A world without bearings

Trump, Netanyahu, Iran and the collapse of American deterrence

I. The architect of chaos

There is a logic to the apparent madness of the ayatollahs' regime. A cold logic, calculated with the precision of those who know they cannot afford mistakes, because in the Middle East, mistakes are paid for with a state's survival. Iran is not a conventional power. It cannot match Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal. It cannot challenge American military projection in open confrontation. It has known this for decades. And for decades it has built its answer accordingly: not a strong state, but a network of weak states dependent on Tehran; not regular armies, but proxies, militias, movements, paramilitary organisations scattered from Lebanon to Yemen, from Iraq to Gaza.

The theorists of this doctrine call it "forward defense": fight the enemy far from your own borders, grind it down across multiple fronts, make the cost of a direct strike unsustainable. If Tel Aviv moves against Tehran, Hezbollah launches three thousand rockets at Haifa. If Washington threatens, Iraqi militias close American bases in Iraq. If a shipping lane needs protection, the Houthis can make it unusable. The principle is simple in form and devastating in effect: the cost of war against Iran must always exceed the expected benefit.

For nearly thirty years, this strategy worked. Hezbollah became a state within the Lebanese state, complete with hospitals, schools, courts, and a military arsenal superior to Beirut's regular army. In 2006 it held off the IDF for thirty-three days, a trauma Israel never fully processed. The Iraqi militias, after 2003, hollowed out Baghdad's sovereignty and turned Iraq from a regional adversary into a logistical corridor to the Mediterranean. Tehran's dream, an unbroken axis from the Iranian capital to Beirut, running through Baghdad and Damascus, had become geographical reality.

Then came October 7, 2023. And with it, the bitterest paradox of recent history: Hamas's attack, the most audacious ever launched against Israel, triggered a response that dismantled in eighteen months what Iran had spent three decades building. Hezbollah decimated, Nasrallah eliminated, its command chains shattered. Hamas in ruins in Gaza. Assad fallen in Damascus, the Syrian corridor lost. And for the first time in history, Israeli missiles struck Iranian territory: Tehran's air defence systems, so long mythologised, turned out to be as fragile as paper.

The ayatollahs' regime is today more vulnerable than it was a decade ago. The deterrence architecture is in ruins. The only remaining lever is the nuclear programme, what the West fears most, and what Tehran uses as its last bargaining chip. Meanwhile, the domestic economy is suffocating: inflation above forty percent, devastating sanctions, a population that no longer identifies with the Palestinian cause and sees the billions spent on proxies as money stolen from its own children. The network strategy held as long as the nodes held. Now the nodes have snapped, and the spider is left alone at the centre of a fraying web.

II. The willing hostage

Benjamin Netanyahu has been under criminal indictment since 2020. Corruption, fraud, breach of trust: charges that in any consolidated democracy would have already ended a politician's career. But Israel is not just any democracy, and October 7 transformed what might have been his end into a new and macabre opportunity for survival. A state of war suspends everything: internal debate, investigations, opposition pressure, coalition crisis. As long as the guns are firing, the prime minister is indispensable.

Netanyahu's coalition depends on Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two ministers whose worldview admits no compromise: no Palestinian state, no ceasefire that is not a total surrender by Hamas, no return of occupied land. They are the real operational constraint on Israeli policy since October 7. And they are clear: the day a lasting agreement is signed, the day the war truly ends, the coalition falls and Netanyahu faces trial without a shield. The war, then, is not only an instrument of national security. It is a personal insurance policy.

This produces structurally impossible military objectives. "Eliminating Hamas" does not mean eliminating an army. It means eliminating an idea, a social network, a form of political organisation rooted in two million people living in one of the most densely populated territories on earth. It cannot be done with bombs. Its military structure can be decimated, and the IDF has done so with brutal efficiency, but every civilian casualty produces new fighters, every pile of rubble becomes recruitment material for the next generation. Gaza, after eighteen months of war, is not safer. It is simply destroyed.

The Palestinian civilian death toll has already exceeded any threshold of acceptability for most of the world's public opinion. Governments traditionally sympathetic to Israel, from Spain to Ireland, from Belgium to Norway, have recognised Palestinian statehood. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. Israel has found itself more diplomatically isolated than at any point since the 1973 war. And Netanyahu has achieved exactly what he wanted: the war continues, the trial is suspended, he remains in power.

