History repeating

The Western World awoke this morning to the somewhat expected news of American strikes against Iranian nuclear sites.(1) As widely anticipated across global media, and as forecast months or even years ago by people closer to the world's intelligence communities, the strikes represent a seismic shift in the international landscape of the early 21st century.(2) None of this, however, is without historical precedent, and the precedents generally do not look especially favorable for American ambitions around the globe.

First, a note on Iran. The past ten days, or, if we like, roughly the past ten months, represent a pretty dramatic turn of fate for the Persian state.

• Start on September 17, 2024, with the devastating attacks — via pager! — on the leadership of Lebanese Hezbollah, and both asymmetrical and conventional Israeli attacks on the Iranian proxy thereafter, pretty much eliminating a leading Iranian proxy in a matter of weeks.
• Continue on to December 2024, and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. Again, in just a few weeks, Iran's entire western flank unravelled.
• Cap this off with Israeli and now American strikes on Iran itself over the past ten days, revealing in stark terms just how poor the Islamic Republic really is, not only in terms of projecting power and influence across the Middle East, but even acting in its own self-defense.

This is not new territory for a Persian state. The defeats of the past ten months are probably about as embarrassing for the regime as the battles of Issus and Gaugamela against Alexander the Great, or facing Heraclius' Nineveh campaign in 627-628 CE. It's for good reason that some commentators have started to anticipate the end of the Islamic Republic, though Iran itself may yet survive — not least thanks to Western norms known as the Westphalian system that frown pretty harshly on the idea of disestablishing sovereign states.(3) What form a new Iran may take is open to speculation, though in the current security environment, Iranian revival under a figure like Nader Shah seems extremely unlikely. (4)

Meanwhile, the geopolitical consequences for the U.S. and the rest of the world might be just about as shocking, and as long-lasting. Recalling my earlier "Cardinal Directions" posts, we're now broadly into the last era of Cardinal Fleury's influence in France, trying to limit French involvement in what became the War of the Austrian Succession and hold onto whatever prestige and reputation France had as an honest broker. In that event, surely some French ministers and diplomats remained on the level, and indeed James Pritchard's excellent study of the d'Enville Expedition (5) illustrates a pretty high degree of French professionalism in general, even amid some catastrophically corrupt high-level politics. There is little doubt that the American military and diplomatic corps today remain highly professional and highly capable, though top level leadership, again, may be leading them down a rather tortuous path where thinking minds among them may prefer not to go.

Where are they going? Military adventurism. It didn't work out well for France in the 1740s, and with Chinese threats to Taiwan today, and plenty of other regimes around the world seeing whatever advantage they can find in their spheres of influence, the door is now more open than it has been in many decades to probe the limits of kinetic operations. Pandora's box may well be open as Iran's leaders have warned. Whether Iran itself does much in the short term remains to be seen; but American action in this instance also has consequences that are much larger in scope, global in scale, and could well shape international relations as a whole for decades to come.

--------------------------

1. https://www.axios.com/2025/06/21/us-strike-iran-nuclear-israel-trump

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TU6-k1rgPA

3. Andreas Osiander, ”Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth” International Organization 55:2 (Spring 2001): 251-287.

4. https://archive.org/details/b30529967/page/n3/mode/2up

5. James S. Pritchard, Anatomy of a Naval Disaster: The 1746 French Naval Expedition to North America. McGill-Queens, 1995.