THE ISRAELI-AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAN AND THE KEYS TO PEACE AND WAR

THE ISRAELI-AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAN AND THE KEYS TO PEACE AND WAR

Irnerio Seminatore

An asymmetric confrontation

The war that began on 28 February 2026 against Iran takes place in a context of crises and diplomatic negotiations which, since the agreements of 29 September 2025 in Washington, has led to the elaboration of a peace plan for Gaza and which drew its origin, in conception and action, from a secret meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu on 11 February last, in the crisis room of the White House, the White House Situation Room, where the crucial decisions for the security of the United States are taken. The New York Times revealed this origin and thus unveiled the behind-the-scenes of the United States’ entry into war in the Middle East.

In its conception, typology and implementation, this conflict can be read as an asymmetric confrontation between two conventional and nuclear powers (the United States and Israel) and a conventional and theocratic state (Iran).

The declared objective was initially to neutralize the nuclear threat, to destroy the ballistic missile network and to dismantle the influence of the pro-Iranian “axis of resistance” from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

For the State of Israel the purpose of the conflict is existential and the risks of regional conflagration were anticipated and justified by the doctrine of “offensive realism.” However, the objectives of decapitating the regime, evoked at the beginning of the conflict, have given way to a regional crisis of major strategic implications, in view of the economic, financial or security repercussions that were going to affect the various actors of the international system. Yet, by its context, its scope and its impact, this war illustrates the tensions and the precariousness of a world order in which Iran seeks to rely on Russia and China in order to rebalance the relations of forces within a multipolarity whose space and function—as a systemic alternative and strategic rebalancing—the conflict is redrawing.

On unequal resilience

The unpredictable resilience of Iran has had as its foundation a strategic node of systemic importance, resting on several factors:

• a compensation for its technological inferiority by a decentralized approach, using regional militias (“the axis of resistance”) and tactics of attrition;
• a remarkable capacity to accept losses and to maintain internal social cohesion;
• the structural resistance of a state with a religious foundation, which significantly influences the outcomes of the war.

Thus, the failure of the conception of power of a technological character, based on air and naval superiority, the targeting of leaders and the destruction of military infrastructures, has shown the deficiency of the concept of war adopted to define the notion of “military victory” and to translate it into “political victory,” without a terrestrial occupation of the country.

The limits of power

At the systemic level, the widening of the conflict has highlighted the “limits” of power in its function of military protection and guarantor of political stability and has re-evaluated the importance of the “moral values,” internal to the belligerent countries, for enduring in the conflict.

At the world level, the conflict has accentuated the vulnerability of energy supplies and their direct shocks on the economy, compounded by the volatility of the financial markets, which influence the sustainability of Russia’s war effort and the dynamics of Chinese production and exports.

Africa and Eurasia. Global escalation or systemic transition?

An inevitable questioning leads us to take into consideration, faced with these regional mutations, the interrogation of a general order, consisting in knowing whether this conflict is not leading us toward a global escalation and an order of uncontrollable risks or whether it is only a matter of an adjustment of the system. A questioning, however, that more closely resembles a doubt.

Returning to the Washington agreements of 29 September 2025, which concern Africa, these agreements have shifted the lines of the diplomatic impasses existing for thirty years between the DRC and Rwanda, rooted in the mid-1990s following the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the Congo wars, and have led to the replacement of Europe and, in particular, of France by China, Russia and the United States for the control of resources.

They were “an important step toward de-escalation, peace and stability in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the Great Lakes region,” commented the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Guterres, whose role was as always marginal.

The NATO Summit in Ankara and the hierarchization of political roles

As for the NATO Summit in Ankara, which completes the survey of our diplomatic current events, its displayed significance consisted in:

• confirming the transatlantic link between the Europeans and America (credible deterrence and recourse to Article 5 in the event of a major crisis),
• persuading Europe to take charge of its own militarization (the 5 % clause),
• subordinating Europe to Germany and both to the United States.

In specifying and commenting on the measures on the Summit’s agenda, particular attention concerned the growing role of Turkey, in a position of interface between Russia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

In this regard, the countries of the Summit consented that Ankara continue to ensure control of access to the Black Sea and to play a key role as an intercontinental hinge of conventional power. The United States thus remain the nuclear and technological anchor of the Alliance, which is in the process of transformation in its structure and in its command. For Germany, this means playing a leadership role within NATO as well as in the EU. In the formulation of a new Eurasian geopolitics, Ukraine must continue to play its role as disruptor, in order to exhaust Russia, and from the strategic point of view the lowering of the threshold of deterrence between nuclear and conventional reduces the political margins of manoeuvre of Germany, integrated into the structures of the Alliance. Thus, with a Federal Republic recentered and burdened with new charges and new risks, Ukraine in the forward position, Paris and London in retreat, losing weight and rank, Washington can devote itself to its true mission: the search for a strategic condominium with China or the acceptance of the “Thucydides Trap,” which will mark a historical and perhaps fatal turning-point for the West.

