The 1967 Six-Day War stands as one of history's most decisive campaigns: in six days, Israel captured the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, tripling its territory and permanently reshaping regional borders. The 1983 invasion of Grenada achieved its objectives within days. The 2026 regime change in Venezuela is also a success story. Yet history is equally littered with strategically pointless conflicts, from the 1982 Lebanon War to the 2003 Iraq invasion. The just-concluded Middle East war now belongs firmly to that latter category, distinguished not by territorial change but by the sheer futility of its outcomes.

As the dust settles, the landscape remains hauntingly identical to 27 February, the day before the war started. Despite over 1,500 missiles, an estimated $80 billion in military expenditure, and weeks of diplomatic upheaval, the region has reverted to the status quo ante. The core issues—the two-state solution, the spectre of a nuclear Iran, proxy wars involving the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the fragile Arab détente, with UAE-Israel trade dropping by forty per cent—persist as intractable as ever. Far from being transformative, this war has served as a grim empirical lesson: in geopolitics, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The conflict opened with audacious goals. Planners believed a swift, three-day campaign could degrade Iran's nuclear infrastructure, destabilise its regime, seize its enriched uranium, and dismantle its missile programme. For the United States, the operation was framed as punishment for Iran's 'misdemeanours' since 1979. Beneath that........

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