The long-term implications of the Iran war will be a shift in geopolitics, with the decline of Western dominance in West Asia and new regional coalitions.
Peace is more than the absence of combat between warring parties. Cicero defined it as ‘liberty in tranquility’, a condition in which states and peoples do not use violence against each other to pursue their inherently incompatible goals. There has been no such peace in West Asia since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 divided that Empire’s Arab provinces into British and French spheres of influence. In 1917 Britain – a colonial power – declared its support for the establishment of ‘a national home for the [European] Jewish people’ in Palestine, while fatuously denying that this would affect the civil and religious rights of Palestine’s existing Muslim and Christian communities. In 1919, denied the self-determination promised to other peoples in President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’, the Kurds revolted against British rule in Mesopotamia. They continue to rebel against the Arabs. Persians and Turks who dominate the states they inhabit.
The unintended consequence of these actions has been more than a century of low-intensity conflict in West Asia, punctuated by bloody wars, genocidal massacres and terrorist incidents. The Israel-US war with Iran is the latest expression of this endemic violence. The latest ‘ceasefire with Israeli characteristics’ does not promise an end to it.
Israel’s insistence on absolute security for itself has meant absolute insecurity for everyone else in West Asia. With US backing, it has felt free to bomb, strafe and murder its potential adversaries throughout West Asia. Israeli and American attacks on Iran have, however, now evoked effective counterattacks. Israel retains its ‘qualitative edge’ over its neighbours but it has lost its immunity from devastating reprisal.
Almost all wars conclude through negotiations. To succeed, these must recognise what interactions on the battlefield have produced. Otherwise, the negotiations fail. The chances of success are improved if the negotiators representing the parties are experienced professionals with no conflicts of interest, who have built mutual trust with their opposing counterparts. That has not been the case in US negotiations with Iran, which have been and will remain complicated by Israel’s determination to ensure they fail.
The Iran War will not be followed by peace in West Asia but it may mark the end of direct great-power involvement in armed conflict between its warring parties. Memoranda of understanding may be ‘deals’ in the sense of a coordinated statement of intent, but they are the equivalent of a handshake before the parties sit down at the negotiating table. They are neither peace nor a peace agreement.
The immediate results of the Iran War are clear. The war after the war has begun. Its longer-term consequences are only now coming into view. Some of them are strategically systemic.
This war has resulted in:
- Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
- Iran’s adoption of an Israeli-style standard of disproportionate retaliation for attacks on it or Israel’s neighbours or Arab movements resisting Israeli expansionism.
- A US-Iranian de-escalation agreement misdescribed as a ‘ceasefire’ and, so far, not accepted by Israel, which continues to seek to annihilate Iran and dominate West Asia through the use of force.
- A growing US rupture with Israel.
- Escalating energy prices and inflation.
- The probable tipping of the global economy into recession or worse.
- Impending food and other supply shortages.
- The creation of a greatly expanded market for Chinese renewable energy technology and products.
- The erosion of the dollar’s global monopoly on trade settlement through the slow birth of a Chinese ‘petroyuan’.
- A convincing demonstration of the limits of US military power.
- The depletion of the US weapons and defence systems needed for other contingencies or contracted for delivery by allies and partners.
- The flaking apart of NATO and the basing and overflight rights its members have granted to the US.
- The probable eviction of the US armed forces from the bases the Gulf Arabs have heretofore loaned them.
- The murder of the Iranian leadership echelon most opposed to building a nuclear weapon, with the consequence that Iran will do so after the 60- day ‘truce’ in the absence of the return of its frozen assets, the removal of sanctions, and credible security guarantees,
- The severe devaluation of the US word by performative rather than substantive diplomacy and erratic oscillation in negotiating position.
- Definitive proof that selecting personnel for their political subservience and sycophancy rather than their experience, expertise and willingness to speak truth to power can render a government incompetent and ‘agreement incapable’.
Meanwhile, gross violations of international law and human decency by Israel continue to escalate antipathy to it in ever-younger echelons of the US population, including American Jews. Israel’s charges that criticism of its polices amount to antisemitism have largely lost their sting. Israel is now an international pariah. It is becoming the skunk at the garden party in American politics. A similar evolution is underway in Europe.
The influence in American politics that the so-called Abraham Accords gained for the UAE and Bahrain through the US Zionist lobby is therefore a wasting asset. The accords themselves are on life support. They are unlikely to survive the logic of Gulf Arab national interests. Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing and expansionism, plus the need to make peace with an Iran determined to counter Israel, have combined to make overt cooperation with Israel a domestic threat to Arab governments. The Israeli police-state and defence technology the Gulf Arab rulers have acquired from Israel is formidable but not irreplaceable.
Yemen and Iran have now both successfully conducted land-based blockades of their adjacent seas. This calls into question the traditional Anglo-American view of the sea as a strategic domain from which to dominate the land. The three-mile range of canon in the 18th century established a three-mile limit for territorial seas. Now drones and terminally-guided missiles can strike ships up to 4,000 kilometres away from coastal batteries. Sea control is no longer the uncontested province of navies.
Meanwhile, international law no longer inhibits acts of piracy – seaborne murder and robbery. Ships are now subject to unprovoked attacks or outright seizure by the former champions of freedom of navigation. Insurance rates are rising. The seas are no longer open to all nations for secure navigation and trade.
War always creates new realities and adjusts relations between states and peoples. That is its purpose. But armed conflicts seldom work out the way those who start them imagine they will. And they are not always succeeded by peace. The prospect that a peace will emerge from whatever negotiating process follows the US-Iran memorandum of understanding announced on 15 June 2026 is poor. In West Asia, warfare is far more likely to persist at varying levels of intensity.
