bought 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year and takes over 80% of everything Iran ships. Half of China’s total oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. With Ayatollah Khamenei now dead and Iran’s military leadership weakened, the Gulf’s strategic balance shifts decisively toward Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose energy ties with the United States are strengthening. China’s old selling point was very simple and transactional: we buy your oil and never mention human rights. That pitch loses its utility when Gulf producers already feel protected by an American security guarantee that just proved, on live television, that it works.

The Messaging Trap

Xi’s communications problem may be worse than his strategic one, because there is no good answer. If Beijing endorses the strikes, it loses the “Global South.” If Beijing condemns the strikes, it attaches Chinese prestige to a dead man’s regime, and risks provoking a Trump administration that has just demonstrated, through the act itself, that it does not bluff.

So Beijing chose the remaining option: hide behind the United Nations. Mao Ning called the killing “a grave violation of sovereignty.” The language sounds forceful, but the Belt and Road countries are watching, and what they see so far is a confused superpower reading from a script while American carriers do the actual deciding.

Every Iranian Move Is a Chinese Loss

The truly vicious part of Beijing’s situation is that Iran’s entire playbook for retaliation was designed to punish Washington, but the geography and economics of each weapon mean the damage lands on China instead. Iranian missiles aimed at Gulf states threaten the very oil infrastructure and port facilities that Chinese companies have spent billions investing in across the region.

The Strait of Hormuz is worse. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced within hours that no ship would pass through the channel, a threat designed as leverage against the West, except that the United States has a shale industry and a crisis-proof strategic petroleum reserve. In fact, according to Kayrros, as of March 31, 2025, China had only filled 56% percent of its above-ground strategic and commercial storage facilities.

Which means that nearly 45% of China’s own oil imports now sit/would sit hostage to a blockade that was never meant to hurt Beijing. The Houthis have resumed attacks on Red Sea shipping, every flare-up in Iraq threatens oil concessions that Chinese companies spent billions building, and the sum of Iran’s resistance amounts to a systematic disruption of Chinese commercial interests across every waterway and energy corridor Beijing depends on, executed in Khamenei’s name, with no regard for who actually pays the price.

Counting Moves

The clearest sign of Beijing’s disorientation is the absence of action: no emergency summits, no diplomatic maneuvers, no military repositioning, even as a Chinese citizen was killed in crossfire in Tehran and over 300 nationals were evacuated. The sum total of Beijing’s response to the largest American military operation in a generation remains a press conference.

Xi bet a decade of foreign policy on Khamenei’s ability to withstand American pressure, and the bet did not pay off. Operation Epic Fury was designed to break the Islamic Republic, but it may also have exposed the uncomfortable truth that Chinese influence in the Middle East was only as durable as the assumption that no one would ever call it into question, and in Zhongnanhai, they know it.

In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was sold to the American public and to the world as the definitive answer to Iran’s nuclear threat. The agreement placed extensive restrictions on uranium enrichment, centrifuge capacity, and stockpile levels, but said almost nothing about the one thing that would actually deliver a nuclear warhead to its target: ballistic missiles. Nothing about cruise missiles either. No limits on the development, testing, production, or deployment of the very weapons systems that transform a nuclear device from a dangerous secret in a bunker into a weapon that can destroy a city. A bomb is only as threatening as your ability to deliver it, and the JCPOA left Iran’s ability to deliver it completely unconstrained.

For Iran, this distinction matters more than it does for almost any other country on earth.

Decades of international sanctions have left Tehran with one of the weakest air forces in the region, an aging fleet incapable of penetrating the air defenses of Israel or any major Gulf state. Iran cannot deliver a nuclear weapon by aircraft. It cannot do so by sea with any reliability. The ballistic missile is the only component that gives the rest of the nuclear program strategic value.

What makes this failure even more consequential is who stepped in to exploit it.

Over the past two years, China has emerged as the principal external supplier of Iran’s ballistic missile program, providing everything from chemical precursors for solid rocket fuel to satellite guidance through its BeiDou-3 navigation network, which replaced American GPS across Iran’s entire military architecture. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned several Chinese entities for supplying the IRGC with chemicals used in missile fuel production.

