The war consuming the Middle East is, at its core, a zero-sum contest between two incompatible survival imperatives. Israel’s long-term security, as defined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, requires not merely the degradation of Iran’s proxies but the dismemberment of the Iranian state itself — a fragmentation into six or seven ethnic ministates. Tehran, for its part, frames its own existence as inseparable from the resistance axis it has built across the Levant and Mesopotamia. As the late strategist Edward Luttwak observed, in the Middle East, peace processes tend to freeze conflicts rather than resolve them. Ceasefires here are not endings; they are pauses for rearmament.

The structural logic is unforgiving. A pro-Western government in Tehran would sever China’s Belt and Road corridor through Central Asia, tilt South Asia’s balance against Pakistan, and cut Russia’s only viable overland access to warm-water ports. These are not marginal interests — they are existential ones for Beijing, Islamabad, and Moscow alike. Iran’s survival, in other words, matters more strategically to its allies than Israel’s survival matters to its Western patrons, if only because the United States has the luxury of geographic distance. As scholar Vali Nasr has argued, Washington’s Middle East policy has long underestimated the depth of Iran’s regional embeddedness.

Washington: Winning the Battle, Losing the Map

The Biden-to-Trump transition has done nothing to simplify America’s position. The United States will announce a version of victory — citing degraded Shiite militias in Iraq and demonstrated naval dominance — but the strategic ledger is far murkier. Trump’s political capital is under severe strain.

A rising anti-interventionist chorus within his own MAGA coalition is already framing the........

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