Author’s note: Portions of the conceptual framework and selected passages in this article are adapted from Suren-Pahlav (2020), Israel’s Strategic Doctrine and the Somalisation of Iran: Erosion of National Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity. The argument has been substantially revised and extended in the present analysis.

Abstract

This article argues that the anticipated, yet fundamentally illegal, war against Iran by the United States and Israel is not merely misread within prevailing strategic discourse, but systematically misunderstood at the level of its underlying logic. Rather than constituting a decisive demonstration of American power capable of eliminating the Islamic Republic, such a war risks activating a structural trap embedded within the regional order itself. Drawing on geopolitical analysis, military doctrine, and international political economy, the article demonstrates how Iran’s decentralised command architecture, the asymmetry between low-cost offensive drone systems and high-cost Western missile defences, the vulnerability of global energy routes, and the recalibrating strategic behaviour of regional actors together produce a conflict environment qualitatively distinct from those that enabled the rapid collapse of Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

 

The central contention is organised around two outcomes, not as equivalent projections but as asymmetrically related trajectories. The first remains conditional upon the preservation of Iran’s territorial integrity and institutional coherence under conditions of war. The second follows more directly from the escalation patterns and infrastructural targeting that have defined recent Western interventions in the region. The distinction, therefore, is not between two equally plausible futures, but between a contingent transformation and a structurally grounded process of disintegration.

 

In the first scenario, war fails to produce the regime collapse anticipated by its advocates and instead consolidates the Islamic Republic in a more radicalised and militarised form. Under such conditions, the regime would almost certainly pursue nuclear capability as a strategic imperative, with the explicit objective of deterring, and if necessary confronting, Israel. The narrative that military confrontation can prevent such an outcome, persistently advanced by Benjamin Netanyahu in his efforts to draw the United States into direct conflict with Iran, rests on a strategic inversion. The very logic used to justify war becomes the mechanism through which the feared outcome is realised.

 

The second scenario, which carries greater structural weight, entails not regime transformation but state destruction. Under conditions of sustained escalation and infrastructural targeting, Iran would be driven towards a condition analogous to Somalia, defined not simply by instability but by the systemic collapse of central authority within a historically continuous and territorially integrated state. The large-scale degradation of energy infrastructure, national grids, transport systems, and military command structures would dissolve the material foundations of sovereignty, producing a fragmented territorial landscape in which competing centres of power, including regime remnants, separatist formations, and jihadist groups, contest authority. In such a context, the language of ‘liberation’, propagated by segments of the opposition, collapses into contradiction, as the destruction of the state eliminates the very conditions under which political transformation could occur.

 

This fragmentation would not remain internal. The erosion of sovereign control would invite sustained foreign intervention, both overt and covert, as regional and external actors seek to secure strategic corridors, energy assets, and geopolitical leverage. Iran’s oil and gas regions would be transformed into sites of extraction and contestation, potentially reconstituted into quasi-autonomous or externally aligned entities, thereby inaugurating a process of de facto Balkanisation. As argued in the article, this outcome does not emerge in a strategic vacuum, but intersects with a longer trajectory within Israeli geopolitical thinking, in which the fragmentation of large Middle Eastern states has been conceived as a mechanism for securing enduring regional asymmetry.

 

The article concludes that the proposed war would represent not a restoration of strategic order but the culmination of a profound geopolitical miscalculation. In its conditional form, it risks accelerating the decline of American hegemony and consolidating a China-centred geopolitical configuration. In its more probable form, it would dissolve Iran as a coherent state, producing a condition of enduring fragmentation whose consequences would extend far beyond the region. The choice, therefore, is not between order and disorder, but between two forms of systemic rupture, one contingent and the other structurally inscribed in the logic of the war itself.

 

 

1. Introduction

Donald Trump is known for many things, but historical literacy is not among them. His public record is already littered with historical absurdities: the claim that the British army took over US airports in 4th July 1775 (Lyons, 2019), or the assertion, made to Italian President Sergio Mattarella, that the U.S. and Italy are bound by a "shared cultural and political heritage dating back thousands of years to Ancient Rome" (Trump, 2019). These are not slips of the tongue but symptoms of a sustained historical illiteracy. He has now extended this indifference into farce. He has chosen not only to name the fleet he proposes to deploy against Iran the ‘Armada’, but also announcing, with performative bravado, that a second ‘beautiful Armada’ is already on its way (The National, 2026).

 

The historical irony is not subtle. The original Armada occupies a fixed and unambiguous position in European history as one of the most comprehensive military failures of the early modern world. It was not a display of irresistible force, nor a moment of imperial confidence vindicated. It was a meticulously assembled disaster (Parker, 1998). Spain’s Armada was defeated by an underdog that was economically underdeveloped, militarily inferior, and institutionally fragile. Late 16th century England was not a great power. It was a poor, peripheral, and internally insecure state, lacking a standing army, operating on a shallow fiscal base, and widely expected to collapse under Spanish pressure. Yet it prevailed.

 

What followed was not Spanish triumph but Spanish humiliation. The defeat shattered the mythology of Habsburg invincibility and exposed the structural limits of imperial overreach (Thompson, 1976; Parker, 1998). The episode demonstrated, with brutal clarity, that scale, spectacle, and over self-confidence do not substitute for strategic coherence. Spain did not fall overnight, but the aura of inevitability that sustained its imperial dominance was decisively punctured. The consequences were structural. Spain’s capacity to project power into northern European waters was weakened, while England, despite its material backwardness, began the long and uneven process of imperial ascent.

 

To revive the term ‘Armada’ as a symbol of menace is therefore not merely ironic; it is historically illiterate. It is to name a show of force after a collapse, a threat after a debacle, an instrument of intimidation after a lesson in how empires overestimate themselves and fail. Few historical metaphors could more clearly evoke hubris followed by disintegration. If intimidation is the objective, history suggests the opposite effect, since it is satrap laid down by the Islamic regime China and possibly the Saudi Arabia, to get rid of US and Israel once for all.

 

The argument advanced in this article is that a war between the United States, Israel, and Iran could produce consequences very different from those anticipated in Washington. Rather than consolidating American dominance in the Middle East, such a conflict could activate a structural trap embedded within the regional system itself. Iran’s decentralised military architecture, the economic asymmetry between offensive drones and defensive missile systems, the strategic vulnerability of global energy routes, and the shifting calculations of regional actors together create the conditions under which a conflict initiated by the United States might ultimately weaken American hegemony rather than reinforce it.

 

The analysis proceeds in several stages. It first examines the transformation of the regional order and the emerging operational role of Israel within that system. It then turns to Iran’s military doctrine and decentralised command architecture, explaining how these structures are designed to sustain conflict even after leadership decapitation. The discussion subsequently analyses the economic asymmetry embedded in missile defence and drone warfare before turning to the broader geopolitical consequences of escalation, including the possible closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic intervention of China, and the shifting calculations of Saudi Arabia. Taken together, these dynamics suggest that the proposed war may produce systemic consequences extending far beyond the battlefield itself.

 

​

 

2. From Balkanisation Doctrine to Open War: The Strategic Prelude to A Possible the US–Israeli Strike on Iran

In an analysis published in 2024, I argued that Donald Trump, despite sustained efforts to cultivate the public persona of a deal-maker and a man of peace, would ultimately be drawn into a military confrontation with Iran (Suren-Pahlav, 2024). At first glance, such a prediction appeared to contradict Trump’s own rhetoric. Throughout his political career, he repeatedly condemned the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and presented himself as a political outsider unwilling to replicate the strategic follies of the American foreign policy establishment. Yet these proclamations obscured a far more constraining reality. Trump, like several powerful figures within Western political circles, carries a political vulnerability that has long shadowed his public career: the Epstein files (New York Times, 2025).

