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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 of the rules of the international order.

China has evolved as a countervailing world power in the 21st century, both economically and militarily, but it has not yet engaged in any direct military battles against the West or any of its puppet regimes to establish its supremacy on the world map. China remains engaged with the West for economic reasons.

Iran, though a middle power, is possibly the only country in the world that has openly pursued an anti-Western agenda since the Islamic revolution in 1979. Many countries are highly critical of the Zionist state, but would not like to burn bridges with the US, of which Israel is the foster child. But there is no place for such hypocrisy in Islamic Iran’s foreign policy. It has called a spade a spade and it has paid a heavy price for it – it has faced severe sanctions ordained by the US, crippling its economy.

Countries like India, with a centuries-long relationship with Persian civilisation, have refrained from any trade with Iran in order to avoid the wrath of the US. Iran has survived largely thanks to China, which has defied the Western sanctions and continued its trade with Iran. China, in fact, accounts for more than 80% of Iran’s export of oil, which is a lifeline for Iran’s economy.

That leaves Iran in an unenviable position; it sups with the enemies of the West while all other countries of West Asia are not only client states of the US, they are also eager to break bread with Israel to remain in the good books of their common Master. In this West Asian power play, Iran stands out as a sore thumb.

Israel wants complete monopoly in the affairs of West Asia so that it can establish Greater Israel by killing or displacing all Palestinians from West Bank and Gaza and by partitioning Lebanon. Iran is the sole obstacle in this path. So long as it stands its ground, Israel cannot complete its colonial mission. Israel also knows that it could not militarily take on Iran alone. That’s why the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been soliciting US support in the venture to obliterate Iran.

Successive US presidents had refused to take the bait as Iran never posed any direct military threat to Israel, and it could not be a military threat to the US, located continents away.

In fact, Iran’s military preparedness has always been of a defensive kind, to protect itself from an openly aggressive and expansionist Israel. It militarily collaborated with resistance groups in Palestine and Lebanon only to help them defend themselves from the Israeli military onslaught.

But this time Netanyahu succeeded in doing a Winston Churchill. During the Second World War, the British Prime Minister had managed to persuade the US to break with its policy of isolationism and join on the side of the allied forces ranged against the military axis led by Nazi Germany. And that proved decisive in the victory of allied powers. The Israeli Prime Minister succeeded in enticing President Trump for a swift Iranian adventure that would assure him the top billing in American history as a decisive president.

But the script went awry. Iran, despite carpet bombardment by both Israel and the US, didn’t crumble. It not only stood firm but also gave back an eye for an eye. Its unique ballistic missile arsenal, buried deep inside mountain trenches, was beyond the reach of powerful American bombs.

Like Vietnam and Afghanistan before, Iran is proving to the world again that the US, with all its military wherewithal, can kill millions and raze a country to the ground but it cannot win a war. Vietnam went back to being ruled by communists after ten years of US devastation of that country. Afghanistan once again embraced Taliban’s whom the US had tried to vanquish in a 20-year war. Iran will also prove to be the US’s Achilles heel, whether the war ends soon or prolongs for years.

But there is a difference: after the war, both Vietnam and Afghanistan returned to being focused on their internal affairs, bereft of any major influence on politics of the region. It will be different in case of Iran. A defiant Iran will reshape the politics of West Asia. The royal aristocracies of the region will have to rethink their warm embrace of Israel. They will have to seriously recalibrate the policy of allowing the American bases operating from their soil.

But, possibly, the most significant outcome of the Iranian response to the joint attacks will be a better deal for both the Palestinians and the Lebanese people, who are up against Israeli expansionism. A chastened Israel will not be able to operate with impunity as it did before. Iran will surely succeed in reshaping a just and equitable order in West Asia after the war.

N.R. Mohanty is a senior journalist.

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