Iranians are the biggest losers in a war that exposed US power

​No one starts a war – or at least no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve in that war and how he intends to conduct it.” So insisted Carl von Clausewitz in his classic On War, written in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. I have no idea if Donald Trump has read Clausewitz (though I have my suspicions…). Nevertheless, the daily changing of US objectives in the Iran war suggests that even if he has, Trumpian caprice would leave little room for Clausewitz’s dictum.

Wars without clear objectives are not merely Trumpian phenomena. They are increasingly the way of contemporary conflict. The number of armed conflicts has soared over the past decade, with nearly half involving non-state actors – whether al-Qaida or South American drug cartels – and most of them civil wars or internal bloodshed. These conflicts are often intractable and the peace processes fragile. In Yemen, for instance, there have been some 28 peace agreements of various forms since 2016.

The decay of political order in many parts of the world has led to armed conflict replacing political struggle as the path to governance.

The Iran war is different. It is an attempt by the most powerful nation on the globe (allied with Israel, the regional power with greatest military prowess) to impose its will upon another nation and cut it down to size. What it reveals again is that even a dominant war machine cannot simply bludgeon its way to victory, not least as the old international order begins unravelling.

The widely debated question, “Who won the Iran war?”, seems to me ill-framed (not least because the war is not over). Nearly everyone –apart from China, Russia and global arms manufacturers – has lost to some degree. It might make more sense to ask, “Who lost the least?”

The answer to that question is probably the Iranian regime – its leadership may have been decapitated and the country battered, but it has not just survived, but survived with greater control, especially through its stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz. And who lost the most? The Iranian people, who have not only suffered the destruction of homes, workplaces, hospitals, universities, power plants, even a synagogue, but who still remain under the heel of theocratic rule, their struggle for freedom cynically exploited, then abandoned, by America and Israel.

Iranians had risen with great courage against the theocratic regime in mass demonstrations from 28 December. They were met with brutal violence, with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, slaughtered.

“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING... HELP IS ON ITS WAY”, Trump posted in January on Truth Social. No help came. Instead, almost two months later, America and Israel began their mass bombing campaign, heedless of its impact on the very people they had so recently lauded.

Cynicism towards ordinary Iranians was well expressed by Danny Citrinowicz of Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, a former head of the Iran branch of Israel Defense Intelligence. “If we can have a coup, great,” he told the Financial Times. “If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future… [or] the stability of Iran.”

As for America, Trump, eager to tear down the postwar liberal international order and create a new world rooted in American might, has discovered the bounds to his capacity to assert American hegemony. Not all countries are like Venezuela.

The rules and institutions of the postwar order were designed to entrench US power and maintain stability through the cold war. Today, Washington fears that those same rules and institutions are not sustaining American interests but undermining them. But in tearing up the old system, the weaknesses of American power have become more exposed. The half-demolished East Wing of the White House, the grand ballroom yet to be built, stands as a metaphor for the new order.

A key theme in the remaking of the world order is the assertion of national self-interest, the insistence that a nation’s policies, both internal and external, should be defined solely by that self-interest. This was always the case, of course, but it has been made more trenchant and explicit.

The assertion of national interest often reads as being meaningful only when applied to western nations, and especially to America. In this reading, America’s nationalinterest includes the invasion of Venezuela, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, and the installation of his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, as an American-friendly successor, and the demand that Greenland become American territory for security reasons.

Asserting American interests, in other words, requires the denial of other nations’ sovereignty. It is the expression of national interests through an imperial lens.

Similarly, American national interest demands the refusal to recognise the rights of Palestinians to nationhood. When it comes to Iran, it is not just that America (and Israel) deemed that their interests required them to wreak destruction upon the country, but also that their myopic view of national commitment has led them to gravely underestimate both the resolve of the theocratic regime to resist and the unwillingness of the Iranian people, even those hostile to the regime, to welcome a military onslaught by foreign states.

The outcome of the putative peace process remains uncertain. What is certain is that the interests of those who should be at the heart of this process – the ordinary people of Iran – will be absent from any discussion.

Photograph by ZUMA Press/Alamy