Rethinking India’s Energy Security And A Window For Cooperation

Sai Sowmya Dendukuri

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Following the joint offensive against Iran, the Gulf region has witnessed heightened geopolitical tensions that disrupted the energy supply chain. Considering Iran’s strategic cushion, provided by its proxy groups, has been weakened, it is employing its last card, blocking the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage connecting the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, is considered an important sea lane of communication in global trade. Sources such as EIA and Kpler state that 40% of India’s crude oil imports transit through the Strait of Hormuz. The figure underscores its strategic significance in India.

Despite the commendable strides India has made in the renewable energy sector, primary energy consumption remains heavily weighted towards coal and oil. As per the Energy Statistics published by MOSPI, the share of crude oil has hovered between 30% and 33% over the past five years. During this period, the top suppliers of crude oil are Russia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the US, and Kuwait, highlighting India’s import dependency on the Gulf region.

How China Forgot Karl Marx

Yasheng Huang

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In the early 1980s, rural Chinese workers saw their incomes surge amid the country’s economic liberalization. It was the beginning of one of the most remarkable feats in history as hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens rose out of poverty. But while many watched in awe, one high-ranking official in the Chinese Communist Party was worried by what he saw happening.

Deng Liqun (no relation to Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader at the time, who had initiated the economic reforms) noticed that many rural businesses had started to hire a large number of workers. Deng, citing Das Kapital by

Why is China Sitting Out the War on Iran

Ali Wyne

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Aquestion has become ubiquitous since President Donald Trump started the war against Iran: Why is Beijing not doing more to support Tehran? There are many answers, and they begin with a practical one. Given the intensity, pace, and scope of American and Israeli strikes, it is far from clear what assistance China could provide that would meaningfully enhance Iran’s capacity to retaliate in the short term.

But the more significant answer lies in China’s security priorities. China may have the world’s second largest defense budget, but its military modernization remains overwhelmingly oriented toward its objectives within Asia. The paramount objective for Beijing is advancing unification with Taiwan, followed by pressing its territorial claims across its disputed border with India, and across the contested waters of the East and South China Seas.

America Has No Good Options in Iran

Ilan Goldenberg

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Three weeks into the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the outlines of a familiar and dangerous pattern are emerging. The current conflict may for now be significantly different than American wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam—it has not yet drawn in U.S. ground forces in great numbers. But the Iran war shares a deeper strategic reality with these predecessors. Washington is once again fighting a weaker regional power without having clear objectives, a defined theory of victory, and a viable exit strategy.

The result is a different kind of quagmire, but a quagmire nonetheless. U.S.

Iran’s Chokehold On Hormuz And The Limits Of Military Force

Kian Sharifi

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The Strait of Hormuz, a 33-kilometer-wide chokepoint through which roughly a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes, is effectively closed to normal commercial traffic. Iran has not blockaded the strait with a chain or a fleet. Instead, it has made the waterway ungovernable through a combination of kinetic strikes, mines, electronic warfare, and market fear — creating a closure that is arguably harder to reverse than a conventional blockade.

“I can think of no way to reopen and keep open Hormuz militarily and easily,” Richard Allen Williams, a retired US Army colonel and former NATO Defense Investment Division official, told RFE/RL.

Geology as warfare: Iran put its missiles where physics, not diplomacy, keeps them safe

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Three weeks of intensive US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure have destroyed radar systems, collapsed tunnel entrances, and cratered ventilation shafts across dozens of sites. Iran keeps firing. The reason, according to satellite analysis by CNN and assessments by Israeli security research centre Alma Research, lies not above the ground but hundreds of metres beneath it; inside a network of underground missile cities connected by internal railways, carved into mountains that no bomb in the current American or Israeli arsenal can fully reach.

Iran’s underground missile programme is not a recent improvisation. Reports that emerged as far back as 2020 claimed an automated railway system running through cavernous tunnels, transporting ballistic missiles between assembly halls, storage vaults, and blast-door exits. What is becoming clearer now, as Operation Epic Fury enters its fourth week, is the scale of what was built and the limits of what air power alone can do against it.