Intelligence revealed Iranian cargo ships unloading shipments of sodium perchlorate at Bandar Abbas, a substance that bypasses existing monitoring mechanisms, in quantities sufficient to produce propellant for approximately 800 new missiles in a single delivery.

Beijing had also been negotiating the sale of CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles to Tehran, a system designed to sink aircraft carriers. In December 2025, American special forces raided a merchant vessel in the Indian Ocean carrying Chinese military cargo bound for the Revolutionary Guards.

By the time Operation Epic Fury launched, Iran possessed the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, an estimated 2,000 missiles of varying ranges dispersed across hardened underground facilities, rebuilt and resupplied in large part by Chinese industrial networks.

The Deferral

But let’s take a step back and look at what happened:

The Obama administration’s decision to exclude missiles from the 2015 JCPOA agreement represented a calculated concession, and more fundamentally, an act of deliberate deferral. In fact, both China and Russia categorically refused to include missile restrictions in the multilateral negotiations, and Tehran declared its indigenous missile development a non-negotiable sovereign right.

Naturally, the Obama team, determined to secure a landmark diplomatic achievement before leaving office, separated the nuclear file from the missile file entirely, treating them as two distinct problems when they formed two halves of the same threat.

Obama especially framed the deal in aspirational terms, saying it provided “an opportunity to move in a new direction,” but the direction left the missile program entirely unaddressed. In the language of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, the provisions on missiles merely “called upon” Iran not to conduct certain activities, far weaker than the binding prohibition in the prior Resolution 1929, which had explicitly prohibited Iran from pursuing ballistic missile technology capable of delivering nuclear warheads.

The administration even watered down the enforcement language of that earlier resolution to get the deal through, reasoning that missiles could be addressed later. That word, “later,” defined the entire approach. Iran tested ballistic missiles within weeks of the JCPOA entering into force, and no mechanism existed to stop it.

Free from constraint, Iran used the decade that followed to transform its missile program from a crude deterrent into a sophisticated, mass-produced strategic arsenal. It perfected guidance systems, extended ranges to cover all of the Middle East and parts of Europe, transitioned from liquid to solid-fuel propulsion, and constructed hardened underground launch facilities designed to withstand aerial bombardment. The interesting part? None of this violated a single provision of the deal.

And the missiles served a purpose beyond delivery: Iran aimed to amass such an overwhelming conventional arsenal that military action against its nuclear program would become prohibitively costly. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put today the math in stark terms: “They can build 100 ballistic missiles a month. We build 6 or 7 interceptors a month.” Each interceptor costs between $1 million and $15 million, while each Iranian missile costs between $200,000 and $500,000.

But the missiles did not stop at Israel’s borders. In the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, Iranian retaliatory strikes slammed into civilian areas across Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Manama; debris from intercepted projectiles rained near Kuwait International Airport. In the UAE alone, three people were killed and at least 58 wounded. Iran, in this sense, was (and still is) holding Arab capitals hostage, using its missile arsenal as a coercive instrument to punish the Gulf states for daring to deepen their alignment with Washington and/or Jerusalem.

The cruelest irony is that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi saw this coming. Neither was consulted as a stakeholder during the JCPOA negotiations, and both warned — publicly and repeatedly — that any deal leaving Iran’s missile program untouched would one day endanger their populations. They were dismissed as alarmist. Iranian warheads landing on Gulf Arab soil have now settled the argument.

The Reversal

Rubio's articulation of the objectives behind Epic Fury collapsed a distinction that three decades of American diplomacy had fought to preserve. "The objectives of this operation are to destroy their ballistic missile capability and make sure they can't rebuild, and make sure that they can't hide behind that to have a nuclear program," he said. One sentence fused what the JCPOA had deliberately kept apart, the nuclear file and the missile file, and redefined what an acceptable Iran looks like.

The urgency is real. Israeli defense planners had tracked how Chinese components, machine tools, and technical guidance were accelerating Iranian production lines, and their projections pointed toward catastrophe: 5,000 missiles by 2027, potentially 10,000 by the end of the decade. Every warhead carried a Chinese fingerprint, from solid-fuel propellant chemistry to the precision guidance systems that turned inaccurate rockets into weapons capable of striking downtown Abu Dhabi. Beijing was not merely trading with Tehran.

