“You are gambling with World War 3, you are gambling with World War 3.”
These were the words of US President Donald Trump on February 28, 2025, during a highly contentious bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy inside the Oval Office at the White House. It was a moment that really brought to light what a lot of people had been feeling for months: the way we expect countries to interact with one another, even if it’s not perfect, just isn’t working like it used to.
The ten days surrounding that exchange have felt something between a cold fever dream and a slow-building “World War” atmosphere. US First Lady Melania Trump presided over a United Nations Security Council meeting on children and education in conflict zones in New York (just a few days after we saw the news headlining the U.S. hitting a school near the IRGC camp). Republican front-office figures laid hands on Donald Trump in prayer, visibly rallying around his office. Meanwhile, Israeli Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi allegedly said the scenario of a missile strike on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, out loud being blamed on Iran, a suggestion so inflammatory it almost defies commentary.
This conflict, like all conflicts that matter, is resistant to clean narratives. Any commentary that sounds sarcastic probably captures the situation more accurately than anything earnest, unfortunately. Unironically, it really is a more complex situation than it seems.
The Iranians perceive this as a religious war, and they have responded accordingly, announcing what amounts to a posture of total resistance (the same could be stated for the US as well, but it’s a bit different). Command and control within Iran is decentralised: every region operates under its own orders and its own strategy. Removing the leadership in Tehran, in this framework, changes very little. As the saying goes, cut off the head, and the body keeps moving – status-quo is always protected.
This reality presents a fundamental problem for American military doctrine, the architecture by which the United States designs and deploys its forces. Despite its formidable conventional capabilities, the US military is not well-equipped for 21st-century warfare defined by drones, decentralised resistance, and religious fervour. And yet, doctrinal inertia pulls Washington toward targeting Tehran regardless.
The great irony is, that those Iranians most likely to welcome change, educated, progressive, urban, are concentrated in the very cities being bombed. Those most likely to fight to the last breath, Shia militants, rural and deeply devout, are precisely those being left alone. The military logic, in other words, is destroying its own potential constituency and radicalising its most dangerous opponents.
The Republican Administration did not calculate one more thing. The U.S. believed that a war lasting only a few days would weaken Iran, leading its people to turn against their government. However, they underestimated the consequences of killing religious leaders during Ramadan, which ultimately united the Iranian population rather than dividing them. Now that his son has come to power, there is no significant influx of people into the country, a scenario the U.S. could not have anticipated. At the same time, Iran is utilizing its atomic capabilities to target and undermine the costly infrastructure of the U.S.
For related insights, you may also read our latest analysis on three possible scenarios for the conflict in Iran: Iran-US-Israel war: possible scenarios
Uncertain gains
The situation following the second US strike against Iran on 28 February, part of what analysts are now calling the twelve-day conflict of June 2025, has made one thing clear: the strategic calculations made in Washington were far from precise. The confident rhetoric that accompanied early strikes masked assumptions that events quickly complicated.
President Trump had asserted that American strikes on Iran’s strategic infrastructure had delivered a decisive advantage. During the first days of hostilities, reports emerged of the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. By the eighth day, the bombing of a major refinery in central Tehran was presented as evidence of decisive leverage over Iran’s internal stability. Yet ten days in, Iran’s political system had not collapsed. Mojtaba Khamenei, the Supreme Leader’s fifty-six-year-old son, assumed the position and moved quickly to consolidate control over the country’s theocratic structure. The system held.
Public reaction on social media reflected widespread scepticism. For many observers, the war was not a carefully designed strategy so much as a sudden, improvised confrontation, driven less by a coherent Trump doctrine than by America’s determination to defend Israel. This perception, however reductive, has shaped how the conflict is understood globally.
On 10 March, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner arrived in Israel, their presence widely read as signalling the beginning of a new diplomatic phase. Both figures have form in this regard: they attracted attention during earlier international crises, including visits to Moscow during periods of tension surrounding the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Kushner, in particular, remains the principal architect of the Abraham Accords, the 2020 agreements that facilitated a notable warming of ties between Israel and several Gulf states, altering the diplomatic landscape of the region. Current discussions appear to be closely connected to that framework. Early indications suggest the central focus is a coordinated regional security network involving Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, an arrangement designed to strengthen collective defence while reducing the risk of further uncontrolled escalation.
What is the logic you may ask yourself?
Israel confronting Iran alone carries significant strategic risks. For the United States, maintaining a direct military presence in the region is both financially burdensome and politically difficult to sustain. For Israel, confronting Iran’s extensive proxy network without Arab partners is increasingly untenable. The war, in this sense, may be accelerating what diplomacy alone could not.
