How Many Faultlines Will the Iran War Leave Behind?

Like all wars, the war on Iran will also come to an end, sooner rather than later. How will that world be different from the one before it? Since crystal balls haven’t started working even with the advent of AI, we can only make intelligent guesses.

One thing that is dead certain is that Israel will emerge the undisputed regional hegemon, leaving much discomfort in the Arab capitals of the region, who, while opposed to Iran, took comfort in its role as a regional counterweight to Israel. That counterweight could come back, but not for a decade, at the least.

If the war ends with Iran more or less intact as a nation, so would other regional powers. However, if Iran is left fractured, the chaos would engulf the entire region and its incumbent regimes. Most likely, Trump would declare victory and get out before things reach the point of irremediable chaos of the kind that rules Libya.

However the war ends, Palestinians face a grim prospect. The ultra-Orthodox Jews and Christian fundamentalists, who accept the Old Testament of the Bible as the literal truth, will seek to obliterate the division of the region into Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to restore Biblical Canaan — or Eretz Yisrael, in the Hebrew Bible — and claim the region for God’s chosen people, the Israelites.

Israeli settlers would venture forth boldly to claim more parts of the West Bank, with Israeli soldiers enforcing the law only against Palestinians who try to resist. Palestinians would be forced to migrate to Jordan, Egypt and other Arab nations, albeit with vengeance in their hearts and the promise to return. This will have its own security implications, states everywhere augmenting their capacity, legal and technological, to surveil their people.

The US would support the move, encouraged by America’s own history of pushing out the native population to so-called Indian Reservations — those of them that survived the massacres dubbed the Indian Wars, disease, and the virtual extinction of the bison, their traditional source of protein. The UN, the Europeans and most of the rest of the world would oppose the squelching of the Palestinian dream, but with thundering rhetoric and pounding of the desk. Israel already knows how scary that is.

Trump had threatened dire consequences for NATO, if his allies did not step in to save his skin over the Strait of Hormuz, so what if he did not consult them before he started the war. The allies have chosen, so far, to let Trump fume and fret his way out of the chokepoint on his own. Even if Trump does not formally dismantle NATO to please MAGA voters, who hate America’s external entanglements, ahead of the November mid-term elections, Europe is already on course to develop its own security posture distinct from America’s. In that, China would figure not as a hostile power against which the West must prepare.

Increased concerns over energy security would facilitate China’s transition, in Europe’s imagination, from a potential source of instability to a potential source of stability. Every rational policymaker in every national capital would start thinking of ways to reduce dependence on imported hydrocarbons and increase the share of electricity in their economy’s energy mix. China is a one-stop source for the means of electrification: renewable power gear, nuclear reactors, electric mobility, battery electric storage systems unavoidable for stabilising a grid that feeds off a lot of intermittent renewable power, and the power electronics needed to keep burps under control when such feeding is underway.

Iran will pursue nuclear weapons with greater determination and greater secrecy. Kim Jong Un of North Korea can throw whatever tantrum he wants into the Sea of Japan, and the US would not even say tut-tut. The lesson will not be wasted on Iran — or Germany, Turkey, Japan or South Korea. This is so, regardless of whether the Ayatollah regime survives or is replaced by a democratic one. Ordinary Iranians might despise their oppressive regime but cherish their history, not just ancient glory but also being the only bit of the developing world not to have been formally colonised.

The war on Iran will accelerate the creation of a truly multipolar world order. The US and China, of course, will be the dominant focuses of power, with Russia, Europe, and Japan sharing the high table, and a bunch of others, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa and India among them, jostling for a place. If Europe has any sense, it would absorb Russia into its mainstream, shedding US-inspired hostility and putting in its place the shared history of defeating Nazi Germany, the shared cultural heritage of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, and the Bolshoi Theatre.

What of Ukraine? MAGA or no MAGA, the US has no appetite to keep funding a war that drags on to the last Ukrainian. Neither has a Europe committed to raising its own defence spending and strengthening its energy security. Ukraine will have to surrender the Don Bas region, through which runs Moscow’s land access to Russia’s only warm-water naval base, located at Sevastopol, in Crimea, apart from Crimea itself.

Crimea had been a part of Russia, right from 988 AD, when the pagan Grand Prince of Kievan Rus, Vladimir, was baptised into Christianity, at a location near modern Sevastopol, through the Crimean War, in which Florence Nightingale earned her nursing spurs and deployed data visualisation ingenuity to demonstrate the difference to mortality rates good nursing and clean bandages make, right up to 1954, when Khrushchev, in a fit of thoughtlessness, transferred the peninsula to Ukraine, never imagining that Ukraine would ever be outside Moscow’s control.

Where does this leave India? India has all of what it takes to become a great power: a huge demographic that can be educated to advanced levels in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, the arts of the imagination and the crafts of translating imagination into realised beauty and other uses. It invested early in developing technical skills and creating organisations to materialise strategic capability.

India has diverse, even if related, civilisational experiences condensed into multiple languages and associated histories, a rich intellectual and aesthetic tradition, and a unique religious ideology that sees no deviance in diversity of faiths, seeing them as so many different paths to the same spiritual destination.

But India has politics that divides the people and fritters away their potential. It has a social structure of hierarchy and a culture of treating knowledge as something that is finite, pre-existing and meant to be mastered by a chosen few. That inhibits true freedom of inquiry, reinforced by a ruling ideology that marvels at ancient glory, rather than at the future of possibilities that can be built.

India’s captains of industry demonstrate their true ambition by spending such vast sums on research and development that India’s collective R&D outlay is 0.65% of GDP, comparable to Gambia’s, less than half that of the United Arab Emirates’. China, the US, South Korea, Japan and Israel are in the Champions’ League, while India plays in the small-town league, while pretending to fly high in the Pushpak.

Of course, things can change. India is like Schrodinger’s Cat, not dead or alive, but dead and alive at the same time, the density of either probability in continuous flux.