The Chinese government was industrializing Iran’s capacity to hold the Middle East at gunpoint. Whatever Beijing’s full calculus, the military consequences of that investment are legible on at least three levels.

• First, every interceptor the United States fires over the Middle East represents one fewer available for the Western Pacific. THAAD batteries, Patriot systems, and SM-3 carrying naval vessels all draw from the same overstretched production lines. By accelerating Iran’s missile output, China imposed a war of attrition on American munitions without deploying a single soldier.

• Second, Every Iranian salvo also forces the United States to reveal electronic warfare capabilities, radar signatures, and interceptor performance data in real combat conditions, giving Chinese military intelligence a live laboratory to study American defense systems without ever confronting them directly.

• Third, if the United States proved unable to shield its Arab partners from sustained bombardment, every ally watching from Tokyo to Manila to Taipei would draw the same conclusion: Washington’s promises have material limits.

The drain on American readiness had already begun.

During the twelve-day war in 2025, the United States burned through roughly 150 THAAD interceptors, munitions that take years to produce and that feed the same queue supporting Pacific deterrence.

Only a few dozen replacements followed. Iran was rebuilding faster than America could reload. Left unchecked, the math led to a devastating fork: accept Iranian nuclear breakout behind a missile shield too thick to penetrate, or fight a war in the Middle East with stockpiles earmarked for the Taiwan Strait. Beijing had engineered precisely this dilemma. Operation Epic Fury represented the decision to prevent that choice from ever arriving. By destroying the missiles, the United States turned years of Chinese strategic investment and billions in transferred technology to ash.

Operation Epic Fury is already destroying one of the central pillars upon which the entire architecture of Middle Eastern geopolitics rested for four decades. The joint American-Israeli strikes eliminated Supreme Leader Khamenei, dismantled Iranian command-and-control infrastructure, and degraded Tehran's missile and nuclear programs. This was the most consequential use of American military force in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

And the second-order effects will prove far more significant than the kinetic operation itself. Ankara now occupies a position of extraordinary strategic consequence. Iran's incapacitation opens space across every theatre where Turkey projects influence:

1. The Levant,

2. The Turkic world,

3. The African continent,

4. And the broader competition between Washington and its rivals.

Erdogan's initial response to the strikes was characteristically calibrated. He condemned the American-Israeli operation as a violation of Iranian sovereignty, attributed the escalation to Netanyahu's provocations, and called upon the Islamic world to prevent a wider conflagration. In the same breath, he denounced Iran's retaliatory strikes against Gulf states as unacceptable and dispatched his Foreign Minister, intelligence chief, and Interior Minister into intensive coordination with counterparts across the region. Turkey rejected claims that it provided airspace or logistical support for the operation. The dual posture—deploring all parties while positioning to inherit the aftermath—is typical Erdogan. What distinguishes this moment is the sheer scale of the opportunity now available to him.

Filling the Vacuum

Iran’s degradation accelerates a transformation already well underway.

Since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 and the ascent of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government in Damascus, Turkey functions de facto as Syria’s principal external patron. Approximately 10,000 Turkish troops remain deployed in northern Syria. Ankara shaped the January 2026 ceasefire arrangements that consolidated Damascus’s authority over key territories and oil fields east of the Euphrates. And Turkey’s Defense Minister stated in February that Ankara intends no withdrawal from Syrian or Iraqi territory. The decision, he made clear, belongs to the Republic of Turkey alone.

The removal of Iranian influence completes a process that began with Hezbollah's degradation in Lebanon and accelerated with Assad's ouster. Tehran's network of Shia militias in Iraq—Kataib Hezbollah, which threatened to attack American bases in Babil province following the strikes, and the broader Popular Mobilization Forces apparatus—now faces an existential leadership vacuum. The command-and-control links to Tehran that sustained these organizations for two decades are severed.

Naturally, Ankara sees an opening to deepen engagement with Iraqi factions already gravitating toward Turkish influence, particularly the Kurdistan Democratic Party and an array of Sunni Arab groups disillusioned with Iranian patronage. Turkey's growing influence in Syria already emboldens these Iraqi constituencies, and the Syria file now functions as a strategic multiplier for Ankara's position in Baghdad.

