There is a dangerous, academic notion currently haunting the halls of Washington and Tel Aviv: the idea that a fractured Iran, carved into a half-dozen ethnic mini-states, would be safer than the one we have known. It is a theory that has clearly found a home in the Trump Administration. But as the current strikes across Tehran and the Natanz facility show, it is a theory that is already crumbling under the weight of a violent reality.

The whispers of CIA-backed Kurdish insurgents—PDKI, PAK, and PJAK—operating from the mountains of northern Iraq have moved from the shadows to the headlines. In the southwest, Arab militias like the Mobarizoun Popular Front have turned the heat in Khuzestan into a second front, forcing the IRGC to scramble its command and control. Whether this fragmentation is a deliberate US policy or merely the chaotic fallout of “maximum pressure” pushed to its breaking point, the architecture of collapse is being built in real time.

This ideology isn’t homegrown in America.

The vision of a “New Middle East”—where borders are erased, and rivals are pulverized into ethnic fragments—is a vintage Israeli strategy, a staple of Benjamin Netanyahu’s playbook for thirty years.

The vision of a “New Middle East”—where borders are erased, and rivals are pulverized into ethnic fragments—is a vintage Israeli strategy, a staple of Benjamin Netanyahu’s playbook for thirty years.

What has changed is the man in the Oval Office. President Trump’s foreign policy has always been driven more by instinct than ideology, yet he has........

© Middle East Monitor