A superpower’s final act?

Attacked: Huge plume of smoke rises up from an oil facility facility after it appeared to have been hit by an Israeli strike on June 14 in southern Tehran. -- AP

GREAT powers rise and fall as assuredly as the laws of physics. Gravity is universal for those that have outlived their purpose.

Lesser powers with pretensions to greatness, or just great pretensions, are subject to the same universal constraints. Karmic forces are immutable and indiscriminate, regardless of claims to historical exceptionalism.

Nonetheless, the vilest perpetrators of today’s mass horrors carry on as if their actions have no consequences. Their indifference will not remove or reduce the stain of infamy or the payback.

When Israel unleashed the Gaza genocide purportedly in response to a Hamas attack, the world initially thought its excesses would sate its thirst for blood. But the horrific excesses continue with no conceivable end in sight.

Then Israel’s unprovoked and full-scale attack on Iran on June 13, a Friday, took international thuggery to a new level. Prayer day meant Iranians would be more mindful of their weekly religious obligations than vigilant against sudden attack.

Both of Israel’s “exercises” in mass bloodletting have a common theme: a wilful desire to annihilate disagreeable neighbours by acting beyond all proportion, far exceeding the bounds of civilised human behaviour, international law and natural justice.

Last October Israel attacked Iran in three waves targeting 20 areas, claiming it as a response to Iran’s incursion earlier that month. Mass violence can be addictive, particularly when handily prepackaged with official justification. This month’s attack has no credible justification. In the same week, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report affirmed that Iran possesses no nuclear weapons.

At the same time, Israel was trying hard to persuade US officials that Iran’s nuclear energy programme had switched to producing nuclear warheads so it had to be attacked and destroyed. But the US officials came away from the meeting unconvinced.

Iran has repeatedly said it is not developing any nuclear weapons. On the day of Israel’s attack, news outlets cited US intelligence officials as saying that Iran has not weaponised its nuclear energy programme.

Can Israel’s latest attack serve its claimed purpose of halting Iran’s alleged nuclear aspirations? From all indications it is set to backfire, spurring all of Iran to seek nuclear weapons instead.

The world’s nuclear-armed powers justify their nuclear arsenal by citing its deterrent effect against attacks. They argue that nuclear weapons may never be used, but they help deter attacks from countries fearing nuclear retaliation.

No nuclear-armed country has been attacked summarily. Equally, countries with no nuclear weapons – from Lebanon and Libya to Syria and Iraq, with Iran next – continue to be attacked, occupied, and dismembered.

More Iranians than ever must now feel that their country’s best defence against further attacks is the possession of nuclear weapons. No foreign critic of Iran’s defence policy has been able to comprehend this basic reality.

None of the apologists for Israel’s aggression can understand that more Iranian citizens are now firmly and solidly behind their government, and more Global South countries are further alienated from Israel and its Western sponsors.

Some European and US leaders now champion Zionist barbarism as a means for defending Western “civilisation”. Gandhi’s observation in the last century still holds: Western civilisation is a project yet to be launched, let alone attained.

Whenever the “Jewish state” invokes self-defence, any means it uses against others is admissible to the West. War guilt – from WWII in this case – can be very powerful and enduring, even after more than half a century.

Israel’s few supporters accuse Iran of sponsoring terrorist groups, but Israel has done even more of this itself. Israel is the embodiment of state terrorism, practises it routinely as a matter of course, and cannot continue in its known form without it.

Some say that for Israel, Iran is an “existential threat”. The problem is that Israel has done everything it can to prove that it is the prime existential threat in the region to Iran and its neighbours.

What comes next? Much depends on the United States, which has let Israel act with impunity, granting it strategic assistance, and which may now act likewise itself.

The Washington commentariat sees Iran as an item to be ticked off and shelved, prior to shifting more attention to China as the leading US rival. That is a formidable task when neither the Ukraine war nor the Gaza genocide has been settled.

Iran will prove the hardest nut to crack because it is the most formidable bump in the road before the China challenge. It is no mere item to be ticked off anywhere.

Only profound and acute ignorance can have an administration giving Iran an ultimatum for renouncing its national dignity within a fortnight. Defeating Iran on these terms will cost Israel its future and the US its superpower status.

Such a reckless and wanton misadventure is bound to expedite the rise and fall of great powers in 2025.

Bunn Nagara is director and Senior Fellow at the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Caucus for Asia-Pacific, and Honorary Fellow at the Perak Academy. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.