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8:27 am, March 1st, 2026 - 42 comments
Categories: Disarmament, Donald Trump, International, Iran, israel, Peace, uncategorized, war -
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Every time US President Trump has threatened a massive intervention in another country, military or otherwise, there has been a broad chorus of commentators and political leadership decrying that the US won’t achieve anything and will make matters worse.
President Trump has however faced zero consequences for all his military belligerence and has achieved most of what he has sought: threatening Europe with lowered military support, EU countries are rapidly re-arming. Threatening Mexico, Mexico has responded by attacking its own drug cartels. Threatening Venezuela or Cuba with regime change, there’s been no useful resistance. Not a single useful shot has been fired back against the United States military for all its recent irrational attacks against countries.
Trump has already ordered attacks on Iran, and together with Israel is attacking Iran again. Trump simply can’t understand why the Iranian regime isn’t cowing to him. Whether the United States is now best considered a rogue state, picking on another rogue state, isn’t particularly useful, when it’s just more words railing in the media against actual massive bombardment. Trump is once more getting away with it.
But I believe Iran is different. Iran will never cower to the United States nor to Israel. They will never cower in the first place because they hate the United States and Israel to their core to start with.
But there’s more to the toughness of Iran that the United States is failing to comprehend.
Iran has unmatched ideological coherence as a regime. Its 93 million people have very little to lose anymore. Iran’s shadow fleet of ships is keeping its oil exports going through the world including to China, Iraq, and Turkey. The IRG is the state-within-a-state that holds much of the economy together. Iran commands the largest military in the region and certainly has the capacity strike directly at United States military and allied interests in the Gulf. Iran has oil and has solid buyers for it. Iran has a military with some support from Russia to re-arm, since it has been isolated for so many years through embargoes. That’s how tough it is.
A massive United States bombing campaign into Iran will unite the population against the United States, rather than expand existing pockets of resistance against the regime. They should have figured that out from the Arab Spring failures. The United States proceeding with military action absent any credible justification or even a clear objective is a reckless gamble. It risks plunging the United States into another catastrophic MIddle East war that the United States would have a strong chance of losing, if its track record in Afghanistan and Syria and Yemen are relevant measures of previous recent military interventions. If the US hasn’t learnt from its failure in Afghanistan, it might like to consider Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.
Airpower alone won’t collapse the existing regime, and quick results were elusive the last time they tried it. That will increase the clamour from the Pentagon for even deeper military commitment, and major military interventions by the US have only worked in the last four decades if the country is as small as Nicaragua or Grenada. Iran is of a different order to that.
The more that Iran is attacked by the United States, the more Iranian resolve will grow. Punitive measures like this are unlikely to make Teheran concede to Trump in negotiations over matters it has consistently stressed are non-negotiable. Nor is there any evidence that strikes would lead to anything within Iran other than internal turmoil. There is instead a very high likelihood that the military bases of the United States within the Gulf will be attacked, which will send some of its 40,000 stationed troops in the area dead and flag-draped back home.
Further, this isn’t the Gulf War: no-one other than Israel is coming to support the United States on this.
The actual level of danger Iran poses to the United States is minimal. Teheran’s main threat to the United States is from the United States’ own counterproductive military presence in the region, dysfunctional regional partnerships, and other perverse policies within the Middle East. It would be better for the United States and for the entire Middle East if it entirely evacuated its massive military bases and enabled its soldiers to go home and live more useful lives.
The position the United States now finds itself in is of its own making. It is a crisis born of choice, not necessity. It won’t work. It will make most things worse. And it has a high risk of turning into another Afghanistan in which the United States was utterly humiliated.
Brilliant summation. Thank-you Ad.
Panama – Noriega. (Ortega is still ruling Nicaragua).
Syria and Yemen?
Syria? They only had a few troops there, but with the help of some locals, such as Kurds they finished off Islamic State in the NE.
It was the Russian and Hezbollah backed regime that fell in Damascus.