The Gulf States’ Iran Dilemma

Abdulla Al Junaid, and Paul J. Saunders

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The US-Israeli strikes in Iran have put the Gulf States in Iran’s crosshairs. In an effort to divide the United States, Israel, and the Gulf monarchies, Iran has blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, potentially severing a fifth of the global oil supply, targeted cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, and, more recently, struck critical oil and natural gas refineries and infrastructure throughout the Gulf. The consequent oil market chaos is raising questions about the long-term viability of the Gulf States as economic powers and US security partners.

How are the Gulf States reacting to the conflict’s escalation? How will the war affect the Gulf states’ view of the United States as a security and economic partner? Is there still a way out of the conflict at this point? In this episode of Three Questions, CFTNI President Paul Saunders discusses how the Iran War has impacted the Gulf States with Abdulla Al Junaid, a longtime analyst of the region. Mr. Al Junaid is a former official of Bahrain’s National Unity Party.

Iran War Has Put Putin in Zugzwang

Igor Desyatnikov

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Moscow cannot abandon Tehran without undermining a military partnership that has been vital to its war in Ukraine and weakening its carefully cultivated image as a champion of the Global South. Yet providing meaningful support risks provoking Washington, especially Donald Trump, whose unpredictability and willingness to escalate have made the Kremlin more cautious than before.

Whatever Russia does, its strategic room for maneuver is shrinking.

Iran has been more than a diplomatic partner for Moscow during the Ukraine war—it has been a critical military enabler. Early in the conflict, Russia’s drone capabilities were rudimentary and lagged behind Ukraine’s. Iranian-designed Shahed drones helped close that gap and soon became central to Russia’s campaign of long-range strikes against Ukrainian cities and civilian energy infrastructure.

Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran

Phil Klay

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I have plenty of complaints about the war I served in two decades ago: the Iraq war was ill-conceived, hubristic and marred by poor leadership at the highest level. But I did know why I was there. What exactly do our service members think we’re trying to do in Iran?

The justifications for the war have been stunningly incoherent. Maybe the war is about regime change, about Iran’s nuclear program, about the narrow military objectives of degrading their ballistic missile and drone capabilities, or perhaps it was because Israel was about to attack and we’d be at risk, or because the United States was under imminent threat from Iran, or to achieve peace in the Middle East, and so on.

Maybe it’s not a war at all. Maybe it’s an “excursion that will keep us out of a war” or an incursion or maybe it’s only a “little excursion.” In President Trump’s America, there may be only two genders, but our military adventures can identify however they please.

The rise of the ‘leadership first’ strike — and why it’s so important in warfare

John Spencer

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Imagine if Allied intelligence had located Adolf Hitler in late May 1944 and killed him before the Normandy invasion. Imagine that in the same hour, strikes eliminated Hitler’s designated successor, the head of the German Armed Forces High Command, the chief operational planner of the war effort, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, responsible for defending Western Europe, and the rest of Germany’s field marshals and senior commanders.

Imagine that the officers publicly announced to be replaced were struck within hours as well.

Before a single Allied soldier stepped onto the beaches of Normandy, the brain directing Germany’s war effort would have been destroyed. The Wehrmacht would still have possessed tanks, aircraft, and divisions. But it would have been operating without its central nervous system.

Why Iran does not appear ready to give in, despite heavy losses

Susannah George

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As the war in Iran enters its fourth week, with U.S. operations increasingly focused on global energy flows, Tehran is rebuffing efforts to identify a diplomatic off-ramp from the war launched by the United States and Israel, according to officials in the region.

Instead, Tehran is escalating attacks on its neighbors, betting it can ratchet up global economic pain faster than the Trump administration can relieve it with military force, according to an Iranian diplomat, two European diplomats stationed in the region and a senior Arab official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media on sensitive details.

Iran’s unwillingness to capitulate is wrapped up in the power it exerts over the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s fuel shipments transit, that Tehran has largely closed, roiling energy markets. President Donald Trump gave Iran a 48-hour deadline on Saturday to reopen the critical waterway, threatening to “obliterate” the country’s power plants if Tehran doesn’t comply.