The Iran War has just reminded the world that wars test endurance and weapon systems. They do not end until the loser accepts defeat – something the United States apparently finds it impossible to do. Wars do not end because one side blows up more buildings or kills more civilians than the other. (Ask the Vietnamese, Afghans, Ukrainians, Palestinians or Lebanese about this.) Military prowess can impose outcomes but it does not always prevail. The balance of fervour – the degree to which each side sees the conflict as vital to its national identity and interests, dignity and survival – can enable a militarily weaker side to carry the day. When the fundamental causes of war do not disappear, the parties will remain determined to keep fighting as best they can. Iran and Israel have made no effort to set aside their differences. The 15 June ‘ceasefire’ between Iran and the United States does not oblige them to bury the hatchet or offer a process to facilitate them doing so.
The prospects for peace are also ill-served by the changes in the information environment that recent wars have catalysed. The new transparency of battlefields to observation by satellites and drones has made deception difficult, if not impossible, so states now rely on information warfare to accomplish it. Censorship, lying narratives, fake news and false flag operations are central to the strategies of contemporary combatants. The press is no longer an effective check on Orwellian storylines. This leaves governments free to consume their own propaganda and to formulate policies based on it rather than on unpalatable underlying realities. This feeds hallucinations that suffocate diplomacy and help prolong ‘forever wars’.
The Gulf Arabs have just learned the hard way that the United States prioritises Israel’s defence over theirs and that Iran can and will punish them for any alignment with Israel or the United States. Cooperation by them with either Israel or the United States will continue to invite Iranian attack. So Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members now face a choice between wary cooperation with Iran or continuing threats to their oil and gas facilities or, even worse, their desalination plants – without which they cannot exist as modern societies. This is no choice at all. The Gulf Arabs have a powerful incentive to accommodate Iran’s demand that they remove American bases from their territory.
The states of the region do not want to replace the United States with another external actor like China or Russia. A new four-party coalition of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Türkiye and Egypt has formed to create a revised West Asian security architecture that can provide deterrent weight against either Israeli or Iranian regional hegemony, while reducing reliance on external great powers and building strategic autonomy. The members of this coalition, which is likely to expand, hope to build an indigenous military industrial base that will reduce their overall dependence on both foreign protection and arms imports. They will seek assurances of respect for their strategic autonomy from external great powers.
Iran now controls and will continue to regulate passage through the Strait of Hormuz in partnership with Oman and (possibly) other littoral states but not with any external great naval power. This sets a precedent that overturns centuries of international law and risks being applied to other straits. The list of waterways that might be reduced to a nationally regulated transit status like the man-made canals of Panama and Suez is long. It includes Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, the Bab-al-Mandeb, Taiwan, Gibraltar and the Bosphorus. The international community – including countries dependent on maritime trade like China, Japan, and India – should share an interest with the West in ensuring that whatever management system is put in place in the Strait of Hormuz does not inspire comparable limits to freedom navigation elsewhere.
The economic stress and the uncertainties that the Iran War has introduced are a great stimulus to national efforts to consolidate supply chains, lessen reliance on maritime transport of fossil fuels, invest in renewable energy technology and products, and otherwise pursue self-sufficiency. The result will be slower economic growth pretty much everywhere as self-reliance replaces ‘comparative advantage’. But the transition to renewable energy and electrification of the world’s economies will accelerate.
So, in sum, we are likely entering an era in which:
- shipping is more expensive and less secure
- economies worldwide strive to lessen their dependence on hydrocarbons as their primary sources of energy
- the need to restore lost hydrocarbon production burdens Persian Gulf economies in ways that demand reformulation of their policies and development plans
- the pressure on Gulf economies to wean themselves from their economic dependence on hydrocarbon exports increases, even as revenues from such exports decline and development projects are trimmed back
- Iran answers intermittent acts of aggression by Israel against it and Israels’ Arab neighbours with retaliatory strikes on Israel
- the resistance movements Israel has battered are tempted to revive 1960s-style attacks on Israelis and their foreign supporters
- foreign investment and economic activity in the UAE and other GCC members are hampered by a perceived rise in political risk
- geopolitics in West Asia are dominated by détente between the Gulf Arabs and Iran and a search for regional strategic autonomy by a coalition whose core is a partnership between Ankara, Cairo, Islamabad, and Riyadh
- Iran, Lebanon and Syria are obsessed with repairing war damage and reconstructing their economies, providing opportunities for foreign construction companies (e.g., from China and Turkey)
- Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Russian and Turkish influence in West Asia grows, while US influence diminishes
- Iran joins Israel as a de facto nuclear power, sparking the development of nuclear weapons by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others.
These unfortunate potential results of the American debacle in the Persian Gulf cannot be separated from broader geopolitical and geoeconomic trends. The five-century-long era of Western dominance of global affairs is over. A disunited Europe is no longer an effective participant in global geopolitics or economics, despite its obvious potential to be both. China has no interest in assuming the decaying role of the United States as the global hegemon. India is far from ready to do so. Africa and Latin America remain self-absorbed. International institutions are increasingly ineffective. The world order is no longer regulated by international law. Disorder, for now, prevails. We are all less secure than we were.
We are again at a moment like the one Gramsci described at the outset of the 1930s:
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of morbid symptoms.
He did not, as supposed, refer to the advent of ‘monsters’ but that is no consolation. The monsters are already here and show no signs of going away.
Republished from Chas Freeman
Ambassador Freeman chairs Projects International, Inc. He is a retired U.S. defence official, diplomat, and interpreter, the recipient of numerous high honours and awards, a popular public speaker, and the author of five books.