What American forces have gone into Yemen?
Surprisingly then that they needed to shoot thousands of protestors to end protests (and the country has one of the worst water shortages going around and currently really bad food price inflation).
The real Iran issue is its arming of Shia groups (militias)(Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen) as proxy fronts and otherwise its drone supply to Russia for use in Ukraine. Something Trump is quiet about because … well … .
That should have been negotiated as per ending of sanctions (and back to a nuclear deal).
I agree that escalation is dangerous. But your analysis overstates Iran’s strength, understates the regime’s fragility, and treats every reaction to US pressure as proof that “threats work.”
First, “no useful shots fired back” is already false. Iran has retaliated with missiles and drones. The question isn’t whether it can respond: it clearly can. The question is whether it can win a sustained conventional contest. There is very little evidence Iran can withstand prolonged US and Israeli air superiority once command-and-control nodes, air defences, and missile infrastructure are systematically degraded.
Second, “largest military in the region” is not the same as being able to contest advanced ISR, electronic warfare, and precision strike over time. Raw manpower does not substitute for survivable networks and layered air defence. Once ballistic inventories are attrited and C3 links disrupted, the fight shifts toward asymmetric retaliation and proxies. That’s dangerous, but it’s not conventional parity.
Third, the claim that Iran is uniquely cohesive and has “nothing to lose” ignores persistent domestic unrest, economic strain, water shortages, and infrastructure decay. A rally-around-the-flag effect is plausible in the short term. But nationalist consolidation under bombardment does not equal deep regime legitimacy. Structural grievances don’t disappear because of external pressure.
Where I think the real danger lies is regional, and it doesn’t depend on the United States being the central actor. Not everything has to be about Trump.
Because this is not a neat bilateral contest between Washington and Tehran. Iran has influence networks across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. US forces and partners are distributed across the Gulf; in Iraq, Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. If Iran retaliates asymmetrically against bases, energy infrastructure, or shipping lanes, the conflict widens immediately.
And that is where the simmering rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia becomes central. If Saudi territory or energy infrastructure is hit, Riyadh faces pressure to respond. If Bahrain or UAE facilities are struck, Gulf states are pulled further in. Once Saudi Arabia and Iran are trading blows, either directly or through proxies, this stops being a limited strike campaign and becomes a broader regional confrontation.
That scenario doesn’t require Iran to “defeat” the United States militarily. It requires escalation to move horizontally across the region rather than vertically between two capitals. Energy markets react. Maritime routes become contested. Regional militias activate. De-escalation becomes politically harder for every government involved.
Comparisons to Afghanistan are imperfect in detail. But the structural warning still applies: tactical military dominance does not automatically produce strategic control over political outcomes. Airpower can punish. It cannot design a stable successor order, nor can it easily contain the second- and third-order effects once regional actors are directly engaged.
So yes, escalation is reckless. But portraying Iran as an invulnerable ideological fortress that the US is doomed to lose against is just as misleading as pretending this is a low-risk operation.
The more realistic risk is this: the US can inflict enormous damage; Iran can impose meaningful regional costs; and a widening confrontation: particularly one that collapses the uneasy balance between Iran and Saudi Arabia, could drag the Gulf into a far more destabilising conflict than a contained US–Iran exchange ever would.
Very true. But is this current US administration actually capable of rational thought?
I wonder if this is the US adopting the model that Israel calls "mowing the grass." You can't get rid of the bad guys but every now and then you can carry out some strikes to degrade their military capacity back below the level that poses a risk ("Risk" here meaning risk to Iran's neighbours from its proxies – there's no way to remove the risk the Islamic Republic poses to its own citizens).
Looks like Mark Carney has made a quick calculation that maybe he was a bit hasty in his speech to the WEF re the end of American hegemony and the "rules based order"
He's all in with Trump on the attack on Iran.Who will ever want to enter into de escalation talks with the US when they typically strike in the middle of them?
