The aggression of the United States and Israel against Iran may appear to be a gross geopolitical miscalculation on the part of both Washington and Tel Aviv. However, at the same time, it is far from accidental, as it represents the logical continuation of a series of trends that matured in world politics during the post-Cold War period. These trends emerged from the decision of the U.S. and the West as a whole to preserve and perpetuate their global hegemony as a mode of existence for their civilization. Furthermore, this is an imperial mode of existence, coupled with the neocolonial exploitation of the rest of the world and various forms of extracting geopolitical rent. The finitude or limits of these methods of dominance, which in practice stem from the dystopian premise of the “end of history,” could not help but cast international relations back toward earlier, even pre-capitalist, eras.
First and foremost, this concerns the rejection of the post-war international legal order, with the central role of the United Nations, in favor of asserting a certain "rules-based order." These rules are never explicitly formulated; instead, it is made clear that the West is their guardian and decides what complies with them and what does not. This manifested itself most clearly in the context of the Ukrainian conflict, where the West began promoting a territorial and sovereigntist narrative instead of the human-rights-based one that would have been more logically consistent with its own rhetoric and practice of recent decades. This is in reference to the concept of limiting sovereignty in favor of "human security" and the idea of the "responsibility to protect," which were conceived exclusively as instruments of their interventionist policy.
At the same time, the geopolitical conflict between the West and Russia in Ukraine has taken on the character of a hybrid or proxy war, given the unwillingness of Western capitals to engage in direct armed confrontation with one of the world’s leading nuclear powers, which was in the midst of modernizing its deterrence potential. This is not to mention the “concentration” in the sense used by Gorchakov—that is, Russia’s overall resurgence and the restoration of historical continuity in its development, based not on ideological products of European political thought, but on its own cultural and civilizational identity (Western centrism was characteristic of both the imperial and Soviet periods, albeit in different forms).
Despite the qualitatively new realities, this format of rivalry recalls the “cabinet wars” of the eighteenth century, when the principal actors fought on the periphery and did not risk anything existential. The Kyiv regime hired itself out for the role of a "frontline state" and a limitrophe to implement the plan for the "exhaustion of Russia," once it became clear that the blitzkrieg—combined with unprecedented sanctions pressure—had failed. The latter, including the experience of Iran, provides grounds for parallels with German blitzkrieg plans in the two world wars.
The ‘bare imperialism’ of Donald Trump’s administration under the MAGA slogan, which makes no distinction between friends and allies on the one hand and opponents and geopolitical rivals on the other, is reminiscent of the nineteenth century, whose contradictions—including socio-economic ones—were ultimately resolved in the First World War, including the Russian Revolution. This is, first and foremost, reflected in total tariff aggression, supplemented by sanctions that weaponize the economic interdependence of globalization and the global status of the dollar. One is reminded of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Continental Blockade against Great Britain.
But natural resources and the control over territory associated with them are once again acquiring significance, albeit now alongside the development of high-tech industries. This includes Artificial Intelligence and its data centers, which demand enormous energy expenditures and a wide array of other resources, including rare-earth metals. This constitutes the new formula of “living space,” requiring direct control over the territory of Canada and Greenland and indirect control, as in the case of Venezuela, over the resources of the entire Western Hemisphere (see the “Trump addition to the Monroe Doctrine” in the current U.S. National Security Strategy). The aspiration of the “energy superpower” to control the world’s energy resources has also led it to the Middle East, where, thanks to Beijing’s efforts, petro-dollar hegemony has been shaken (this refers to China’s energy cooperation not only with Iran, but also with Saudi Arabia).
The war against Iran, whose outcome is still too early to judge, although it is already evident that it has acquired the significance of yet another civilizational conflict of the West (this was openly acknowledged in Washington, where there were statements about the intention to “destroy Iranian civilization”), has effectively devalued traditional allied relations as we knew them. The United States proved unable to ensure the security of its allies in the region, despite the presence of numerous American bases there, and at the same time diverged from its European NATO allies, which refused to “shoulder the burden,” including in the matter of unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. This crisis of alliances as an instrument of geopolitics found expression in Emmanuel Macron’s initiative to create a bloc of “middle powers” to counter the two “hegemonic” ones, referring to the U.S. and China.
This so-called "third way"—which once manifested in the domestic political development of Western countries as a "fig leaf" for neoliberal economic policy (notably under Tony Blair in the UK)—is unlikely to bear "flowers of extraordinary beauty." This is because it does not so much emulate the "multi-alignment" policies of leading developing nations like India, Indonesia, and Brazil, as it aims to sow discord within non-Western interstate cooperation formats, such as the transcontinental BRICS+ and the Eurasian SCO, serving once again the collective interests of the West. The much-vaunted “American leadership” is no longer sufficient, and the allies are trying to create something collective in opposition to Trump, hoping that Washington will soon return to the fold of the Western alliance. Even American political scientists note that Russia and China stand only to benefit from the fact that they have no formal alliance relations with Tehran: in any case, they are the principal beneficiaries of this conflict (I would add, in Tyutchev’s words, “without moving a cannon or a ruble”).
