Endless Wars in the Middle East

The Middle East is sinking into wars and upheavals that show every sign of worsening, more malevolent than at any previous moment. This alone is reason enough to devise solutions that might allow the world to escape its predicament — through diplomacy, through acting with sound judgment freed from instinctive reflexes, through demonstrating the limits of military power, or through some combination of these factors — including by curbing the defiance of laws and the recklessness that now prevails in the conduct of war, under what might be called the “law of the authority of the killing machine.”

Wars, assassinations and strikes may achieve military objectives, but they far more often serve as media spectacle, generating effects that run counter to those intended. The ideological and nationalist systems of the region rarely collapse under external pressure alone; they tend instead to reconstitute their cohesion by invoking narratives of threat, siege and resistance to anything new. Assassinations carried out in excess belong not only to the technological realm — they are political operations inseparable from the relationship to human beings, to peoples and to history, and they do not necessarily liberate the region from its convictions. Historical precedents consistently suggest that the fall of totalitarian regimes rarely comes about through direct external strikes. Dismantling the environment that sustains them is a far deeper process, and one that is generally underestimated. What begins as a surgically precise news event evolves into escalation, destabilization and identity alliances more powerful than before.

Strikes may yield tactical success, but they become a strategic problem when they kindle a fiercer nationalism and a bloodier violence. Killing a leader such as Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei would mark a moment of rupture for the Middle East, and for global Islamism as well, after four decades of absolute power and a theocracy hypermilitarized by the Revolutionary Guards — opening onto social violence, chaos and pressure within a country like Iran, one that has equipped itself precisely to absorb shocks, monitor its environment and manage risk.

The United States and Israel took the gamble of a “decapitation” operation against this eighty-six-year-old man. Beyond the act itself, history illuminates the danger of such an approach when it fails to wager on the mobilization of civil society and on social change within closed regimes. Bombardments can kill or neutralize enemy leaders and condense wars into days, or prosecute several wars at once, but they rest on the assumption that “cutting off the head” brings down the entire structure — whereas Franco’s regime fell with his death, while the deaths of Stalin and Mao did not immediately dissolve the systems they had built.

This is the trap of the contemporary war machine: it kills individuals, it compresses conflicts rather than resolving them, it weakens regimes without definitively toppling them in societies with a strong doctrinal imprint and a more insurrectionary internal character, as the Middle East and Africa both attest. The conflict with the outside world is distorted by the fusion of identity with martyrdom — as seen in Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran’s leadership — and escalation takes on an ever-wider political dimension. The circle of vengeance and reprisal expands, anchored in a composite institutional and ideological architecture that weaves together religion, politics and society.

External elimination within these structures becomes a factor of internal mobilization, liable to reinforce the political framework rather than impel any deep reorientation toward ending the regime. Conflict mutates into a quasi-permanent cycle of violence, accompanied by a steady rise in the capacities for fortification, adaptation and renewal, while the wager on internal transformations — which presuppose complex political, social and economic conditions — gradually fades. Diplomatic negotiations grow longer and less fruitful, and extended war becomes inevitable — all the more so since the Iranians believed they could buy time by redoubling their arguments for endurance, at the cost of their own people’s lives and wellbeing.

For his part, Donald Trump overestimates his capacity to carry messages, his ambitions ranging across ceremonial halls — from the Arc de Triomphe to the Kennedy Center — through to the most serious political stakes: inflation, reforms stalled before the courts, public discontent in the months before the midterm elections, and even the international balance of power, from his war against Iran to his diplomacy toward Russia and China. Nothing is going as he wishes in bending what remains of the Guide’s regime to obedience, while Israel relentlessly pursues the opportunity it has long awaited in its endless expansionist war.

America finds itself in a situation strikingly similar to that of 2003. Once again, a Republican president wages a war of regime change; once again, the target is a dictatorship within an American equation of control. But this is also the equation that kills people in fishing boats in the Caribbean without evidence or legal process, that imprisons and isolates the Venezuelan president, that threatens Cuba and Mexico, that eliminates the Iranian Supreme Guide — whatever one may say about his record in crushing popular uprisings. And the world has not forgotten how George W. Bush described the invasion of Iraq as “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” nor how he envisioned, in his grand designs, the export of democracy to Afghanistan.

There is a singular irony here: Donald Trump, elected by a constituency persuaded by the “America First” banner in a strict isolationist logic during his two successful campaigns of 2016 and 2024, is redoubling foreign interventions and returning to war, premised on assumptions about an Iranian nuclear program that was on the verge of becoming dangerous. Yet tactical success is transformed into making “James Bond” more technological, in the dimension of interference in Venezuela.

The phase shift that great military powers can bring about by eliminating foreign leaders with precision is not technological in nature but political. It may well fail to settle the matters at hand or simply erase power, redistributing it instead and turning into a problem in its own right — as the attempted assassinations of Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, of Saddam Hussein in the nineteen-nineties, or of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the leader of the Chechen separatist movement, all demonstrate. Escalation options then take shape that cross a threshold into something else entirely.

The assassination of Hassan Nasrallah did not annihilate the resistance as a whole, nor did that of Dudayev, nor those of the historic leaders of Fatah and Hamas: on the contrary, these eliminations ignited the movements in forms more violent and more destructive than before. Things shift toward leaderships less constrained by diplomacy, more disposed toward escalation and violence, with an emotional intensity that sharpens — none of which achieves absolute control, and all of which corrupts it.

Afghanistan lived under the Taliban’s theocracy, and America decided to subdue it and drag it into the modern era, imagining a future where girls could go to school, grow up, find employment, stand for public office and dress as they chose, with equal rights. And what came of it? The conclusion is inescapable: war does not succeed in making a country democratic; only a country and its own citizens can accomplish that, from within. It is probable that power is what matters above all to Trump, who will strike deals with whoever holds it — whether religious clerics, socialists in Venezuela, communists in Havana or authoritarian rulers in Iran. He is almost committed to seeking allies without real weight, as is the case with Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela.

Iran is not Iraq in 2003, and appears capable of asymmetric retaliation against the painful American-Israeli strikes, as well as against those attacks carried out against the Arab Gulf states, unjustified by any reasonable reckoning. All of this risks leading as well to contradictory diminishing returns, and this war may prove far darker and far longer — a war of attrition for the countries of the region — while the world begins to adapt and accommodate itself to its economic repercussions, rather than focusing the political attention that the West wished to direct toward Asia.

Factoring in risks ordinarily accounts for half of any calculation, without sufficient assessment of the scale of damage as to their consequences. There is no doubt that Iran’s vexatory political conduct has caused immense harm to the lives of Iranians and the peoples of the region over half a century, provoking regression and a manifest indifference to the needs of populations in the building of any future. The strategic errors lie in an evil to which no one any longer responds — that of striking a Gulf region that was attempting to accomplish its own modernity. And the greatest challenge remains avoiding the worst in the many wars that the world does not know how to close.