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A quick end to Iran war is in India’s interest. But Modi has no influence over US or Israel

The US-Israel war in Iran has shown India’s real place in global politics — a middle power, not a Vishwaguru.

How long might the war in Iran go on? In what ways is India affected or vulnerable, now or later? What are India’s options?

The question of when and how the war might end depends, in part, on the objectives of those who initiated the war—the United States and Israel. It also, in part, depends on Iran’s response and its military and political capacities. While the war objectives of Israel have been clear and consistent, the US position remains trapped in multiple rationales.

Iran’s revolutionary theocratic regime has been hugely oppressive toward its own citizens and externally aggressive, especially toward Israel. The former is not Israel’s primary concern; the latter is. Ideally, Israel would like to see the elimination of Iran’s regime, or at the very least, a radical emasculation of its military strength and that of its proxies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Both proxies were severely wounded after 7 October 2023, and the expectation in some quarters was that they would not be able to rise again. But it is clear that in Lebanon, Hezbollah, though weakened, has risen.

Israel’s approach to Iran, which is not an Arab country, is not the same as its approach to the Palestinians. Not only for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Right-wing politicians, but also for a fairly large part of Israeli society, the Palestinians in Gaza had become “subhuman” after 7 October 2023—and therefore worthy of violent extermination. History and theory tell us that such attitudes create conditions for mass exterminations and genocides.

On Iran, a distinction is often drawn in Israeli discourse between the regime and society.  While the regime is “evil” and must be eliminated, the Iranians, friends of Israel before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, are viewed as belonging to a civilisation of long standing. What was done to Gaza cannot be entertained as a strategy towards Iran. For Israel, regime change rather than societal destruction would be the prime objective in Iran.

The US has given multiple reasons for why it invaded Iran: To bring about a regime change; to destroy the military capability of Iran, especially its missile making and launching capacity; to prevent weapons-grade uranium enrichment and the acquisition of nuclear weapons; to destroy Iran’s proxies in the Arab world; to liberate the oppressed citizenry; to strike Iran hard before it struck America and its assets in the region. Given the multiple formulations, many would argue that it is Israel’s war, and the US is basically a co-sponsor and a co-initiator.

Be that as it may, the problem of rationale multiplicity is, in principle, resolvable. One can logically argue that regime change is the principal American objective, and the other objectives are ancillary. Should the........

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