Six months. That’s how long I’ve been off Waypoints. It’s also how long this silly and self-defeating war has gone on. Engineered by a handful of spectacularly incompetent leaders, with at least one of them making for a perfect James Bond villain, the conflict against Iran has been a masterclass in historical folly — haphazard, hubristic, brainless, and featuring a questionably giddy media gulping the Kool-Aid of military might.
Watching this fiasco unfold has awakened many thoughts, but on a more measured note, it highlights what Robert Kaplan called ‘present-ness’ — this affliction where “we lose all memory of the past and remain oblivious to the future.”
Now nearly six months into this mess, a few realities have become clearer to me.
1. Power is not control.
Trump is learning in real time that there’s a massive difference between power and leverage.
For decades, ideological war hawks in DC and Tel Aviv argued that military action against Iran would be good for the Middle East. Mr. Bond Villain himself, Benjamin Netanyahu, has peddled this fantasy for nearly 30 years. And yet, here we are — witnessing the superior firepower of the US and Israel create ever more chaos as Iran flexes a leverage that neither one can bomb out of existence.
Think about it. Destroying infrastructure, assassinating leaders, and degrading military capabilities has been easy for the two most powerful militaries in the world. But producing a favorable political outcome has been hard. The destruction they’ve wrought has bred entirely new catastrophes and instability. From an Israeli perspective, that could very well be the point. It’s easy to argue that historically, Israel, the strongest economy and military in the region, has long been more interested in war than in peace.
But chaos and instability in the Middle East are not US interests — just ask those tracking passage through the Hormuz Strait and Iran’s “lateral escalation” across the wider Gulf region.
That is the inherent stupidity of the “might-makes-right” worldview, propagated so vociferously by Trump, Netanyahu, and their minions. This pseudo-doctrine mistakes the ability to compel for the ability to control. But as we’ve seen so clearly, military dominance is not strategic dominance.
2. Wars spill over.
Those who thought this stunt could somehow be neatly contained — geographically, economically, or politically — were either lying, dangerously detached from reality, or just deliberately dangerous. You cannot set (another) fire to the center of the world’s most volatile region and expect the smoke to stay local.
The Turkey-Saudi Arabia-Pakistan defense pact is only one recent example. Another is Ukraine’s reckless gambit on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea. And of course, the wider fallout across Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria—fault lines that don’t exist in isolation. The downstream costs were always going to be innumerable.
As for the repercussions beyond regional instability and security assumptions — nearly every major economy has taken a hit in some form. Oil and natural gas have forced new questions on household budgets and industrial production. Fertilizer has raised questions about today’s food prices and tomorrow’s crop harvests. Shipping disruptions are becoming supply-chain problems.
This is why I’ve found the war so difficult to treat as just another Middle East conflict. Like an airborne pathogen, this ultimate ‘forever war’ respects neither borders nor our wallets. And that’s before we count the costs of profligate US government and military spending, the casual normalization of targeted assassinations, and the weakening breath of international law. The consequences will easily outlast the ammunition, while Russia and China smile from the sidelines.
3. The news informs us, but it rarely educates us.
The news and information surrounding this war has made it nearly impossible to look away while simultaneously making genuine understanding weirdly difficult.
I see this constantly in conversations with people in my own life, from a couple of ardent Trump supporters to some liberal-minded Israelis. Many seem unwilling or possibly incapable of recognizing the grand implications of this war of choice.
The headlines—as shown by major TV news networks and many legacy newspapers—fail to contextualize and educate. Developments are presented as decisive, but the military strikes, Truth Social posts, market movements and reassurances, assassinations, and threats to blockade or bomb ‘like never before’ all fail to provide the historical context needed to understand what’s really altering the trajectory of our future.
Recognizing the difference between being bombarded with info, opinions, and spin, and actually possessing an arc of understanding is why I look to specific guides.
A few minds have consistently helped me see past the cacophony.
Throughout all of this, there have been a few people whose insights and historical analysis have repeatedly helped me look past the media theater.
Trita Parsi: Quite possibly the sharpest mind on this foreign policy blunder. He cuts through the rhetoric to explain the actual political incentives and strategic calculus driving Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran. You can find him at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and on his Substack.
John Mearsheimer: The ultimate realist. He’s an intellectual giant and has been invaluable for mapping out geopolitics, exposing the gap between what politicians think military force will achieve and the real chaos it actually produces. He’s also on Substack and at Mearsheimer.com.
Vali Nasr: Arguably the most insightful scholar on the Islamic Republic of Iran, he has deep historical knowledge of the country’s relationship to the region and the decades of friction that duped the “foreign policy blob” into this quagmire. Nobody understands the country’s internal mechanics better. Follow him on Twitter.
The war on Iran is a paradigm-shifting event. We won’t fully appreciate it until years from now, and how it’s reshaping our world. But staying informed is important. And having a true reading means finding the voices who can actually help us trace the ramifications and trends of the world being built above the pointless rubble.
— Fela Kuti, “Shuffering & Shmiling, Pt. 1&2”
51.5447° N, 0.0575° W