This is not a war that can be understood merely by counting missiles, nor by listening to military briefings and political press conferences. What appears on the surface is only the outer shell of the event; its true core lies elsewhere: in interests as they change colour, in alliances as they shift, and in prophecies as they are invoked to give bloodshed meaning and to clothe greed in the language of destiny. How often has an enemy been publicly denounced as an absolute threat, only for a hidden channel of coordination, a quiet corridor of understanding, or a moment of strategic convergence to emerge when necessity demanded it. Iran, which today is presented in American and Israeli discourse as an existential adversary, cooperated with the United States after the attacks of 11 September on the Afghan file, and Iranian representatives took part in arrangements for the post-Taliban order at the Bonn Conference, as the Council on Foreign Relations' historical timeline of US-Iran relations makes clear.[1]

Yet that same adversary was soon returned, in American discourse, to the position of a central enemy, as though politics were governed not by enduring hostilities but by shifting needs. Nor was this the first such reversal. The United States, which long raised the banner of hostility towards Tehran, was itself involved in secret arms deals with Iran during the Iran-Contra affair — one of the clearest demonstrations that public denunciation does not prevent covert partnership when interests demand it.[2]

Yet interests alone, however fluid, are not enough to sustain long wars, nor to draw whole publics into theatres of attrition, nor to justify the immense costs paid in blood, urban destruction, and moral collapse. That is why prophecies are summoned whenever the language of naked interest can no longer mobilise belief. Christian Zionism in the United States did not make support for Israel merely a political stance; for large sectors of its adherents, it linked that support to the return of the Jews to the land as a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ, as explained by Encyclopaedia Britannica.[3]

This is why the ongoing war is not simply a confrontation between states and armies. It is a war of interests that rearrange themselves whenever balances of power shift; a war of symbols in which God is invoked, books of prophecy reopened, and geography itself is given an apocalyptic meaning that exceeds its physical boundaries. Once interest joins hands with prophecy, once strategy fuses with narrative, and once domination cloaks itself in sacred promise, the conflict becomes far larger than a passing military clash. It becomes a whole architecture of justification, mobilisation, and entrapment, into which peoples are driven — at one moment in the name of security, at another in the name of history, at another in the name of revelation, and at yet another in the name of salvation itself.[4]

Interest as the Mother Strategy: When Pragmatism Removes Its Secular Glove and Wears the Mask of Prophecy

The first key to understanding this conflict is that interest is no longer merely one motive among others in politics. It has become the mother strategy from which all other strategies branch out, under whose shadow alliances, hostilities, and alignments are formed. An ally is not an ally because he stands for principle, nor is an enemy an enemy because he embodies some fixed evil. Everything turns on benefit where benefit lies, on necessity where necessity descends, and on interest where interest settles. For this reason, it was not strange that Iran cooperated with the United States in Afghanistan, nor was it strange that Washington later restored Iran to the position of a central foe. American policy itself demonstrates that partial cooperation does not prevent a return to containment once calculations change.[1][2]

More dangerous still is the fact that Western thought, which for so long presented itself in secular and utilitarian terms, under the logic of the market, management, and efficiency, did not remain loyal to its own secularism when overtaken by the lust for dominance and tied to the Israeli project. Instead, it bent back towards what it once claimed to exclude from public life: sacred promise, scriptural entitlement, and historical chosenness. When the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, spoke of a "biblical right" for Israel to large parts of the Middle East, this was not simply an unfortunate remark; it was an expression of the growing entanglement of geopolitics and theology within certain circles of American influence. Those remarks were met with broad Arab and regional condemnation, even as the US Embassy insisted they did not represent an official policy change.[4]

At precisely this point, what may be called the Israeli-American nexus comes into view — almost as a unity of interest and a unity of justification. Interest moves in the language of security, force, and supremacy; then a theological, biblical, and messianic discourse arrives to grant that interest a sense of destiny and redemptive purpose. Israel is no longer merely a functional ally of the United States, nor is America merely a supporter of Israel. Rather, the whole field is recast in the image of an alliance in which utility joins prophecy, domination joins redemption, and military decision joins religious narrative.[3][4]

