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........

© Pearls and Irritations