The Elder’s Gambit and the Practice of Narrative Warfare

Paul Cobaugh

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For years, the U.S. national security apparatus has grappled with influencing adversaries by confronting their ideological convictions head-on. This approach often hardens resistance rather than dissolving it. But what if, instead of attacking a hostile narrative, we could activate a deeper, more resonant one within the subject?

This approach is the essence of population-centric warfare, which prioritizes understanding and influencing the human domain over purely kinetic action. While the doctrine is widely discussed at the strategic level, its tactical application remains less understood.

This article argues that identity-based narratives—especially those rooted in honor and social obligation—are more powerful than ideological persuasion in tactical engagements, and that practitioners can deliberately activate these narratives to achieve effects in the human domain.

Interests And Armageddon: The Third Gulf War Shakes Middle East

Jose Miguel Alonso-Trabanco

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War has broken out in the Middle East once again, but this time the writing on the wall brings an unusually ominous message. Although the Third Gulf War is unlikely to be the last showdown between Iranian and Israeli-US forces, this ongoing conflict is heading in a dangerous direction. What both sides are fighting over is the strategic prerogative to redraw the very balance of power in West Asia, so the aftermath could produce a prolonged local ‘Cold War,’ a new hegemonic cycle, or widespread anarchy. The ripple effects are not just encouraging the proliferation of regional seismicity in multiple overlapping layers. This front is a facet of a broader chessboard in which the multipolar great game of high politics plays out. But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the war is that its politico-strategic logic of statecraft is interwoven with the incendiary grammar of religious millenarianism.

Geopolitical Outlook

The current US-Israeli Iran war is the culmination of a long-range trajectory. As the late Shabtai Shavit, former Mossad chief, noted, Israel and Iran have been locked in a low-intensity war for decades. In the multidimensional operational theatres of this dispute, both sides have relied on grey-zone tactics and mosaic warfare, but no checkmate has occurred.

The Fault Lines Of A New Middle East: The 2025-2026 US-Israel-Iran War And The Reordering Of Regional Geopolitics

Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

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The 2026 Iran War — formally initiated on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — represents a watershed in Middle Eastern geopolitics. Building upon the precedent established by the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, the current conflict has detonated a cascade of secondary crises: the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian retaliatory strikes across nine Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, the reactivation of Hezbollah on the Lebanese front, the effective dismantling of Iran’s Axis of Resistance, and unprecedented disruptions to global energy markets.

This analysis examines the structural fault lines exposed by the conflict across five interlocking domains: (1) the origins and escalatory ladder of the US–Israel–Iran confrontation from October 2023 to February 2026; (2) the strategic logic and operational dimensions of the combined air campaign; (3) the fracturing and realignment of Gulf Arab state security postures; (4) the energy-economic shock radiating from Hormuz closure; and (5) the wider implications for international order, including the responses of China, Russia, Turkey, and the Global South. The paper concludes that the conflict has irrevocably dismantled the post-2015 JCPOA architecture and catalyzed a new regional security order whose contours remain deeply uncertain.

In Lebanon, Israel Wants Dominance, Not Deterrence

Alexander Langlois

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As the American and Israeli war on Iran expands across the Middle East, Lebanon faces its nightmare scenario. Israel has invaded the country once again, supposedly to disarm Lebanese Hezbollah, its non-state rival to the north. This specific component of the broader war is ultimately critical, as it could become the primary focus of the warring parties in the coming weeks, especially if direct confrontation with Iran yields diminishing returns.

It is no secret that Israeli officials have long wanted to apply more pressure on Lebanon to solve the Hezbollah problem. After a year of exchanging fire, Israel opted to invade Lebanon in 2024 to directly combat the group, severely hampering Hezbollah’s ability to conduct serious military operations while killing most of its senior leadership. Following the November 2024 truce that was supposed to constitute a true ceasefire but rather fostered near-daily Israeli strikes on Lebanon, Beirut began the effort of disarming Hezbollah.

America and Israel United to Fight Iran. Both Will Pay a Price.

Jon B. Alterman

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When Israeli and American jets joined forces to attack Iran, it was a departure for both countries. The two had grown increasingly aligned over more than three-quarters of a century, but their militaries had never mounted a campaign together. This time, they were synchronized on every aspect: planning, execution, command and control, intelligence and damage assessments.