When Desire Turns Savage

This opportunistic shifting of interests, once draped in religious language and undertaken by powers that show neither covenant nor restraint towards the peoples under their shadow, reveals the degree of moral and political decay this age has reached. They may soothe opponents with their words, speaking in public of law, de-escalation, and peace, but their deeds insist on a form of ethical and political deviance with few parallels — recognising no covenant, honouring no promise, stopping at no boundary. And between the arrogance of power when it exalts itself, and the spread of falsehood when it runs loose, the tragedy reaches its highest point in a visible extermination the world can see with its own eyes and yet refuses to stop: from the people of Gaza, slaughtered before a silent humanity, to the corners of the Middle East collapsing under waves of fire, in a war whose theatre widened from Gaza to Lebanon, Iran, and the Gulf, paralysing shipping lanes and disrupting the world's energy arteries in ways visible in the international press day after day.[5][6]

Amid all this wreckage, positions keep shifting, hostilities are remade, and alliances are rewritten — not according to any truth that is followed, nor according to any value that is protected, but according to whatever interest demands, whatever the balance of power requires, and whatever ultimately serves the lust for domination, even if the whole land must be watered with the blood of its people. And so long as official American strategy itself continues to make support for Israel, deterrence against Iran, and deeper integration between Israel and Gulf partners an explicit part of its regional security vision, this movement is not an incidental feature of events; it is a recurring structure in the management of the conflict.[7]

Strategies After the Crime

This conflict did not unfold in a vacuum, nor did it move blindly. It has been accompanied by a set of strategies that sometimes appeared as instruments of action and at other times as its justification, until it seemed to me that strategic theories no longer hold their traditional standing as prior planning — defining goals, designing means, and controlling the sequence of action. Instead, in our time, they have often become a language that explains what had already been decided, justifies what was already intended, and grants policies of domination names that sound more elegant and more acceptable in political and media discourse. This meaning is reinforced by the persistence of official American language centred on protecting Israel, deterring Iran, and reshaping regional arrangements in ways that serve those ends.[7]

From this perspective, the Middle East appears not simply as a region in which war erupted because of its own internal causes, but as an open field for reshaping influence, controlling routes, and managing geography in a way that serves the centre of Israeli-American hegemony. The region is not read in strategic documents merely as a geography of peoples and states, but as a space of energy, chokepoints, corridors, and alliances. Once a region is read in that language, its inhabitants become substructure in a larger equation.[7][8]

The Faces of Strategy in the Ongoing War

If interest is the mother principle in this conflict, then we arrive at the heart of the matter: the strategies accompanying this war. Strategy here does not mean the cold textbook sense of a clean plan followed by disciplined execution. More often, it refers to frameworks designed to serve a reality of domination, to explain behaviour already chosen by power, or to give political greed a more refined name on the international stage. The strategies of this war are not best understood as isolated military techniques, but as tools for managing influence, encircling adversaries, preventing the emergence of any countervailing force, and keeping the Middle East open to Israeli-American supremacy.[7]

Mowing the Grass: A War That Does Not Seek Final Victory So Much as Perpetual Weakening

One of the clearest strategies in this conflict is what Israeli literature has called "mowing the grass" — a strategy that does not seek to eliminate the adversary once and for all so much as to periodically weaken it, drain its capacities whenever they accumulate, and prevent it from reaching a point at which it can impose a real strategic cost on Israel. Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir explained this clearly in their BESA paper, where they argued that the aim is not final political settlement, but the management of a long conflict through repeated cycles of degradation and erosion.[9]

The Begin Doctrine: Striking the Threat Before It Fully Forms

Alongside "mowing the grass" stands the Begin Doctrine, one of the most explicit Israeli strategies in its pre-emptive logic. This doctrine holds that no hostile state should be allowed to acquire a military nuclear capability that might one day be used against Israel. Studies by the Institute for National Security Studies describe this doctrine as emerging from the strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, and later the Syrian reactor, reducing the principle to a simple formula: do not wait for the threat to become complete — strike it before it becomes reality.[10]

