Tag: israel

• The Civilizational Blind Spot: How the US and Israel Miscalculated Iran

  The war with Iran was sold as a quick decapitation—a replay of Venezuela, where a brittle regime would crumble under the first real shock. Instead, it became a strategic catastrophe. The US and Israel believed they were targeting a government. They discovered, too late, that they were confronting a civilization.

  Iran is one of the oldest, most resilient civilizations in human history. The Persians have fought wars for three thousand years, survived invading hordes, and revived every time. This insight—obvious to any student of history—was entirely absent from US and Israeli war planning.

  The False Analogy: Iran as Venezuela

  Weeks before the conflict, Netanyahu briefed Trump on a promise: a quick, easy war. Decapitate the leadership, the regime collapses, victory declared. Trump bought it. The premise was that Iran was a hollow shell like Venezuela. But Venezuela is a 19th-century nation-state. Iran is heir to Cyrus the Great and millennia of resistance. No invader has ever erased Persia.

  When decapitation strikes failed, Washington was surprised. Instead of weakening, Iran gained a powerful burst of energy. A civilization under existential threat does not send armies into hopeless battles. It strikes the global economy’s jugular: the Hormuz Strait.

  The Strait That Broke the War

  Iran had warned for years it could close the strait. The US and Israel bombed nuclear facilities while leaving this obvious lever unaddressed. Within days, Iran imposed de facto control. Oil prices spiked. Suddenly, Trump’s overriding concern—November’s midterm elections—became Iran’s primary bargaining chip. Iran is not waiting for a military knockout. It is waiting for an electoral clock.

  The Unraveling Alliance

  The US and Israel are no longer in unison. Trump, facing domestic pressure, desperately wants an off-ramp before November. Israel insists on finishing the job but cannot. This war is fundamentally between Iran and Israel. The US was dragged in by undue Israeli influence and, Washington embraced the Venezuela fallacy. You cannot decapitate a civilization. You can only bleed against it.

  Businessmen Negotiators

  The final insult: Trump appointed businessmen Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff as negotiators. Their expertise is real estate, not Persian history or Shiite theology. They expected to out-haggle Iran. Instead, Iran holds the upper hand—because when a civilization feels existentially threatened, it does not negotiate from weakness. It waits. It plays the long game.

  As one seasoned observer put it: “Any other country would have surrendered from day one. Iranians didn’t surrender. In fact, they retaliated very strongly.” That is not bravado. That is three thousand years of muscle memory.

  Conclusion: The Cost of Forgetting History, Felt Even Here

  The US and Israel launched this war believing Iran would fold like a house of cards. Instead, Iran closed the Hormuz Strait, kept its economy afloat, and forced Washington to beg for a way out. The magnitude is undeniable: a civilization was underestimated, and the global order is paying the price.

  But this price is not paid only in Washington or Tel Aviv. Even here in Fiji—thousands of miles from the Persian Gulf—we are already feeling the direct effects, and we will continue to feel them long after the fighting ends. The closure of the Hormuz Strait has sent energy costs soaring. Imported goods, from food to fuel to manufactured basics, have become dramatically more expensive. Inflation presses down on every Fijian household. Our small island economy, already vulnerable to global shocks, has no shield against a war we did not choose and cannot influence.

  This should be a wake-up call. The era of stable fossil energy flowing through chokepoints controlled by distant powers is over—at least for now. It is time for Fiji to look seriously at alternative energy sources, as China has shown. Beijing understood years ago that strategic vulnerability follows the oil tanker. Today, China leads the world in renewable energy—not out of environmental idealism, but out of hard-nosed strategic, visionary calculation. Fiji can learn from that. What we lack is the political will to accelerate the transition.

  The Iran war has reminded every nation without its own oil fields of a simple truth: when great powers clash over civilization and empire, small countries get crushed by the wake. The only defense is resilience. And for Fiji, resilience means less reliance on fossil fuel. The Americans and Israelis miscalculated Persia. Let us not miscalculate our own future. The war will end. The lesson should not.

  2026.05.24

• The Fog of War and the Vacuum of Aims: Two Months of Confusion in the Gulf

  What began on February 28th as a thunderclap of coordinated American-Israeli strikes against Iran, has now dragged into a third month of bloodshed, reprisals, and regional chaos. Yet, more than two months later, a durable peace is nowhere on the horizon—and perhaps the most frightening reason is that Washington still cannot articulate why it is fighting.

  Back on that February night, the United States and Israel launched their war without informing their Western allies, let alone the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, who sit just across the water and have taken the full brunt of the war up close—from missile debris to disrupted shipping lanes to the economic strangulation of the Hormuz Strait. Now, 66 days into a conflict with no endgame, the prevailing whisper in Washington is that the Gulf should be grateful.

  Grateful for what? For being blindsided? For being turned into a frontline buffer zone?

  This is not strategy. It is arrogance wrapped in amateur hour—and the passage of time has only laid bare the rot underneath.

  Two months in, the most dangerous weapon in this war is not an Iranian drone or an Israeli bunker buster. It is the profound, paralyzing confusion over America’s ultimate aim. Is this a war to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program? A campaign to cripple the IRGC? A perpetual open-ended commitment to defend Israel, leaving America’s oldest Arab allies to absorb the shrapnel? Or—as daily headlines of stalled back-channel talks suggest—is it merely a tantrum masquerading as policy?

  The Gulf states have spent nine weeks asking a question that the White House cannot answer: What does victory look like? Without a coherent objective, this is not leadership; it is a bar fight where the instigator cannot remember why he threw the first punch. And when the brawl grinds on for two months with no exit strategy, the instigator’s confusion becomes indistinguishable from sheer incompetence.