They were also newly connected in another way. The Israeli military has remained on a war footing for generations. Soldiers sometimes attack the same targets their fathers and grandfathers did. The reason is clear. Israel’s political and military leaders have focused on many of the same challenges for decades and often see force as the only available option. Seeing no near-term solutions, Israel’s political and military leaders have adopted an approach they describe as mowing the grass. That is, they attack adversaries, and when the adversary rebuilds, Israel merely attacks again.

A New Perspective on Protracted Wars

Harrison Schramm

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The purpose of war is to, eventually, stop being at war. So much the better if war achieves an objective otherwise unobtainable by peaceful negotiation. But how wars end is famously an oft under-studied strategic consideration. While there are many references on the theory of war, modern readers will be most familiar with the eponymous Powell Doctrine,[i] itself based on Fred Ikle’s[ii] earlier work. Powell lists seven conditions for entering into a military conflict, two of which involve war termination, restated here:

These two criteria suggest that when embarking upon a course of war, political and military leaders have a mandate to define termination conditions. Beyond the Doctrine, as a practical matter, it is difficult to get a legislature… let alone electorate – to sign on to a ‘protracted’ conflict. Furthermore, there are the double devils of a tendency for optimism that the war will be short and victorious, as well as the inclination to kick the proverbial ‘can down the road’ and claim it will be impossible to think about war termination before war because there is too much (perceived) uncertainty.[iii] Paradoxically, one source of perceived uncertainty is the difference between the efficacy of a fighting force in theory vs. in practice.

How two wars are pulling Europe and the US apart

Nicholas Vinocur

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The biggest fear of European leaders is that Donald Trump’s war in Iran will lead him to abandon Ukraine.

Governments are terrified that the U.S. president could retaliate against America’s European allies for spurning his appeals for assistance in the Middle East, primarily by cutting off what’s left of U.S. help for Kyiv, according to four EU diplomats with knowledge of their discussions. As they scramble to avoid a permanent break in the transatlantic relationship, leaders hope their offer of limited support for his action against Tehran will suffice to convince Trump to stay the course in the conflict with Russia.

The war in Iran “must not divert our attention from the support we give Ukraine,” French President Emmanuel Macron said at the end of last week’s EU summit in Brussels.

Why Russia Is Worried About the Iran War

Suzanne Loftus

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On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a large-scale bombing campaign against Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of the country’s senior leaders within the first day. According to the Trump administration, the objective of this campaign is to degrade Iran’s ability to wage war. This includes degrading its nuclear enrichment program, its missile development systems and capabilities, and its ability to arm proxy forces throughout the Middle East. Iran responded by attacking US bases across the region as well as neighboring countries.

Many commentators and analysts argue that rising oil prices and renewed American attention to the Middle East could give Russia an advantage in its war against Ukraine. While this may prove true in the short term, this view overlooks a potential strategic consequence of the United States’ renewed willingness to employ coercive diplomacy and targeted military force to reshape regional power balances. If the United States succeeds in significantly degrading Iran’s military capabilities and weakening the regime, it could contribute to a gradual weakening of the geostrategic ecosystem that has helped Russia withstand Western pressure since its invasion of Ukraine.

America Has No Good Options in Iran

Ilan Goldenberg

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Three weeks into the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the outlines of a familiar and dangerous pattern are emerging. The current conflict may for now be significantly different than American wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam—it has not yet drawn in U.S. ground forces in great numbers. But the Iran war shares a deeper strategic reality with these predecessors. Washington is once again fighting a weaker regional power without having clear objectives, a defined theory of victory, and a viable exit strategy.

The result is a different kind of quagmire, but a quagmire nonetheless. U.S.

Russia Is the Big Winner in the Iran War

Andrew A. Michta

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The Key Point: Drawing on his extensive expertise as a Professor of Strategic Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Dr. Andrew A. Michta argues that Russia is the “biggest winner” of the ongoing Iran War.

How Russia Is Leveraging the Iran War

M2 Bradley. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

With all the attention on the escalating war in Iran, Ukraine has almost faded from the headlines.

Still, there are signs that Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of this moment as the U.S. shifts its focus away from Europe, American munitions grow scarce, and Russia actively works to weaken the U.S. by assisting Iran with satellite targeting data showing the movement of U.S. forces.

What is Hybrid Warfare? A Comprehensive Guide

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Hybrid warfare is the coordinated use of military and non-military tools — including cyber attacks, disinformation, economic coercion, sabotage, proxy forces, and covert action — to achieve strategic objectives while remaining below the threshold of conventional armed conflict. The defining feature is not any single method, but the deliberate integration of multiple domains simultaneously, designed to exploit the seams between a target state’s military, political, economic, and information defenses.

The term entered mainstream military discourse through the work of U.S. Marine Corps officer Frank Hoffman, who in 2007 defined hybrid wars as conflicts incorporating “a range of different modes of warfare, including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder.” But the practice is far older than the label. What distinguishes the modern iteration is the scale, speed, and technological sophistication with which state actors — particularly Russia, China, and Iran — now orchestrate campaigns across every domain of competition.

Drone Warfare Has Come to the United States

Glen VanHerck, and Ramon Marks

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Amid the raging conflict in the Middle East, the astonishing events at Barksdale Air Force Base earlier this month have attracted only limited media attention. It is reported that swarms of unidentified drones repeatedly loitered over Barksdale between March 9 and 15, drawing no publicly known effective response from the military or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Barksdale is the headquarters of the Air Force’s Global Strike Command, which is responsible for the nation’s nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bomber forces, including B2, B1, and B52 aircraft. The base is home to the 2nd Bomb Wing B52s and is the central hub of communications and logistical support for coordinating and directing those forces. The fact that potentially threatening drones were able to operate over such a critical complex with apparent impunity over several days, after a similar event, spanning 17 days, occurred more than two years ago at Langley AFB, is astonishing. Reports indicate that Barksdale personnel were repeatedly ordered to take cover as drones roamed over buildings and aircraft.

Ensuring the Next Generation of U.S. Weapons Has Homegrown Electronics

David Schild

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The U.S. has in the works several new weapons to counter emerging enemy threats. These include new warships, fighter aircraft, bombers, submarines, drones and a network of air defenses to defend the entire U.S. against missile and air attacks. And yet the U.S. will be challenged to produce key electronics within these systems known as printed circuit boards (PCBs), which are primarily sourced domestically.

While the U.S. government has played a key role in helping to revive the domestic semiconductor industry, with the exception of some funding through the Defense Product Act it has largely ignored domestic production of PCBs.

Discovery Before Disaster: The Louisiana Maneuvers and the Untested Warfighting Concepts of Today’s Army

Matthew Revels and Eric Uribe

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This slogan is among the Army’s favorites, yet its application at the operational level remains uneven. Brigade combat teams rotate through combat training centers, maneuvering largely in isolation while simulated adjacent formations execute scripted roles that fails to introduce the friction that defines the real world’s battlefields. To compensate for the absence of field training at echelons above the brigade level, the Army increasingly relies on command post and simulation-based exercises. While such exercises are valuable for refining staff processes, they cannot replicate the uncertainty, degraded communications, and cumulative friction inherent in multidivision operations. The result is a training system optimized for confirmation rather than correction.

The Army’s shift toward preparing for large-scale combat operations has necessitated that the combat training centers reorient from training brigades on counterinsurgency doctrine to implementing the Army’s new operational concept, multidomain operations. Doctrine manuals make it clear that divisions and corps are the central maneuver elements under the new concept. To better align with its operational doctrine, the Army developed the Army of 2030 plan to reorganize the force, shifting responsibility away from brigade commanders by allocating additional resources to division and corps commanders, effectively centralizing an increasing number of resources and assets within higher echelons to limit brigade commanders’ span of control.

Two Loops: How China’s Open AI Strategy Reinforces Its Industrial Dominance

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China has opted to go all in on an open-source approach to AI. Most Chinese labs publish model source code and weights. They also charge far less to use high-end products than their global competitors. This has resulted in the acceleration of global uptake of Chinese AI and created a feedback loop where widespread adoption drives iteration, then further adoption. As of publication, Alibaba’s Qwen models accounted for the largest model ecosystem on Hugging Face, with over 100,000 derivatives.