The Campaign Between Wars: Organised Attrition Below the Threshold of Full-Scale War

Then comes the strategy known in Israeli doctrine as "the campaign between wars" — essentially an attempt to manage conflict through a steady series of strikes below the threshold of total war. The adversary is not left to rebuild quietly, nor given time to secure supply routes, move weapons, or widen deployment. It is pursued in the grey space between peace and war. The Institute for National Security Studies has described this as the official Israeli security term for a long-running pattern of offensive operations aimed at slowing the growth of enemy capabilities and preventing them from reshaping Israel's strategic environment.[11]

Qualitative Military Edge: Preventing Balance from Emerging in the First Place

Yet all of these strategies remain branches of a wider principle: preserving Israel's qualitative military edge — not merely as military superiority, but as a fixed rule in the design of the region itself. The issue here is not simply defeating a specific adversary, but preventing the rise of any regional balance in which Israel becomes merely one power among comparable powers. This is why the concept of the Qualitative Military Edge became an explicit American policy commitment, as shown in US State Department material about guaranteeing Israel's superiority.[12]

At this point, another face appears — equally dangerous. These strategies, though presented outwardly as military tools or security concepts, perform a larger function underneath: they turn a project of domination into something presented as rational necessity. Once one says an enemy must have its "grass mown", or its capability must be struck "before it is complete", or its growth must be worn down "between wars", the strategic language is no longer merely describing reality. It is producing legitimacy for reality. It makes expansion look like defence, pre-emption look like reason, and prolonged attrition look like responsible statecraft.[9][10][11]

Defence After Expansion: When Iranian Strategy Collided with the Ceiling of Hegemony

If we turn to Iran, we find that its strategy in this phase no longer moves with the same expansive confidence that characterised the years of forward defence and the building of the Axis of Resistance. It has entered a more defensive, exposed, and tense phase because the project that spread for years across Arab geography ultimately collided with a fact it could not overcome: expansion does not happen in a vacuum, influence does not grow without limits, and hegemonic powers do not permit the rise of an independent regional centre capable of contesting the same space or sharing in the determination of the region's future. Chatham House has pointed out that the "Axis of Resistance" suffered major setbacks in 2024, and that the weakening of Hezbollah and the fall of the former Syrian regime pushed Iran to rely more heavily on its partners in Iraq and Yemen.[13]

From this point, it may be said that Iran's present defensive strategies revolve around three main axes: decentralised mosaic defence, asymmetric deterrence, and maintaining whatever remains of the regional encirclement as an external defensive depth. This reading is reinforced by Reuters' reporting that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tightened its grip over wartime decision-making despite the loss of several senior commanders, and now leads a harder line in the management of missiles and drone warfare across the region.[14]

Yet this defensive turn also reveals the crisis within Iran's own expansionary strategy. Iran, while presenting its external project in the language of resistance, was in reality also pursuing sectarian-political influence that would secure it an uninterrupted regional depth stretching from Iraq to the Levant, Lebanon, and Yemen. But that project did not proceed in a straight line, because it ran into Israeli-American hegemonic power on one side and into competing regional interests on the other. Thus Iranian pragmatism — or what might be described as political taqiyya in certain moments, whether in Afghanistan after 11 September or in later episodes — proved insufficient to secure Iran a durable and uncontested right to expansion.[1][13]

As a result, Iran no longer moves today with the logic of steady ascent, but with the logic of defending survival, raising the cost, and preventing rapid collapse. Even American statements reveal this transformation. The US Defence Secretary stated that the campaign focused on destroying Iran's offensive missiles, missile production, naval capabilities, and preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.[15]

The Ring That Tightened Around Its Owner

One of the clearest manifestations of Iranian strategy over the past two decades has been what may be called the ring of fire — shifting the field of pressure away from Iranian territory itself and distributing the capacity to inflict pain through successive rings encircling Israel from multiple directions: Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. This was not merely rhetorical decoration. The conflict-monitoring organisation ACLED explicitly described it as a "ring of fire", explaining that Israeli operations in Gaza and Lebanon weakened this ring and that the later loss of Syria dealt an additional blow to Iran's strategy of forward defence.[16]