III. The deal president

Donald Trump returned to the White House convinced he could solve the Middle East within a few months. The same confidence, the same transactional vision that in his first term produced the Abraham Accords, a normalisation between Israel and several Gulf states, celebrated as historic, built by ignoring the Palestinian variable entirely, as if the region's most explosive issue could simply be bypassed with a trade agreement. The illusion of the deal: that every problem has a price, and that the right price resolves everything.

The reasons for American entanglement in this quagmire are multiple and overlap in ways that resist linear analysis. There is the evangelical voter base: American Christian Zionists are a structural component of the Republican vote, and for them Jerusalem and Israel are not geopolitical questions, they are theology, eschatology, biblical prophecy waiting to be fulfilled. There is the documented network of personal and financial ties, interwoven with the Gulf investor world. And there is the negotiator's instinct: Trump genuinely believes he can do what no other president has managed, that he can close the deal through force of personality alone.

The most striking product of this vision was what might be called the "Gaza board proposal": empty the Strip of its population, transfer Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan, and turn the territory into a kind of American-managed Mediterranean resort. An idea so far removed from any geopolitical, historical, or demographic reality that it seemed to have come from a pitch for a reality television show rather than a National Security Council meeting. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, regional allies Washington considers indispensable, rejected it with a unanimity that made the rebuff all the more embarrassing.

The United States finds itself today in a deeply compromised Middle Eastern position: no real leverage over Netanyahu, no credible Palestinian interlocutor, no strategy beyond the short term. The diplomatic failure is real, and may prove the most costly in terms of American regional credibility since the catastrophic mistakes of 2003 in Iraq.

IV. The broken compass

The Middle East is not the only theatre where American foreign policy appears directionless. On China, Trump has raised tariffs and lowered them in sequences that have disoriented even his own industrial supporters. The stated objective, reduce the trade deficit, bring manufacturing back to America, is politically understandable. But the tactics are so chaotic, so subject to sudden reversals, that they produce precisely what markets fear most: uncertainty. And uncertainty freezes investment, suspends decisions, paralyses industrial planning.

On Russia and Ukraine, the contradiction runs deeper. Trump wants to claim a peace agreement, to be the man who ended the war Biden could not finish. But the conditions he considers acceptable, Ukrainian territorial concessions, Kiev's neutrality toward NATO, effectively a partial surrender to Moscow, are unacceptable to Europe and to large parts of Congress. Meanwhile, Zelensky has become an inconvenient figure: too present, too demanding, unable or unwilling to play the part of the grateful victim. Trump treats him with growing irritation, as one treats a difficult client who fails to understand that the deal is not even that good to begin with. But without real pressure on Moscow, Putin has no incentive to negotiate seriously. Why would he, when time is on his side?

The underlying problem is not a lack of intelligence or experience in Trump's team. It is structural: Trump has no grand strategy. He has tactics, instincts, and an entirely transactional worldview in which every relationship is a deal, every alliance is a cost to be justified, every crisis is a negotiating opportunity. This works in certain limited contexts. It is radically inadequate for conflicts where the variables are in the dozens, the actors do not respond to deal logic, and the timescales are generational rather than quarterly.

V. The void at the centre

There is a thread connecting all of this: the collapse of American deterrence as the organising principle of the international system. For thirty years, with all their enormous errors, from Iraq to Afghanistan, the United States nevertheless provided a reference framework, a set of unwritten rules that defined the limits of the possible. What could be done and what could not. That framework is today empty. And in geopolitics, a vacuum never stays empty for long.

Iran exploits it for as long as it has levers left to use. Netanyahu uses it to survive. Putin tests it in Ukraine with the patience of someone who knows the other side of the table has no appetite for playing to the end. China watches with the calm of those who have time: every year of Western disorder is a year in which Beijing's alternative model looks a little more solid, a little more credible to the eyes of the global south.

Trump is not the cause of this collapse. He is its most visible product, and at the same time its accelerator. He expresses with an almost brutal frankness what other presidents did more discreetly: treat the world as a market, alliances as revocable contracts, values as bargaining chips. The difference is that he says it out loud. And saying it out loud, in a system built on trust and the projection of power, is already in itself a strategic damage that is difficult to reverse.

What emerges in the end is not the picture of an orderly multipolar world, not yet. It is an interregnum: a period of transition in which the old order is no longer capable of imposing itself and the new one is not yet strong enough to assert itself. In these interregnums, Gramsci wrote a century ago, monsters appear. In today's Middle East, in Ukraine, in the South China Sea, the monsters are already moving. And Washington, for the first time in eighty years, does not seem quite sure what to do with them.