This open ecosystem enables China to innovate close to the frontier despite significant compute constraints. Chinese labs have narrowed performance gaps with top Western large language models. They have also developed key architectural and training advances that are now industry standards.

China’s Sovereignty Paradox: Why Beijing Won’t Militarily Defend Its Close Partners

Tomaz Fares

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In an effort to reassert geopolitical influence vis-à-vis China’s longstanding allies, the United States, under the Trump administration, conducted a military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and subsequently launched military operations against Iran, which have escalated into a wider conflict in the Gulf region. Why, then, has China refrained from offering direct military support to its close partners? The first thing that comes to mind is that China lacks both the inclination and the expeditionary military capacity to undertake such ventures, but this article shows it is also about political will – rooted in Beijing’s deep integration into global capitalism, its cautious adherence to non interference, which results in the absence of binding security commitments with these regimes.

Over the past two decades, several regimes positioned against Western dominance – Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and Russia – have endured in part through Chinese economic and diplomatic engagement. Beijing has become their key creditor, trading partner, and political interlocutor. This has led some observers to interpret China’s rise as the consolidation of an alternative bloc within the global order. However, while China’s support for anti-Western regimes is real, it is structurally constrained, often utilitarian and subordinated to Beijing’s broader integration within the existing international system. The very sovereignty-centred politics that attract these regimes to China simultaneously prevent Beijing from converting partnership into broader influence with durable political allegiance or security guarantees.

Could Taiwan’s military continue to fight after an Iran-like decapitation?

Lawrence Chungin

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The survival of Iran’s political and military apparatus following a massive US-Israeli decapitation strike has ignited a strategic debate in Taiwan, with experts weighing the island’s ability to withstand a similar “surgical” opening to an attack from the mainland.

Military analysts and officials in Taipei are closely studying the February 28 strikes that killed Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, and Iran’s ability to sustain organised resistance in the weeks that have followed.

How the war with Iran is actually goingby Harlan Ullman, opinion contributor

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While President Donald Trump has told Americans that Operation Epic Fury is “way ahead of schedule,” how well are the U.S. and Israel doing in compelling Iran to submit to our demands, no matter how confusing they may be in declaring the outcomes we seek?

According to press reports, U.S. officials confirmed five KC-135 tankers crucial to refueling striking aircraft were damaged at an airbase in Saudi Arabia. One had a mid-air collision and crashed killing its aircrew. And an F-35 was reportedly damaged but made it safely to base. In addition to three F-15’s downed by friendly Kuwaiti fire, over 200 American service personnel have been wounded or killed by Iranian missiles and drones.

The Geopolitical Implications of the Iran War

Bulent Gokay and Lily Hamourtziadou

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Since the United States and Israel commenced their unwarranted and unprovoked strike against Iran, codenamed Operation Epic Fury by the US and Roaring Lion by Israel, the character of the offensive has become apparent. It constitutes a large-scale bombing campaign intended to systematically dismantle the Iranian state and subjugate the entire population. The US under Trump has started a war whose outcomes it neither anticipates nor controls. Its actions have an element of irrationality, but this irrationality is based on decades of aggression in the Middle East, and in particular against Iran.

Wesley Clark famously recounted seeing a 2001 Pentagon memo that detailed plans to “take out” seven countries over five years, culminating in Iran. Clark attributed the origin of these plans to the neoconservatives within the George W. Bush administration, specifically mentioning the influence of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) (Greenwald, 2011). PNAC was an influential think tank established in 1997, and almost all of its major figures found themselves in the George W. Bush administration after 2000. Considering US foreign policy in the Middle East since the start of this century, this attack should not be considered a surprise and is largely unrelated to the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump, who is simply implementing a longstanding project aimed at establishing complete US dominance over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East. Furthermore, American (and Western) interventions in Iran have a long history.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War in Iran Was the Truth

David Remnick

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“In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program?