But more importantly, Turkey's leverage over Iraq extends into the most fundamental resource of all. As the upstream power on both the Tigris and the Euphrates, Ankara possesses decisive control over Iraq's water supply—a reality that constrains Baghdad regardless of political dynamics or of Iran’s state of affairs.

Turkey also recently expanded road construction in the Kurdistan Region's western Duhok province and deepened cooperation with the Kurdistan Regional Government on the Development Road Project which is a $17 billion corridor designed to link the Grand Faw Port on the Persian Gulf to Turkey through Iraqi territory. Qatar and the UAE signed a quadrilateral memorandum of understanding with Ankara and Baghdad to serve as the project's strategic financiers, creating a coalition that binds Gulf capital to Turkish logistical reach through Iraqi geography.

Iran viewed the Development Road with undisguised unease, recognizing it as a direct threat to its own ports and transit leverage. Tehran's incapacitation now removes the principal external actor that counterbalanced Turkish influence over both Baghdad and Erbil.

Putin: The Widening Asymmetry

The other important player for Erdogan is Putin.

Russia’s position in the Middle East collapsed over the past year, and Operation Epic Fury will accelerate the process to its logical conclusion. Moscow lost its Syrian foothold when Assad fell. Russian bases at Tartus and Khmeimim remain nominally operational, but Russia’s strategic influence in the Levant evaporated.

The Turkey-Russia relationship was always one of mutual opportunism held together by the hard logic of energy (although there are obviously numerous other factors at play, but energy/water these are extremely important). Turkey relies on Russian natural gas. The Akkuyu nuclear power plant, under construction by Rosatom, binds the two economies in a multi-billion dollar commitment that neither side can easily unwind. Moreover, bilateral trade reached $55 billion in recent years, a volume large enough to give both capitals a material stake in managing their disagreements.

And the economic entanglement is reinforced by genuine personal chemistry: Putin and Erdogan share parallel trajectories, both were born in the 1950s, both governed for more than two decades, both are nostalgic for imperial grandeur and skeptical of Western institutional frameworks, and both prefer to settle matters between themselves rather than through multilateral machinery.

But Russia's weakening already tilted this relationship decisively in Ankara's favor. Turkey supplied Bayraktar drones to Ukraine, facilitated prisoner exchanges, humiliated Moscow over the return of Azov commanders, and cultivated Central Asian states in Russia's near abroad, all of this without meaningful Russian retaliation.

Why? Well, Putin needs Turkey more than Erdogan needs Putin.

Ankara offers a diplomatic channel to NATO and a partner whose acquiescence Moscow cannot afford to lose in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Operation Epic Fury deepens this asymmetry further. With Iran destroyed and Russia consumed by Ukraine, Putin's capacity to constrain Turkish ambitions is diminished to the point of irrelevance in every theatre except energy supply.

It bears remembering that Erdogan positioned Turkey as a mediator on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, offering to host peace talks and proposing limited ceasefires targeting energy infrastructure. This mediator role enhances Turkey's strategic autonomy rather than tethering it to Moscow.

The dynamic is not whether Turkey will abandon Russia—it will not, as long as energy dependence persists—but that Ankara accumulates leverage at a rate that allows Erdogan to dictate terms rather than negotiate them.

The Turkic World

Iran's degradation carries consequences that extend far beyond the Middle East, and nowhere more so than in the Turkic world.

The Organization of Turkic States (OTS), comprising Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, underwent a transformation from a cultural identity platform into an increasingly substantive geopolitical grouping. Intra-OTS trade reached an estimated $58 billion in 2024, and Turkey's cumulative trade with member states over five years exceeded $62 billion. At the October 2025 Gabala summit in Azerbaijan, the organization placed security cooperation on its agenda for the first time, with Baku proposing the first-ever OTS military exercise for 2026. It is safe to bet that group will only grow stronger.

The physical infrastructure to match this political consolidation is already taking shape. Iran's paralysis opens new possibilities for the Middle Corridor, the trade and transport route linking China to Europe through Central Asia and Turkey. The corridor bypasses both Russia and Iran, and gains strategic viability as Iranian disruption potential diminishes. A Polish logistics company already completed the first full round trip through Iraq's new TIR corridors in June 2025, reducing transit time from 24 days to 10. The route now functions. Iran can no longer threaten it.