Yet the ring that was meant to be an instrument of deterrence and expansion began to tighten around its owner as the environment changed and losses mounted. Chatham House noted that the "Axis of Resistance" suffered major setbacks, and that the weakening of Hezbollah and the collapse of the Syrian link forced Iran to rely more heavily on allies in Iraq and Yemen.[13] Reuters also reported on 6 March 2026 that Israeli attacks on Hezbollah were likely to continue even after the joint aerial war on Iran had ended, suggesting that the various rings of the encirclement were no longer treated as isolated theatres, but as parts of a standing system to be dismantled link by link.[17]

For this reason, Iranian strategy cannot be understood by viewing the ring either as pure success or total failure. It was successful in shifting part of the burden outside Iran's borders, yet failed to transform that shift into a stable and unbreakable formula. It granted Iran years of gradual deterrence, but ultimately revealed that deterrence, if not backed by a broader balance of power, a stronger network, and a less hostile regional environment, can turn from shield into burden.[13][16][17]

Entrapment: From Theology to the Final Bill

One of the most dangerous features of this conflict is that it has not unfolded merely as direct warfare, but also as a form of graduated entrapment. It begins in discourse, then moves into alliance structures, and finally settles into geography, economics, and blood. Its first dimension is theological entrapment: prophecy is summoned to grant the political project a meaning beyond its practical limits, and the ally is elevated from the level of partner to that of a historically mandated or scripturally blessed force. In this way, taking sides ceases to be optional and becomes a duty. The invocation of "biblical right" in American rhetoric, as in Mike Huckabee's remarks, is part of shifting the conflict from political calculation to doctrinal obligation.[4]

That theological entrapment then rebounds into direct American entrapment. A war first presented as a defence of Israel or of "the right" quickly becomes an exercise in draining American power itself. Reuters reported on 7 March 2026 that the dangers to the United States and to Donald Trump had multiplied after just one week of war, amid rising prices and widening theatres of response.[18]

Yet once America found itself at the heart of the game, it did not want to bear the burden alone. As empires often do, it moved to shift the bill onto the Arab and wider Middle Eastern environment: through security commitments, financing, geography, and the risks of blowback. The war does not happen in Washington. It happens here — in straits, ports, airports, energy fields, and fragile capitals across a battered Middle East. In this sense, American entrapment does not merely involve allies in decision-making; it forces them to absorb the consequences: drained air defences, threatened infrastructure, and disruption to trade.[7][8]

On the other side of the picture stands Russian entrapment of a different sort — not ideological entrapment, but indirect attrition. Russia does not appear eager to enter the war openly on Iran's behalf, but it is equally unwilling to hand Washington a cheap victory. Hence the reports, carried by Reuters, that Russia provided Iran with targeting intelligence including the locations of US ships and aircraft in the Middle East — a model of support intended not to fight the war directly, but to raise the cost of American involvement.[19]

China's position is not identical to Russia's. Beijing does not publicly appear to be pushing for a long war. Rather, it calls for de-escalation in order to protect Gulf trade and energy, while quietly benefiting from every day in which the United States is drained away from East Asia. For that reason, it is more accurate not to say that China seeks to "take Hong Kong", since Hong Kong has been under Chinese sovereignty since 1997, even as Beijing's grip there has tightened in recent years, as the Council on Foreign Relations explains.[20] The more accurate observation is that Beijing benefits from the strategic distraction of American power, a point reflected in the concerns reported by Reuters among Washington's Asian allies, who fear that the Iran war may sap the very capabilities meant to deter China in Asia.[21]

For all these reasons, the most deeply entrapped party in the end is not always the one that launched the war first, nor even the one that justified it theologically, but the one upon whom its final costs fall: the peoples and states of the Middle East. They are the ones who pay in their cities, ports, airports, straits, public finances, and social stability for these layered strategies.[18][19][21]

The Final Bill

If the preceding strategies have revolved around expansion, deterrence, encirclement, and entrapment, then the decisive question at the end of this path is not who wrote the plan, nor who lit the first spark, but: who will pay the final price? The answer requires little effort. It will not be Washington whose neighbourhoods are razed, nor Moscow whose ports are shut down, nor Beijing whose skies close above its citizens. The final bill is typically written here, in the Middle East, on the bodies of its peoples, in the security of its cities, and in the wealth of its seas, straits, and fields.

