Beijing no longer behaves like a rising power seeking acceptance into an American-led order. It behaves like a co-owner of the international system. And increasingly, Washington treats China that way.
For years, Washington comforted itself with a reassuring phrase: China was a “near-peer competitor.” Near-peer implied China was close but not equal. It was a challenger still climbing the ladder while America remained securely at the top.
The visit showed that the world’s largest autocratic state is no longer America’s near-peer. It is America’s peer.
The symbolism alone was striking. Trump arrived in Beijing not as the triumphant leader of an unchallenged superpower, but as the head of a country increasingly constrained abroad, economically vulnerable at home, and struggling to impose its will even on far weaker adversaries.
Xi understood the moment perfectly. The carefully choreographed summit was designed to project parity: two leaders, two superpowers, two equals managing global stability together. Beijing no longer behaves like a rising power seeking acceptance into an American-led order. It behaves like a co-owner of the international system. And increasingly, Washington is treating China that way.
Trump’s tone during the visit reflected the altered realities. The same president who routinely berates allies as freeloaders adopted a strikingly deferential posture toward America’s principal geopolitical rival. He praised Xi lavishly, calling it “an honor” to be his friend.
Equally striking was what Trump did not say. There was no mention of China’s human rights abuses – not of the mass incarceration and surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, not of the crushing of freedoms in Hong Kong, not of tightening repression in Tibet or Inner Mongolia. A decade ago, such silence from an American president visiting Beijing would have been politically unthinkable.
Today, it reflects a deeper reality: Washington increasingly treats China less as a wayward authoritarian state to be lectured and more as a peer superpower whose cooperation it needs and whose sensitivities it must manage.
In Trump’s first term, Washington still believed it could fundamentally reshape China’s behavior through tariffs, sanctions and technological pressure. The assumption was that America possessed overwhelming leverage. That confidence has eroded.
Most importantly, Beijing has demonstrated that interdependence cuts both ways.
When Trump last year escalated tariffs, China retaliated by tightening rare-earth exports, exposing America’s deep dependence on Chinese supply chains. Suddenly, the world’s strongest economy looked vulnerable to industrial choke points controlled by Beijing.
The most telling aspect of Trump’s Beijing visit was that both sides emphasized “stability” in their relationship. This is no longer a relationship defined by American primacy. It is one increasingly defined by mutual constraint.
But peer competition does not require symmetry. The Soviet Union was America’s peer despite being economically weaker. Britain was once Germany’s peer despite Germany’s larger industrial base. The defining characteristic is the ability to resist coercion and shape global outcomes independently.
China can now clearly do both.
Indeed, the summit underscored how much Washington’s ambitions have narrowed. Trump once talked about decoupling from China. Now the goal appears far more modest: managed coexistence, stabilized trade and guardrails against open conflict.
That is what peer rivalry looks like.
The danger for the U.S. lies in refusing to adapt to the new reality. Much of Washington still oscillates between complacency and denial, either dismissing China as fundamentally fragile or assuming America can easily restore uncontested dominance.
Yet China’s message during the summit was unmistakable: It no longer seeks admission into an American-led order. It seeks acknowledgment as an equal center of power.
And despite all the pageantry, Trump’s visit ultimately conveyed something Xi desperately wanted the world to see: The U.S. may still be the world’s strongest country but it no longer stands alone at the apex of global power.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets members of the Indian contingent of UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) during a visit at the Indian Army Cemetery of World War I to honour fallen Indian soldiers, in the Israeli coastal city of Haifa, July 6, 2017. REUTERS/Jack Guez/Pool
India created the post of Chief of Defense Staff in 2019 to achieve what its military had long lacked: genuine jointness among the Army, Navy and Air Force.
The CDS was intended to function as the principal military adviser to the government, improve interoperability among the services and push through long-delayed reforms such as integrated theater commands.
Yet less than a decade later, the institution is being weakened by the very government that created it.
The issue goes to the heart of civil-military relations, military effectiveness and India’s ambitions as a rising major power.
The latest appointment to the office illustrates the issue clearly. For the second consecutive time, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has chosen a retired three-star lieutenant general to serve as CDS, immediately elevating him to four-star rank upon appointment. Lt. Gen. N.S. Raja Subramani will now coordinate among serving four-star service chiefs who continue to command troops, budgets and operational structures.
This is an unusual arrangement for a position that was originally conceived as primus inter pares — first among equals.
Only the first CDS, Gen. Bipin Rawat, assumed office while serving as Army chief. His appointment carried institutional weight because he entered the role directly from active command at the apex of the military hierarchy. By contrast, a retired officer re-entering service on a contractual basis inevitably derives authority less from institutional standing than from political selection.
Since Rawat’s death in a helicopter crash in late 2021, the government has moved toward appointing retired officers — a shift that reflects both a rethink of the CDS office and a broader instinct toward institutional “coup-proofing.”
India, unlike neighbors such as Myanmar, Bangladesh and Pakistan, has no history of military intervention in politics.
Indeed, much like Japan, India long remained reluctant to integrate military officers into a defense ministry dominated by civilian bureaucrats often lacking specialized military expertise. Over the past decade, however, Japan has moved further and faster than India in dismantling the bureaucratic walls separating its military from the defense ministry.
Yet, even as career bureaucrats still dominate Indian defense planning, New Delhi appears increasingly wary of concentrating too much institutional authority in a CDS drawn directly from the serving chiefs of staff. A sitting service chief elevated to CDS would carry operational authority, institutional networks and considerable standing within the armed forces.
A retired officer reappointed through executive discretion is inherently more dependent on the political leadership. That may reassure civilian authorities seeking tight control over the military hierarchy. But it also risks weakening the CDS’s credibility within the services themselves, undermining the very jointness and theaterization the office was meant to advance.
That distinction matters. A serving chief who has risen through the ranks and commands active forces possesses independent stature within the military system. Such an individual is better positioned to provide candid advice to political leaders, including advice they may not wish to hear.
A retired officer brought back through a government notification may instead be perceived — fairly or unfairly — as more beholden to the political executive that restored him to office.
Perceptions shape institutions. If serving chiefs begin to see the CDS primarily as a political appointee rather than an impartial coordinator among equals, the trust necessary for meaningful military integration erodes.
This comes at precisely the wrong time for India.
Modern warfare increasingly depends on cross-domain integration. Air power, naval reach, cyber capabilities, space assets and long-range precision systems are becoming as important as massed land forces. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated that military success now hinges less on the dominance of any single service than on the ability to synchronize all instruments of combat power.
India itself has recognized this reality. The push for theater commands — integrating Army, Navy and Air Force assets under unified operational structures — reflects an understanding that future wars cannot be fought through service silos.
Yet institutional culture matters as much as organizational charts. And here the government risks sending the wrong signal.
Every CDS so far has come from the Army. Given the Army’s size and political influence, that may not be surprising. But repetition creates institutional expectations. If the top military post appears effectively reserved for Army officers — including retired ones — the Navy and Air Force may reasonably conclude that “jointness” in practice means Army predominance.
That is a dangerous perception for a country seeking to become a major maritime and aerospace power.
India’s strategic challenges are increasingly maritime in nature, from the growing Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean to the security of sea lanes and energy routes. Likewise, air and missile power will be central to any future conflict involving China or Pakistan. A genuinely integrated military structure requires all three services to feel equally represented and invested in reform.
Instead, New Delhi appears to be moving in the opposite direction: centralizing authority politically while narrowing the institutional base of the CDS.