Turkey's soft power reinforces the institutional gains. Turkish television dramas reach hundreds of millions of viewers, Turkish Airlines connects Istanbul to dozens of Central Asian cities, Ankara launched social media platforms in 2025 aimed specifically at Turkic populations, and Turkish defense exports now penetrate markets that were once exclusively Russian.

The African Expansion

Turkey’s growth across the African continent stands as one of the most significant and least appreciated geopolitical developments of the past decade.

• Trade between Turkey and African countries exceeded $37 billion in 2024.

• Defense exports surpassed $10.56 billion in 2025, a historic record, with Turkish military hardware now deployed across the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and North Africa.

• Turkish Airlines serves 64 African destinations which is a soft-power enabler for Ankara’s broader strategic agenda.

Iran’s degradation matters here too. Tehran cultivated African relationships for decades, using embassy networks, Shia community ties, and arms transfers to maintain footholds from West Africa to the Horn. That infrastructure is now in disarray.

Turkey moves into the space with a model that combines large-scale infrastructure, defense cooperation, and a distinctly Ottoman sensibility about civilizational ties to the Islamic world. Turkish religious foundations, educational scholarships, and humanitarian organizations laid the groundwork long before the state apparatus followed.

The approach is transactional and unencumbered by the conditionality that constrains Western engagement. Ankara, like Beijing for that matter, does not make defense cooperation conditional on governance or human rights commitments. For instance, Turkey backed the Government of National Accord in Libya’s civil war, deploying drones and Syrian fighters that reversed Haftar’s advance on Tripoli and secured Ankara a lasting foothold in North Africa. In Sudan, Turkey cultivated ties with both the military establishment and civilian factions, positioning itself as a mediator while expanding commercial and defense relationships. This gives Turkey access to partners and markets that Western capitals forfeited, and that Tehran can no longer contest.

The Calculation

Erdogan's Turkey stands at a moment of extraordinary possibility. Iran's destruction removed the most significant regional check on Turkish ambitions. Russia's preoccupation with Ukraine neutralized the second. The Kurdish question is closer to a political settlement than at any point in four decades. Turkey's influence extends from the Balkans to the Horn of Africa, from the Levant to the steppes of Central Asia. No other middle power in the international system operates across so many theaters with such a combination of military, diplomatic, economic, and cultural instruments.

Erdogan's genius always lay in his capacity to maintain contradictory positions simultaneously. He condemned Israel while preserving deconfliction channels, armed Ukraine while purchasing Russian energy, championed the Islamic world while expanding NATO engagements. Operation Epic Fury does not end this hedging. It raises the stakes. The post-Iranian Middle East offers Turkey more room to maneuver, but also more pressure to choose. Choices that could be deferred when Iran absorbed the attention of every regional actor will now demand resolution.

For Washington, the strategic imperative is to treat Turkey as what it is: not an easy partner, not a submissive ally, but an indispensable one.

Erdogan’s relationships with Trump, with al-Sharaa, with Putin, and with the leaders of the Turkic world give him a connective capacity that no other leader in the region possesses. The United States should use the post-Epic Fury environment to press for a Turkey-Israel settlement on Syria, positioning Ankara as a stabilizer rather than a spoiler in the Levant. It should engage the Organization of Turkic States as a serious element of Central Asian strategy. And it should coordinate with Turkey on African engagement where interests converge, especially in countering terrorism and stabilizing the Horn.

The alternative is neglecting Turkey’s potential while Erdogan hedges between competing poles, squandering the most significant realignment of Middle Eastern power since the end of the Cold War.

Erdogan will, as always, calculate. The question is whether Washington will calculate with equal precision.

Nothing about Operation Epic Fury occurred within a thousand miles of Tokyo. Yet no capital in the world stands to gain more from the wreckage of Khamenei’s regime than the one sitting across the East China Sea from Shanghai.

Japan is one of China's main strategic rivals in the Western Pacific: the two compete for military dominance in the East and South China Seas, for economic influence across Southeast Asia, for secure energy supply chains, and for the allegiance of every mid-sized Pacific power now deciding whether its future runs through Washington or Beijing.