This is not merely a rhetorical judgement. Reuters reported on 7 March 2026 that the war threatened a prolonged shock to global energy markets, and that roughly 20% of global oil and gas supply had been disrupted by production stoppages, infrastructure damage, and paralysed navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, while oil prices rose by more than 25% in one week.[22]

The destruction does not stop at markets. It extends into the human and urban sphere. In Lebanon, Reuters reported on 3 March 2026 that around 30,000 displaced people had already been counted in collective shelters alone. On 6 March 2026, Reuters again quoted the UN refugee agency describing the Middle East situation as a "major humanitarian emergency".[23][24]

If we turn to the Gulf, supposedly the centre of wealth and energy, the bill appeared there too. On 7 March 2026, the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation announced cuts to crude production and declared force majeure because shipments had been disrupted by the war, while the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil and liquefied gas passes — remained blocked for eight consecutive days.[25]

Nor was the United States, as the principal sponsoring power, untouched by cost. But the crucial difference is that its cost is mostly measured in prices, elections, and domestic political pressure, whereas the Middle East's cost is measured in blood, urban ruin, infrastructure, and sovereignty. Reuters reported on 7 March 2026 that the dangers to the United States and Trump had multiplied after a week of war, and that the White House was seeking bolder measures to contain energy prices under the pressure of the conflict.[18][26]

Thus, the most deeply entrapped party in the end is not only the one drawn into war politically or theologically, but the one that will carry its consequences in its economy, society, and sovereignty for decades. In that sense, it is most accurate to say that the Arabs — or more broadly, the states of the Middle East — are the most deeply entrapped, even when they were not the original decision-makers. They pay out of their urban fabric for international rivalry, out of their resources for the struggle over energy and routes, and out of their stability for the mutual deterrence of others fought over their land.[22][23][25]

Leaving Hegemony or Falling into the Abyss

In the end, I do not believe the real solution lies in swapping one face for another, nor in patching up one round of conflict only to wait for the next. The real solution lies in breaking free from Israeli-American hegemony itself. That hegemony no longer produces security, stability, or balance for the region. It reproduces war in a new form each time, opens repetitive cycles of exhaustion across the Middle East, and then demands that the region finance its own destruction and remain silent about its wounds. So long as the region remains governed by the logic of Israeli superiority backed by the United States, and by the logic of deterring Iran while deepening regional integration in ways that preserve that superiority, as stated in the US 2026 National Defense Strategy, it will remain threatened by wars that yield nothing except the consolidation of control and the perpetuation of vulnerability.[7]

More dangerous still, this hegemony no longer moves in merely cold colonial terms. In some of its circles, it is underwritten by a biblical and messianic discourse that makes the political project seem like divine destiny, historical promise, or scriptural entitlement. When such theological language is brought into the centre of geopolitical decision-making, wars cease to be merely contests over influence. They become means to fulfil redemptive dreams, for which the world is mobilised and for which some senior politicians are cast as servants of a project that transcends the state and enters myth, transcends interests and enters promise.[4]

This is why the persistence of this hegemony threatens not only geopolitics, but also the global ethical and social fabric. Wars conducted in this spirit do not merely produce physical destruction. They unleash recurring waves of extremism, hatred, and hardening identity blocs. Reuters reported that the war on Gaza and its aftermath were linked to record-high anti-Muslim incidents in the United States, according to CAIR; it also quoted the UN Secretary-General warning of a disturbing rise in anti-Muslim bigotry globally. At the same time, Reuters reported findings from Harvard's task forces describing widespread fear and prejudice tied to both antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus.[27][28][29]

The danger does not stop at hatred and extremism. It moves beyond them towards the possibility of a much larger explosion. The war has already widened, threatened prolonged damage to global energy markets, and raised concerns among Washington's Asian allies that the Iran conflict may drain the very American capabilities intended to deter China in Asia.[21][22] The longer this chain continues, the wider the prospect of global blowback becomes — not because a third world war has formally been declared, but because the aftershocks of its earthquake are already visible: erosion in deterrence structures, energy chokepoints, spreading theatres of fire, and the conversion of the region into an open contact zone between great-power projects.