War of Distraction in Iran: Existential Anxiety and Strategic Failure

Robert L. Oprisko

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Anxiety over the existentially precarious position Israel occupies in the Middle East has persisted for thousands of years, though it has grown and intensified after World War II; genocide was no longer mere theory, it had been attempted. While existential anxiety can be alleviated, mitigated, and ultimately eliminated through dedication, discipline, and intentional action, Israel’s persists. Israeli and American politicians have personally found it politically useful to maintain and leverage the eschatological anxiety of the Jewish people. Existential angst matters here: in the spectrum of conflict, it escalates everything into an absolute position, one where defeat is untenable – because there will be no tomorrow (Speier 1941). 

When absolute anxiety extends beyond martial conflict and becomes internalized within any dispute or disagreement, it presents in one of two absolute or “fanatic” forms: zeal or spite (Oprisko 2010). Fanaticism generally is, “the political mobilization of the refusal to compromise” (Olson 2009, 83). Within that there is a characteristic of directionality between the self/in-group and the other/out-group; zeal is the absolute will to inflict one’s value system onto others whereas spite is the absolute rejection of others’ values being inscribed onto the self (Oprisko 2010).

Erasure as Assessment: Middle East Forum’s Analysis of Iran’s Opposition

Morteza (Mory) Gharib and Kazem Kazerounian

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The Middle East Forum’s January 2026 report, “After the Protests: Who Can Lead Iran?”, does not analyze Iran’s principal opposition, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK); it attempts to erase it. That is not scholarship but political denial. No serious observer can wish away a movement that has been embedded in Iran’s political and social life for more than six decades; one that has survived two dictatorships and has paid for its resistance through mass executions and exile. Whether the MEF approves or not, the MEK remains an enduring fact of Iranian politics: discussed in the streets and in private homes, debated within the regime’s own seminaries and institutions, and raised even in Tehran’s political exchanges with foreign interlocutors.

The sheer volume of regime propaganda devoted to it, dozens of feature films and long-running television series, hundreds of books, and thousands of articles, speaks less to the MEK’s marginality than to its perceived threat. The authorities themselves understand this best: even mentioning the MEK’s name or its slogans is treated as a prosecutable offense, a red line enforced by prison and, at times, death.

Iran at War: Deterrence, National Identity, and Existential Stakes

Tewfik Hamel

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To read the present conflict in Iran only through the categories of the Iran-Israel rivalry or the Tehran-Washington confrontation is to miss its most consequential dimension. For Israel, the central problem is the neutralization of a military and potentially nuclear threat. By the time of the military attacks of June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that Iran had accumulated 9,247.6 kg of enriched uranium in total; by the time of the attacks in mid-June 2025, it had also accumulated 440.9 kg enriched up to 60 percent U-235, making it the only non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT to have produced and accumulated material at that level (IAEA 2025a; IAEA 2026).

For the United States, the conflict is embedded in a broader calculus of regional security, alliance credibility, energy security, and escalation control. For several Arab states, it is principally a matter of balance, containment, and spillover management. Tehran, however, increasingly appears to read the war in a different register: not simply as another episode in a long regional struggle, but as a crisis touching the continuity of the state itself.

War on Iran and the Breakdown of the Liberal International Order

Carlos Frederico Pereira da Silva Gama

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On February 28, 2026, Iran suffered coordinated missile attacks from Israel and the United States. The breakdown of diplomatic negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program was followed by heavy bombing of civilian infrastructure and military sites. The assault on Teheran victimized a girl’s school (with more than 170 casualties) as well as the highest echelon of the Islamic Republic’s administration – including its Supreme Leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was in office since the Cold War, in 1989. 

This event provided the apex to a 3-year long war of mutual attrition between the regional powers, ignited by unprecedented missile attacks in April 2024. The entrance of the US into the conflict in 2025, so far, has not proved decisive. In spite of President Donald Trump’s declarations that the US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities during 2025’s 12-day war “obliterated” the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, diplomatic negotiations on the nuclear issue were still under way in the weeks leading to the February 28 attack. In hindsight, the latest Trump declarations stating that US attacks “decimated” Iranian military capacities shall be similarly taken with a pinch of salt.