The starting point for this war was not a missile strike or a tanker in flames. It was the quiet collapse of a diplomatic arrangement that had been containing Iran’s nuclear programme for years. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had placed strict limits on enrichment and allowed constant inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was not elegant and it was not permanent, but it kept the problem contained.
Wars often begin with the sort of clarity one normally associates with a pub argument at closing time. Then along came Donald Trump, who decided that if an agreement carried even the faint scent of multilateral diplomacy it clearly had to go. Out he walked and the sanctions went back on.
What is often forgotten is that the deal did not collapse overnight. Iran actually stayed within the limits for roughly a year while the Europeans tried to keep the arrangement alive and inspectors continued confirming compliance.
Eventually the logic of the thing asserted itself. If one side abandons the bargain and restores sanctions, the other side has little incentive to keep observing the restrictions. Iran gradually stepped away from the limits, enrichment crept upward again, and the carefully constructed framework began to unravel.
A few years later we find ourselves in the rather surreal position where the proposed solution to the nuclear problem is bombing the nuclear problem. The stated objectives of the war are, shall we say, a little untidy. Destroy Iran’s nuclear capability, weaken its regional influence, perhaps nudge the regime off the stage altogether.
It all sounds wonderfully decisive until one remembers a rather awkward historical detail. Bombs destroy buildings. They do not destroy physics. Once a country has the engineers, centrifuges and knowledge, smashing facilities merely resets the clock.
There is also the small matter that the same president now insisting Iran’s nuclear capability must be destroyed was proudly announcing only months ago that it had already been obliterated. One assumes the centrifuges must have been very sporting about the whole affair and rebuilt themselves out of sheer enthusiasm.
Israel’s position is more straightforward. From its perspective a nuclear Iran represents an existential threat. That view is understandable given the country’s size and history, though it does glide politely past the fact that Israel itself is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons while sitting outside the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The counter-argument is that nuclear weapons tend to produce deterrence rather than instant apocalypse. Iran’s leadership, unpleasant though it may be, has shown little appetite for national suicide, and nuclear weapons are not fired by one man pressing a red button but by chains of command who also have a strong interest in remaining alive.
Which means the war begins to look less like a decisive campaign and more like a contest of endurance. Iran has spent decades living under sanctions and pressure. Pain is something it has learned to absorb.
Western democracies, by contrast, have electorates who notice petrol prices and inflation with remarkable speed. With American midterms approaching, the political clock is already ticking.
Iran seems to understand this perfectly well and is pushing where it hurts. Energy routes, Gulf infrastructure, the plumbing of the global economy. Airports, ports, desalination plants. All technically infrastructure, all inconveniently connected to civilian life.
Markets twitch, oil prices climb, and politicians begin to sweat. In other words, Tehran is not trying to win the war on the battlefield. It is trying to win it in the petrol price displayed on American forecourts.
There is another layer to all this which commentators have not been shy about mentioning. War has a habit of arriving at politically convenient moments. For Benjamin Netanyahu, a prolonged national emergency inevitably pushes domestic legal and political troubles into the background.
For Trump, the calculation may have been rather different. Rally the country, demonstrate strength, and change the subject. The difficulty is that wars do not always cooperate with political scripts. Markets move, oil prices rise, and voters start asking awkward questions. What was intended as a show of strength can quickly turn into a rather public test of competence.
Europe has seen this story play out before. The Iraq war removed Saddam Hussein quickly enough. The difficulty came afterwards, when it turned out there was no real plan for what followed the invasion. The result was years of instability that nobody had particularly intended but everybody ended up living with. Iraq showed what happens when you start a war without a credible end state.
Then there is Gaza. That conflict did not collapse for lack of planning but for the opposite reason: a relentless military campaign whose civilian cost became politically and morally toxic across much of the world. Gaza shows what happens when the human cost overwhelms the political narrative. And now there are reports of a missile strike killing scores of schoolgirls. Lawyers will argue for years about targeting intelligence and proportionality. The public will remember only the image.
European governments remember both episodes rather clearly. Iraq was a coalition war in which several European states participated and then spent years dealing with the consequences of a conflict that had removed a regime without a credible plan for what came next. Gaza was different. Most European countries were not fighting there, but they still had to absorb the political and humanitarian fallout of a campaign whose civilian cost dominated international opinion.
Europe therefore looks at the situation and sees two wars. One in Ukraine, which directly concerns European security and the ambitions of Vladimir Putin. The other in the Middle East, which does not directly threaten Europe but does threaten energy prices, trade routes and political stability. Faced with that choice, European governments are quite sensibly focusing on the war that actually involves their continent.
There is also the awkward question of refugees, which tends to disappear from the discussion whenever people start talking about bombing Iran into the Stone Age. Iran has a population of more than ninety million. If the state fractures or infrastructure collapses, millions of civilians will not sit politely in the rubble waiting for geopolitics. They will move.
Most will move first to neighbouring countries, but history suggests that sooner or later some will move towards Europe. The same political movements that currently cheer for the bombing campaign will then rediscover, with great theatrical outrage, that wars in the Middle East have a habit of producing refugees. It is one of those irritating side effects that rarely appears in the speeches advocating the war in the first place.
At times the whole thing begins to resemble a piece of Dada. The Dada artists who emerged during the First World War believed the world had become so irrational that only absurdity could describe it. They responded with collages, nonsense manifestos and performances that deliberately rejected logic.
One begins to see their point. A war launched to destroy a nuclear programme that was previously declared destroyed. Strategic goals that cannot be achieved without escalation nobody wants. Politicians calling for Iran to be bombed into rubble while ignoring the refugees such rubble will inevitably produce. The whole enterprise starts to look less like strategy and more like geopolitical collage.
And Vladimir Putin must be watching with quiet satisfaction. Oil prices rise, Western attention drifts south, and the strategic spotlight moves away from Ukraine. One almost feels obliged to send Washington a thank-you note. From Moscow.
So here we are. A war justified by arguments that contradict each other, pursued with tools that cannot achieve the grander objectives being hinted at, greeted by reluctant allies, shaped by markets and elections, and quietly advantageous to Moscow. One suspects that somewhere in Tehran they have already worked this out. The real question is how long it takes Washington to do the same.
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