Russia and China, postures of “restraint” and “waiting.” A third front of conflict in the Far East or the key to peace and war

From the multipolar point of view, Russia and China, advantaged by the conflict and important supporters of Iran, have adopted a posture of restraint and waiting, in order to avoid a direct confrontation with the West, which would modify the dynamics of the “unstable blocs” and give them the keys to the game in Eurasia.

With the Ankara Summit, whose aim was to clarify the transatlantic relationship, this clarification has resulted in an order in which Germany pays and directs, Ukraine fights and interposes itself, and the United States exercise the dominant and directing function.

This area, formerly decisive, is influenced by the risk of the opening of a third front of conflict in the Far East where the United States play at containment all around the Heartland and where are situated the keys, to be bargained, of a possible negotiation between Russia and the states of the West. The price to be paid is the decoupling of Western Europe from the United States and not the highly improbable one of Russia and China.

The USA and their planetary game

In this way, in a remodelled international context, the United States, at the apogee of their hegemonic power and in a central position, refusing a more balanced distribution of power and therefore a multipolar world, will control in a direct or indirect manner the Rimland, beyond the Northern Hemisphere and, by means of informal relations, the two Americas and the two poles, Arctic and Antarctic, the Atlantic façade, Africa, the Near and Middle East, the North and South Pacific, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, the maritime circuits, international finance, energy, mineral resources and the economies of the developed and developing countries. The Global South, which wants to escape this embrace, has only one project, that of emancipating itself, and can for the time being only aspire to its subordinate emergence within a multipolar world. The latter and the actors who form part of it now refuse vassalization to the United States, which is a source of reiterated conflicts and crises.

The reading of the present international system excludes the prospect of a stable order and prefigures instead a future of progressive fracturing of the community of nations and an extended disorder, difficult to check.

The disinterested observer will have no difficulty in noting that the strategy of a regional actor tends to reduce the space of conflictuality and that a great strategy with a hegemonic aim proceeds by stages and spreads the excess of its ambitions over long periods of time, the better to manage conflicts or to create others, the better to reign and the better to justify its interests and its power.

The risks to stability

What of the internal relations of stability for the dominant powers, all subjected, to varying degrees, to problems of equilibrium and of change of governance? What of the tensions and latent crises, confronted with the simultaneous risks of rupture of the internal consensus and of impairment of international stability?

The domino effect, the “war-politics totality” and the unity of total combat

The “domino effect,” which is taking shape in the Middle East, increasingly defines a strategy, because it corresponds on the one hand to the widening of the conflict and on the other to an anticipation of the responses, in themselves singular, but planned in advance on the regional scale. If one refers to the implicit purpose of the foreign policy of a belligerent country and therefore to the “war-politics totality,” as a whole with two structures of wills, this totality requires a unity of combat and therefore the unity of a single will (“The boss is me!” D. Trump). The concept of total combat decomposes into a number of partial combats which, according to Clausewitz, involve a double hierarchy of ends: one, of international order, inherent in the general strategy (Zweck) issuing from “great politics,” and the other, of national order (Ziel), inherent in the number of actors involved (the pawns). This totality requires a unity, because “only he who is directed by ‘one’ will belongs to ‘one’ combat” (R. Aron). In order that the combat against the enemy may permit the attainment of the higher level, that of political victory, the pawns, subjected to the hierarchy of ends, must fall and cease their support or their participation in the combat. The pawns targeted, on the regional scale, are therefore the American bases in the Gulf countries, in Saudi Arabia and in Iraq, the Shiite militias in Lebanon, in Iraq and in Yemen, and military objectives in Israel itself. On the world scale, the actors of total combat are the various public opinions, the electoral bases of Trump, Netanyahu and others, the return of the Islamic State and the great migratory waves, tomorrow the opening by the Middle Kingdom of a third combat front in Taiwan and in the Far East. The factors of this dispute will be economic sanctions in Eurasia, the retreats of the West in Africa and in Central Asia, and the rapprochement of the two theatres of crisis, Ukrainian and Middle-Eastern. Added to this is the American national security document published on 4 December 2025 (National Security Strategy), on the confidence between historical allies, on the identity drifts of the two continents and their civilizational crises. Constituting objective targets at the regional level are the “data centers” of the Gulf countries, then, in the event of a prolonged blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, the West in general and Europe in particular. This primacy of hegemonic politics of a planetary type, which has escaped the EU, has not left the American and Israeli decision-makers indifferent and is playing its ultimate and decisive cards in an unpredictable enterprise.

