The American-Israeli war on Iran is no longer understood solely as an open military confrontation; it has also become a political and strategic test of the idea of American-Israeli deterrence in the region.
اضافة اعلان
The core problem today is not only the scale of the mutual strikes, but the fact that Iran has so far succeeded in preventing its adversaries from turning their military superiority into a swift political outcome. This explains the growing concern in Washington DC, Tel Aviv, and some European capitals, because the continuation of the war without clearly weakening Iran means that the image of deterrence that has governed the region for decades is no longer what it once was.
The clearest indication of this is that the United States has not been able to achieve military decisiveness in its joint war with “Israel”, after the course of the war slipped beyond full control. This behavior reveals that Washington DC fears two possibilities at the same time: appearing incapable of protecting its image as a dominant power, or sliding into a wide regional war that would raise military and economic costs and disrupt energy markets and international shipping. Here, deterrence no longer serves as a tool for imposing will, but becomes a burden whose erosion Washington fears.
As for “Israel,” its aim behind the war is to reshape the security environment in the Middle East, not merely to conduct a punitive round against Iran. It seeks to entrench an equation stating that it is still capable of striking, reaching its targets, and imposing a high cost on its adversaries, including through efforts to bring down the regime in Iran. But this objective collides with a different reality, as the continuation of painful Iranian missile strikes moves in the opposite direction. Deterrence is not measured only by the ability to destroy, but also by the ability to prevent the adversary from continuing to respond.
In contrast, Iran’s goals appear clearer. It does not seek merely to absorb the blow, but rather to raise the cost of the war to a level that makes any attempt to break or isolate it extremely costly. Through this approach, Tehran seeks to impose a political and strategic reality before it is a military one: that no new regional arrangements can be built without recognizing its interests and its capacity to influence events.
This means that the war has turned into a struggle over the meaning and substance of deterrence itself: does it remain monopolized by the United States, “Israel,” and their allies, or does it shift into a mutual balance that imposes limits on all?
The importance of this shift is not limited to the military dimension. Economically, the war continues to fuel anxiety in energy markets and maritime corridors, along with the broad repercussions that follow. Politically, it reveals the limits of American influence, while at the same time giving China and Russia greater room to observe the decline of Western dominance and benefit from the reshaping of international power balances. Therefore, this war is no longer merely a crisis in the Middle East; it has become a moment that reveals a broader transformation in the global order.
The clearest conclusion here is that the most dangerous challenge facing the United States and Israel is not the missiles alone, but the consolidation of a new international impression that American-Israeli deterrence, and relatively speaking, Western deterrence more broadly is no longer absolute, and that the balance of power has become more even than it once was. This is a result that does not stop at the boundaries of the battlefield, because it affects the image of influence and the ability to impose conditions in other regions of the world.
In sum, the priority does not lie in prolonging the war or merely managing it, but in pushing toward a political end that recognizes the transformations underway in the structure of regional and international power. What this war reveals is that the region, along with the broader international system, is moving toward a more complex redistribution of power, one that requires settlements based on mutual interests and recognition of new and real balances, rather than on a unilateral will that is no longer capable of imposing itself as easily as the world once knew in past decades.
