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The war in West Asia has entered its second month. It’s difficult to surmise how and when this raging war will come to an end. But one thing is certain: at the end of this war, the politics in West Asia would undergo a sea change. United States (US) President Donald Trump has promised the world that he will bomb Iran into the ‘Stone Age’, but it appears that even a flattened Iran is likely to reorder how the US and its client state Israel operate with impunity in West Asia.

A war between Israel and Iran would have made it a West Asian war; but the active involvement of America, the world’s mightiest economic and military power, on the side of Israel has lent it a global character. Iran is clearly vulnerable to complete decimation. It could have taken on Israel on its own, but to fight the combined might of Israel and the US makes it like the proverbial David vs Goliath battle.

Like Trump and Netanyahu, the rest of the world had expected Iran to cave in on the very first day of the surgical bombings that killed top Iranian officials, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But that Iran has not only survived them but has been able to retaliate, and retaliate fiercely, despite being subjected to carpet bombing over the last several weeks tells us a different story.

In the last 80 years, since the Second World War, the West led by the US set the template for the world order. The former Soviet Union was a challenger to that order for almost four decades. After its disintegration in the 1990s, the US emerged as a unipolar arbiter........

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