 

Within certain investigative and intelligence circles, it has long been believed that Jeffrey Epstein functioned not merely as a financier embedded within criminal networks but as a Mossad asset tasked with the systematic collection of compromising material, including evidence of underage sex and paedophilia involving influential Western politicians, business elites, and members of royal families. According to this interpretation, the purpose of such operations was straightforward: the accumulation of material capable of exerting political leverage over decision-makers whose cooperation might later be required to advance Israeli strategic objectives. Within this framework, Trump’s long-documented personal proximity to Epstein (Gabbatt, 2025) acquires a significance that extends well beyond social acquaintance, situating him within a network of potentially serious allegations of sexual conduct with underage girls that could be activated at moments of geopolitical decision.

 

Under such conditions, the notion that Trump could indefinitely resist pressure to confront Iran becomes increasingly implausible. Political actors whose careers remain vulnerable to reputational destruction rarely enjoy unlimited strategic autonomy. It was therefore foreseeable that a moment would arise when Israel, pursuing a long-standing strategic objective, would exert decisive pressure upon Washington to initiate a direct strike against Iran. That moment has now arrived. Israel’s strategic ambition, articulated for decades in explicit terms, has shifted from aspiration to operational reality. What is now unfolding is not merely an assault upon the Islamic regime in Iran but the opening phase of a project whose deeper consequence lies in the destruction of Iran as a sovereign state, echoing earlier precedents in Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

 

The origins of this project extend much further back. For decades, Israeli strategic discourse has entertained the proposition that the fragmentation of large Middle Eastern states into smaller and more manageable political entities would fundamentally reshape the regional balance of power. Within such an arrangement, no single state would retain the territorial scale, demographic weight, or military capacity necessary to challenge Israeli primacy, while simultaneously paving the way for the creation of a Greater Israel embedded within Israel’s political imagination. Fragmentation, in this sense, emerges not merely as a by-product of regional instability but as a strategic objective in its own right.

 

The intellectual genealogy of this vision can be traced to ideas associated with Bernard Lewis, whose proposals concerning the redrawing of Middle Eastern borders following the collapse of centralised states anticipated precisely such a process of geopolitical fragmentation (Suren-Pahlav, 2018). In this interpretation, the first victim of Lewis’s plan was the fall of the Imperial Government and the subsequent rise of the current Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran in 1979.

 

Over subsequent decades, the Islamic regime has supplied the necessary instruments not only to sustain a condition of permanent conflict in the Middle East and perpetuate Israeli narratives of ‘victimhood’, accompanied by the ritual shedding of crocodile tears over the regime’s alleged intention to destroy Israel, thereby facilitating the expansion of its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the commission of genocide with global complicity, but also to cultivate a range of separatist terrorist organisations operating within Iran’s territorial boundaries as well as in its peripheral regions. These groups have reportedly received ideological encouragement, financial assistance, and terrorist training by exploiting Iran’s linguistic diversity, transforming it into an ‘ethnic card’ deployed for geopolitical purposes. Within this wider ecosystem of destabilisation appear Kurdish militant networks, Baluchi insurgent groups, elements within the Azeri nationalist milieu, and certain organisations claiming to represent Arabic-speaking communities in southern Iran.

 

Parallel to these covert mechanisms, an accompanying intellectual infrastructure has also been cultivated. Several Western think tanks closely aligned with Israeli strategic interests have played a prominent role in normalising the discourse of Iranian fragmentation within policy debates. Among these institutions, the Henry Jackson Society and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) have been particularly active in advancing frameworks that reconceptualise Iran not as a single ‘ethno-nation’ and historically integrated civilisation-state but as a loose aggregation of competing so-called ‘ethnic entities’, whose projected future lies in federalisation and, ultimately, in the Balkanisation of Iran through a range of tactics that include the ignition of civil war. Within such narratives, intellectual argument functions as the scaffolding for political projects whose ultimate consequence would be the territorial disaggregation of Iran itself.

 

However, Israeli efforts to divide and conquer did not succeed so easily, largely because of Iran’s historically organic character, which has long bound Iranians into a single unified nation. Iranian regional divisions, in particular, are not structured along ethnic lines but instead follow political provincial boundaries. Consequently, Israeli hostility towards Iran and the broader project aimed at its destruction soon became apparent to political and cultural activists, including the present author.

 

From 2020 onwards, a subtle yet significant shift in Israeli strategy became increasingly visible. Rather than presenting Israel as an external adversary confronting the Iranian nation, Israeli leaders began recalibrating their rhetoric in order to draw a distinction between the Islamic regime and the Iranian nation itself. Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly emphasised that Israel’s hostility was directed solely at the clerical establishment in Tehran while simultaneously portraying Israel as a potential ally of the Iranian people. This rhetorical repositioning proved politically effective among certain segments of the Iranian diaspora and opposition communities. Yet rhetoric alone could not produce operational influence. What was required was an intermediary vehicle capable of transmitting these narratives into Iranian political networks. That intermediary gradually emerged in the figure of Iran’s Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi.

 

Although the Crown Prince has opposed the regime since the establishment of the totalitarian theocratic order, his political trajectory has at times been marked by a degree of naivety that left him vulnerable to individuals pursuing their own agendas and instrumentalising his position for personal objectives. Following the 2022 Mahsa uprising in Iran, and the Crown Prince’s subsequent attempt to form an opposition coalition that ultimately proved short-lived (Suren-Pahlav, 2023), Israeli actors appear to have recognised the political value of his position, particularly in light of the visible support among Iranians for his return. Israeli networks succeeded in recruiting members of Farashgard, a diaspora-based political group whose members had previously supported the Islamic regime before later rebranding themselves as opponents of the clerical establishment, yet who, according to this interpretation, remained embedded within the regime’s ‘False Opposition’ strategy (Suren-Pahlav, 2018). These individuals were subsequently filtered and absorbed into networks already connected to policy institutions in Washington, including the very think tanks that have promoted the discourse of Iran’s Balkanisation, most notably the FDD, before eventually consolidating themselves in a group called NUFDI. Their selection by Israel, and their emergence as the new driving force within this networked formation, was not accidental. As noted earlier, these figures had long been committed supporters of the regime, operating within and alongside it while remaining closely aligned with its reformist faction. Once repudiated by the regime, however, they experienced this exclusion not merely as political marginalisation but as betrayal, a rupture that rapidly translated into a politics of retaliation. After arriving in the West, particularly in 2016, and immediately following Trump’s first accession to the presidency, they published an open letter openly calling for the bombardment of Iran (AhmadBatebi.com, 2016).

 

A recurrent trait among loyalists of the Islamic regime may be understood as politically anti-Iranian and anti-patriotic, insofar as their primary allegiance lies not with Iran as a historical and civilisational community, nor with its national identity, but with an ideological project grounded in political Islam and revolutionary universalism. Within such a framework, elements of Iranian national identity that resist absorption into the revolution’s doctrinal architecture are subordinated, reinterpreted, or at times repudiated altogether (Farhi, 2005). Scholarship on post-revolutionary Iran has consistently shown that the Islamic regime privileges Islam as the principal source of political legitimacy while treating nationalism with marked ambivalence and at times overt hostility, even as it selectively appropriates nationalist symbols when politically expedient. When individuals who were once committed supporters are subsequently excluded by the regime, the resulting ideological disillusionment may precipitate a profound crisis of identity (Hogg, 2014). Research in political psychology indicates that conditions of exclusion, uncertainty, and loss of significance often render individuals more receptive to rigid ideological narratives and tightly bounded networks capable of restoring meaning and self-worth (Kruglanski et al., 2022). Under such conditions, external powers may discover among these disaffected actors a reservoir of individuals unusually susceptible to co-option, precisely because ideological estrangement erodes prior attachments while intensifying the search for a substitute community capable of supplying recognition, purpose, and political belonging (Banuazizi, 2021). It is therefore unsurprising that Israel recruited them with relative ease, transforming personal estrangement into political utility, while over time this constellation of actors began inserting itself into the political orbit of the Crown Prince, widely regarded as the most credible symbolic challenger to the Islamic regime and the only opposition figure capable of commanding widespread recognition among Iranians.

