No Exit: The Global Stakes of the Iran-Israel War

The war consuming the Middle East is, at its core, a zero-sum contest between two incompatible survival imperatives. Israel’s long-term security, as defined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, requires not merely the degradation of Iran’s proxies but the dismemberment of the Iranian state itself — a fragmentation into six or seven ethnic ministates. Tehran, for its part, frames its own existence as inseparable from the resistance axis it has built across the Levant and Mesopotamia. As the late strategist Edward Luttwak observed, in the Middle East, peace processes tend to freeze conflicts rather than resolve them. Ceasefires here are not endings; they are pauses for rearmament. The structural logic is unforgiving. A pro-Western government in Tehran would sever China’s Belt […]