For this reason, leaving this cycle will not come through a temporary ceasefire, nor through redistributing roles within the same structure. It requires cutting the root that reproduces it: ending subordination to Israeli-American hegemony, rejecting the reduction of regional security to the security of Israel, and refusing to let the Middle East's wealth, chokepoints, and societies serve as raw material for external supremacy projects. Either the peoples and elites of the region realise that remaining in this orbit will hand them nothing but more wars, more exhaustion, and more moral and social fragmentation, or these lands will remain poised on the edge of an abyss — pushed toward it once in the name of security, once in the name of deterrence, and once in the name of God — until the day comes when no one will remember who lit the fire first, because all will already have been consumed by it.

Endnotes

[1] Council on Foreign Relations, "U.S. Relations With Iran: Timeline."
[2] Council on Foreign Relations, "Timeline of U.S.-Iran Contacts"; Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Iran-Contra Affair."
[3] Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Christian Zionism."
[4] Reuters, 22 February 2026, "US envoy's remarks on Israel and Middle East land draw condemnation in region."
[5] AP News, coverage of the widening regional war, March 2026.
[6] Reuters graphic and regional coverage of the widening Middle East conflict, March 2026.
[7] U.S. Department of Defense, 2026 National Defense Strategy, 23 January 2026.
[8] The White House, National Security Strategy, December 2025; US State Department material on regional security cooperation and Hormuz.
[9] Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, "Mowing the Grass in Gaza," BESA Center Perspectives Paper, 2014.
[10] INSS, "The Begin Doctrine: The Lessons of Osirak and Deir ez-Zor," 21 March 2018.
[11] INSS, Gadi Eisenkot and Gabi Siboni, "The Campaign Between Wars," Memorandum No. 186, 2019.
[12] U.S. Department of State, "Ensuring Israel's Qualitative Military Edge," 17 November 2011; "U.S. Security Cooperation with Israel," 25 April 2025.
[13] Chatham House, "The Shape-Shifting Axis of Resistance," 6 March 2025.
[14] Reuters, 4 March 2026, "Iran's Revolutionary Guards take wartime lead, ensuring harder line, sources say."
[15] Reuters, 5 March 2026, "US not expanding military objectives on Iran, Hegseth says."
[16] ACLED, "The Axis of Resistance and the Regional Ramifications of Israel's War in Gaza," 2025.
[17] Reuters, 6 March 2026, "Israel's Hezbollah attacks are likely to continue beyond Iran war."
[18] Reuters, 7 March 2026, "One week into Iran war, the dangers for the US and Trump multiply."
[19] Reuters, 6 March 2026, "Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target US forces, Washington Post reports."
[20] Council on Foreign Relations, "Hong Kong's Freedoms: What China Promised and How It's Cracking Down," updated 9 February 2026.
[21] Reuters, 3 March 2026, "Trump's Asian allies fear Iran war will sap defences against China."
[22] Reuters, 7 March 2026, "Iran war threatens prolonged hit to global energy markets."
[23] Reuters, 3 March 2026, "At least 30,000 displaced people in shelters in Lebanon, says UN refugee agency."
[24] Reuters, 6 March 2026, "Middle East situation is major humanitarian emergency, UN refugee agency says."
[25] Reuters, 7 March 2026, "Kuwait declares force majeure, cuts crude oil output due to Middle East conflict."
[26] Reuters, 7 March 2026, "White House seeks bolder action on energy prices amid Iran conflict."
[27] Reuters, 11 March 2025, "Israel-Gaza war behind record high US anti-Muslim incidents, advocacy group says."
[28] Reuters, 15 March 2025, "UN chief says there is disturbing rise in anti-Muslim bigotry."

[29] Reuters, 29 April 2025, "Harvard antisemitism and Islamophobia task forces find widespread fear, bigotry."