The irony is striking. With considerable fanfare, Modi announced the creation of the CDS position on Independence Day in 2019 as a transformational reform intended to streamline military advice and reduce bureaucratic barriers between the armed forces and the political leadership. Yet the government has increasingly transformed the CDS into a politically managed bureaucratic office within the Ministry of Defense.
The CDS also serves as secretary of the defense ministry’s Department of Military Affairs, effectively combining military leadership with bureaucratic responsibilities. That dual role risks turning what was envisioned as India’s senior-most military strategist into a highly placed defense administrator.
The country’s political leadership may prefer a CDS who remains firmly dependent on civilian authority and lacks an independent institutional power base. But there is a trade-off between political control and military effectiveness.
An overly constrained CDS may preserve tighter civilian oversight in the short term while weakening the office’s ability to drive difficult reforms, resolve interservice rivalries and provide independent strategic advice. Theaterization, long discussed but still unrealized, could continue to stagnate.
The CDS was created to strengthen India’s military integration. Instead, the office risks evolving into a politically managed coordinating post with diminishing institutional authority.
That would leave India with the appearance of reform, but not its substance.
Brahma Chellaney, a longstanding contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.
Effective diplomacy depends on credibility, consistency, and a clear alignment with national interests. The US administration’s personalized, opaque, and venal shadow diplomacy delivers none of that, and it will leave the US less respected, less trusted, and less effective on the world stage.
In most democracies, a leader outsourcing high-stakes diplomacy to family members and business associates would provoke outrage. But US President Donald Trump has faced little pushback for doing so, with many downplaying his crony diplomacy as mere “heterodoxy.” The long-term consequences will be severe.
Instead of relying on the secretary of state and the professional diplomatic corps, Trump has placed pivotal diplomacy largely in the hands of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his business partner, the Manhattan real-estate mogul Steve Witkoff. Kushner was a senior adviser in Trump’s first administration, responsible for helping to broker the Abraham Accords between Israel and four Arab states, and is now, like Witkoff, a Special Envoy for Peace.
Together, Kushner and Witkoff have spearheaded negotiations on Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Yet neither had any diplomatic experience before Trump tasked them with resolving some of the thorniest and highest-stakes foreign-policy challenges of our time, and both have glaring conflicts of interest.
Start with Witkoff. Last year, Pakistan signed a controversial investment deal with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm whose CEO is Witkoff’s son, Zach, and in which the Trump and Witkoff families hold a dominant ownership stake. This past January, a WLF affiliate reached another deal with Pakistan—this time, to introduce the company’s stablecoin for use in cross-border transactions.
But Pakistan has also been the site and, to an extent, the broker of talks between the United States and Iran. When actors are negotiating geopolitical outcomes and pursuing business opportunities in the same arena, diplomacy begins to resemble a marketplace: access, influence, and profit are tightly interwoven.
As for Kushner, after leaving Trump’s first administration, he set up a private-equity firm, Affinity Partners, and took billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies, including about $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. In other words, Kushner is dependent on Saudi capital. Yet he is now expected to negotiate a détente with Iran, even as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly urges Trump to continue the war.
And it is not just Iran. Kushner’s “New Gaza” proposal, unveiled at Davos this past January, has been widely criticized as “real-estate diplomacy,” as it effectively recasts reconstruction as a business venture while ignoring questions of sovereignty and rights.
Kushner and Witkoff’s conflicts of interest, together with their lack of foreign-policy credentials, explain why Trump has not sought to appoint them to official diplomatic positions. Special envoys avoid Senate confirmation hearings, as well as the disclosure requirements, ethics rules, and congressional oversight that bind professional diplomats. Kushner and Witkoff are thus able to exercise influence without transparency, and to negotiate on behalf of the US without accountability.
Of course, Kushner and Witkoff are hardly the only figures capitalizing on their proximity to Trump. Prominent allies and donors, such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison, have won big from their investment in the majority American-owned TikTok venture that Trump effectively forced the Chinese parent company to create, supposedly over national-security concerns.
Moreover, Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald, Jr., recently joined a drone company Powerus, and are attempting to sell drone interceptors to the Gulf states to ward off attacks from Iran as it retaliates for their father’s war. Foundation Future Industries, a robotics startup where Eric is chief strategy adviser, was recently awarded a $24 million Pentagon contract.
Now, reports are emerging of possible insider trading around the Iran war, with large bets being made right before market-moving public statements from Trump. Yet the American public, whether desensitized to Trump’s breaking of norms or simply unable to keep up with the pace and scale of the violations, hardly reacts to such news. Scandals that would have brought any past US administration down—or at least prompted urgent investigation—have become routine under Trump.
With a Republican Party that bows to Trump’s every whim and justifies his every crime—while controlling both houses of Congress—a kind of resignation has taken hold. But as outrage fades, so does the restraining power of political norms. As a result, abuses become increasingly blatant and egregious, and trust is eroded. Even if Trump’s cronies did manage to reach a peace deal, it would warrant suspicion, with every concession raising questions about who really benefits—and who is compromised.
This undercuts not only specific agreements, but also US global leadership more broadly. With US foreign policy now guided by personal loyalty, informal networks, and private gain, whatever credibility the US had as a reliable partner, good-faith negotiator, and champion of the rule of law has been decimated. None of this will be easily restored.
In the meantime, if foreign governments want to influence US policy or secure the country’s geopolitical cooperation, they must make it worth Trump’s while. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Trump’s so-called Board of Peace—a putative alternative to the United Nations where a permanent seat carries a billion-dollar price tag. This is less a multilateral institution than a pay-to-play geopolitical franchise, but some countries appear willing to cough up the cash to stay in the US president’s good graces.
Others seeking to shape US policy head to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which he increasingly uses for official diplomatic engagements. And, of course, there are those who go there to get in on the self-dealing, making business deals with Trump’s inner circle. Meanwhile, wars continue to rage, with far-reaching human and economic consequences.
Trump’s defenders argue that unconventional actors can produce breakthroughs where conventional processes have failed. But diplomacy is not merely deal-making; it depends on credibility, consistency, and a clear alignment with national interests. The personalized, opaque, and venal shadow diplomacy being pursued by Kushner and Witkoff can deliver none of that. What it can and will do is ensure that the US is less respected, less trusted, and less effective on the world stage.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
When President Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, it will look like another great-power summit. It is anything but. The balance has shifted — and not in Washington’s favor.
Trump goes with a weakened hand as the Iran war has boomeranged into a global energy shock. The visit, delayed from March to May as the conflict escalated, is less a show of strength than it is damage control.
The geopolitical landscape has shifted markedly since Trump and Xi first agreed to the Beijing summit last October.
The immediate source of weakness is the war itself. What Washington billed as a short, decisive campaign against China’s closest Middle Eastern partner has instead exposed systemic vulnerabilities in the American way of war, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them.
Iranian reprisals degraded U.S. air defenses, blinded early-warning systems and left many of its 13 regional bases inoperable. Low-cost drones and missiles imposed disproportionate costs. Chokepoints became contested.
Just as consequential is the drain on U.S. munitions. Precision interceptors, missiles and other high-end systems have been consumed at a pace that has forced the Pentagon to divert stockpiles from Asia, thinning deterrence in the Indo-Pacific just as China’s coercive power expands.
Replenishment will take years, not months. And the problem is not just quantity — the war has exposed deeper weaknesses such as vulnerable forward bases, the difficulty of countering drone swarms and how quickly maritime superiority erodes in narrow seas.
