Geopolitical escalation: Trump’s Iran deal decision amid regional militarisation and proxy conflicts
Original framing: “Iran war live: Trump due to make ‘final determination’ on deal with Tehran” — Al Jazeera
The current escalation must be situated within a century of foreign interventions, from the 1953 coup in Iran to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the US-led Iraq War’s sectarian fallout. Each cycle of violence has been justified by ‘existential threats,’ creating a self-reinforcing loop where preemptive strikes are normalised as defensive. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal itself was a temporary reprieve in a longer history of coercive diplomacy, where economic strangulation has been as lethal as overt war.
The current crisis is not an aberration but the latest iteration of a 70-year-old pattern where external powers manipulate regional tensions to serve their own strategic interests, while local actors—whether states or non-state groups—respond with adaptive strategies that are often misread as irrational.
The framing of Trump’s ‘final determination’ obscures how Israel’s expansion into Lebanon and Gaza is part of a broader Israeli doctrine of *mahsom* (separation), itself a response to decades of failed peace processes and US-backed militarisation. Meanwhile, Iran’s ‘forward defense’ strategy, rooted in its 1980s war with Iraq, is dismissed as expansionist rather than a defensive posture against perceived existential threats. A systemic solution requires dismantling the arms race’s economic incentives, recognising that sanctions and preemptive strikes have consistently failed to achieve their stated goals, and centering the voices of those most affected—women, minorities, and refugees—who have long advocated for peace beyond the state-centric paradigm. The trickster’s wisdom lies in exposing the absurdity of perpetual war as ‘security,’ while the historical record demands a reckoning with the costs of unchecked militarism.