The gains Operation Epic Fury delivered to Tokyo are structural and extend across every dimension of that rivalry.

First, the energy constraint.

China’s ability to project power simultaneously in the South China Sea and the Western Pacific depends on a permissive energy environment, one in which tankers move freely, reserves remain full, and no external shock forces Beijing to choose between fueling its navy and fueling its economy. That environment no longer exists. Every barrel China must now renegotiate, reroute, or replace from Iranian sources tightens the logistical margin available for sustained military operations around Taiwan or the Senkaku Islands.

Second, the sanctions evasion infrastructure.

Iran is the world's most sophisticated laboratory for circumventing Western financial enforcement, and the networks it built had dual-use value for Beijing's own contingency planning in a Taiwan scenario where China itself could face comprehensive sanctions. The operational knowledge embedded in those networks is now degrading in real time. For Japanese defense planners, who have long worried that Western economic leverage over China might prove insufficient in a Taiwan crisis, the destruction of Beijing's most advanced sanctions-evasion rehearsal space is a strategic gain of the first order.

Third, the alliance contrast.

China, Russia, and Iran signed their trilateral agreement barely a month ago. Neither Moscow nor Beijing has moved to defend Tehran. The "axis" has been revealed as a series of transactional arrangements that collapse the moment American power is applied with seriousness.

Putin, who signed a 20-year comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran in January 2025, is now watching his second major security client buckle under Western military pressure in as many years, having already failed to translate Russian power into decisive outcomes in Ukraine. A president who cannot finish his own war has nothing left to extend to his partners.

For Tokyo, which has long treated Russian military activity around Hokkaido and the Kurils as a second-front threat designed to complement Chinese pressure in the south, the implications are clarifying. A Russia that cannot sustain its commitments to Iran has no credible capacity to open a northern front against Japan on Beijing's behalf.

It also shows that Japan's alliance with the United States rests on mutual defense obligations and seventy years of institutional integration. Every government in the Western Pacific can now see the difference.

Fourth, the Global South recalculation.

Beijing's diplomatic brand across the developing world rested on a core proposition: that alignment with China and Russia offered a viable counterweight to American coercion, a path to sovereignty. Operation Epic Fury has gutted that proposition in public view.

This is the second time since January that Washington has moved against a Chinese partner, after Maduro's fall in Venezuela, and in both cases Beijing absorbed the loss without visible distress. Every prospective partner state is now updating its priors.

The non-aligned path that Beijing marketed so effectively looks considerably less attractive when the patrons of non-alignment cannot protect their own clients. Japan, which has spent the better part of a decade building defense partnerships with the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, offering patrol vessels, radar systems, and coast guard training as alternatives to Chinese dependency, finds the credibility of that offering increased by an order of magnitude.

Fifth, the continental bypass.

The Belt and Road corridor through Iran, the railway network that promised to free Beijing from dependence on the very maritime chokepoints Japan and the United States dominate, is now indefinitely deferred.

The Five Nations Railway connecting China to Iran through Central Asia depended on political stability that no longer exists. Every month that corridor remains inoperable is another month the Malacca Strait retains its strategic centrality, and another month Japan's geographic position astride the Western Pacific sea lanes appreciates in value.

Sixth, the Trump factor.

The administration that just executed Operation Epic Fury alongside Israel has simultaneously deepened military cooperation with Tokyo, expanded joint exercises in the Philippine Sea, and maintained the institutional commitment to Japanese security that no Chinese partner has ever received from Beijing.

Trump arrives in China next month having just destroyed a Chinese strategic partner, while the $13 billion Taiwan arms package remains conspicuously unsigned. For Japan, the configuration is close to ideal, they will see an American president who has proven that alliance commitments carry lethal weight, sitting across the table from a Chinese leader who has just discovered what it means to be on the other side of that equation.

What Tokyo received today was a confirmation: that the alliance architecture Japan has invested in since 1952 remains the only security framework in the Pacific that functions under pressure. China's alternative offered the promise of multipolarity but no protection. The distinction now carries weight and Japanese strategists are the primary beneficiaries of every government that recognizes it.