These are not abstract lessons for Beijing. They are a playbook.
The Iran conflict has shown China how asymmetric tools can blunt a superior military, and how control of chokepoints can yield leverage without full-scale war. The implications are clear as Beijing plans for contingencies along the First Island Chain — from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines — which it views as a U.S.-led line of containment.
For Washington, the lesson is sobering: a two-theater posture may be far harder to maintain than had been assumed.
The U.S. economic picture is just as troubling. The war has triggered an energy shock that is feeding inflation and eroding political capital. Gasoline prices now shape the White House’s strategic calculus as much as battlefield outcomes.
Trump’s bargaining position is thus tied to his need for relief — relief Beijing is uniquely positioned to facilitate, whether through its leverage over Iran as its main oil customer or its central role in global supply chains.
In April 2025, in response to Trump’s tariffs, Beijing effectively pulled a geoeconomic kill switch by halting most exports of rare earth minerals — critical inputs for high-tech production. Washington was forced to climb down and negotiate a truce.
In his first term, Trump recast China as a strategic adversary, launched tariffs and made the Indo-Pacific central to U.S. strategy. He revived the Quad and treated economic interdependence as a vulnerability.
In his second term, that posture has softened. Planned tariffs have been paused, punitive measures shelved and rhetoric cooled. Even baseline steps — such as arms sales to Taiwan — have been delayed. As the administration now frames it, Trump seeks “stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations” with China.
The shift is unmistakable. The U.S. remains deeply reliant on Chinese inputs, not least rare earths, and Beijing has shown it will weaponize that dependence. At a moment of depleted munitions and economic strain, the risk of disruption is a constraint Trump cannot ignore.
Trump now needs China — a major financier of U.S. government spending — in ways he did not in his first term. Then, a strong economy allowed escalation. Now, stagflation makes confrontation costly. The White House needs stable supply chains, and cannot risk Beijing weaponizing its U.S. Treasury holdings as U.S. borrowing rises.
That dependence reframes the summit. Trump is going not to dictate terms but to seek relief — on energy and financial stability and a political “win.” Chinese cooperation will not come cheap.
Beijing’s leverage is substantial. It has cushioned its energy vulnerabilities through stockpiles and overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, while deepening ties with Moscow. China can afford patience, and will trade only for advantage.
Export controls are a prime target. Beijing will push to ease restrictions on advanced semiconductors and AI. Extending the trade truce will be framed as stabilizing but will lock in Chinese gains.
The most sensitive domain is security — above all, Taiwan. The concern is not a dramatic “sell-out,” but gradual erosion: fewer arms sales, quieter naval operations, more ambiguity. In a transactional framework, such concessions can be traded piecemeal. Over time, they shift the balance.
The Iran war has sharpened these concerns by exposing Taiwan’s vulnerabilities. Highly dependent on imported energy and with limited reserves, Taiwan is exposed to sea-lane disruption. The lesson of Hormuz — that chokepoint control can impose pressure without invasion — will not be lost on Beijing.
All this points to a stark conclusion: Trump’s visit comes on terms that favor China. The likely outcome is a managed detente — a cooling of rhetoric and a symbolic reset. Trump will present it as deal-making prowess; Xi as proof of China’s rise. Both will claim success.
But the underlying shift will endure. A rivalry of near-peers is giving way to something closer to a creditor-debtor dynamic, in which Washington seeks relief and Beijing sets terms. Beijing can wait. Washington cannot.
In geopolitics, as in markets, timing matters. Trump is going to Beijing at the wrong time, and with fewer cards than he would like. The question is not whether he can strike a deal, but what he will give up to get one.
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action.
In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them.
Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most consequential fallout of the Iran conflict may be unfolding thousands of kilometers away from the Middle East — in Taiwan itself.
For Taipei, the war has been not a distant geopolitical crisis, but a stress test of its economic model, energy security and, most importantly, its faith in American strategic reliability. That test is exposing a stark reality: Taiwan’s vulnerabilities are no longer hypothetical; they are being exposed in real time.
Taiwan’s economic miracle has long rested on the assumption of stable, affordable and uninterrupted energy imports. That assumption is now unraveling, as the Iran conflict accelerates a shift toward a more fragmented, volatile global order in which energy is politicized and supply chains are contested.
For an economy that imports roughly 97 percent of its energy, the implications are existential.
Taiwan’s growing reliance on liquefied natural gas (LNG) — now nearly half of its power mix — has created a system optimized for efficiency, not resilience. LNG is difficult to store, and Taiwan maintains only about 11 days of reserves. In normal times, this “just-in-time” model functioned adequately; in crisis conditions, it becomes a glaring liability.
As summer nears and electricity demand surges, the risk of power shortages looms large. For an economy anchored in high-energy industries such as semiconductor manufacturing, even short disruptions can have outsized consequences.
Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors, long viewed as its “silicon shield,” is increasingly turning into a double-edged sword.
High energy prices are eroding the cost advantages that made Taiwan indispensable to global supply chains. If electricity costs remain structurally elevated, profit margins in energy-intensive fabrication plants will narrow sharply, accelerating the relocation of production to the United States, Japan and Europe.
At the same time, global supply chain disruptions — including higher shipping costs, delays and insurance premiums — are compounding the pressure. Even as Taiwan remains central to advanced chip production, the ecosystem around it is becoming more fragile.
The unpalatable truth is that Taiwan’s economic strength is now directly and acutely exposed to geopolitical shocks far beyond its control.
More troubling for Taipei than the economic fallout, however, is the strategic signal the conflict has sent.
The US has long been Taiwan’s ultimate security guarantor. But the Iran conflict has stretched American military and political bandwidth to its limits. US attention has shifted, and military resources have been diverted from Asia. In geopolitics, distraction can be as dangerous as decline.
For Taipei, the concern is not just that Washington is again mired in Middle Eastern conflict, but that it may emerge weaker from an unnecessary war.
As Trump prepares for a high-stakes visit to Beijing, fears are growing that Taiwan could become a bargaining chip in a broader US-China negotiation. In a transactional framework, issues such as arms sales, military signaling or even core commitments could be quietly adjusted in exchange for Chinese cooperation on trade or Iran.
Even subtle shifts in language carry strategic weight when they introduce ambiguity where clarity once existed.
If Taiwan is under pressure, China is watching closely — and learning.
For Beijing, the Iran conflict has been a live laboratory. For the first time, Chinese planners can observe how a highly developed, trade-dependent economy like Taiwan responds to a sudden, externally induced shock to energy supplies and maritime flows. Given that China has long studied blockade scenarios against Taiwan, this offers invaluable real-world data.
Several insights are already emerging.
First, the crisis reveals the tempo of vulnerability. Taiwan’s limited LNG reserves highlight how quickly energy stress can cascade into industrial disruption. Beijing can now model, with far greater precision, how long it would take before rolling blackouts begin, which sectors would be hit first and how economic pain might translate into political pressure.
Second, it exposes sectoral choke points. The disproportionate impact of energy shortages on semiconductor fabrication, data centers and high-end manufacturing underscores how a narrow set of industries underpins Taiwan’s economic model. From Beijing’s perspective, this suggests that targeted disruption — rather than a comprehensive blockade — could yield outsized effects.
Third, the crisis illuminates maritime and insurance dynamics. The spike in shipping costs, insurance premiums and risk aversion following instability in the Persian Gulf shows how quickly commercial actors retreat from perceived danger zones. China may conclude that it need not physically seal off Taiwan to achieve economic isolation; sustaining a climate of risk may be enough to deter shipping and drive costs to prohibitive levels.
