Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the extension of policy by other means. He meant it as a caution against romanticism. Wars do not erupt from nowhere; they are the end products of political failure, accumulated grievance, and strategic calculation. By that measure, the open war between Israel, the United States and Iran that the world is now witnessing is not a surprise. It is a conclusion.

This war was always going to happen. Not necessarily at this exact moment, and not necessarily in this exact form, but it was inevitable in the way that a flood is inevitable when five rivers converge during a heavy rain. The question was never whether, but when. Five distinct arcs of history: local, regional, ideological, global, and personal: matured simultaneously and collided. Understanding each arc separately is useful. Understanding how they converged is essential.

The local arc: from territorial to existential

The modern state of Israel was born in 1948 into a condition of permanent siege. For most of its history, Israelis understood the conflict with their neighbors in essentially territorial terms. After the stunning victory of 1967, a quiet confidence settled in, and Israel’s existence was no longer seriously in doubt. The question became borders. Land for peace became the negotiable future. This strategy found its full expression in 1979 with the historic peace agreement with Egypt and the return of the Sinai Peninsula.

Yet the euphoria of that peace deal overshadowed another tectonic shift that same year. The Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution in Iran expressed out loud what Israel’s enemies had said quietly. The new Iran was a neighbor that did not want Israel’s land; it wanted Israel’s elimination. In response to the Iranian threat, Israel’s security establishment eventually adopted characteristic pragmatism: contain the threat, deter escalation, avoid direct confrontation, and manage the proxies.

That doctrine held for over four decades. Then came October 7, 2023.

What Hamas did on that morning was not merely an atrocity. It was a strategic forcing function. Hamas dragged Israel into the very war its political leadership, including its current Prime Minister,  and security establishment had spent years engineering around. It prematurely pulled Iran and its entire proxy network into open conflict before all strategic pieces were fully in place. The Israeli response was therefore not just military retaliation. It represented a fundamental rewriting of Israel’s security doctrine, shifting from containment, which focused on balancing an enemy’s intent vs. ability, to the pre-emptive disabling of capabilities simultaneously across multiple fronts. The conflict is no longer viewed by most Israelis as territorial. It is viewed as existential. When a nation concludes its existence is at stake, the calculations change entirely.

The regional arc: the empire that overreached

Iran’s ambitions in the Middle East have been hiding in plain sight for decades. Through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran effectively colonized its neighbors, not with conventional troops and flags, but with money, weapons, ideology, and the patient construction of armed proxy movements. By Oct. 2023, the heavy hands of the Revolutionary Guard were all over Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and Yemen.

The Gulf states watched this expansion with mounting alarm. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and their neighbors found themselves in an extraordinarily delicate position. They were squeezed between aggressive Iranian pressure and the perceived unreliability of American protection. They spent years hedging between Washington and Beijing, calculating whether alignment with either side was more dangerous than strategic ambiguity.

Currently, Iran’s direct attacks on its neighbors and on American assets in those countries forced a reckoning. The Gulf states have moved, quietly but decisively, toward an anti-Iran posture. In private channels, the message from Riyadh and Abu-Dahbi to Washington has been consistent: finish this. The recent collapse of Assad’s regime in Syria is not a footnote here; it is a turning point. It severed a critical node in Iran’s regional network and demonstrated that the axis of resistance is far more fragile than it appeared. Iran’s overreach created the conditions for its own strategic encirclement.

The ideological arc: when war is the point

Much of the Western commentary on this conflict is built on a foundational misreading. The dominant frame in mainstream Western media, academia and activist circles, presents Iran’s behavior, its proxy wars, its terror exports, and its brutal suppression of its own people as responses to Western imperialism or Israeli aggression. The Islamic Republic, in this telling, is pushed into belligerence by the sins of others. They call themselves “the axis of resistance”, a moniker that fits well into the “Israeli colonialism – American Imperialism” paradigm.

This is not analysis. It is the acceptance of Iranian propaganda.

Back to Clausewitz. The first question to ask of any state is: what is its policy? The Islamic Republic was founded not merely as a government but as the political expression of Twelver Shia millenarian ideology. The spread of revolutionary Shia Islam, the destruction of Israel, the humiliation of the United States, and the destabilization of the existing world order are not incidental goals. They are sacred obligations written into the constitutional DNA of the state.