 

The consequences of this proximity proved strategically significant. Acting under the guise of political advisers and intermediaries, members of this network encouraged and facilitated the Crown Prince’s controversial visit to Israel in 2023. The visit constituted a symbolic rupture whose geopolitical implications were far-reaching (Suren-Pahlav, 2023b). For the first time since the creation of Israel by Britain in 1947, a prominent Iranian political figure travelled to Israel, and the gesture was publicly framed as a moment of reconciliation between the state of Israel and the Iranian nation. Beneath this symbolic theatre, however, a far more consequential political dynamic was already beginning to take shape.

 

From that moment onward, the contours of a broader strategic project became increasingly visible. Israel had succeeded in manufacturing the appearance of alignment between its own geopolitical objectives and the aspirations of certain currents within the Iranian opposition. Gradually, the symbolic capital associated with the historical legacy of the Iranian Imperial monarchy was appropriated to legitimise a confrontation that would ultimately devastate Iran itself. What initially appeared as rhetorical outreach thus evolved into a process of political preparation for a decisive confrontation.

 

The events that culminated in the national uprising of December 2025 must therefore be situated within this wider strategic architecture, not the uprising itself but the manner in which it was subsequently hijacked by Israeli actors with the assistance of the MEK, a Marxist-Islamist terrorist organisation widely loathed among Iranians. The uprising itself emerged through organic eruptions of domestic unrest rooted in internal socio-political and economic grievances (Suren-Pahlav, 2025a). Yet the uprising rapidly transformed into a slaughterhouse when Mossad agents, together with MEK militants, opened fire on the protestors, alongside the regime’s own security forces (Suren-Pahlav, 2026a). The consequence was a campaign of mass killing initiated by the regime, which has so far resulted in more than 35,000 deaths and, according to some accounts, as many as 95,000, with hundreds of thousands injured or arrested.

 

Additionally, Iranians took to the streets after the Crown Prince declared in early 2025 that more than 100,000 members of the regime’s security and military apparatus, including elements of the IRGC, had aligned themselves with him and would protect protestors in any forthcoming uprising. The claim functioned as a calculated instrument of weaponised hope, promoted by NUFDI through what has been described as a Strategy of Perception Management (Suren-Pahlav, 2025b). The conceptual groundwork for this narrative had already been laid years earlier. Since 2016, Farshagard, before reconstituting itself as NUFDI, had advanced the proposition that the Iranian nation was incapable of liberating itself from the Islamic regime’s despotism and therefore required foreign intervention, a doctrine I described as the ‘External Liberation Strategy’ (Suren-Pahlav, 2016; 2017a).

 

The same instrument of weaponised hope and perception management resurfaced soon afterwards, this time through the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who appeared to act in alignment with Netanyahu. On 2 January 2026 Trump warned that the United States would intervene if the regime killed protestors (BBC News, 2026), a warning he repeated on 10 January (NBC News, 2026). Three days later, on 13 January 2026, he published a message on Truth Social declaring: ‘Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!’ and ‘HELP IS ON ITS WAY’ (Trump, 2026). Prince Reza Pahlavi promptly echoed and endorsed this message, first on 13 January 2026 (Pahlavi, 2026a), and again through an official statement published on his website on 15 January 2026 (Pahlavi, 2026b).

 

Amplified by NUFDI, and evidently supported by Israeli intelligence networks, this narrative emboldened protestors who were led to believe that American intervention was imminent. No such intervention occurred. What followed instead was intensified repression by the regime and further bloodshed in the streets (Suren-Pahlav, 2026b). Despite repeated warnings about the danger of such false promises, warnings that largely fell on deaf ears (Suren-Pahlav, 2026b), particularly when issued by a figure such as Trump, whom some psychologists have described as exhibiting malignant narcissism (Gartner, 2018), a pathology historically associated with figures such as Hitler, Stalin, and Trujillo, these declarations were never intended as expressions of solidarity with Iranian freedom or grief for Iranian lives taken by a murderous regime. Their function was strategic. They were designed to manufacture the political conditions necessary for escalation to war. The ignition and subsequent justification of war under the false pretext of defending human rights constitutes a textbook strategy repeatedly deployed since 2003 by the United States and its European proxy states acting on Israel’s strategic imperatives. The sequence is familiar: first war, which destroys a country’s infrastructure and cripples its capacity to govern internally and internationally; then civil war; and finally fragmentation, while its natural resources are systematically pillaged by Western powers.

 

The war now approaching Iran’s doorstep is therefore not the consequence of sudden miscalculation or accidental escalation, it represents the culmination of a strategic trajectory decades in the making, whose intellectual foundations, political intermediaries, and operational triggers had already been carefully assembled. Any serious attempt to understand the conflict now unfolding must therefore move beyond the surface narrative of regime confrontation and examine the deeper strategic logic through which this war was prepared, structured, and ultimately set in motion. Yet, as Peter Berger observed, ‘Things are not what they seem’. The Islamic regime is not the paper tiger that Netanyahu and Trump appear to believe it to be. The regime retains its own strategic repertoire and its own set of cards, not merely to survive a potential war but also to inflict maximum damage capable of ending American hegemony in the region and even threatening the existence of Israel to the point where the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel could transform into the nightmare of no Israel at all. Within this unfolding strategic contest, the Islamic regime also possesses a potential partner: China.

 

 

3. Scenario One: The Decline of US and Israeli Hegemony and the Emergence of a Perso–Sino Order

 

3.1 The Two Winners of War: Iran’s Islamic Regime and China

The established global order is undergoing an irreversible process of disintegration, and it is the United States itself that has begun to dismantle it. Yet a fundamental question immediately arises. Why would an architect deliberately demolish a structure that it originally designed and constructed? This is precisely the puzzle that requires explanation.

 

The explanation requires an examination of the earlier system itself and of the structural pressures now driving its fragmentation. The starting point is a moment in which the entire board has effectively been overturned. For several decades, international politics operated within a framework structured by a combination of formal agreements and tacit conventions. The system, whose principal architect was the United States in the aftermath of the World War II, was intended to produce stability and predictability in global affairs. The central question, however, emerges at the point when the architect itself concludes that the system it created no longer serves its interests. It is at this juncture that the decisive turning point appears (Kempe, 2026; Kiley, 2026; Ibrahim, 2026).

 

What, then, is meant when one claims that the order has collapsed? One interpretation advances a deliberately radical understanding of the concept of order grounded in a familiar concept within International Relations: Hegemonic Stability Theory (Walter, 1996). The terminology may appear technical, yet the underlying proposition is straightforward. According to this perspective, the international system tends towards stability only when it is anchored by a dominant power capable of enforcing the rules of the system (Ikenberry, 2019).

 

The central claim follows from this observation. Order, in this interpretation, does not primarily consist of legal frameworks, formal regulations, or institutional procedures. Rather, order is the direct expression of the will of the hegemonic power. International law retains validity only insofar as the dominant authority, in this case the United States, chooses to recognise and uphold it. The moment that will changes, the normative force of those rules dissolves; they are reduced to little more than paper declarations.

 

The contrast between the earlier and the emerging configuration of power is stark. In the previous order, international institutions constituted the operational foundation of the system. In the new configuration, by contrast, the determining factor is the direct will of the United States itself. Previously, the costs associated with maintaining systemic stability were distributed among several major powers. In the emerging arrangement, the calculation is no longer framed in terms of collective stability but in terms of American advantage alone. Most consequentially, the objective is no longer the preservation of predictability and equilibrium. Instead, the strategic goal has shifted towards the direct control of resources, a transformation that fundamentally alters the logic of the international game.

 

The implementation of this emergent order within the region requires a corresponding instrument, one that does not remain bound by the constraints of the earlier normative framework. In this interpretation, that instrument is Israel.