Fourth, Beijing is gaining insight into societal and political thresholds. Energy rationing debates, industrial lobbying and public anxiety offer clues about how resilient Taiwan’s society is under sustained pressure. This is critical for calibrating gray-zone tactics and identifying the point at which pressure generates leverage without triggering outright conflict.
Finally, the war is clarifying a hard truth about external intervention: it is inherently constrained. What Beijing is learning is that timing can redistribute those constraints. If Washington’s attention and resources are tied down elsewhere, it may be slower, more cautious and less willing to escalate in the Taiwan Strait, creating greater space for calibrated Chinese pressure.
Taken together, these lessons may point toward a more refined strategy. Rather than a high-risk invasion, Beijing could prioritize a spectrum of coercive tools — maritime quarantine, selective interdiction, cyber disruption and economic pressure — designed to exploit precisely the vulnerabilities now being revealed. China does not need to act dramatically to shift the balance. Incrementally rising pressure may suffice, especially if the US margin for rapid response in the Indo-Pacific remains constrained.In that sense, Trump’s Iran war is not just reshaping global energy markets; it may be quietly influencing China’s playbook for a future crisis over Taiwan.
Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. sails in the Arabian Sea for a mission supporting Operation Epic Fury during the Iran war at an undisclosed location, March 18, 2026. U.S. Navy/Handout via REUTERS
A naval blockade is not merely a coercive tactic to prevent vessels from entering or leaving a country’s ports. It is an act of war.
History points out that this distinction matters. Yet it is precisely this line that the U.S. under President Donald Trump chose to blur through its naval blockades of Cuba and Iran.
By straining the bounds of international law, those actions revived a historically dangerous logic: that economic strangulation can be used as a substitute for open conflict without triggering similar consequences.
The humanitarian consequences are already starkly visible in Cuba. The blockade, in place since Jan. 29, has contributed to a worsening humanitarian crisis marked by grid collapse, water scarcity, failing hospitals and shortages of food and basic goods for Cuba’s 11 million people, with hunger spreading. Trump has been explicit about the endgame: “taking Cuba.”
Under Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions (1949), starving civilians as a method of warfare, or inflicting disproportionate suffering on a population, is explicitly prohibited and constitutes a war crime. So, too, is collective punishment: penalizing an entire population for the actions of its government or military.
The blockade of Iranian ports carried serious international implications, as the world economy was already reeling from the largest energy-supply disruption in history, triggered by the 40‑day U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that began on Feb. 28. Trump’s Iran blockade was not merely a violation of the April 8 ceasefire understanding; it amounted to the initiation of new hostilities by other means.
Under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, nations have a right to self-defense only in response to an “armed attack.” A naval blockade, by contrast, is generally regarded in international law as an initial act of aggression.
History offers sobering lessons about where such actions can lead.
In 1962, the U.S. under President John F. Kennedy imposed what it termed a “quarantine” on Cuba — a linguistic maneuver that did little to disguise the reality of a blockade. The result was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a calamitous U.S.-Soviet nuclear war.
The crisis was ultimately defused not because the blockade was stabilizing, but because both sides stepped back from the abyss.
Two decades earlier, the U.S. had pursued a different form of economic strangulation: the 1941 oil embargo on Japan. While not a naval blockade in the strict sense, it had a comparable effect — cutting off vital supplies to a major power. Tokyo interpreted the embargo not as a reversible economic measure but as an existential threat.
Widely seen as the point of no return, it led to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — which, in turn, triggered a protracted Pacific War culminating in the U.S. nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The pattern is difficult to ignore. Measures intended to coerce through deprivation are often perceived by their targets as acts of war, demanding a forceful response. In such circumstances, legal distinctions that may appear clear in theory become secondary to the imperatives of survival and deterrence.
This is the central danger of blockade as a strategy. It rests on a fragile assumption: that one side can impose escalating pressure while retaining control over the threshold of war.
Yet history suggests otherwise. Once a capable, resilient nation is subjected to what it perceives as strangulation, the incentives shift toward escalation, often in unpredictable and asymmetric ways.
For the U.S., the risks from the latest blockades extended beyond reputational costs to the danger of strategic miscalculation.
More ominously, the normalization of blockade as a tool of statecraft risks further eroding the already-fragile constraints on the use of force in international relations. If powerful states can act this way without clear legal justification, the precedent will not remain confined. Others will follow and the distinction between war and peace will become increasingly difficult to sustain.
There is a reason why international law has sought to regulate — and in many respects restrict — the use of blockades. It reflects a hard-earned recognition that strategies of strangulation carry within them the seeds of major escalation. They do not freeze conflicts; they intensify them and widen their human cost.
The lesson of both the Pacific War and the Cuban Missile Crisis was stark: When a nation is being strangled, restraint becomes politically and strategically untenable.
In the nuclear age, strangulation is not just coercion; it is a gamble with uncontrollable escalation.
Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
While obsessing over a nuclear bomb Iran may or may not build a decade from now, Trump has effectively given Pakistan a free pass to expand its nuclear arsenal — even as the U.S. intelligence community’s latest Annual Threat Assessment, for the first time, identifies Pakistan as a missile and nuclear threat to the American homeland.
A nuclear-capable Pakistani missile, displayed during a 2022 military parade. AP Photo
By any reasonable strategic measure, the divergent nature of U.S. policy toward Iran and Pakistan defies logic.
Both are Islamic republics. Both are authoritarian in structure. Both have had links to transnational terrorist networks. And both have long had fraught relationships with Washington.
Yet one is relentlessly sanctioned, threatened and even denied civilian nuclear rights under international safeguards. The other has been indulged, armed and repeatedly excused, even as it built nuclear weapons while fostering terrorist proxies.
In Western political discourse, “Islamic Republic” has become shorthand for Iran. But that is historically inaccurate. The first Islamic republic of the postcolonial era was Pakistan, which adopted the title in 1956, more than two decades before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
The label, in other words, does not explain Washington’s choices. It only exposes its inconsistency.
Consider Iran first. For decades, Washington has treated Tehran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat. President Trump scrapped the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal despite Iran’s verified compliance. Under that agreement, Tehran shipped out most of its enriched uranium, capped enrichment levels and accepted intrusive international inspections.
Yet today, the U.S. insists that Iran must go further — that it must not merely agree never to develop nuclear weapons but abandon uranium enrichment altogether, even under stringent international monitoring.
The demand for zero enrichment goes beyond the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which explicitly guarantees non-nuclear states the “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear energy, including enrichment. This explains why non-nuclear states like Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Brazil operate active enrichment programs, including maintaining enriched uranium stockpiles.
So long as international inspectors can verify Iranian compliance with its commitments, zero enrichment is not required to prevent Iran from building the bomb.
Now contrast this with Pakistan, the only country to have developed nuclear weapons while cultivating terrorist proxies as instruments of state policy. It built its arsenal outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expanded it steadily and continues to invest in new warheads and delivery systems, including tactical nuclear weapons designed for battlefield use. Washington largely looks the other way.
Even as the U.S. warns about the dangers of a hypothetical Iranian bomb, it has largely ignored Pakistan’s ongoing nuclear and missile buildup. At its current pace, Pakistan’s arsenal is expected to grow significantly by the end of this decade.
More striking still is that the U.S. intelligence community, in its recently released 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, has for the first time placed Pakistan alongside China, Russia, North Korea and Iran as a missile and nuclear threat to the American homeland.