For the Islamic Republic, war is a feature, not a bug. During the Iran-Iraq war the regime recruited then kidnapped thousands of children to be used as ‘first wave’ soldiers across mine fields, wearing red martyrdom head bands and carrying “keys to heaven”. The chaos Iran exports is the deliberate instrument of a coherent ideological project. A state whose ideology requires conflict operates on a fundamentally different logic than a standard geopolitical actor. It cannot be offered a deal to end its violent aspirations that satisfies its core interests because its core interest is the struggle itself. The standard Western diplomatic framework of engagement is conceptually mismatched to the problem.

The global arc: the century’s real contest

Iran’s significance to the global order far exceeds its own borders. China, engaged in its long project to recover from its “century of humiliation” and achieve world primacy by 2049, has found a highly useful partner in Iran. Iran provides cheap oil purchased in defiance of sanctions. It acts as a testing ground for weapons and influence operations, and it serves as a piece on the board in China’s broader challenge to the American-led international order, among other things, for control of Taiwan and the semiconductor supply chains that underpin the coming era of artificial intelligence dominance. The contest between Washington and Beijing is not primarily a Middle Eastern story, but the Middle East has become one of its most consequential theatres.

Russia belongs in this picture for similar reasons. Vladimir Putin’s goals are old, consistent, and highly legible to any student of Russian imperial history: dominance over Europe’s eastern flank and the restoration of Russia to the front rank of global powers. That latter goal has a necessary precondition: the diminishment of the United States. Russia’s stake in Iran’s survival is not sentimental; it is strategic. Iran is not only a supplier of attack drones for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. A weakened or collapsed Islamic Republic is one fewer lever in Moscow’s hand and one fewer node in the anti-American network it has spent years building. A great Russian power cannot reassert itself in a world organized around American primacy.

Russia and China have worked methodically to erode that primacy, through BRICS as an alternative economic architecture, through sophisticated influence campaigns targeting Western media, academia and social media platforms, through the systematic amplification of division inside democratic societies, and through what can only be described as a coalition of convenience with every other government, some with extremely deep pockets, that shares an interest in a post-American world order. Iran is a pillar of their strategy, a natural partner in this project.

The personal arc: the variable of leadership

History is driven by vast structural forces, but it is executed by individuals. The individuals in the room when these rivers converge matter enormously. While decades of calcified policies laid the groundwork, the specific decisions of individual leaders accelerated the timeline of this conflict. The political convictions of American leadership regarding the Middle East play a critical role. Barak Obama’s decision to sign the JCPOA and lift sanctions, the withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement under Donald Trump, or the original policy failures surrounding the fall of the Shah and the saga of American diplomats held hostage for 444 days under Jimmy Carter, illustrate how personal historical self-image and individual risk calculus alter geopolitical trajectories. In the case of President Trump His first-term withdrawal from the JCPOA was the policy expression of a long-held conviction that pre-date his political career and were lockstep with his desire to reverse Obama’s legacy. The assassination attempts attributed to Iranian operatives, against Trump personally, introduced a dimension for which analytical frameworks alone cannot fully account.

There is also the matter of historical self-image. Trump has spoken publicly, and at length, about his belief that he is uniquely positioned to correct the mistakes of his predecessors. Different leaders, operating with different convictions and different interpretations of deterrence, would have produced a different timeline. The personal arc is real precisely because it is the variable factor most capable of accelerating or delaying what the structural arcs were already making highly likely.

The conclusion that was always waiting

The word “inevitable” should be used with care. History is not a machine. Choices matter, and conflicts that seem foreordained are sometimes averted by improbable diplomacy. However, the simultaneous maturation of these five independent historical arcs created conditions so ripe that the question of whether war would happen had effectively already been answered.

Every year the confrontation was postponed, Iran’s nuclear program advanced. Every year, Iran’s proxy network consolidated, expanded and emboldened. Every year Chino-Russian coalition grew stronger and the threats to the West greater. Every year, the strategic cost of action increased. We are witnessing the bill coming due for decades of policies from Washington, Jerusalem, Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow. These choices often made rational sense in the short term, but collectively, they made war highly probable over time.

The outcome of this war will determine far more than the fate of Iran’s regime or the security of Israelis within their borders. It is relevant to every single member of Western Civilization as it will help determine whether the American-led international order reasserts itself or continues its slow retreat. It will shape the global trajectory of Chinese ambitions and Russian revisionism and Islamic radicalism. And for the Iranian people it will answer the question of whether a regime built on the systematic brutalization of its own people and the export of terror can survive in a world that finally decides to say: enough.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)