After the American-Israeli strikes and the Iranian response, three outcomes take shape: limited conflict, regional conflagration or escalation/de-escalation under world pressure. Beyond these three hypotheses there remains only the systemic option of the turning-point of history, the duel of the century, United States–China.

Stability, the balance of power and the realist school

The Realists and neo-realists tend to interest themselves exclusively in the relations between the Great Powers and in the polarity of the system, in such a way that the stability of a system is defined by the relations of equilibrium between multipolar powers. Now the theory of hegemonic stability implies that, when a Great Power becomes Hegemonic or powerful enough to be able to hold in a single hand the same forces as those of all the other powers combined, the system becomes or becomes again stable. This seems to suit President Trump, insensitive to the criticisms that see in it the signs of a hubris condemning Hegemon to its decline.

By impotence or by jealousy, these criticisms emphasize now the “overextension of imperial power,” as an inexorable sign of the decline of Hegemon, now the “complex interdependence” which erodes the links of traditional allegiance and brings to the fore the doctrine of interdependence, in this case asymmetric.

Whatever the theoretical option retained, the balance of power seems to be the only means of international regulation capable of ensuring an order and a stability in a world that is always anarchic. Thus the foreign policy of Trump, the Great Satan the destabilizer, will have to undergo still more crises and impairments of stability, beyond the multiple disappointments, difficulties and criticisms, internal and international.

The return to politics

If a Head of State, who is at the same time the Head of War, must ensure the supreme law of war, which is decision by arms or again the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces, how can he ensure the supremacy of politics over war and guarantee that he has attained his political objectives? How can he return to a politics of peace or of the silence of arms, if peace does not represent the accomplishment of the military objective and of the declared political purpose? If, because of the excess of his ambitions or of his exclusive confidence in force, this Head of State, as well as the State that he represents, can perish from their success and raise against them the majority of the members of the Community of States and that of planetary society.

If this Head of State, as political Chief and War Chief, must by his function embrace the whole of the political as well as military circumstances in becoming, he cannot ignore that exclusive confidence in the force of arms or in diplomatic efforts alone is destined for final defeat, because the community of States, as a whole or as a system, is constituted by an entanglement of interests, of values and of rationalities, as well as of actors small or great, who judge of their own conservation and represent interests common to all, universal interests, which render history intelligible. In this capacity they impose a “limit” just as much upon the power of arms as upon blind faith before the fetishes of peace. Thus, in an interpretation conformable to the spirit of our time, it is therefore by the return to a relative equilibrium and therefore to objective or global politics, or again to great politics, that this Head of State can recover the modalities of a planetary security. Subjective politics or that of a major actor knows perfectly well that violence possesses its own legislation and that politics cannot reign despotically over it without having renounced the other means of ordinary governance—declarations, notes, talks, diplomatic detours—which permit a return to the ordinary characteristics of civil exchange, made of demands or of goods inherent in the customary commerce of peoples.

Politics, an art of the unforeseen

In view of peace and of war is there a model, an ideal archetype or a privileged political regime for attaining the ends of a deliberate politics, but one never acquired once and for all? Neither Plato’s Philosopher-King, nor Machiavelli’s Prince-Master, half-lion and half-fox, nor Aristotle’s political animal governing free men, nor again Bossuet by Christian morality or Thomas Hobbes by Reason of State, and least of all the democratic regime, have painted the image of the undisputed Chief equal to the unforeseen events of history. The art of great principles or that of the most shameless opportunism can be the bed of distant personalities, animated by the Roman pietas of Cicero and his sense of duty, or by indifference to crime, like the accomplished revolutionaries or the religious fanatics of all times. The moral of our history cannot be measured by a catechesis or by an idea of the good or of the just, but by the success of every human enterprise according to the pitiless law of probability.

Brussels, 27 July 2026

Latest work by Irnerio Seminatore:

“Peace and War in Great Politics. Planetary Society, the Destiny of the West and the End of European Civilization.” Éditions Godefroy De Bouillon, published 26 February 2026.