This contradiction extends beyond weapons to governance.
Both Pakistan and Iran are structurally undemocratic, but Washington treats their internal politics very differently.
Last November, Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, effectively staged a constitutional coup, consolidating power behind a legal facade. Munir accomplished what Pakistan’s previous military dictators never quite managed: He seized absolute power cloaked in constitutional legality.
Yet Washington turned a blind eye, in part because Trump has repeatedly praised Munir, including calling him “my favorite field marshal,” “a great, great guy” and “an inspiring personality.”
Less than four months after Munir’s power grab, Trump on February 28, 2026, launched military action against Iran aimed explicitly at forcing regime change in Tehran.
The inconsistency becomes almost surreal in diplomacy. Washington recently leaned on Pakistan to host high-level U.S. talks with Iran, effectively asking one nuclear-armed Islamic republic to persuade another not to follow the very path it was allowed to take.
In other words, Pakistan was asked to warn Iran against becoming another Pakistan.
The deeper history makes this double standard harder to dismiss.
Pakistan’s bomb did not emerge in isolation. It was enabled by external assistance and illicit procurement, much of it orchestrated by A.Q. Khan, who ran the world’s most extensive nuclear-smuggling network. Yet Khan was never held to account by Washington. When his network was exposed, Pakistan staged a controlled confession, pardoned him, and barred international investigators — an outcome Washington quietly accepted.
Geopolitics explains the indulgence. During the Cold War and the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan was seen as indispensable. Its nuclearization and internal conduct were overlooked in exchange for strategic cooperation.
Iran, in contrast, has been cast as a permanent adversary. Its theocratic system is often cited as justification. The U.S., however, has long partnered with Islamist regimes elsewhere, including in Gulf Arab states. The real dividing line is not ideology but alignment.
Pakistan, for all its contradictions, has been a security partner. Iran has not.
Yet the selective enforcement of nuclear norms carries consequences. It undermines the credibility of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy. It signals that strategic utility can excuse almost anything.
Most dangerously, it distorts incentives. If Iran sees that compliance with international agreements leads to sanctions, while defiance — Pakistan-style — ultimately leads to acceptance, what lesson is it supposed to draw? Indeed, why should any state trust that nuclear restraint will be rewarded?
American policymakers often frame their Iran policy as a defense of global order. But order depends on consistency. When rules are applied selectively, they cease to be rules at all. They become instruments of convenience. And in a nuclearized world, that is profoundly risky.
Trump’s show of force has triggered the deepest global disruption in decades
A vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Oman, on April 12. The waterway, once a reliable artery of global commerce, is now a contested chokepoint, with lasting implications for how energy moves and power is exercised. Photo: Reuters
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran lasted just 40 days. Its consequences will last years.
What ended with a fragile ceasefire on April 8 has already become the most economically disruptive war in half a century. Not since the oil shocks of the 1970s has a conflict simultaneously ruptured energy supply, disrupted trade arteries, strained food systems and tightened global financial conditions.
What distinguishes this war is not just its scale, but its breadth: It hit multiple pillars of the global economy at once, and in ways that cannot be quickly reversed.
U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office promising to end “stupid wars.” Instead, he delivered one of the most strategically self-defeating conflicts. While U.S. and Israeli forces degraded Iran’s military capabilities, the war revealed a harsher truth: Overwhelming force cannot compel favorable outcomes against a resilient adversary capable of imposing systemic costs by widening the battlefield beyond its borders. The result was power without resolution.
Like the 1956 Suez Crisis that exposed the limits of British power, this war has prompted a growing question: Did Trump just engineer America’s own Suez moment?
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign quickly metastasized into the largest energy-supply disruption in history. Energy infrastructure across Iran and the Gulf was damaged or disabled. Supply routes fractured. And most critically, the Strait of Hormuz became effectively unusable.
Unlike past crises, there was no workaround. Oil and gas output fell sharply. Shipping insurance premiums in the Gulf surged more than fourfold.
Even after the ceasefire, a permanent risk premium has been embedded into global energy markets, as investors and shippers now assume that instability in the Gulf is no longer episodic but enduring.
In effect, Trump became the first leader in modern history to trigger a global energy crisis through direct military action.
For Asia, particularly India, Japan and South Korea, the shock has been severe. Along with China, these economies depended heavily on Gulf energy flows. But while Beijing has accelerated its pivot toward overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, Tokyo, Seoul and New Delhi remain structurally exposed, with no viable alternative to vulnerable sea lanes.
Because energy underpins every stage of modern production, the global shock does not stop at fuel. It is already cascading into the world food system.
Modern agriculture runs on energy. Natural gas is essential for fertilizer production; oil powers irrigation, transport and mechanization. When energy systems fracture, food systems follow.
The Gulf is a key supplier of fertilizers such as urea and ammonia. Disruptions sent prices soaring, just as the Northern Hemisphere entered its spring planting season. Reduced fertilizer use is now locked in for the 2026 harvest.
The consequences are unfolding in stages: first an input shock, then a production shortfall, and finally a consumption crisis marked by rising food prices.
By next year, analysts expect significant increases in the cost of grains, vegetable oils and meat. Corn — central to global feed systems — is particularly vulnerable, raising the prospect of a “protein shock.”
A sign displayed at a Thai gas station announces that diesel fuel has run out. Photo: AP
Government responses are compounding the problem. High oil prices have made biofuels more attractive, prompting countries to divert more crops into fuel production. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: Higher energy prices tighten food supply, pushing prices even higher.
The war also exposed a rarely acknowledged vulnerability: the Gulf’s heavy dependence on desalination.
After a desalination facility on Iran’s Qeshm island was struck, reprisal attacks on desalination plants in Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE triggered a cascading water-energy crisis. Desalination facilities are highly energy-intensive and indispensable. Damaging them forced governments to divert enormous resources simply to maintain potable water supplies.
In the world’s most freshwater-scarce region, water itself became a weapon of war.
While the war-triggered crisis is global, its burden is not.
In advanced economies, the crisis manifests as inflation and industrial strain. Households face higher costs, while central banks delay rate cuts. But these countries retain buffers.
The Global South does not. Many developing economies rely heavily on imported energy, particularly from the Gulf. Rising prices have ballooned import bills, weakened currencies and increased debt burdens, especially where liabilities are dollar-denominated.
Capital is flowing out of these economies into perceived safe havens, tightening financial conditions further. The result is a vicious cycle: higher costs, weaker currencies and shrinking fiscal space. For some countries, the risks are existential.
Compounding the crisis is a sharp drop in remittances. Millions of workers from developing countries are employed in Gulf economies. War-related disruptions have reduced remittance flows significantly. At the household level, families are losing financial lifelines just as food and energy prices surge. At the national level, governments are losing critical foreign exchange, undermining their ability to stabilize economies.
Globally, what makes this moment especially dangerous is not any single disruption, but their convergence.
Energy systems are fractured. Food systems are under strain. Financial flows are shifting. Trade routes are costlier and more uncertain. The Strait of Hormuz, once a reliable artery of global commerce, is now a contested chokepoint, with lasting implications for how energy moves and power is exercised.
The era of cheap energy, secure transit and frictionless globalization is giving way to something more fragmented, more politicized and more volatile. Even if the ceasefire holds, this will not quickly reverse.
Damaged energy infrastructure will take several years to rebuild. Confidence in Gulf transit has been eroded to the extent that the costs — in terms of prices, insurance and strategy — are now locked into the system.