 

Israel’s regional role has undergone a decisive transformation. It no longer functions merely as a conventional proxy of the United States and Europe. Rather, it has assumed the position of the operational arm through which this new strategic doctrine is executed. In this configuration Israel appears as an actor tasked with reshaping the regional environment in accordance with the requirements of the emerging order, doing so outside the legal and institutional structures that previously governed interstate conduct.

 

The scale of this transformation becomes apparent when one considers the geographical range of recent operations identified in the discussion. Israeli actions have been directed against targets located in, or associated with, six capitals: Beirut, Damascus, Gaza City, Tehran, Sana'a, and even Doha. The geographical dispersion alone suggests that these are not isolated episodes of conflict. Rather, they form part of a coordinated regional strategy. The source text cited here summarises the logic in stark terms: for the purposes of this mission Israel operates without limitation and without red lines (Doha Institute, 2025; Kempe, 2026). Such a formulation implies a complete rupture with the regulatory constraints that previously structured regional conduct.

 

Three premises are already evident. The earlier international order has eroded, and a regional actor now functions as the instrument through which a new strategic will is implemented without meaningful restraint (Dobson, 2025). The remaining question concerns the ultimate objective of this transformation. What outcome does this strategy seek to produce?

 

The answer perhaps is unsettling. The aim is not the construction of a new and stable regional settlement comparable to the territorial arrangements produced by the Sykes–Picot Agreement. On the contrary, the strategic objective is the deliberate production of fragmentation and disorder. Within such an environment the management and extraction of resources becomes considerably easier to secure.

 

The strategy of disorder unfolds through three successive stages (Chatham House, 2025). First, instability is injected into the regional system through multiple and overlapping conflicts. Second, this turbulence progressively weakens, and in certain cases disintegrates, strong central states. Third, within the resulting vacuum of authority, the direct control of strategic resources becomes achievable.

 

As a clear illustration of how resource extraction may be sustained within conditions of persistent instability without the financial and political burdens associated with a full-scale military occupation, the oil fields of eastern Syria provide a revealing example.

 

One of the most consequential structural concerns is the strategic containment of China as a prospective rival superpower to the United States. Within this interpretative framework, the perpetuation of controlled regional instability functions as a mechanism through which the emergence of an alternative centre of global power is obstructed. The argument proceeds from the premise that the maintenance of such disorder constrains China’s strategic expansion while preserving the geopolitical architecture of American primacy. Under these conditions, China would be compelled to challenge the emerging American order indirectly through alignment with key regional actors, most notably Iran and Saudi Arabia.

 

A striking paradox nevertheless emerges. Policies associated with the possible presidency of Donald Trump, particularly the prospect of a direct military confrontation with Iran, may ultimately operate as a mechanism that undermines the very geopolitical order they are intended to consolidate. In this interpretation, such a conflict could function as a strategic trap deliberately structured by Iran in coordination with China and potentially with the cooperation of Saudi Arabia. The consequence would not simply be regional escalation but the internal destabilisation of the American strategic project itself.

 

The central analytical problem therefore concerns the plausibility of this proposition. How could a military strike initiated by the world’s pre-eminent superpower against a state such as Iran, a country widely assumed to lack the capacity even to wage sustained war against a single major European power, plausibly constitute a strategic trap? The explanation advanced here rests on the contention that the anticipated American attack would unfold in accordance with a scenario already foreseen and incorporated into the adversary’s strategic planning. Rather than disrupting the opponent’s expectations, the operation would realise them.

 

During the US–Israeli air strikes on Iran in June 2025, the operational environment was shaped by a tactic that relied upon calculated deception. Washington simultaneously maintained the appearance of diplomatic engagement while preparing and executing military action, thereby preserving an element of surprise that constrained the regime’s immediate capacity to respond. This pattern was not entirely unforeseen. In an earlier analysis published shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, the present author argued that negotiations were functioning less as a pathway towards settlement than as a strategic instrument designed to obscure preparations for military escalation (Suren-Pahlav, 2025c). The subsequent course of events largely confirmed that assessment. Yet the conditions that made such deception effective in June 2025 are unlikely to be reproduced in a subsequent confrontation. Iranian planners now treat this pattern not as an anomaly but as an identifiable feature of American coercive strategy. Renewed diplomatic signalling is therefore unlikely to be interpreted as evidence of restraint. On the contrary, negotiations may increasingly be understood as a possible prelude to attack. Under such conditions the incentive structure changes fundamentally. Rather than delaying retaliation in order to observe the trajectory of events, Iranian forces would be predisposed to respond almost immediately to any strike, activating the retaliatory mechanisms already embedded within their command architecture.

 

An American defensive trap would emerge if Iran were to respond immediately and without hesitation by initiating a large scale counterstrike against American military installations throughout the region (Vatankhah, 2023). Such a response would run counter to prevailing assumptions in Washington, where the dominant expectation appears to be that Iran would either postpone retaliation or restrict itself to a limited and largely symbolic response. An immediate and synchronised regional counteroffensive would therefore confront American forces with a scenario for which existing logistical and strategic preparations may not be configured. Under these conditions, the United States could find itself drawn into the operational dynamics set in motion by its own initial strike.

 

Such a rapid and expansive response would depend upon several structural conditions. Iran’s principal strategic advantage lies in a distinctive military doctrine structured around a sequential two-stage operational logic. This advantage is understood to derive from a distinctive military doctrine structured around a sequential two-stage operational logic.

 

The first phase would consist of a sustained and concentrated wave of missile strikes directed at the adversary’s radar infrastructure and air defence systems. The immediate objective would be the systematic degradation of the opponent’s capacity for detection and interception. In operational terms, the strategy would aim to render the adversary effectively blind. Once these defensive systems had been sufficiently weakened, a second phase would follow. With the defensive architecture disrupted, successive waves of attacks would be conducted through a coordinated combination of unmanned aerial systems and missile platforms directed against military targets that would then become highly vulnerable.

 

This operational model would generate several strategic advantages. First, Iran’s extensive territorial scale would permit missile launch systems to be widely dispersed across the country, thereby rendering their simultaneous neutralisation exceptionally difficult. Second, the adversary’s capacity to execute a decisive surprise strike would be correspondingly reduced. Third, the forward ground bases that constitute a central pillar of the American regional military posture would lose a significant degree of operational effectiveness once exposed to repeated waves of missile saturation.

 

The discussion extends to the case of Israel. Owing to its limited geographical depth, Israel’s defensive systems would be vulnerable to rapid attrition under sustained missile pressure. Within this framework, the doctrine is presented as capable of sustaining resistance even in the event of attacks directed at the national capital itself.

 

The scale of Iran’s strategic depth is reflected in a single figure: 1.648 million square kilometres. Iran’s territorial scale would provide a spatial depth sufficiently vast to permit military assets to be dispersed across the country to such an extent that even a large-scale assault would not be capable of disabling them simultaneously. This spatial dispersion would constitute the structural basis of Iran’s strategic resilience. At the same time, reports suggest that some underground facilities are used to store stockpiles of components and assembly lines for future production, while others have been constructed as decoy installations intended specifically to exhaust US and Israeli missile stockpiles during any attempted strike.

 

Yet the issue extends beyond military tactics and operational planning. Beneath the strategic layer lies a deeper ideological and cultural dimension. Regarding the Supreme Leader, in the event of war it would be highly likely that American or Israeli forces would attempt to target him directly, thereby inadvertently falling into a strategic trap structured by the regime itself, since the man currently occupying the office may in fact be a body double. In an earlier article published in 2022, the present author examined reports concerning the possible death of Ali Khamenei as a result of progressive prostate cancer and advanced a scenario in which the regime might preserve the appearance of his survival through the use of a body double during a prospective confrontation with the United States (Suren-Pahlav, 2022). Such a strategy, it was argued, would enable the leadership to transform his eventual death into an act of martyrdom intended to mobilise Shi’a communities across the region and intensify anti-American sentiment. Therefore, such an attack would generate the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than weakening morale, it would operate as a catalyst capable not only of temporarily suspending internal divisions and mobilising the population around a shared objective, but also of mobilising Shi’a communities outside Iran to attack US political and diplomatic centres. The origins of this dynamic may be located within a deeply embedded Shi’a ideological conviction. Within this religious and cultural frameworks martyrdom is not interpreted as defeat but rather as an intensifier of collective resolve, a symbolic force capable of reinforcing unity and sustaining resistance.

