Iran ceasefire reveals a world transformed

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The smoke may not have cleared over Tehran and other Iranian sites bombarded by American and Israeli forces in recent weeks, but it has begun to clear diplomatically – and what lies beneath is a world transformed.

A country larger than France, Spain, Germany and Great Britain combined is left devastated. A NATO alliance that has kept the peace and allowed millions to sleep in peace for more than three-quarters of a century is rocked, perhaps damaged beyond repair. New technologies have extended the limits of conventional warfare even as their own limits have been perceived. The geopolitics of the world’s most vital energy source, fossil fuels, have been readjusted.

In five weeks of brutal warfare the world has been altered in manifold ways, so much so that Jeremy Hansen and his three companions aboard Artemis II will return Friday to the home they have been observing from the deep blackness of space to find its geopolitical landscape changed utterly.

Trump has confirmed himself as the straw that stirs the international drink

This metaphor comes from baseball player Reggie Jackson’s take in the late 1970s on his role with the New York Yankees. But in bestriding the narrow world like a colossus, U.S. President Donald Trump increasingly is seen globally as both a phenomenon and a menace.

One lesson he surely has taken from this episode, and from the apparent coda that produced the ceasefire: Threats work.

Opinion: Can a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire hold?

Mr. Trump possessed the capacity to destroy “a whole civilization,” though the conflict he initiated was designed to prevent Iran from having that very capacity in the form of a nuclear weapon, presumably aimed at Israel. His threat, denounced as vulgar even by some of his customary supporters, was evocative of one issued by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1956: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!”

Historians later argued the Khrushchev threat was more economic than military but at the time the rhetoric stunned and frightened Americans.

The global axis of influence shifted

The United States was the principal combatant in the conflict, intervening in Iran to destroy 80 per cent of Iran’s air defences, hundreds of drone and missile storage facilities, more than 150 ships and still-uncounted military and civilian casualties. Its military performance took “shock and awe” – a phrase from late 20th century military theorists that won popular acceptance during the 2003 Iraq war – to new levels.

But it was China and Pakistan that won the world’s plaudits for their diplomatic intervention. Ever strengthening, ever more ambitious, China has hovered at the fringes of global politics since the beginning of the 21st century, especially with initiatives in Latin America and Africa. But Beijing’s efforts, by some accounts, to win a two-week ceasefire put the world’s most populist country at the centre of diplomacy, matching its profile in economics.

Pakistan, an Islamic nuclear power itself, played a vital role in bringing at least a tentative conclusion to a conflict that in large measure was designed to curtail, if not eliminate, Iran’s drive for a similar role as a nuclear power.

The world shuddered at the destruction wrought by the United States but NATO trembled

Battered by years of bitter criticism from Mr. Trump, shaken by the American President’s demands for increased military spending, rocked by his ferocious rhetoric at Davos and stunned by the range of his covetous eyes over Greenland, NATO countries were not inclined to join a conflict that they did not initiate and over which they were not consulted.

But it was the express criticism of Spain and Germany, and European nations’ reluctance to pledge to reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz, that triggered a new fusillade of anger from Mr. Trump – and that threw the alliance, born in the wreckage of 1945, into new uncertainty, perhaps into a death spiral.

It actually is possible, despite enormous rubble and human misery, to produce a win-win situation, at least in the eyes of the beholders

The U.S. learned that its military mastery had the effect of stunning the world, permitting Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth to recount the vast extent of destruction his forces produced over and in Iran, and to declare Wednesday that, “Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield.”

At the same time, Iran learned the power of asymmetrical warfare – the very kind of battle used by North Vietnam for more than a decade in the 1960s and ’70s and by terrorist groups beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century and extending well into the 21st.

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This time the theatre of asymmetrical wartime wasn’t the Ia Drang Valley (North Vietnamese ambush of the American 1st Cavalry, 1965) or the World Trade Center (destroyed by weaponized airliners in the 9/11 terror attacks, 2001). It was the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian mines and threats of destruction left 800 energy freighters stuck in its waters, and made a fifth of the world’s energy supply the new Iran hostages.

These twin perceptions were not mutually exclusive. The Americans claimed their bombardment produced a victory, and Mr. Hegseth made it clear that, “We are prepared to restart at a moment’s notice.”

Iranian First Vice-President Mohammad Reza Aref, meanwhile, spoke of the dawn of “the era of Iran” – perhaps one with a chokehold on global energy greater than that possessed by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in its 1973-74 oil embargo.

In a Truth Social posting, Mr. Trump said that there would be “no enrichment of uranium” and that enriched uranium would be removed from the country. Iran’s understanding of the agreement was not as specific.

The religious theorists on both sides of this conflict might consider the wisdom of the lay theologian C.S. Lewis, who offered the caution that “what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing.”