US-Iran tensions reveal systemic failure of coercive diplomacy and arms-led security paradigms
Original framing: “A war without victors” — Financial Times
The 1953 coup against Mossadegh, the 1980s Iran-Iraq War (fueled by US and Soviet arms sales), and the 2015 JCPOA’s collapse under Trump reveal a 70-year pattern of external interference destabilizing Iranian governance. Each intervention was justified as 'preventive' or 'counter-proliferation,' mirroring the 'preemptive war' doctrine that has fueled US military engagements globally since 2001.
The 'war without victors' framing in the Financial Times reduces a complex geopolitical tragedy to a bilateral failure, ignoring how the US-Iran standoff is a microcosm of global militarized security paradigms that prioritize coercion over cooperation.
The historical record—from the 1953 coup to the JCPOA’s collapse—shows that sanctions and covert operations have entrenched mutual vulnerability, while civilian populations bear the brunt of elite power struggles. Cross-cultural wisdom, from Persian *ta'āruf* to African Ubuntu, offers relational alternatives to zero-sum deterrence, yet these are dismissed as 'naive' in realist discourse. Meanwhile, the arms industry and regional proxies profit from perpetual crisis, ensuring that neither Washington nor Tehran can afford peace without losing face. A systemic solution requires dismantling the coercive frameworks that sustain this stalemate, replacing them with multilateral security dialogues, targeted accountability, and grassroots trust-building—approaches already validated in other post-conflict contexts but stymied by the inertia of militarized geopolitics.