 

The conclusion is unequivocal. Such an event would be likely to produce an unprecedented moment of national consolidation within Iran. Domestic political divisions would be pushed to the margins and replaced by a renewed surge of nationalist mobilisation. External pressure, in this interpretation, would not fragment the political community. Instead, it would generate internal cohesion.

 

A further element must also be considered: the Islamic regime’s network of regional proxies. Over the past four decades Tehran has deliberately cultivated a transnational system of aligned militias operating across the Middle East. These include Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi movement in Yemen, Hashd al-Shaabi formations in Iraq, and the Zeinabiyoun and Fatemiyoun brigades composed largely of foreign Shi’a fighters recruited and organised under Iranian patronage.

 

In the event of open war between Iran and the United States or Israel, these forces would almost certainly be mobilised as instruments of indirect retaliation. Their operations would extend beyond conventional military confrontation and would likely involve asymmetric attacks against American and Israeli military installations, diplomatic missions, economic infrastructure, and shipping routes across the region.

 

In this sense these organisations function as the outer perimeter of Iran’s strategic defence system. They enable Tehran to transform a bilateral confrontation into a regional theatre of conflict, multiplying the number of operational fronts while imposing costs on its adversaries far beyond Iran’s own territorial boundaries.

 

Another dimension of the regime’s deterrence architecture concerns the maintenance of dormant networks operating beyond the Middle East. Iranian intelligence services, alongside organisations aligned with them, particularly within certain Islamic centres that have historically functioned both as ideological platforms for the regime’s revolutionary doctrine and as recruitment channels for Shi‘a sleeper cells, have long been suspected of sustaining support infrastructures across several Western states (Suren-Pahlav, 2015; 2017b). These networks are believed to remain inactive during ordinary circumstances and to be activated only under exceptional strategic conditions. In such a scenario their activities could include bombings civilians, sabotage, targeted assassinations and other acts of terrorism intended to create political instability and public panic in the United States and its Europena proxies particularly the United Kingdom and France which have always been invludev in all the US wars and claimed they are not involved – they . However, within the regime’s broader strategic reasoning, the activation of these networks would likely be considered only when the survival of the regime itself was perceived to be at stake.

 

The leadership is aware that the deliberate extension of violent operations into Western societies would carry severe political consequences and could rapidly consolidate international support for military action against Iran. For this reason the regime has historically sought to maintain a distinction between regional confrontation and direct attacks within Western states. Its broader objective in the event of war would be to encourage international opposition to military escalation and to prevent the formation of a unified global coalition aligned with the United States and Israel.

 

Nevertheless, the possibility of such networks being activated cannot be entirely dismissed, particularly in circumstances in which the regime believed its survival to be at stake. Under such conditions the strategic logic of restraint could be replaced by one of escalation, in which previously dormant operational capabilities might be deployed in an attempt to raise the costs of confrontation for Western states.

 

At the same time, the possibility of false flag operations carried out by Israeli intelligence cannot be ignored. In a climate of escalating confrontation the attribution of covert terrorist attacks becomes highly uncertain, making it possible for operations to be conducted or manipulated by other actors in order to justify a wider military escalation against Iran. Mossad could therefore, particularly in the opening days of military operations, stage false flag attacks both in Western states and in the Persian Gulf Arab countries in order to draw them into war with Iran.

 

Yet another deeply alarming possibility remains. If the regime were confronted with annihilation and American forces placed boots on the ground, escalation could move into the nuclear domain. Tehran might respond not only by targeting the Dimona nuclear facility and the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Centre, Israel’s primary plutonium production and research complex, an action that would effectively amount to the nuclear destruction of Israel, but also by deploying several nuclear warheads suspected of having been obtained from former Soviet republics and North Korea, thereby acting in accordance with the ultimate logic of martyrdom that underpins the regime’s ideological worldview. Within that worldview destruction is not necessarily defeat but sacrifice. Under such circumstances the regime could seek not only to wipe Israel from the map but also to devastate the Persian Gulf Arab states, thereby inflicting maximum economic damage upon the West, even if such an act condemns Iran itself to ruin. The consequences of such a decision would be civilisational in scale, potentially transforming the Middle East into an uninhabitable zone for at least a century.

 

Taken together, these elements reveal a broader structural configuration. The military trap, the asserted strategic advantages, and the mobilisation of national unity converge upon a single projected outcome: the emergence of a new order in the Middle East, that is to say a fundamentally reconfigured regional structure of power.

 

What is at stake is the emergence of a proposed order that departs in significant ways from the earlier regional configuration. Under the previous arrangement, the military presence of the United States across several Arab Persian Gulf states was treated as a normal feature of the strategic landscape. In the emerging order, however, any American military presence would instead be regarded as a legitimate target. Whereas hostile actions were previously answered through limited retaliatory strikes, the new framework would force states hosting American forces to confront the possibility of direct attacks not only on military installations but also on critical infrastructure and even on their political centres.

 

At the centre of this projected transformation lies a significant reordering of the regional hierarchy. Iran, previously regarded as one regional power among several competing actors, would be repositioned as a hegemonic force capable of defining the operative rules of the geopolitical contest across the Middle East. In this interpretation, the shift would not merely concern relative military capability but the authority to determine the strategic parameters within which other regional states would be compelled to operate.

 

In order to demonstrate that this interpretation extends beyond abstract theorisation, the source cites what it presents as a particularly direct warning reportedly addressed to the United Arab Emirates. The wording attributed to this message is deliberately confrontational. Should the state wish to receive an ambassador, it might, according to the reported phrasing, prefer to send that envoy ‘on one of our missiles towards the presidential palace’. Even if interpreted as rhetorical exaggeration rather than literal threat, such language illustrates the altered register through which the rules of the strategic contest would be articulated under the proposed order.

 

The ultimate objective is therefore the compelled withdrawal of the United States from the region. Should such a withdrawal occur, a new balance of power would be expected to emerge whose operative principles would be defined and enforced by Iran itself. Within this framework, the issue is not understood as a temporary cycle of confrontation but as the prospective restructuring of the geopolitical architecture of the Middle East over the coming years.

 

The broader implications of such a transformation remain subject to considerable debate. Whether one ultimately accepts or rejects the premises underlying this interpretation, examining its internal logic remains analytically important. It reveals how a particular geopolitical worldview seeks to reinterpret the structure of regional order and to redefine the respective roles of regional actors and external powers. In that sense, the discussion offers a projection of the future articulated from a markedly different strategic perspective.

 

3.2 The Strategic Trap: Iran’s Decentralised War Machine

For more than two decades the Islamic regime has prepared itself for a confrontation with the United States. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 the leadership in Tehran has assumed that its own confrontation with Washington was only a matter of time, and that time may now be approaching.

 

Yet it appears that Trump’s strategists have overestimated American power while underestimating Iran. They have failed to recognise that Iran is not Iraq, Syria, or Libya, neither in the scale of its territory nor in the complexity of its political and military apparatus, and therefore cannot be defeated with the ease they anticipated or reshaped through the regime change, as they are hoping for.

 

To understand the complexity of the Islamic regime’s political and military system, one must first recognise what might be described as a striking paradox, or an unusual contradiction, on the battlefield. It is expected that in the first few days of the war the US and Israel would attack not only the regime’s organs and visible symbols of state power, including the leadership, but also Iran’s military and paramilitary infrastructures. The objective would naturally be to neutralise any resistance and Iran’s offensive missiles. Yet soon the US and Israelis would learn that missiles would launch continuously, unabated, since the offensive arm of the armed forces would largely remain unaffected and would continue its operations as if nothing had happened. This is the paradox that it seems the US cannot comprehend.

