"The rightness of a war is judged not by its outbreak but by its outcome," explained political scientist Olivier Roy in our pages a few days after the start of the one launched by Israel and the United States against Iran.
The text of the agreement reached Sunday between Washington and Tehran has not yet been made public, and its durability will depend on nuclear negotiations that are likely to be particularly arduous. But even while remaining cautious about what comes next, how can we not already consider this war a fiasco that risks having serious consequences in Iran, the Middle East and on the international order?
I ask this question with all the more gravity as I am among those who believed it was then the least-bad solution to break the deadlock in which the region was mired — which sparked heated debate within our own newsroom. Given the gap between aims and results, the human losses and the (geo)political repercussions, it is nevertheless clear that this was not only a mistake but even a fault.
From the outset, this war posed a double impossible equation. First, on a moral level, not just because of its timing but also because of its actors. It came on the heels of the annihilation of the Gaza Strip, on one hand, and the massacre of Iranians in the wake of protest movements, on the other. It pitted an Israeli prime minister targeted by an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity — and moreover, allied to an American president who has become chief torpedo of the international order — against a radical Islamist regime ready to sacrifice even its last citizens to survive.
There was no "good side," much less "good intentions" behind the calculations of any of these three actors. Reason enough to justify a position of neutrality. But neutrality is a luxury one can hardly afford when our fate depends greatly on the conflict in question.
The situation was no less gray strategically. Before the conflict broke out, the regime was both deeply weakened and at the same time extremely resilient. The Revolutionary Guards were increasingly influential, the security apparatus had suppressed all waves of protest without hesitation, ballistic capabilities were increasing month after month, and the nuclear program was still alive. The regime faced many major challenges (the succession of the supreme leader, the strangulation of the economy, public disavowal, the weakening of its "Axis of Resistance"), but nothing likely to finish it off in the absence of an armed opposition inside the country or outside military intervention. The first being absent, the second therefore remained the only way — if not to end it, at least to force it to change course after having long been a source of suffering and destabilization for its own people and the region for decades.
But with what objectives? If the status quo favored the regime, was it possible to break it at a reasonable cost? Either Washington and Tel Aviv settled for purely operational goals (destroying ballistic and nuclear programs, eliminating certain key figures) without really changing the equation in depth, or they launched a regime change operation that required far more resources and would entail costs and consequences of a totally different magnitude.
Without a clear strategy, the United States wavered between the two, thinking they could achieve the second with the means of the first. But regarding this point, the war at least had the merit of clarifying things. On the one hand, the disparity between the losses the regime is willing to accept and the cost the United States is willing to bear is such that the military option has turned against the world's leading power to become an asset for the Islamic Republic. On the other hand, the nature of the regime is such that there is no way to make it capitulate before it disappears.
Faced with it, either the war has to be total — with enormous repercussions for the world economy, Iran and the Middle East — or it has to be very limited to specific aims. If it is neither, as was the case, it inevitably works to its advantage. Because how do you defeat an enemy who, regardless of losses, will never accept defeat?
Everything about this war was gray. The identity of the belligerents, the lack of strategy, the absence of credible information on both sides and the number of layers, international stakes or national debates that piled up on the issue to the point of entirely obscuring it.
Its outcome? An emboldened regime, a weakened and terrorized Gulf, an unreadable America, an isolated Israel and an increasingly tempestuous relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv.
The full outcome is still hard to gauge since we know little about the state of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic programs, apart from the fact they have not been wiped out. We also don't know how a regime that has radicalized further will be able to manage a population that, just weeks before the conflict began, was taking to the streets at great personal risk in a country in ruins. We do not know how the geopolitics of the Gulf will evolve after this conflict, between an unpredictable and deficient American ally, a potential Israeli partner who is selfish and a source of destabilization, and an Iranian neighbor who, unable to hurt the United States and Israel enough, took his frustrations out on the petro-monarchies.
We also do not know whether the Washington-Tel Aviv relationship is going through a rough patch — as has happened before — or heading towards a divorce that would have major strategic consequences. Nor do we know if China, Russia and all the other predators who observed this war from afar have drawn as their main lesson the decline of the American empire or the limits of superpowers in the face of asymmetric conflict.
What we do know, however, is that, failing to win the war, Iran is once again winning at the negotiating table. It has conceded nothing on missiles or militias, sees its regional role legitimized, internal power reinforced, appears to have made very few concessions on the nuclear issue and could even—this is the big unknown of the agreement — get access to some of its frozen funds. Enough to give it and its proxies some oxygen…
For Lebanon, the agreement in the works looks like a double penalty. We risk suffering both from Israeli occupation and Hezbollah’s revenge. Both will dig in even further on their positions toward the state — the former by setting impossible conditions, the latter by threatening to topple the government. It will now be even harder for Beirut to separate its fate from that of the Iran-Israel standoff.
To this bleak picture, we must still add one big caveat: if one chapter is closing, we are certainly not at the end of the story. Nothing is fundamentally resolved between the United States, Israel and Iran. Only historical hindsight will show whether this war was or was not a tipping point — and above all, for whom.
This editorial was translated from L'Orient-Le Jour.
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