FP: How the Iran war reshaped the Global landscape of Power

Pic.: Manara Magazine

The geopolitical disaster authored by U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done far more than squander the dominant position both nations were in just three and a half months ago. The United States and Israel will be weaker for years to come, Foreign Policy writes.

Their unprovoked and failed war against Iran has likely set in motion a sea change in global power balances — a shift that will leave both the United States and Israel relatively weaker in the months and years to come.

Trump is now a seriously diminished figure at home and around the globe, his world-beating bluster turned to ash and empty threats. For the foreseeable future, the projection of U.S. power will no longer be as ominous as it once was — not just in the Middle East, but in the Indo-Pacific and Europe as well.

The memorandum of understanding (MOU) is effectively a surrender document — for Washington, that is. Apparently, in exchange for doing nothing more than signing the MOU, agreeing to 60 days of talks, and opening up the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians will gain financial concessions that would have been unthinkable a few months ago. These could include the release of at least some frozen or restricted Iranian funds and assets, as well as waivers available “immediately upon the signing of this MOU” for “the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.,” according to the MOU released by the Trump administration.

To sum up: The U.S. president gained nothing at all in his war — far less than nothing, actually — in return for spending tens of billions of dollars and costing thousands of lives, including at least 13 Americans killed. To win vague promises from Tehran, Trump did major damage to the newly inflation-plagued U.S. economy; betrayed his political base at home; seriously depleted the U.S. critical weapons supply; empowered China and heightened its relative stature; alienated U.S. allies; and weakened the Gulf states.

And all at the hands of a regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, that only three and a half months ago was isolated and economically devastated. Thanks to the war, even a severely weakened Iran has now become a significant geopolitical player—one that will soon reap new financial windfalls. The regime in Tehran has established its legitimacy over 47 years of existence largely by adopting a martial everybody-is-against-us mentality; now it can boast that it has successfully stood down the global and regional superpowers.

And because of Tehran’s continuing ability to control the Strait of Hormuz and use it to extract concessions from Washington and the Gulf nations, Iran also enjoys leverage that it never had before over the region and the global economy.

The Iranians “now know the power of the strait,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, an Iran expert and former CIA officer. “They’re probably going to use it to deconstruct the entire sanctions architecture that’s been set up since [former U.S. President] Bill Clinton.”

Trump managed to achieve this outcome by risking something that history shows does not work — regime change from the air — while ignoring a major threat that U.S. intelligence had long warned would likely ensue: Iranian seizure of the strait.

What is most significant about this coming era of U.S. retrenchment, perhaps, is that Iran — and now the entire world — is suddenly aware of how it can exploit Trump’s worst vulnerability. That is the president’s deep fear of a market downturn on his watch and his resulting tendency to TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), whether over his tariff wars or his demand to seize Greenland.

No nation is more attuned to this weakness than the United States’ No.1 rival, China.

The Chinese were the first to apply that economic pressure on Trump over his tariff war last year — forcing the president into an earlier “truce” by halting the export of critical minerals, which threatened to paralyze the U.S. high-tech and defense sectors. Chinese President Xi Jinping is no doubt now probing the softness of Trump’s support for Taiwan, especially his unwillingness to risk another major war.

In contrast to his earlier demand for “unconditional surrender” and calls for regime change in Iran — a longtime goal of U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic — Trump has now committed Washington to “refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.”

As for Netanyahu, his comeuppance could not be more complete. Until Feb. 28, Israel had gone a long way toward changing “the balance of power in the region for years to come,” as Netanyahu had boasted in 2024. In the nearly three years since Hamas’s brutal invasion on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel had made dramatic strides to restore its strategic edge against Iran and its proxies. Israeli forces damaged Iran’s nuclear and missile facilities and air defenses; killed off Tehran’s senior leadership and nuclear scientists; decapitated and disabled Hezbollah; and even assassinated Hamas’s political leader in the heart of Tehran.

Now, by launching what appears to be a war too far, Netanyahu has managed to re-empower his worst enemy, Iran, and alienate his closest ally, the United States. He has created the sort of breach in U.S.-Israeli relations that no one in U.S. politics thought was possible only a few years ago.

In a humiliating rebuke, Israel was not made a party to the MOU — even though it began the war in close coordination with Washington. And the United States and Iran agreed in the memorandum to the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Israeli hard-liners are insisting they will not be bound by the agreement.

And Iran, which has been a major burr in the side of U.S. presidents for 47 years, can claim the upper hand. Sensitive to criticism that he negotiated a bad deal, Trump threatened again at the G-7 summit this week that if Iran doesn’t comply, “We’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.”

But his bellicosity no longer has the same bite.

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