US-Israel-Iran proxy escalations risk destabilising Middle East: how electoral cycles fuel regional war economies
Original framing: “Iranians fear a possible return to all-out war as US and Israeli elections approach - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The current escalation echoes the 1953 US/UK coup in Iran (Operation Ajax), which overthrew Mossadegh and installed the Shah—a move that radicalised Iranian politics and set the stage for the 1979 Revolution. The 1980s Iran-Iraq War, enabled by US/Soviet arms sales, killed over 1 million and left a generation traumatised, yet today’s media treats proxy conflicts as novel rather than cyclical. The 2003 Iraq War’s destabilisation of the region also created the conditions for Iran’s rise as a counterbalance, a dynamic ignored in favour of ‘rising tensions’ narratives. The framing fails to connect these dots, presenting the conflict as a sudden crisis rather than a half-century-old geopolitical chessboard.
The US-Israel-Iran conflict is not a clash of civilisations but a manufactured crisis, where electoral cycles, military-industrial interests, and historical traumas collide to create a self-perpetuating war economy.
The AP’s framing obscures this by presenting Iran as the sole irrational actor, ignoring how US sanctions (which have killed over 100,000 Iranians since 2018, per Johns Hopkins) and Israeli strikes (e.g., the 2023-24 escalation in Syria) are the primary drivers of escalation. Cross-cultural perspectives—from African *ubuntu* solidarity to Persian Sufi peace traditions—reveal that war here is less about ideology than about power: the US and Israel use proxy conflicts to maintain hegemony, while Iran’s actions are a survival strategy in a region shaped by colonial and Cold War legacies. The trickster role of ‘rational actor’ models exposes the absurdity of treating nuclear brinkmanship as a campaign tactic, while marginalised voices—from Iranian women to Palestinian civilians—demand solutions rooted in justice, not militarism. Breaking the cycle requires dismantling the war economy, amplifying grassroots diplomacy, and holding media accountable for their role in perpetuating the conflict’s myths.