There are political mistakes.

There are strategic miscalculations.

And then there is that particular kind of stupidity which dresses itself up as strength, speaks through bombs, performs itself through pathos, and in the end arrives exactly where it stood before — only with more dead, more hatred, more instability, and worse conditions.

That is precisely what has happened here.

One does not have to be a friend of the Iranian regime to see it. One only needs two functioning eyes and the ability not to confuse cause and effect with propaganda. Years ago, there was already a bad, imperfect, limited arrangement. It was not peace. It was not harmony. It was not a miracle. But it was a framework. An ugly, unsatisfying, imperfect framework — and still a framework. It held something back. It imposed limits. It pushed catastrophe, at the very least, into a system of control, inspection, and political predictability.

What that framework concretely achieved deserves a sober reminder: it limited Iran’s uranium enrichment to 3.67 per cent, drastically reduced the number of centrifuges, bound Iran to regular IAEA inspections, and extended the so-called breakout time — the time Iran would need to produce enough weapons-grade material — to at least one year. That was no guarantee. It was no disarmament. But it was a measurable, verifiable system of restraint. And that system no longer exists.

Then came the grand pose.

Trump destroyed that framework as though it were a historic act of clarity. His supporters cheered, Israel hoped for a harder line, and many behaved as if sheer destruction were already a strategy. But to destroy a bad framework is only wise if one is capable of putting a better one in its place. If one cannot do that, it was not strength. It was merely an attack of grandiosity.

And that is where the stupidity lies.

For what does one have now? Has Iran been stopped once and for all? No. Has the nuclear problem been cleanly resolved? No. Has a stable regional order been created? No. Has Israel been given genuine long-term security? No again. What has been produced is a situation in which all parties stand deeper in the mud than before, only some now pretend that the mud is victory.

That is the whole misery of this episode: a bad status quo has not been overcome, but exchanged for a worse one.

Iran has been damaged, yes. That is beyond dispute. It has absorbed blows, felt pressure, suffered losses. But Iran has not disappeared. Iran has not dissolved. Iran has not been reduced to a state of strategic impotence. On the contrary: in the end it is once again sitting at the table as an actor and setting conditions. That alone says everything. Whoever has truly been defeated does not negotiate at that level. Whoever formulates conditions has not been erased, but remains capable of action.

And that is what makes the matter bitter for the United States and for Israel.

For they have incurred costs without bringing the problem to a final close. They have destroyed without solving. They have escalated without ending. They have paid the price — politically, militarily, humanly — and now stand before a reality in which negotiations must begin again, while the decisive questions are still not off the table. That is no masterstroke. It is a strategic humiliation.

Trump is the most embarrassing figure in all this. As so often, he operates at maximum volume. Everything is total, final, historic, annihilating, overwhelming. First comes the pose of the strong man, then the threat, then the rhetoric of apocalypse, then the usual theatre — and at the end some pause, some deal, some negotiation that is sold as triumph. The pattern is so crude that it is almost caricature. Yet the real stupidity does not lie in Trump’s personality. It lies in the model: in the structural conviction that destruction gives birth to order, that maximum pressure automatically produces capitulation, that frameworks of negotiation are weakness, and that brinkmanship is wisdom. This model is not new. It has predecessors. And it has failed before.

But Israel, too, does not emerge from this story looking strong. For Israel bears the real blood price — not merely symbolically, not merely rhetorically, but concretely: the dead, the fear, the permanent strain, the insecurity, the open fronts, the strategic exhaustion. The decisive question that arises is this: did Israel act out of its own strategic calculation, or was it swept along by an American policy that did not know its own limits? If the former, then it bears co-responsibility for the result. If the latter, then it is the costliest victim of someone else’s grandiosity. Both are bitter. Both deserve honesty. And in either case, the same remains true: what was gained was not security, but time — and at an extreme price.

That is where the absurdity lies.

If you strike an opponent hard, but in the end find yourself once again facing him from a worse negotiating position than before, then the violence was not a solution, but an expensive detour back to the problem. And if that detour also sets cities ablaze, kills human beings, poisons the regional climate, and prepares the next escalation, then one has to stop lying to oneself with the usual euphemisms.

Not only morally questionable.

Not only short-sighted.

Geopolitically stupid.

For what matters in geopolitics is not whether one can strike. Almost every great power can strike. What matters is whether, through that strike, one creates a better order. If after the strike the order is worse, the opponents more hardened, one’s own allies more exhausted, and the negotiating position more miserable, then one has not led. One has failed.

That is what has happened here.

An architecture of bad peace was destroyed, and no better one was created. A system of restraint was blown apart and replaced by a system of open insecurity. The controlled problem was exchanged for the uncontrolled one. And now the very same actors who sold all this as necessary toughness are meant to explain to the world why a new negotiation should suddenly count as reason.

Reason would have been to improve the framework, rather than shatter it out of vanity. Reason would have been to develop an existing system of control soberly and further, rather than demolish it through political self-dramatization. Reason would have been to understand power as the capacity to impose limits, and not as the lust for escalation.

But reason was never the centre of this policy.

The centre was toughness as spectacle.

The centre was the primitive fantasy that destruction automatically begets order.

Destruction often begets only more destruction, and once it is mistaken for strategy, it almost always ends in what we are seeing now: a worse condition that must be masked with grand words so that no one notices that all that blood has not even produced a better outcome.

Iran is not the victor in this story. The price for that is too high. The damage is too real. But the United States and Israel are not victors either. And that is the point. Whoever, after so much investment, so much risk, so much escalation, cannot point to a clearly better condition in the end, has lost strategically — no matter how often he declares himself the winner on television.

What remains is the naked balance:

That was not brilliant power politics.

That was not historic resolve.

That was not an intelligent demonstration of deterrence.

That was a stupid geopolitics.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)