The irony is stark. A war intended to assert American supremacy has instead imposed global costs that the world will continue to bear even after Trump leaves office.
Global growth will likely remain constrained. Energy markets will stay tight. Food systems will absorb delayed shocks. And U.S. credibility will continue to erode.
The war’s true legacy is not the 40 days it lasted but the systemic crisis it set in motion. And that bill is only beginning to come due.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
Children use a water fountain in Tehran in March. Iran does not depend on desalination to the extent the Gulf states do, but different factors contribute to its water scarcity. Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran crossed a dangerous threshold that few have yet fully grasped. It was not just one more Middle Eastern conflict defined by missiles, drones, bunker-busting bombs and cyberwarfare. It marked the normalization of something far more insidious: the deliberate targeting of water facilities.
Water itself became a weapon of war in a region already defined by extreme scarcity of the world’s most vital resource.
This weaponization was not incidental: it was deliberate, reciprocal and escalating, with implications far beyond the Persian Gulf.
The Middle East is the most water-stressed region in the world, with over 80 per cent of its population living under conditions of extreme scarcity.
Within this region, the Persian Gulf stands out for its acute water scarcity, with per capita renewable freshwater availability falling well below the “absolute” scarcity threshold of 500 cubic meters per year in most countries. Contrast that with between 80,000 and 100,000 cubic meters per capita availability in Canada, which, along with Brazil and Russia, ranks among the richest in freshwater resources.
The Gulf Arab countries and Iran’s coastal areas and islands rely heavily on desalination rather than renewable internal water resources, which are less than 100 cubic meters per capita in all the Gulf sheikhdoms other than Oman.
In such an environment, water infrastructure is not just civilian; it is existential.
What the war revealed was a profound transformation in how such infrastructure is perceived. Desalination plants, water treatment systems and electrical grids that sustain them were no longer treated as protected civilian assets; they became targets.
Early in the conflict, damage to desalination facilities in Kuwait and the UAE was dismissed as collateral — an unfortunate byproduct of strikes on nearby military installations. That illusion did not last. Within days, the logic of retaliation took hold.
On March 7, a desalination plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island was struck, cutting off water to dozens of villages. The very next day, an Iranian drone targeted a desalination facility in Bahrain, disrupting supply to civilian areas.
A taboo had been broken. Water-for-water retaliation had entered the battlefield.
The anatomy of vulnerability
Nowhere is such escalation more dangerous than in the energy-rich Gulf Arab nations. These petro-states are, more precisely, “saltwater kingdoms,” surviving by converting seawater into potable water through desalination.
Yet this highly energy-intensive technological solution, long seen as a triumph of engineering over geography, revealed itself as a strategic weakness in wartime because of the plants’ vulnerability to attack.
In some Gulf states, up to 90 per cent of drinking water comes from desalination. These supplies are produced by a small number of massive, highly visible coastal facilities that are nearly impossible to fully defend.
Most states maintain only three to seven days of potable water reserves, although some are now working to expand them. A successful strike on a major plant could leave millions without water in less than a week.
In other words, modern Gulf cities — from Dubaito Doha toRiyadh — are never more than a few days away from a total water blackout.
Iran, for its part, faces a different but equally severe water crisis. It is not dependent on desalination to the same degree, but population and economic growth and resource mismanagement have pushed it into virtual “water bankruptcy,” with consumption exceeding natural replenishment. Aquifers have been depleted, rivers diminished and ecosystems like Lake Urmia nearly disappeared.
Even before recent U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on critical infrastructure compounded these pressures, Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian had proposed relocating the capital to a wetter area, warning that Tehran’s deepening water crisis could render the city “uninhabitable.”
The infrastructure asymmetry between the Gulf states and Iran creates a volatile dynamic. The Gulf states are technologically resilient but physically exposed. Iran is structurally fragile but less vulnerable to single-point infrastructural collapse.
War turned these vulnerabilities into targets.
What distinguished this conflict was not simply that water infrastructure was hit, but that it was targeted as part of a deliberate strategy.
The logic is straightforward: modern societies depend on tightly integrated systems — electricity powers water infrastructure, and water sustains public health, industry, agriculture and social stability. Disrupt one node, and the entire system begins to unravel.
The U.S. understands this well. During the 1991 Gulf War, it systematically destroyed Iraq’s electrical grid, disabling water purification systems. The consequences were catastrophic: contaminated water supplies, collapsing hospitals, surging waterborne diseases and rising child mortality.
A subsequent study analyzing declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents concluded that the destruction of electricity and water-treatment infrastructure effectively functioned as a “biological weapon in slow motion.” One cited DIA document, “Iraq’s Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” detailed how sanctions combined with electrical-grid destruction would produce “incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.”
In the Iran war, that logic — using electricity and water systems as instruments against civilian populations — was being reapplied.
Threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to destroy Iran’s electricity and desalination plants and broader energy infrastructure underscored how deeply that approach was embedded in thinking. Iran’s response was to mirror that logic in its own retaliatory approach.
Civilian lifelines were recast as instruments of coercion. The result was an emerging doctrine of “hydro-warfare,” one that threatened to intensify an already acute regional water crisis.
There was also an “invisible front” in this hydro-warfare: cyberattacks.
The war began with one of the largest cyberattacks in history, disrupting Iran’s digital infrastructure and crippling the automated systems that manage water distribution. A prolonged near-total internet blackout followed. In response, Iranian-linked cyber groups targeted industrial control systems associated with water and wastewater facilities across the region.
Such attacks aimed not to destroy infrastructure physically, but to manipulate its “digital brain” — to disrupt flow, degrade supply or trigger system-wide failures.
Unlike conventional strikes, cyber operations offer deniability and scalability. They blur the line between war and sabotage, making attribution difficult and escalation harder to control.
But their effects are no less real. A malfunctioning water system can be as devastating as a bombed one.
The collapse of legal restraints
International humanitarian law is unequivocal. The Geneva Conventions, reinforced by Additional Protocol I, explicitly prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival — water facilities foremost among them.
Yet the Iran war suggests that these norms are rapidly eroding. Mr. Trump, while mocking international law, threatened to return Iran to the Stone Age and destroy a “whole civilization.”
Each side accused the other of initiating the escalation. Each strike was framed as retaliation. Each violation became justification for the next.
This is how norms collapse, not through formal repudiation, but through gradual normalization.
Had this trajectory continued, the consequences would have extended far beyond this war. The targeting of water infrastructure risked becoming an accepted instrument of statecraft — a precedent waiting to be replicated elsewhere.
The humanitarian and environmental consequences of hydro-warfare are stark.
Water scarcity unleashes cascading impacts. Hospitals are among the first to fail. Sanitation systems collapse, increasing the risk of disease outbreaks. Industrial sectors, from petrochemicals to data centers, grind to a halt, amplifying economic disruption.
The environmental risks are no less grave. Damage to desalination plants can release toxic chemicals into the Persian Gulf, while disruptions to brine discharge systems can create localized ecological “dead zones.” In a narrow, semi-enclosed body of water already under stress, such contamination could have long-term consequences for marine life — and for the seawater on which desalination depends.
Hydro-warfare also carries profound political implications. In the Gulf monarchies, state legitimacy rests on an implicit social contract: political acquiescence in exchange for stability and provision. Water is central to that bargain. If governments cannot guarantee basic supply — even under the umbrella of U.S. security protection — that contract begins to fray.