 

The continuation of operations is not accidental. It is the product of deliberate and carefully considered institutional design. The system relies upon a decentralised and intelligent command structure, one constructed in such a way that operations can continue even if the central command node is destroyed. This is because Iran’s system is a rare and sophisticated hybrid, one that functions less as a rigid pyramid of authority and more as a distributed network composed of autonomous branches which, during crises, can operate independently while following rules and operational doctrines already embedded within the system.

 

To appreciate how unusual this paradoxical hybrid is, it is useful to recall how a conventional command system operates under normal circumstances, that is, prior to the present crisis.

 

In a classic hierarchical pyramid, at its apex stands the leader, responsible for determining overarching strategic direction. Beneath this position sit the principal commanders of the regular military and the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC). The next layer consists of mid-level commanders. At the base of the structure lie operational units responsible for executing orders. Authority flows clearly from top to bottom. Control is centralised and hierarchical. In this form of system, when the upper layers of the hierarchy are damaged or removed, namely the leader and key commanders, the apex of this command pyramid effectively ceases to function, as witnessed in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela.

 

On the opposite side stands Iran’s unconventional organisational architecture, which may be described as an autonomous command system. The difference between this structure and the traditional hierarchical model is fundamental. In the classical pyramid of authority, strategic attention remains fixed upon the apex, from which directives are transmitted downward through successive layers of command. Without instruction from above, the lower layers remain inert. Within an autonomous command architecture, however, the structure ceases to resemble a pyramid altogether. It instead assumes the form of a network in which each node, namely each operational unit, retains a measure of decision-making authority and thus the capacity to initiate action independently.

 

The Islamic regime’s architecture can therefore be understood as operating across two parallel domains. The first consists of formal political institutions, including a provisional leadership council designed to assume limited coordinating functions should the leadership be decapitated, including the removal of the Supreme Leader. Their authority remains constrained, and their relationship with operational forces would remain largely advisory. The second domain consists of the operational sphere in which effective military power resides. Within this sphere, independent units of the Revolutionary Guards, together with law-enforcement organisations, aerospace forces, and missile units, do not await instructions. Instead, they operate according to what is described as a ‘fire at will’ doctrine, executing objectives that were defined and embedded within the system long in advance.

 

At the same time, in order to eliminate potential vulnerabilities, the political and military spheres maintain only minimal direct institutional linkage. The most striking aspect of this system, however, lies in its scale. The architecture extends far beyond the conventional armed forces and the Revolutionary Guards, incorporating more than 250,000 personnel drawn from the IRGC, domestic law-enforcement agencies, and the regime’s wider security apparatus. These forces are trained for rapid autonomous response, meaning they retain the operational capacity to act without instructions from the capital. The outcome is the creation of a vast decentralised network of operational autonomy distributed across the country.

 

Within such a structure the United States would not merely fail to remove the regime. It would eventually discover that the very act of defending against Iran’s drones and ballistic missiles rapidly depletes its own defensive stockpiles. Once those reserves are exhausted, the United States would find itself increasingly incapable of sustaining defence. It is precisely this dynamic that constitutes the trap into which Trump appears ready to step.

 

 

3.3 The War of Arithmetic: How Iran Could Bankrupt Western Missile Defences

Wars are not only devastating but also very expensive, yet the central question here is whether a repeat of the June 2025 US–Israeli attack on Iran would prove financially and logistically sustainable.

 

Iran possesses vast stockpiles of low-cost yet highly lethal Shahid drones. In retaliation for an American and Israeli strike on Iran, the regime would launch hundreds, possibly thousands, against the US, Israel, and their regional allies. The asymmetry is stark. The regime deploys weapons that are cheap to produce, while its adversaries rely on defensive systems that are exponentially more expensive to operate.

 

During the 12-day war between the US, Israel, and Iran, initiated through air strikes on Iranian territory, interception systems reportedly achieved around 90% success in neutralising incoming missiles and drones. Yet the underlying arithmetic is unforgiving. A Shahid drone costs roughly £25,000, whereas the missiles required to intercept it cost between £400,000 and £1.3 million. Each successful interception therefore costs more than thirty times the price of the weapon it destroys. In a prolonged war of attrition the mathematics favours Iran, particularly given the regime's opaque yet clearly vast stockpiles of drones, which plausibly exceed available interceptor inventories by an order of magnitude.

 

Should this so-called ‘Beautiful Armada’ initiate war with Iran, the United States and Israel may begin the conflict with replenished arsenals and ready defensive systems. Yet within a matter of weeks the structural imbalance would assert itself. Interceptors would be expended at a pace that industrial production cannot realistically replace.

 

Consider the numbers. The United States reportedly possesses roughly 4,000 Tomahawk missiles. THAAD missile inventories are already strained. Around 150 were fired during the 12-day war with Iran in June 2025 alone, representing roughly a quarter of the total stockpile of just over 600. The Islamic regime's strategic calculus rests precisely on this arithmetic: exhaust the defensive capacity of the United States, Israel, and their Arab partners until their missile shields are depleted and their territories exposed.

 

The consequences extend far beyond the battlefield. Once interceptor inventories are exhausted the United States would face the prospect of military withdrawal from the Middle East. Such a withdrawal would not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. It would unfold in a strategic environment increasingly shaped by China and Russia.

 

 

3.4 China and the Strategic Trigger: When the Strait of Hormuz Closes

The final component of this strategic trap lies beyond Iran itself. It concerns the actor whose economic and geopolitical interests intersect most directly with the consequences of a regional war: China.

 

In the event of a large-scale conflict between the United States and Iran, one operational outcome would be almost inevitable. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, would become either partially or entirely closed. Iran has repeatedly signalled that in the event of war it would consider the waterway a legitimate theatre of operations. Mines, anti-ship missiles, drone swarms, and naval harassment tactics would quickly render the passage unsafe for commercial shipping. Even a limited disruption would produce immediate consequences for global energy markets. Insurance costs would surge, tanker traffic would decline, and the price of oil would rise sharply.

 

For the United States this scenario would represent a logistical challenge. For China it would represent something far more consequential: a direct threat to the economic lifeline upon which its industrial system depends. China imports a substantial proportion of its energy from the Persian Gulf. Any sustained disruption to that flow would reverberate throughout its manufacturing sector, its export capacity, and ultimately its domestic economic stability.

 

Under such conditions Beijing could not remain a passive observer. A prolonged closure of the Strait would compel China to enter the diplomatic and strategic arena, not as a neutral mediator but as a power whose core national interests had been placed at risk. The justification would be straightforward. China would present its intervention as a measure necessary to restore stability to global energy markets and to safeguard international trade routes upon which the world economy depends.

 

Yet behind the language of stability would lie a deeper geopolitical calculation.

 

If China succeeded in forcing a ceasefire or imposing a negotiated settlement, such an outcome would not be cost free for Washington. No great power intervenes in a conflict of this magnitude without expecting compensation. The price of stabilisation would almost certainly involve strategic concessions from the United States itself. In practical terms, this could translate into a gradual retreat of American influence from parts of the Indo-Pacific or a reconfiguration of the military balance in East Asia.

 

In other words, the war that begins in the Persian Gulf would not end there. It would extend into the architecture of global power.

 

This is the deeper logic of the trap. The United States enters the conflict believing it is confronting Iran. Yet the structural consequences of that conflict activate a far larger geopolitical dynamic, because Iran, this time, would not contain its defence, which takes the form of offence at its borders, as it did during the June 2025 US-Israeli airstrikes.