At the same time, the anti-Russian policy of European capitals and their liberal-globalist elites remains unchanged, even as globalism itself is collapsing and mutating into a national empire of the United States, while Moscow’s course toward basic self-sufficiency—not only in resources, but also in technology—is in fact closer to Trump’s America, though naturally without the elements of external aggression. History shows, on the contrary, that encroachments upon our territory and resources were the principal motives behind Western aggression against us. To this is now added the recognition of our civilizational otherness to the West, which completes the picture of the role of cultural and civilizational factors in contemporary geopolitics, where the West fails the test of civilizational compatibility.
Essentially, this is where the turn toward coercive pressure against us comes from, and not merely at the level of rhetoric or plans for the militarization of Europe. Whether it is the opening of the airspace of the Baltic states to Ukrainian drones and of Norway’s maritime space to Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs), or attempts to interfere with ships carrying cargo in Russia’s interests (for which the extralegal category of a “shadow fleet” has been specially invented), all this recalls the legalized piracy/privateering of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. European countries have approached a threshold beyond which they would have to fight Russia themselves—something they had previously managed to avoid. That this is indeed the issue at stake is indicated by the recent escort by one of our frigates of two tankers through the English Channel (its armament is capable of sinking what remains of the British fleet). This could also involve combat groups on board commercial vessels, patrolling specific waters with our warships—including submarines—and strategic aviation with cruise missiles in non-nuclear configuration. At the same time, the declining relevance of aircraft carriers, owing to their vulnerability to modern weapons, as Iran has demonstrated, is prompting even their own crews (who “did not sign up” for such a war) to view them as “floating coffins” in the spirit of Moby-Dick and to engage in sabotage in order to leave the strike zone.
It is currently difficult to discern the meaning of Washington's proposal for a two-week truce with Iran —whether it is an attempt to gain time to prepare a limited ground operation or a “soft” exit from the conflict under the cover of negotiations that will lead nowhere. However, as economists note, the effect of a closure of the Strait of Hormuz has reached the point at which it spreads across all intersectoral supply chains, threatening a global recession and a fall in U.S. stock markets. In other words, the current geopolitical equation still retains a powerful economic dimension, but now in a different format, one that reflects a genuinely highly competitive global environment the world did not know even ten years ago. This means that this time the world will be led out of economic crisis by countries such as China, Russia, and India, and naturally on terms agreed with them. It will no longer be an exclusively intra-Western endeavor, and the new international economic order will take shape on a multipolar and intercivilizational basis.
At the same time, new elements of the geopolitical balance of power are also becoming evident, and they are taking shape not in the West’s favor. It is already clear that the Middle East will not return to its previous state, while Iran will only strengthen its influence—here Washington and Tel Aviv have clearly “gone too far” or, as European commentators put it, “bitten off more than they can chew.” These elements add to the inherent fragility of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, whose stock markets, for example, require periodic correction, thereby determining the cyclical nature of economic development. The principal among them is the marginalization of the traditional banking system in light of the growth of marketplaces and direct electronic transactions, one of the consequences of digitalization. So far, nothing suggests that the legalization of stablecoins under the so-called Genius Act in the United States will resolve the country’s financial problems. This development amounts to a “subversion” of interest itself, which has formed the foundation of the Western economy since the Reformation. And if the U.S. financial sector now accounts for 70% of GDP, compared with 5% in 1913, one can imagine what the global economic balance of power will look like even in the medium term, when the commanding role will once again belong to the real economy with its real resource base.
Thus, contemporary geopolitics incorporates vast historical experience multiplied by present-day realities, including technological ones. The latter will be decisive in the ongoing global transformation, amid the declining role of the traditional force factor, where primacy is passing to Russia and China, which are, in essence, depriving the West of prospects in this sphere while gaining time and strategic space. Western countries have proved unprepared for confrontation not only with powers possessing comparable military and technological strength, but even with Iran, which has moreover asserted itself as a civilization. It is clear that such a radical turning point entails uncertainty, including risks connected with the difficult-to-predict behavior of the elites of the former hegemons—the United States and the West as a whole—which may “slam the door” on a world slipping out of their control.
Alexander Yakovenko, Head of the Committee on Global Problems and International Security of the Scientific and Expert Council of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Deputy Director General of Rossiya Segodnya.