Iran appeared acutely aware of this dynamic. By targeting Gulf infrastructure, it sought not only to retaliate against U.S. and Israeli actions, but to drive a wedge between Gulf Arab states, which all host American military bases, and their Western patrons.
In short, the weaponization of water is self-destructive, even for those who imagine they gain short‑term leverage. It degrades the shared ecological foundation on which all communities depend.
Normalizing the unthinkable
What made the Iran war particularly dangerous was the convergence of three forces: deepening water stress, technological dependence and geopolitical confrontation.
Rising temperatures and erratic rainfall are intensifying water scarcity across the Middle East. At the same time, technological solutions like desalination have created new forms of dependency — systems that are efficient, even if costly, but fragile, centralized and exposed. War exploits that fragility.
The Iran conflict demonstrated how quickly these systems can be weaponized — and how difficult they are to restore once broken.
The targeting of water infrastructure marks a profound shift in warfare, extending conflict from the battlefield into the biological core of civilian life. What is at stake is not just the legality of certain tactics, but the survival of a foundational principle: that even in war, some things remain off-limits. That principle is no longer under strain; it is being dismantled.
If water can be weaponized with impunity, the distinction between combatant and civilian collapses. War ceases to be a contest between militaries and becomes an assault on the conditions of life itself.
TheUnited States and Israel may see these tactics as instruments of coercion, and Iran as tools of deterrence and retaliation. But all sides have participated in a dangerous experiment whose consequences will outlast the war.
The Middle East has long been a region defined by the politics of oil. It may now be entering an era shaped by the geopolitics of water. And unlike oil, water has no substitute. It is irreplaceable.
Brahma Chellaney is the author of two award-winning books on water: Water: Asia’s New Battleground and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.
US President Donald Trump returned to office last year vowing to end “stupid wars.” Instead, he has delivered one of the most strategically self-defeating wars in modern American history. His war against Iran has not only failed but backfired on every front.
It has weakened American power, strengthened the very clerical regime it sought to crush and handed geostrategic advantages to US challenger China, all while eroding America’s international credibility and standing.
The Iran war has fundamentally altered global perceptions of American power. While the US and Israel succeeded in decapitating Iran’s leadership and degrading its military capabilities, the price was strategic overextension that has left the US looking diminished in the eyes of adversaries and, increasingly, among partners and non-aligned states.
At its core, the war exposed an uncomfortable reality: tactical success does not guarantee strategic victory. The US and Israel retain overwhelming military superiority, yet the conflict revealed clear limits on how that power can be converted into durable strategic outcomes when faced with sustained asymmetric resistance.
Unable to compete conventionally, Iran turned to low-cost but disruptive tools: drones, missiles, naval mines and proxy attacks across the region. By persistently threatening shipping and energy flows, Tehran demonstrated how disruption, rather than dominance, can shape the battlefield. Most consequentially, it leveraged its geographic advantage over the Strait of Hormuz, effectively choking one of the world’s most critical energy arteries.
In doing so, Iran ensured that even a tactically successful campaign against it imposed significant strategic costs on the US and its allies—destabilizing global energy markets, straining alliances and laying bare the limits of American coercive power.
Those alliance strains were not incidental. The war opened visible rifts between the US and its Western and regional partners over how to deal with Tehran, raising broader questions about Washington’s strategic judgment and reliability.
At the same time, the war diverted American military resources, political focus and logistical capacity away from the Indo-Pacific, undercutting Washington’s ability to sustain support for Ukraine and maintain credible deterrence against China, particularly in the Taiwan Strait.
As Joe Kent, who resigned as the top US counterterrorism official in protest against Trump’s Iran war, has put it, “Like all of our previous interventions in the Middle East, we are worse off after the war (not that this is over) than we were before. Wars in the Middle East are a series of lose-lose scenarios for us, the sooner we learn that, the better off we’ll be.”
Ultimately, the war underscored a deeper constraint: even overwhelming power cannot compel favourable outcomes against an adversary willing and able to impose retaliatory costs. What emerged was a display of raw power without resolution, dominance without control and escalation without a credible endgame.
Gamble Fails
The central illusion behind the war was never about capability. As the world’s foremost military power, the US could always devastate Iran from the air. That was never in doubt. The real question was whether unrelenting bombing raids could compel surrender from a state ideologically conditioned, strategically prepared for asymmetric conflict and historically accustomed to absorbing punishment.
Just eight months earlier, Iran had withstood devastating Israeli airstrikes on a wide range of targets as well as the U.S. destruction of its nuclear facilities with bunker-busting bombs.
Yet, Trump bet that joint US and Israeli force, layered on top of suffocating sanctions, would finally break Iran’s will. That bet has failed spectacularly. The US-Israeli war only hardened Iran’s resolve, showcasing its remarkable resilience in the face of ruthless attacks.
This was not a war of necessity. It was a war of choice, launched without any provocation, yet dressed up as deterrence. What began as “maximum pressure”—economic strangulation, covert operations and targeted killings—mutated into open conflict once the US and Israel abandoned the shadows for direct, sustained airstrikes.
Two grave miscalculations defined the campaign. The Trump administration badly underestimated Iran’s capacity to absorb devastating strikes and retaliate asymmetrically across a wide geography. At the same time, it grossly overestimated America’s ability to control escalation and insulate the global economy from blowback.
As the war continued without any sign of weakening Iran’s determination to fight back, Trump’s frustration and even desperation became increasingly apparent. This was apparent not just from Trump’s incendiary language but from his public threats to commit war crimes—from returning Iran to the Stone Age and destroying a “whole civilization.”
International humanitarian law is unequivocal. The Geneva Conventions, reinforced by Additional Protocol I, explicitly prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of civilian populations.
Yet, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked international law by targeting civilian infrastructure—from health and educational institutions to railway network and bridges—in an apparent effort to “break the will” of the civilian population in supporting the regime in Tehran. Even a desalination plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island was bombed on March 7, which led to a tit-for-tat exchange targeting water facilities.
The World Health Organization expressed “grave concern” over what it describes as a pattern of attacks on health infrastructure. At least 20 health institutions were confirmed as targeted or damaged, including the historic biomedical and vaccine research centre, Pasteur Institute of Iran, Shahid Mutahhari Hospital and Psychiatric Hospital, all in Tehran. Strikes also hit plants producing specialized medications for multiple sclerosis and cancer.
The bombing of premier institutions like the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the Iran University of Science and Technology, also in Tehran, and the Isfahan University of Technology appeared to be aimed at impeding the country’s scientific progress and R&D capacity.
Despite operating under heavy Western sanctions—and with its scientists often excluded from international collaborations—Iran has remained a scientific powerhouse, consistently punching above its weight in publication density and in high-tech niches such as nanotechnology, advanced physics and medical research. In terms of scientific output, Iran has often ranked first in the Islamic world. It is especially prominent in nanotechnology, where it frequently ranks among the top countries globally by volume.
Ultimately, despite Washington escalating US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s civilian and economic infrastructure, it was Trump who blinked first.
The White House effectively ghostwrote Pakistan’s public appeal for cessation of hostilities so that Trump’s climbdown would look less like a retreat and more like theatre. By leaning on his “favourite field marshal”—Pakistan’s de facto ruler—and the latter’s handpicked prime minister to “beg” for peace, Trump recast his ceasefire as magnanimity and statesmanship. In substance, it reflected a familiar reality, one that has earned him the acronym TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).