If these efforts fail, if weakening Tehran proves impossible, Washington and Jerusalem may simply revert to the familiar playbook: tightened economic sanctions, continued skirmishing with Iranian-backed proxies, and the long, uneasy equilibrium that has defined Middle Eastern geopolitics for decades. This situation could lead to all-out war or peace in the Middle East, perhaps even both simultaneously. It may also result in a world where the US President, now emboldened, acts without congressional authorization. Congress is intended to be the most powerful branch of government; the whole point was that decisions should be made by an elected group rather than a single individual.
Upholding reputation: Trump’s idea of a non-negotiable principle
Trump has labelled the Iranian regime as terrorists, and his willingness to act unilaterally, with contempt for multilateral frameworks, raises a question about the body theoretically tasked with preventing such escalations. Where is the UN? The honest answer may be that it has become, in practice, a dead organisation. As he has been saying ever since his second term in the Oval Office. Trump didn’t break the world order. He just stopped pretending it existed. Then he “upped the competitiveness by creating an altenative called Board of Peace.
The creation of the United Nations was never a tidy affair. The period leading to that common framework, from the late nineteenth century through to the end of World War II, was marked by mass death, regime change, and the violent emergence of new systems. History, it is often said, repeats itself; only the conditions, resources, and methods change.
And yet dismantling the current system is not as straightforward as some suggest. Despite periodic calls to dissolve the UN, shared interests have consistently outweighed such ambitions. The architecture, however imperfect, persists, because no one has yet built something better, and because those with the most to gain from its collapse tend to have the most to lose from the chaos that would follow.
The method, unilateral, secretive, dismissive of international mechanisms, undermines the very order it claims to protect. Now it acts more like “United Nonsense” rather than its renowned name. Maybe, optimistically, it could try ‘renovating’ itself within to challenge the US’s Board of Peace, and we see a big, standing support…
But now, selective enforcement of power fronts as principled action. The language of a “new reality” obscures that what we are watching is not coherent order-building, but drift. Regime change without regime change. Legitimacy claimed without institutions. Stability is pursued through shock.
Power has always been like this…unfortunately
Perhaps we should stop pretending. There is no international law, not in any meaningful, enforceable sense. There is no rule-based order. There is no territorial integrity. What exists is power, resources, and the calculations that connect them.
Empires do not disappear. They rebrand themselves. They speak the language of diplomacy, democracy, security, and stability, but they move for the same reasons they always have. Oil, gas, minerals, trade routes, and influence. International law, in theory, exists for sovereign states: equal, independent, inviolable. In practice, it applies when powerful states choose to recognise it. When it suits them, it is law. When it does not, it is ignored.
Borders are crossed. Governments are removed. Legality is invoked after the fact. This is not a failure of the system. This is the system. And the current era, with its risk-taking leaders, its algorithmically curated public opinion that loves or hates without nuance, and its technology capable of amplifying every miscalculation, may be the most dangerous context in which that system has ever operated.
Unlike the diplomatic configurations of earlier centuries, today’s international environment is defined by unprecedented interdependence. A miscalculation that once might have produced a regional war can now produce global consequences. The leaders who understand this least seem, at present, to be the ones most in charge.
The renowned paper, “The Atlantic” writes, As U.S. and Israeli missiles struck Iran this weekend, just weeks after Donald Trump ordered a rapid military action in Venezuela, the president is already considering his next target: Cuba.
Viewing regime change as a way to define his legacy, the president has openly expressed what he envisions for Cuba. During a conversation with reporters at the White House on Friday, he floated the idea of a “friendly takeover” of the island nation, which has a population of 11 million people. The president believes he is the first modern American leader with the courage to accomplish what others have only considered: transformative changes around the world that could, in his view, solidify his legacy, placing him above previous presidents like Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon.
Many Americans appear to be increasingly accepting of illegal and unconstitutional actions, as long as these actions align with their political beliefs. But that is a thorny and slippery issue. When violations of the law become normalized, we also begin to normalize authoritarianism. When that occurs, and the next outcome does not align with their beliefs, who knows what will happen next?
Not a Just War, Just War.
The concept of a “just war” has always been a theological convenience, a framework designed to give moral cover to decisions already made on other grounds. What we are witnessing today does not fit even that elastic category. There is no coherent just cause being pursued through proportionate means by competent authority. There is improvisation, selective memory, and the ancient logic of the powerful deciding, after the fact, that what they did was necessary.
The question in the title of this piece, are we headed into a ‘just war’ era?, may have been the wrong question from the start. The more accurate one is simpler: are we headed into an era where power once again dispenses entirely with the pretence of justification? And if so, what does that mean for those without power? History has a very pessimistic answer to that question. It is not a comfortable one.