He confused sharing an opinion about Iran, with saying something applicable to the US resort to use of military force.
The UK, France and Germany stated they preferred there to be a nuclear deal and for talks to continue.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/02/28/statement-prime-minister-carney-and-minister-anand-situation-middle-east
Link
https://www.policymagazine.ca/trumps-iran-strikes-and-carneys-new-world-order-tightrope/
For all the reasons statd above and many more, this war will go badly for the US and Israel. Withe the Hormuz Straight closed for the foreseeable and soldiers already returning in boxes to a US that already overwhellmingly rejects an Israel inspired war on Iran, US morale will crater.
Iran has lost their beloved leader who, almost alone, stood beside Palestinian suffering, and will not stand down until a heavy price has been paid. They showed in the previous 12 day war that they strengthen with the duration of the conflict and that it is they that will prevail. Already Israel and the US are critically low on interceptor missiles and Iran has the support of China and Russia, both of which will supply whatever is needed or asked for.
The West is on the brink of collapse as the world structures dissolve and reform in new ways.
While Im not mad about a new war starting, in fact Id prefer it hadnt, Im also not going to condemn this action against Iran
A preemptive strike against a country thats attacked you in the past is ok in my book
From the river to sea, Israel will smite its enemies
Sorry,I must have missed the bit where the Iranians murdered the US head of State
It seemed like the nuclear talks were culminating with Iran conceding more than they'd ever done before, so clearly it was the right thing to do, attacking Iran
As I say I'm not keen on new wars starting but Irans one of those countries where you need to sort it out every now and then
Hopefully it forces regime change but at the very least it'll put a dampner on their activities for a while
Sorry,I must have missed the bit where the Iranians murdered the US head of State
Why would they wish to do the US a favour.
Really? Even before they knew he was dead the Palestinians were already saying this about his beloved Iran:
Meanwhile China and Russia have been conspicuous in their sober, standard objections to the actions of Israel and the USA. This is probably driven by several factors, but the ease with which Israel/USA has chopped through all those Russian/Chinese air defence systems, both in this attack and last year, (together with doing the same in Venezuela) is likely one of them.
China also now being in the position the US was in the late 1980's, in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open for oil, is likely the major factor.
'The actual level of danger Iran poses to the United States is minimal.' 🙂
At least the Spanish PM has given a full throated condemnation of the attacks as a breach of international law.
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/3/1/spanish-prime-minister-condemns-war-on-iran-as-breach-of-international-law
I can only think this is sarcasm. Khamenei was an increasingly divisive figure in Iran – especially following the brutal repression of protest action by the IRG under his leadership and direction.
As well as the performative grief scenes in the capital, there have been reports of open rejoicing at the news of his death.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/1/iran-begins-40-day-mourning-after-khamenei-killed-in-us-israeli-attack
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera political analysis is also forecasting the collapse of the anti-Israel Iranian proxies in the Middle East – now politically isolated, and with their supply lines severed.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/2/hold-analysis-khameneis-killing-leaves-irans-axis-in-disarray
Surely there are other ayatollahs who can step into the breach and continue the "oppression".
It won't take long for a full refresh.
They've been preparing for this for years and had plenty of warning.
Suspect volunteers may be a little thinner on the ground – given Israel's apparent ability to identify locations, and assassinate leaders via missile strike.
You think there are volunteers in Iran?
At the senior level – absolutely. Anyone with the power base to gain elevation to Ayatollah status also has the power base to avoid it.
In normal times there would be extreme competition to replace Khamenei – right now, I suspect, there will be extreme competition to avoid replacing him.
Hmm. This will pass and new leaders will rise. As they have in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and more. There's 93 million people to rule before and after this.
Those who want power will jump over the rubble and the graves. That’s Trump’s calculus as well.
The question is whether they will be religious leaders (the Ayotollah regime) or secular (following some form of democracy).
Entirely different leaders.