America Emerges Weaker
Trump’s ceasefire took effect without regime change, without meaningful Iranian concessions and without enduring strategic gain for either of the two parties that initiated the conflict. Instead, the war entrenched Iran’s most hardline factions who gained ascendancy after serial targeted assassinations. The leadership that emerged from the US-Israeli decapitation strikes is more defiant and more uncompromising—politically strengthened by the very pressure meant to break it.
In effect, Trump rescued the theocratic Iranian regime from its own internal fragilities after launching a war to topple it. More significantly, instead of strengthening the US, the war weakened it.
Nowhere is this reversal more visible than in the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war, this critical artery of global energy flowed freely. After launching the war, Trump demanded “unconditional” freedom of navigation as a condition for de-escalation.
What is emerging instead is something very different: regulated passage under tacit Iranian oversight. Commercial shipping now moves through arrangements that implicitly acknowledge Tehran’s gatekeeping role.
Iran is determined to position itself to extract leverage—through inspections, coordination mechanisms and potentially transit fees—echoing Egypt’s stewardship of the Suez Canal.
A chokepoint once kept open by deterrence has been transformed into an instrument of Iranian leverage, thanks to Trump’s war. That shift will outlast Trump, haunting global shipping and leading energy importers like India, Japan and South Korea.
More broadly, the war demolished a longstanding assumption in American strategy: that the US can wage large-scale wars without suffering significant and sustained retaliation.
For more than seven decades after the Korean War (1950-53), the American way of war relied on an effective targeting logic: strike adversaries that lack the capacity to impose serious costs on America’s homeland or its forward military bases. From Vietnam to Iraq, the US suffered casualties and reputational damage, but not sustained, systematic retaliation against its critical regional infrastructure. Nor did its regional allies hosting American bases become targets of reprisal attacks.
Iran did not attempt to match US power symmetrically, platform for platform. It didn’t need to. It pursued disruption instead.
Over years of harsh US-led sanctions, Tehran invested in low-cost, high-impact systems that could be produced and launched in large numbers without a modern air force. Their purpose was not to win conventional battles but to impose costs in order to deny the US the ability to operate against Tehran freely and cheaply in Iran’s immediate neighbourhood
During the war, Iranian strikes rendered many of the 13 major US bases across the Persian Gulf region inoperable, inflicting significant damage despite advanced American air defences.
Swarms of inexpensive drones and missiles overwhelmed expensive interceptor systems, exposing the fundamental vulnerability of a US war model built on high-value, high-cost assets. Washington was forced to expend vastly more to defend against weapons that cost a fraction to build.
The asymmetry was not just tactical; it was economic. The US reportedly spent close to a billion dollars a day sustaining operations, depleting precision munitions and missile defence inventories at a pace that will take several years to fully rebuild. Iran, by contrast, relied on systems that were cheaper, scalable and easier to replenish.
This is the new logic of warfare: the advantage no longer lies solely with the technologically superior, but with the strategically adaptive.
It is a lesson that India, too, must learn, given its continued emphasis on imports of big-ticket weapon systems. India has consistently ranked among the world’s top importers of weapons, procuring $51.8 billion worth of arms from overseas in the period 2008-2025, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data.
The Iran war showed that in an era of asymmetric warfare, even a country that looks weak on paper can impose intolerable costs if it is determined, prepared and unconcerned about conventional victory. The US can still inflict immense devastation. What it can no longer do is dominate the escalation ladder or control the consequences.
The damage from Trump’s Iran adventure extends beyond the battlefield—into diplomacy, where credibility is everything.
Under Trump, US negotiations became instruments of deception rather than resolution. Talks were used as cover for military attack.
In June 2025, US-facilitated nuclear talks in Oman coincided with—and arguably covered for—Israel’s devastating aerial assaults on Iran, catching Tehran by complete surprise. And on February 28, 2026, just as renewed American negotiations with Tehran were reportedly making significant progress, with Oman acting as the key mediator, the US and Israel launched joint strikes aimed at “bombing Iran into submission.”
This pattern of using talks as camouflage for military action has not gone unnoticed abroad.
From Russia and China to the Global South, American diplomacy is now viewed with deep scepticism, if not outright suspicion. The perception has taken hold that negotiations are not pathways to resolving differences or disputes, but preludes to pressure—or worse, attack.
The record of bad-faith negotiations has led many in Moscow, as the Washington Post reported, to question the sincerity of the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts on the Ukraine conflict, with Russian officials now viewing US diplomacy through the lens of “dual-track” manipulation—offering talks while enabling or orchestrating escalation.
When a superpower treats diplomacy as strategic deception, it corrodes its own practical leverage. Once trust is broken, it is extraordinarily difficult to restore it. Why should adversaries place faith in US-led talks if the negotiating table doubles as a targeting mechanism?
At the same time, the Iran war exposed the erosion of US alliances.
Lacking a clear legal basis and broad international backing, the war left Washington geopolitically isolated. NATO allies distanced themselves. Key partners in Asia withheld support. Even states traditionally aligned with the US expressed unease.
Trump’s public berating of allies, especially those in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, only deepened the divide. Meanwhile, Gulf Arab states have been left to absorb both physical damage and reputational costs, having served as staging grounds and targets in a war that their own populations viewed as a disaster.
The net effect is a US more isolated, less trusted and more resented—not only in the Middle East but across much of the world. This could reduce Washington’s ability to build coalitions even when its cause is just.
Enduring Costs
The most economically disruptive war in decades has saddled the world with significant and enduring costs. It will take several years to fully repair the damage to energy infrastructure in the Gulf sheikhdoms and Iran.
If there is a clear geopolitical beneficiary of this debacle, it is China. Beijing did not need to act. It simply needed to wait.
With the US deeply entangled in Middle Eastern conflict yet again, China has gained space for its expansionism in the Indo-Pacific. While the US expended resources on a war with no clear gains, China conserved its strength while stepping up coercive pressure on Taiwan.
Following the Iran war, China’s push to pivot its energy imports away from vulnerable sea lanes toward overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, reducing reliance on chokepoints like Hormuz, has gained new urgency and validation.
Trump did not intend to advance China’s strategic position. But in practice, that is precisely what he has done, including helping expand yuan-denominated energy trade.
Even more troubling are the war’s implications for international norms. Strikes on water installations, universities, research institutions, health infrastructure and other civilian facilities have raised serious legal and ethical questions. Such targets fall under protected civilian categories in international humanitarian law.
When a superpower disregards the rules it helped craft in the past, it weakens the entire international system those rules sustain.
Finally, the war may have reshaped Iran’s long-term strategic calculus in the most dangerous way possible. A country that has endured repeated large-scale attacks is unlikely to conclude that restraint ensures security. Quite the opposite.
The lesson it will draw is that, unlike nuclear-armed states, non-nuclear states are vulnerable to external aggression. That logic, reinforced by experience, strengthens the case within Iran for pursuing a nuclear deterrent.
If a state already proficient in asymmetric warfare acquires a nuclear shield, it will mean the emergence of another Pakistan. But unlike Iran, which Washington has long targeted, the US, along with China, aided Pakistan’s covert nuclear-weapons programme. Both the US and China have also shielded Pakistan’s export of terrorism to its neighbours.
The ultimate paradox of Trump’s war is that in attempting to weaken Iran, it may have made it more dangerous.
The war’s legacy will not be the battlefield gains it delivered to the US and its partner Israel, but the structural damage it inflicted—on alliances and partnerships, on global energy and economic interests, and on the credibility of American power itself.
A sign displayed at a Thai gas station announces that diesel fuel has run out. Photo: AP
Stagecraft and Statecraft 
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