 

In any potential war, the Islamic regime would instead carry the US-Israeli conflict into the oil-rich Arab states of the Persian Gulf, notwithstanding their prior announcement that they would not permit the US to use their airspace to attack Iran. That claim is no more credible than the one made by the Europeans in June 2025, when they said they would remain neutral. Formally, they did not take part. In practice, they participated in the war by providing logistics to the US and defending Israel in a war that Israel itself initiated. Nevertheless, the Islamic regime has already declared that, in the event of an attack on Iran, it would retaliate by targeting US bases across the region, particularly the US Fifth Fleet stationed in Bahrain. Such an attack would have four objectives: first, to inflict maximum damage on the US military; second, to produce an economic chokepoint from which even the petrodollar would not escape unharmed; third, in the event of war, to compel the Arabs to intervene and press the US to stop it; and fourth, to destabilise their political systems, since their populations, unlike their governments, loathe the US and would blame their regimes both for hosting US bases and for dragging them unnecessarily into war.

 

 

4. Scenario Two: The Somalisation of Iran and the Erosion of Iran’s National Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity

If Scenario One outlines the possibility that war accelerates the decline of American hegemony and facilitates the emergence of a Perso–Sino strategic order, Scenario Two proceeds from a more severe and, in structural terms, more probable proposition: namely, that the same war, whether through miscalculation, escalation, or design, culminates not in geopolitical reordering but in the destruction of Iran as a coherent sovereign entity. In this sense, Scenario Two does not contradict Scenario One; it stands as its darker extension and, under conditions of uncontrolled escalation, its default outcome.

 

The distinction is decisive. Scenario One presupposes that Iran retains sufficient structural integrity, military coherence, and territorial sovereignty to convert war into strategic advantage. Scenario Two begins at the point where that integrity is systematically dismantled. The transition from one to the other does not require a conceptual leap but only a shift in operational intensity. Once the threshold is crossed at which infrastructure, command systems, and economic lifelines are targeted not as instruments of military pressure but as objects of elimination, the logic of war mutates. It ceases to be a contest over power and becomes an operation of state erasure.

 

The evidence of such a transition would not reside in official declarations, which remain saturated with the familiar rhetoric of ‘liberation’, ‘precision’, and ‘regime change’, but in the material grammar of violence itself (Suren-Pahlav, 2026a; 2026b). Should the United States and Israel prioritise the systematic destruction of Iran’s air force and naval capabilities, followed by sustained and coordinated strikes against oil and gas infrastructure, refineries, energy grids, ports, transport corridors, and industrial production centres, the underlying objective would become unmistakable. These are not the instruments of coercion directed at a governing elite. They are the structural foundations of state existence. Their removal does not weaken a regime; it dissolves the state that contains it. At that moment, the discursive façade collapses. The claim that such a war is intended to ‘liberate’ Iran from a totalitarian theocratic regime reveals itself not merely as misleading but as conceptually incoherent. Liberation presupposes a subject capable of receiving it, a society whose institutional skeleton remains sufficiently intact to sustain political transition. The systematic destruction of infrastructure produces the opposite condition. It eliminates the very possibility of organised political transformation and replaces it with administrative vacuum, economic paralysis, and social fragmentation. What is presented as emancipation becomes, in practice, the precondition for disintegration.

 

This is not without precedent. The trajectory is already inscribed in the recent history of the region. Iraq after 2003, Libya after 2011, and Syria through the cumulative effects of prolonged intervention each illustrate variations of the same strategic sequence: the dismantling of centralised military capacity, the degradation of state infrastructure, the erosion of sovereign authority, and the subsequent proliferation of armed non-state actors competing for power within a fractured territorial space. Scenario Two represents the convergence of these trajectories within a single geopolitical body. It is not a repetition but an amplification, a composite model in which the Iraqi collapse of state institutions, the Libyan fragmentation of territorial authority, and the Syrian multiplication of proxy battlefields intersect within the territorial scale of Iran.

 

What distinguishes the Iranian case, however, is that this trajectory does not emerge solely from the internal dynamics of intervention but intersects with a longer strategic horizon within Israeli geopolitical thought, one in which the fragmentation of large, coherent Middle Eastern states has been repeatedly articulated as a mechanism for securing regional primacy. As argued in my earlier work (Suren-Pahlav, 2016; 2026b), the destruction of Iran is not conceived as an end in itself but as the opening stage of a broader reconfiguration, in which the decomposition of territorial states produces a geopolitical environment defined by asymmetry, dependency, and external penetration.

 

The consequences would be civilisational in their depth. Iran’s historical continuity, which has endured war, invasions, dynastic ruptures, and ideological transformations over more than seven millennia, would encounter a form of violence qualitatively different from those it has previously absorbed. The destruction of infrastructural systems on a national scale would produce not merely hardship but systemic breakdown. Energy shortages would paralyse economic activity. The collapse of transport networks would fragment territorial connectivity. The degradation of command structures would dissolve the capacity for coordinated governance. Under such conditions, sovereignty ceases to function as a political reality and survives, if at all, only as an abstract legal fiction.

 

In the vacuum that follows, the political landscape would not reorganise itself into a coherent alternative order. It would fracture under an engineered civil war. Remnants of the regime would mutate into militia formations, retaining access to weapons and localised networks of authority. Separatist movements, already cultivated through decades of external and internal manipulation, would seize the opportunity to assert territorial claims. Jihadist organisations, drawn by the absence of central control, would embed themselves within peripheral regions. Criminal networks would expand into governance functions in areas where no other authority remains. The result would not be pluralism but competition, not decentralisation but disintegration. It would be Somalia in the making, not only in terms of political fragmentation, but in the material reality of mass hunger, infrastructural collapse, and the erosion of state capacity that defines everyday life.

 

It is at this point that the regional dimension becomes decisive. The collapse of Iran would not occur in isolation. It would generate a geopolitical vacuum of such magnitude that surrounding states could not remain indifferent to its consequences. The Persian Gulf Arab states, Turkey, and Pakistan would each confront the same strategic imperative: to prevent the instability from spilling across their borders while simultaneously securing influence within the emerging vacuum. Intervention, whether direct or mediated through proxies, would become not an option but a necessity dictated by proximity and self-preservation.

 

Yet such interventions would not restore order. They would multiply lines of conflict. Each external actor would pursue its own strategic calculus, supporting different factions, securing different corridors, and contesting different resources. Iranian territory would thus be transformed into a theatre of overlapping geopolitical projects, a space in which regional powers engage in indirect confrontation under the cover of internal fragmentation. The cumulative effect would be the progressive partitioning of Iran into zones of influence, each aligned with external sponsors, none capable of reconstituting national unity.

 

Within this fractured configuration, a long-articulated strategic vision within segments of Israeli geopolitical thought would find its most consequential realisation. The fragmentation of large Middle Eastern states into smaller, internally divided entities has long been understood as a mechanism for neutralising potential challengers to Israeli regional primacy. The destruction of Iran as a unified civilisation-state would remove one of the last remaining structural obstacles to that objective. In its place would emerge a mosaic of weakened entities, each dependent, each penetrable, and none capable of projecting power at scale.

 

The concept of ‘Greater Israel’, often dismissed as childish dream, acquires a different analytical status under such conditions. It need not be realised through formal annexation or explicit territorial expansion. It can emerge as a geopolitical condition, a regional environment in which the absence of strong, unified states produces a structural asymmetry that secures Israeli dominance without the need for continuous direct confrontation. Fragmentation becomes the mechanism through which primacy is achieved.

 

The end state of Scenario Two is therefore not a transitional crisis but a durable condition. Iran would not simply experience instability. It would be reconstituted as a space of permanent low-intensity conflict, characterised by competing authorities, external intervention, resource predation, and the absence of sovereign coherence.  This is not rhetorical exaggeration but analytical description: a territory in which the state persists in name while authority is dispersed, contested, and continuously renegotiated through force.

 

This outcome must be stated without equivocation. Among the two scenarios outlined in this analysis, it is this second trajectory that carries the greater structural weight. It requires fewer assumptions, aligns more closely with established patterns of intervention, and corresponds more directly to the operational logic of modern warfare as practised by the United States and its allies over the past two decades. Scenario One remains possible, and under specific conditions even plausible. This scenario, however, represents the path of least resistance once war begins and escalation escapes the control of its architects.

