A region at breaking point

EDITORIAL: Twenty-three years after a US president deployed the full force of American military power against a sovereign nation in pursuit of regime change – plunging the Middle East into decades of chaos and bloodshed – another occupant of the White House has chosen to tread the same perilous path.With the launch of joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, resulting in the targeted killing of the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Donald Trump has effectively abandoned his long-standing claims of ending America’s ‘forever wars’. He clearly does not understand – much like George W Bush before him when the US attacked Iraq in 2003 – that regime change projects carry inherent and far-reaching pitfalls.The assault on Iran and Khamenei’s assassination have already triggered a dangerous cycle of escalation, with Tehran retaliating against US installations across Gulf states, including Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, deepening regional volatility and uncertainty.The experience of the past two decades has repeatedly demonstrated, in fact, that externally driven regime change endeavours have only served to fuel militancy and terrorism, devastated economies and fractured already fragile societies, forcing millions to endure prolonged displacement, insecurity and the erosion of basic livelihoods. Worse still, the fallout is never confined within national borders. Such upheavals produce clear and cascading spillover effects, destabilising neighbouring states and dragging entire regions into chaos, volatility and economic precarity.And, as events have so far proven, the same pattern may now be repeating here. Not only have the Gulf states been drawn into a widening arc of confrontation – testing their long-standing stability for the first time in decades – the fallout is also poised to spill directly into adjoining geographies. At some point, the strain may begin to register along the Iran-Pakistan border, and any development there may end up intersecting with Pakistan’s already volatile security landscape in Balochistan and along its frontier with Afghanistan, where fragile conditions could be further reshaped by events inside Iran. Aggravating matters is Tehran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supplies transit. The move is poised to trigger far-reaching and long-lasting consequences for the global economy, as oil prices surge and energy markets absorb the shock.It must be pointed out that the justifications advanced for the assault on a sovereign nation, and the killing of its supreme leader and other senior leaders cannot be reconciled with established principles of international law. Under the UN Charter, the use of pre-emptive force is permissible only in response to an imminent threat or with explicit Security Council authorisation; and these conditions were clearly not met in this case. Furthermore, President Trump’s claims of Iran being hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons also don’t bear scrutiny. As was made clear by Oman’s foreign minister, during the recent negotiations with the US before they were torpedoed by this senseless escalation, Tehran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium. Stripped of legal and factual justification, the US-Israeli action, then, is nothing but a stark assertion of power. This is a war of choice in which might substitutes for right, with the use of force untethered from the legal and moral constraints meant to regulate it.It is increasingly clear that Khamenei’s assassination represents a profound disruption to the Iranian state, arriving soon after the country witnessed violent anti-regime protests, driven by decades of economic hardship and repression. The greatest tragedy is that amidst the turmoil and suffering, it is the Iranian people who will bear the heaviest burden. There appears to be no silver lining on the horizon for them, with the future marked by uncertainty, deprivation and insecurity.Copyright Business Recorder, 2026

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