  That incompetence now hides in plain sight at the highest levels of the administration. The Secretary of State, who is also the National Security Advisor, has effectively abdicated diplomacy to two real estate developers. Let that sink in: the world’s sole superpower has handed the intricate, bloody, and delicate file of containing Iran to men whose career highlights involve steel, glass, and closing deals.

  Diplomacy for a durable peace is not a real estate transaction. It does not reward impatience. It requires the gravitas to sit in a room for months, to achieve a tenuous ceasefire. And the wisdom to know that after two months of war without peace, the real estate approach has failed. The developers lack the patience for deterrence and the nuance for escalation management. They see “deals” where there are only dilemmas. And now, with the war grinding into its third month and no cease-fire in sight, their handiwork has produced the worst of all worlds: a conflict with no purpose, no timeline, and no off-ramp.

  The result is a policy of maximum pressure with minimum thought, leaving the UAE’s ports, Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, and Bahrain’s coastline as perpetual collateral damage in a war whose purpose shifts by the hour—or, increasingly, seems to have no purpose at all.

  The greatest casualty of this administration’s incompetence is trust. By sidelining the Gulf on February 28th, and by offering no coherent vision in the two months since, Washington has proved that its Arab partners are not allies. They are insurance policies—to be billed after the accident, but never consulted before it.

  For the GCC, the lesson is brutal. They have taken the full brunt of a war launched by others. They have endured two months of economic turbulence, missile warnings, and diplomatic whiplash. And in return, they are lectured about gratitude.

  If this is the new American way after 66 days of aimless conflict, the Gulf will not rush to spend its treasure defending a superpower that cannot explain why it is fighting—or, more damningly, whether it even remembers. The fog of war is one thing. A vacuum of aims is quite another. And that vacuum, far more than any Iranian missile, is the real threat to a durable peace.

  2026.05.12

• When Good Relations Are Worse Than Bad: The Trump–Netanyahu Trap

  There’s a dark joke quietly circulating among geo political observers: with two men like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, you can’t decide whether good relations or bad relations are more dangerous. After reading Julian Borger’s masterful pice of the Iran war fiasco (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/09/tensions-emerge-bejamin-netanyahu-donald-trump-alliance), I have reached an uneasy conclusion. Good relations are worse. Bad relations are just the hangover.

  Let me explain why.

  Borger’s piece is a devastating portrait of what happens when two transactional strongmen—both masters of populist grift, both allergic to institutional constraint—bind their fates together. For decades, Netanyahu played a long game: coax, flatter, and manipulate successive US presidents into attacking Iran. Trump, a man who views every relationship as a zero-sum extraction, was the perfect mark. Their “good relations” produced the worst foreign policy disaster since the Iraq War: a 37-day air campaign that failed to collapse the Iranian regime, closed the Strait of Hormuz, triggered a global energy crisis, and left America looking like a paper tiger.

  The tragedy is that neither man will admit defeat. Instead, they’re now trapped in an oscillating nightmare—sometimes coordinating almost daily, sometimes publicly rebuking each other, but never truly disentangled. And that oscillation, I’d argue, is the real poison.

  The case for “good relations” being worse

  Consider what their alignment enabled. Netanyahu fed Trump the fantasy that Iran was “an overripe fruit ready to drop.” He dangled Venezuela’s lightning regime change as proof that war could be “painless, effortless, beautiful.” Trump; already contemptuous of his own intelligence community, bit hard. The result was not just a failed war, but a strategic defeat that will outlast both men’s political careers. Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz. China and Russia are strengthened. America’s allies are hedging desperately.

  Good relations between a con-man and a grifter don’t cancel each other out—they amplify the worst impulses of both. Netanyahu got his war; Trump got to feel like a strongman. The rest of us got $150-a-barrel oil and a crumbling global order.

  But bad relations aren’t a solution

  When Trump finally realised he’d been sold a lemon, he froze Israel out of ceasefire talks, publicly scolded Netanyahu (“PROHIBITED” in all-caps on social media), and forced a truce that leaves Iranian power intact. On the surface, that seems better. It stopped the bombing.

  Yet Borger’s reporting reveals the flaw. Netanyahu knows Trump’s attention span is measured in weeks, not years. He knows that ceasefire or no, he can “mow the grass” later—resume strikes on Iranian proxies or nuclear sites once the president is distracted by China or the election. Bad relations just drive the coordination underground. The mutual dependence remains. The strategic failure is now baked in.

  What we’re witnessing is not a clean break. It’s a toxic codependency. One day Trump praises “full coordination.” The next he bans Israel from striking Lebanon. Neither posture is coherent. Neither restores deterrence or trust.

  The real lesson: oscillation is the enemy

  Stable good relations build disastrous wars. Stable bad relations at least produce predictable distance—allies adjust, adversaries calibrate. But the Trump–Netanyahu relationship offers neither. It lurches from embrace to estrangement and back, leaving US allies in the Gulf, European partners, and even the Israeli security establishment unsure whether Washington is leading, following, or fleeing.

  That uncertainty is more corrosive than any single defeat. It tells the world that American power now depends on the mood swings of two aging populists who have, in Borger’s memorable phrase, “screwed each other pretty badly.”

  So here is my answer to the question. Good relations are worse because they start catastrophic wars. Bad relations are merely the aftermath. But the truly dangerous state is the one we occupy now: neither together nor apart, just conjoined in failure, unable to admit it, and all too capable of lurching into another disaster when one of them needs a distraction.

  The only way out is to stop treating this as a personality problem. It’s a structural one. The United States cannot afford to build its Middle East policy on the back of a prime minister who manipulates US politics for personal survival, nor on a president who mistakes grift for strategy. Until that changes, it doesn’t matter whether Trump and Netanyahu are smiling or snarling at each other. The rest of us will pay the price either way.

  2026.05.11