The latest analysis from the Foreign Affairs magazine, warns readers that the “Axis of Resistance” is more dangerous than ever. The authors; Salisbury, Paes, and Thompson, offer a familiar refrain: military force and economic warfare are insufficient; we must find a “more promising approach” to blunt the threat.
It is a polished, pragmatic piece of statecraft. It is also dangerously ahistorical.
To read this article, is to step into a world where cause and effect have been surgically removed. It treats Iran and its allies as a perpetual motion machine of malice, a geopolitical cancer that emerged spontaneously to disrupt a peaceful West Asia. But any honest reckoning with the current crisis, must begin with a single, uncomfortable question: How did we get here?
We arrived here on the back of an ill-advised war launched on false premises. The invasion of Iraq in 2003—predicated on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist (I know because I was there)—did not merely topple Saddam Hussein; it detonated the regional order. In one catastrophic stroke, Washington eliminated Iran’s greatest conventional enemy and handed Tehran a Shia-majority government in Baghdad on a silver platter. The “Axis” did not emerge from Iranian expansionism alone; it was forged in the crucible of US hubris. To analyze the “Resistance” without foregrounding this catastrophic blunder, is not just an oversight—it is intellectual amnesia, malpractice even.
Yet, the asymmetry of the current conflict renders the Western narrative almost farcical. Let us state the facts plainly:
· Iran has endured 47 years of comprehensive economic sanctions, strangling its economy, limiting its access to medicine, and isolating its people.
· Iran does not possess a single nuclear weapon—a fact repeatedly confirmed by US intelligence assessments and the IAEA.
· Israel, armed with an undeclared nuclear arsenal estimated in the hundreds of warheads, operates with impunity, conducting assassinations on foreign soil, breaching sovereign borders and visiting unparalleled destruction upon Gaza and Lebanon. Let’s not even go into what settlers are doing in the West Bank.
In what moral or strategic universe is the nuclear-armed state the victim, and the non-nuclear state the primary global threat? The “havoc” attributed to Iran and its proxies is, in large part, the flailing response of a nation surrounded by US military bases, nuclear-armed rivals, and a history of CIA-led coups (1953) and targeted killings. When the West decries Iran’s missile strikes or its support for groups like Hezbollah, it conveniently forgets that resistance is the indigenous language of the marginalized. When your adversary possesses the ultimate weapon—and has used its conventional superiority to devastate entire indigenous populations—what is the “resistance” supposed to do? Roll over?
The Foreign Affairs prescription; while advocating for diplomacy, still treats Iran as an irrational rogue that must be “managed” rather than a rational state actor responding to existential pressure. The authors implicitly accept the premise that the US and Israel have an inherent right to exert military and economic dominance, while Iran has no right to push back.
If we genuinely seek to break the “cycles of conflict” the authors mention, we must abandon this paternalistic, West-centric framing. You cannot isolate a country for half a century, assassinate its scientists, topple its neighbors, and then act bewildered when it seeks a nuclear hedge or deepens regional ties. The threat is not “more dangerous than ever” because Iran has grown bolder. It is more dangerous than ever because the West refuses to recognize that, its own unchecked power has created the very monster it now fears.
A “more promising approach” does not begin with how to blunt Iran. It begins with how to rebuild a rules-based order that applies equally to all. It requires acknowledging that as long as one state in the region possesses nuclear arms and faces no accountability for its military actions, the “Axis” will not only survive—it will thrive. It will thrive because, in the absence of justice, indigenous resistance is not a choice. It is a survival instinct.
Until the West confronts its own disastrous interventions and the glaring double standard of nuclear proliferation, we are not analyzing a problem. We are simply documenting the prelude to the next war.
Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian 