For some time now we have been witnessing the gradual exhaustion of American-Israeli dominance in the Middle East, and everything suggests that this war could accelerate that process. Each day that passes with Iran resisting and responding to the aggression it is suffering brings closer the prospect of a strategic defeat for the imperial project in the region.

Iran is not a state that will easily collapse. It is not Iraq, nor Syria, nor Libya. Even in the hypothetical scenario that its political regime were to fall — as the cumulative result of decades of sanctions, external pressure, and the heavy impact of the current bombings — the country, with its millennia-old civilization and deeply rooted historical identity, would remain. And even in that scenario, it would be difficult to imagine the stable installation of a puppet regime imposed from outside.

The United States appears to be acting in this conflict with a profound lack of strategic vision. The supposed “success” of decapitating the Iranian political leadership by assassinating its leader illustrates this logic well. Killing Khamenei along with members of his family may be presented as a tactical victory, but in reality it reveals enormous strategic blindness. If a simple analogy is allowed: it would be like believing that eliminating the Pope in Rome could solve an internal political problem in Italy, completely ignoring the global dimension of Catholicism.

The Iranian leader was not only an important figure within his own country but also for broad sectors across the region, from Iraq to Pakistan, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the Emirates and Qatar, where significant Shiite populations live. Many of these countries are governed by fragile and dependent regimes whose populations increasingly watch the devastation of Gaza with resentment and frustration.

The arrival of Iranian missiles and drones in different parts of the region also sends an unsettling signal: it shows that the so-called imperial protection is neither absolute nor necessarily the priority. A large part of the available anti-missile systems is concentrated on defending Israel, while the Gulf monarchies depend on a fragile balance that can easily break. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz or disruptions to air traffic alone would be enough to paralyze highly vulnerable economies based on energy exports, logistics, and services.

Israel, for its part, does appear to have a clear strategy: securing regional dominance in the name of an expansionist project that some sectors justify with historical or religious references. Yet this strategy also contains a profound paradox. A country of eight or nine million people, without major natural resources and surrounded by a vastly larger demographic and geopolitical environment, can hardly sustain a permanent confrontation with its entire region indefinitely.

Since its creation in 1948, the Israeli state has depended heavily on Western support. That support has been decisive, but it is not necessarily eternal. Moreover, Israel’s international legitimacy has eroded significantly in recent decades, particularly after the 2018 law defining Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” and even more so after the devastation of Gaza, which has profoundly shocked global public opinion.

For centuries, the Arab peoples of the region have lived under different forms of external domination: first the Ottoman Empire, then British and French colonial mandates, and more recently a power architecture in which the United States and Israel play a central role. If the attempt to subdue Iran were to fail, that entire structure of dominance could begin to fracture, with profound consequences also for the petrodollar system, one of the pillars of American financial power.

There is even the risk that Israel might resort to an extreme option, such as the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, in order to prevent a strategic shift of that magnitude. But such a step could trigger a much firmer reaction from powers like Russia or China, forcing the United States to reconsider its unconditional support. In such a scenario, the current model of the Israeli state would inevitably enter a deep crisis. It would not necessarily disappear, but its present form would become increasingly difficult to sustain in the long term, as some historians and analysts have pointed out.

The decline of Western dominance in the Middle East is part of a broader transformation of the international system. The ability of Western powers to impose their will unilaterally is eroding, and the conflicts of the past decades — from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Gaza to now Iran — reflect that shift.

Yet history also shows something troubling: when great systems of power enter into decline, they rarely do so peacefully. More often they react with even greater violence in an attempt to preserve their position. And that may be the most unsettling aspect of the current moment: that the system losing its hegemony may do so while leaving behind an even greater trail of destruction.