Every era reaches a moment when power must decide whether it will be governed by memory or seduced by its own mythology. Our moment is defined by a superpower that has repeatedly chosen repetition over reflection, force over foresight, and domination over wisdom. The escalating confrontation between the United States and Iran is not a discrete security episode nor a sudden crisis born of Iranian provocation, but the latest expression of a long standing doctrine that treats military pressure as statecraft and diplomacy as an afterthought attempted only after coercion has already corroded trust.
What is presented as firmness is in fact habit, and what is sold as leadership increasingly resembles impulse disciplined by nothing but power itself. This pattern has been rehearsed so often that its outcomes are no longer ambiguous. Vietnam entrenched instability rather than peace. Iraq dismantled state institutions and unleashed sectarian violence that still haunts the region. Libya collapsed into armed fragmentation after regime removal without political reconstruction. Afghanistan absorbed two decades of occupation only to end in exhaustion and withdrawal.
Each intervention was framed as necessary and exceptional, each promised order and moral urgency, and each delivered disorder while being retrospectively excused as a deviation rather than a predictable consequence. These were not mistakes of execution but failures of assumption rooted in the belief that superior force can substitute for legitimacy, history, and social consent.
Iran now stands where others once stood, cast as brittle and isolated, described as a regime on the brink, and framed as a problem to be solved through intensified pressure and normalised threats. Yet Iran’s internal crisis, far from validating external coercion, exposes precisely why such strategies fail. The country is under immense economic strain. Its currency has collapsed, inflation has surged, essential services have deteriorated, and living conditions have worsened under state mismanagement.
On 28 December 2025, these pressures erupted when shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar closed their stores in protest. What began as economic grievance rapidly expanded into nationwide demonstrations demanding not marginal reform but the end of the Islamic Republic itself and a transition to a system grounded in dignity and rights. The state responded with repression rather. Iranian authorities later acknowledged that 3,117 people were killed during the crackdown, a figure that reveals not restored stability but the consolidation of coercive power under siege.
This is the paradox Washington refuses to confront. Sustained external hostility does not liberate societies. It hardens security states, elevates militarised institutions, and reframes dissent as treason. Popular movements become trapped between internal repression and external escalation, their legitimacy claimed by foreign actors even as their agency is diminished.
It is within this space that exiled opposition figures are elevated as substitutes for complex internal realities. Reza Pahlavi, born in 1960, son of Iran’s last shah and long based in the United States, has once again been projected as a symbol of a post Islamic Republic future. His prominence reflects less a convergence of Iran’s fragmented opposition than a familiar American reflex, the search for recognisable and manageable figures through whom regime transition can be imagined and controlled.
History offers little reassurance. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, Washington has repeatedly elevated exiled elites with limited domestic legitimacy but strong international visibility, presenting them as democratic alternatives while bypassing social realities on the ground. This is not solidarity with protesters but regime engineering, a process that prioritises legibility to external power over consent at home.
Iranian protesters are not acting on behalf of foreign agendas, but their grievances risk being rhetorically appropriated into a script written elsewhere. Militarily, Iran is no match for the US Navy and Air Force, but war is not decided by parity alone. Iran’s survival strategy has long been asymmetrical, built around ballistic missiles, drones, and dispersed capabilities embedded in mountains and underground facilities.
US bases across the Gulf, particularly in Bahrain and Qatar, would be exposed, as would critical infrastructure in states perceived as complicit, including Israel and Jordan. At sea, the danger becomes global. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow corridor between Iran and Oman, carries roughly a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas and up to a quarter of its oil flows. Iran has mined these waters before and has demonstrated its ability to do so again.
Any disruption would reverberate through energy markets, inflation, food prices, and currencies, punishing societies far removed from the battlefield. This is why regional states that are hardly sympathetic to Tehran have urged restraint. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman have reportedly lobbied Washington against an attack, not out of affection for the Islamic Republic but out of recognition that war would not be contained.
Their anxiety exposes the fiction that American escalation reflects regional consensus. Those closest to the consequences understand that a conflict with Iran would be neither swift nor surgical. Beyond the region, the costs would be borne most heavily by those with the least voice. African economies, already strained by debt and climate stress, would absorb shocks through higher energy prices, currency pressure, and diverted global attention.
Conflicts in the Middle East do not remain local. They reorder markets and priorities worldwide, turning distant decisions into lived hardship. Hovering uneasily over this landscape is the United Nations, an institution created to restrain precisely this kind of behaviour yet repeatedly paralysed when power demands indulgence.
The Charter’s prohibition on force and commitment to peaceful resolution have been selectively applied. Illegal wars are met with procedural caution, devastating sanctions defended as policy tools, and neutrality in the face of repeated violations transformed into complicity.
Even the outcome most often implied by interventionists, the collapse of the Islamic Republic, offers little reassurance. Neighbouring states fear not renewal but chaos. Civil war, ethnic fragmentation involving Kurds and Baluchis, and a humanitarian crisis from a country of more than ninety million people loom as real possibilities.
Many in the region would welcome the end of the Islamic Republic, none more so than Israel, yet almost no one wants to witness the disintegration of Iran and the vacuum it would create. The greatest danger is not a carefully planned invasion but a slide into war driven by posture and pride, by the belief that amassed force must eventually be used or credibility will be lost.
This is how wars begin, not with clear end states but with face saving logic and the illusion that escalation can always be managed. I no longer accept the premise that American military aggression deserves the benefit of the doubt. The record is visible, the consequences measurable, and the human cost undeniable.
A war with Iran would deepen repression inside the country, destabilise an already volatile region, shock the global economy, and further discredit an international order struggling to retain legitimacy. It was foreseeable. It has always been foreseeable. The tragedy is not a lack of intelligence but a refusal of humility, not a shortage of rules but a failure to apply them equally.
Make no mistake: every state blessed with resources is a potential prey to this aggression, driven by an imperialistic imperative and an arrogant hegemonic ambition. The pursuit of oil, the craving for dominance, and the brutal logic of Gangsternomics will stop at nothing – until nations awaken to the predatory nature of this pursuit and reclaim their sovereignty. The world must not sleep as empire feeds on chaos, nor mistake brutality for strength.
By Osbert R. Biryomumaisho, Senior Global Affairs Analyst