I don't think that there is any intention that Iran cease existing as a country (which would, as you point out, be largely impossible).
But I suspect there is very strong desire for the religious dictatorship to become history.
So, any potential religious leaders volunteering to poke their heads up over the parapet to become the next Ayatollah, are likely to be targeted. While potential civilian leaders, volunteering to form a secular government, may not.
Problem: the IRGC constitutes a large, heavily armed organised crime group that controls a significant proportion of the Iranian ecoomy, has internal cohesion based on religious fanaticism and is committed to maintaining the Islamic Republic. I don't think any secular democrats are in with a chance.
Well, that has historically been true for all 'praetorian guard' style military groups.
Amazingly, none of them last forever.
Whether the result will be 'better' than the current Iranian regime is open to question. It seems unlikely that it could be worse.
The Ayatollah had approved 3 successors. Within the past year others were required to do the same for their jobs.
Personal designation does not appear to be the official process for appointing a replacement for Khamenei
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/1/who-could-succeed-ayatollah-ali-khamenei-to-lead-iran
Until that process is able to be concluded (somewhat difficult in an active state of war) – there is an interim council (also not a group designated by Khamenei)
[from the same article]
Whatever, one of the 3 named men will be selected.
The Three Names: While not officially published, reports indicated the list of three senior clerics included Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i (head of Iran’s judicial system), Alireza Arafi (member of the Guardian Council and head of seminaries), and Ali Asghar Hejazi (a key intelligence and political security figure in Khamenei’s inner circle).
And your source for this is?
Last year.
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202506218672
Unsurprisingly two of the said 3 are with the president as interim authority. The cleric who was his chief of staff, is the other one.
This link doesn’t name the people, either.
However two of the people you initially named – are people legally mandated to take interim control in the case of his death. It hardly appears like a secret personally anointed succession plan.
It confirms that he named 3 people as the options for succession last year.
Some coincidence that 2 of the 3 are now on the interim leadership group just announced.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly8gqj9r6go
Your quote doesn't appear in the linked article.
But it is on the face of it, nonsense. You can't both claim that Khomenei designated secret successors, and give the names of them!
It does and anyone else who checks will note it is a stand alone sentence in the news item and thus not hard to find.
So Luxon essentially defends the United States for an event that will slow the entire world economy and smash any sign of economic recovery that New Zealand had.
Luxon is defending an action that is completely against New Zealand's interests.
If the sharemarket roil really sets in there's also a chance that those in their late 50s who thought they could glide into a Kiwisaver-assisted retirement in their mid-60s could find they need to be back at work for another year.
But this is Luxon.
While I agree that the economic costs and consequences may be real – the competing reality is that nothing Luxon says or does can influence Trump (and other international decision-makers) in any way.
However, coming out strongly against Trump is likely to result in additional punitive measures being directed our way. Things like heightened tariffs…
Trump has repeatedly demonstrated a level of petty retaliation when he perceives that someone of 'lesser' status is calling him out. Yes, this is the behaviour of a bully. YNo, there is actually nothing that NZ can do about this.
Luxon and Peters will be well aware of this.
It's the reality of international politics.
Appeasing a bully state never works. Remember when we used to have principles?
Most countries that can are already rapidly de-risking investments and trade away from the United States. So should we, just as major funds have with Israel.
Like Australia we are well de-risked from the US by having a high and increasing proportion of our trade with East Asia.
We have to accept that the US of old is never coming back, and focus our trade and investment accordingly.
NZ has never had principles when our self-interest is concerned.
Lange handed over the Rainbow Warrior bombers to France in the face of economic pressure.
Multiple NZ governments have refrained from addressing China's appalling human rights record, and arguable genocide against the Uyghurs, in favour of retaining our trade relationship with them.
'De-risking' from the US, increases our 'risk' in East Asia (with some very problematic governments, there).
Not true.
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/speech-new-zealand-china-council [speech by Winston Peters, 3 May 2024]