 

In that sense, the real danger does not lie in choosing between two alternative futures. It lies in the failure to recognise that the first may collapse into the second with alarming speed. Once the machinery of state destruction is set in motion, it rarely stops at the threshold imagined by those who initiate it. Iran would not be the first state to discover this.

 

It may, however, prove the most consequential, and the burden of responsibility will not rest solely with external powers, but with those within who have operated as a ‘false opposition’, the ‘constructed traitors’ long identified in my earlier analyses (Suren-Pahlav, 2011; 2016; 2025d), and with a political condition that, over four decades, has too often reproduced its own subjugation through complicity (Suren-Pahlav, 2014), fragmentation, and the refusal to confront its internal failures.

 

 

5. Conclusion

The argument advanced in this paper does not offer two scenarios as parallel possibilities to be weighed in abstraction, but as structurally entangled trajectories emerging from the same strategic logic, a logic already demonstrated through the analysis of operational targeting, regional precedents, and the doctrinal continuities that have governed intervention across the Middle East over the past two decades. Scenario One, in which a war against Iran accelerates the erosion of American hegemony and consolidates a Perso–Sino axis, follows directly from the earlier discussion of systemic transition within the international order, where declining imperial capacity encounters resilient state formations capable of converting external pressure into geopolitical leverage. It is a reading of war as rupture, as an event that escapes the intentions of its initiators and redistributes power in ways that cannot be easily contained.

 

Yet this reading, while analytically grounded, remains contingent upon a set of conditions that the paper has already shown to be fragile at best and illusory at worst. The examination of target selection, particularly the prioritisation of air and naval neutralisation followed by the systematic destruction of energy infrastructure, transport networks, and industrial capacity, has already revealed that the operational grammar of such a war does not align with limited coercion or calibrated regime change. It aligns with systemic dismantlement. When this is placed alongside the historical trajectories of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, not as discrete cases but as iterations of a reproducible model of state destruction, the limits of Scenario One become unmistakable. It presupposes restraint in a context defined by escalation, and coherence in a process structured around disintegration.

 

Scenario Two therefore emerges not as an alternative introduced for analytical symmetry, but as the continuation of the same process once its internal logic is allowed to unfold. The earlier sections have already mapped this trajectory: the destruction of centralised military capacity, the degradation of infrastructural systems, the erosion of sovereign authority, and the subsequent proliferation of armed non-state actors operating within a fractured territorial space. What is at stake in the Iranian case, as your own referenced work on Israeli strategic doctrine has argued, is not merely the neutralisation of a regime but the reconfiguration of a regional order through fragmentation. The longstanding strategic preference, articulated in various forms within Israeli policy discourse and examined in your cited analyses, for the decomposition of large, coherent states into smaller, internally divided entities, must be read here not as speculative theory but as an organising principle that finds material expression under conditions of war.

 

It is precisely at this intersection, between operational doctrine and geopolitical intent, that the asymmetry between the two scenarios becomes decisive. Scenario One depends upon the preservation of Iran as a functioning state capable of strategic alignment. Scenario Two follows from the destruction of that very functionality. The former requires discipline, containment, and a level of strategic restraint that recent interventions have consistently failed to demonstrate. The latter requires only escalation, the extension of methods already normalised and repeatedly enacted. In this sense, Scenario One remains conditional, while Scenario Two approaches inevitability once the threshold of infrastructural warfare is crossed.

 

The ideological implications of this are as significant as the strategic ones. The discourse of ‘liberation’, invoked by Western policymakers and uncritically reproduced by segments of the Iranian diaspora, functions here not as an analytical category but as a justificatory fiction, one that obscures the material consequences of intervention behind a moral vocabulary that has long since lost its empirical grounding. As the cases of Iraq, Libya, and Syria have already demonstrated, the language of emancipation does not prevent fragmentation. It legitimises the conditions under which fragmentation occurs. To continue invoking it in the Iranian context is not merely naïve. It is complicit in the reproduction of a model whose outcomes are already known.

 

This is where the analytical must give way to the political. The refusal to confront the structural logic of Scenario Two, particularly among those who position themselves as advocates of democracy and national renewal, reflects not a commitment to Iran’s future but an evasion of responsibility towards its present. The state cannot be democratised once it has been dismantled. Sovereignty cannot be reclaimed once it has been dissolved into competing zones of influence. The belief that external intervention can produce internal emancipation, in the absence of historical evidence and in the face of repeated contradiction, ceases to be an argument. It becomes an article of faith.

 

To restate the central claim without equivocation: while Scenario One remains within the realm of possibility, it is Scenario Two that aligns most closely with both the operational doctrines outlined in this paper and the empirical record of their application. The war that might, under conditions of restraint, reposition Iran within an emergent geopolitical order is the same war that, under conditions far more likely to obtain, would dissolve the very foundations upon which such repositioning depends. The two scenarios are not alternatives in equilibrium. They are sequential possibilities within a single process, and it is the second that stands as the more probable destination once that process is set in motion.

 

The implications extend beyond regime survival and beyond the immediate calculus of regional power. They touch upon the question of Iran as a civilisation-state. As argued earlier, Iran’s continuity over more than seven millennia has been sustained not by the absence of crisis, but by the persistence of territorial and political coherence across those crises. Scenario Two introduces the possibility that this coherence could be broken not through conquest or ideological transformation, but through systemic disintegration, a form of collapse that does not replace the state but erases it as a meaningful political subject.

 

The conclusion, therefore, is not a warning but an orientation. When the fog clears, the decisive question will not be whether global power has shifted, but whether Iran remains intact as a sovereign entity capable of participating in that shift. All else, including the rhetoric of liberation, the promises of regime change, and the fantasies of externally engineered democracy, is secondary to this foundational concern.

 

What follows from both scenarios, however, is a structural outcome that transcends the immediate regional theatre. In either trajectory, whether through the conditional realignment outlined in Scenario One or the systemic fragmentation described in Scenario Two, the principal strategic beneficiaries would not be the initiating actors, but China and, in a more contingent yet no less significant manner, Russia. In the first instance, a protracted conflict that fails to eliminate Iran would accelerate the erosion of American strategic credibility, while consolidating China’s position as the central pole within an emerging alternative order, particularly through its capacity to absorb energy shocks, reconfigure trade routes, and expand its geopolitical influence across Eurasia. In the second, more destructive scenario, the closure or sustained disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, whether as a deliberate act of Iranian retaliation or as a by-product of systemic collapse, would generate a global energy crisis of immediate and profound magnitude. Under such conditions, the international economies, already structurally dependent on Middle Eastern energy supplies, would be compelled to recalibrate towards alternative providers, thereby increasing their reliance on Russian hydrocarbons despite the political contradictions such dependence entails. The paradox is therefore acute. A war initiated in the name of restoring United States strategic dominance would, in both its conditional and most probable forms, accelerate the redistribution of global power away from the United States and towards its principal competitors.

 

There remains, in my assessment, a narrow probability that Netanyahu would fail with Trump as he failed with previous US presidents to draw the United States into a full-fledged war with Iran, and that such a war will not occur. There is perhaps a 50.01 per cent chance that sober strategic judgement within the American political system could assert itself, even within the erratic cognitive field that has defined Trump’s decision-making. The decisive question, however, remains unresolved: which force will ultimately prevail, institutional restraint or the shadow of the Epstein files? Either the United States and Iran will be dragged together into strategic catastrophe, undone in a manner reminiscent of the Spanish Armada, or Trump alone will fall, leaving both states to endure, however precariously, for another day.

 

​

 

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To cite this article:

Suren-Pahlav, S. (2026) ‘The ‘Beautiful Armada’: Perso-Sino Trap and the End of U.S. Hegemony, or the Somalisation of Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (28 January). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/beautiful-armada-and-the-perso-sino-trap-the-strategic-unravelling-of-american-hegemony.html [Accessed: ].