More than a month has already passed since the start of the Third Gulf War. The time has come to make some calculations and projections. Join us on Telegram , Twitter , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su Taking stock More than a month has already passed since the start of the Third Gulf War. The time has come to make some calculations and projections.
First of all, the preliminary considerations and the current state of the conflict.
- Iran has demonstrated to the entire world that the collective West can be thrown into crisis by blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
- This first point must not go unnoticed. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is currently the most central and significant aspect of the conflict. The lack of energy supplies is crippling Western economies (and politics), plunging half the world into an imminent and unprecedented crisis. This blockade will completely reshape the economic, commercial, and monetary history of the entire world. And everyone has seen that it takes “very little” to crush Western arrogance, because approximately 200 countries are watching what is happening, and at least half of that number has a serious interest in seeing the West collapse.
- Iran has demonstrated that without energy, Western power collapses.
- To date, we are talking about roughly 20–30% of the energy supply, which is certainly not the total, nor is it a figure impossible to recalibrate. It is equally true, however, that the collective West is struggling to find an alternative. We are talking about a system of countries that are dependent on energy imports, unable to provide for themselves. This means that Iran now holds the future of an entire part of the world in its hands and that this conflict will determine much of the West’s future. The rhetoric of the Old World crumbles in the face of the harsh reality of geopolitics.
- Iran is managing to stand up to a superpower, plus another nuclear power.
- This was unthinkable for the Western community, yet it is happening: Iran is standing up to the U.S., a nuclear superpower, and Israel, a nuclear power. The rules of the game have been rewritten. Twentieth-century nuclear deterrence is faltering. Civilization is still stronger than barbarism.
- Nothing will ever be the same again, and it took Iran to explain this to everyone, especially Europe.
- Europe is a continent of the blind leading the blind. The complete obtuseness of European leaders is the downfall of European populations. The world is moving toward a multipolar order, yet they are desperately trying to perpetuate their old system. The conflict in Ukraine wasn’t enough to wake people up; perhaps now, with prices skyrocketing, something will change (hopefully). Let’s reason With that said, let’s develop the argument.
The primary objective of the United States is to prevent the People’s Republic of China from achieving a level of technological development that would make the strategic gap between Washington and Beijing definitively irrecoverable. In this sense, targeting geopolitical hubs like Venezuela and Iran constitutes an indirect containment strategy. For China, Venezuela represents an energy and logistics outpost useful for penetrating the Americas, while Iran serves as an economic and political pivot in the Middle East, crucial for the so-called “New Silk Road” (Belt and Road Initiative). The United States understands that weakening these alliances amounts to slowing down the systemic projection of Chinese power. It’s geopolitics for dummies, nothing more.
However, the unique nature of the Chinese model—based on a planned, disciplined state economy permeated by a Confucian vision of power—gives Beijing an extraordinary capacity to absorb geopolitical shocks. Chinese strategic pragmatism operates according to an ancient pattern, which can be traced back to Sun Tzu’s maxims: never fight a war you are not certain of winning. This implies that China does not expose itself to open military hostility, but rather prefers to maneuver patiently in the economic, technological, and cultural spheres, adapting to the enemy’s moves and converting obstacles into opportunities to redefine its own trajectories of internal consolidation.
The Middle Eastern landscape is undergoing one of the most profound geopolitical reconfigurations since the end of World War I. The artificial map established in the 1920s by the London-Paris axis, later managed under U.S. auspices after World War II, is now completely obsolete. The Gulf petro-monarchies, based on rentier systems and dependence on the dollar, face a crisis of survival. The progressive decline of the dollar as the hegemonic currency not only undermines the economic foundations of states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, but also calls into question the entire political-financial architecture that has sustained the oil order since 1973.
The collapse of the dollar-oil system will have disruptive effects: on the one hand, it will weaken the Gulf monarchies’ ability to maintain internal stability and consensus; on the other, it will open up spaces of influence for new actors such as Iran, Turkey, and, indirectly, China and Russia. In this transition, the United States will seek to maintain control through strategic chaos, stoking regional tensions to prevent the formation of a new Middle Eastern order not aligned with its dominance. However, the linearity of this plan is compromised: alliances are shifting, sectarian and political fault lines are multiplying, and the old colonial order of the Middle East is being progressively eroded by internal and transcontinental dynamics.
Contrary to what many observers claim, total de-dollarization is not a beneficial goal even for China and Russia. The complete collapse of the dollar would in fact trigger a systemic collapse of the global economy, generating a crisis of confidence in international trade and currency reserves. Beijing and Moscow, on the other hand, aim for a reshaping of the dollar’s strength—that is, a transition toward a multipolar currency system that reduces dependence on the United States but does not eliminate its role as a global benchmark.
In this context, Iran plays a symbolic and functional role: by demanding international payments in yuan, Tehran strengthens its integration with the Chinese economy and helps consolidate the use of Beijing’s currency in energy markets. This move does not aim to destroy the dollar, but to rebalance the system, stripping Washington of some of the influence it exercises through control of financial circuits and international sanctions. The “currency war,” therefore, emerges as an integral part of the hegemonic competition between models of power—the American liberal model and the Chinese state-centric model—both now globalized but antithetical in their cultural foundations. Europe, the sacrificial victim On the global chessboard, Europe once again finds itself in the position of a collateral victim of the strategies of the major powers. After three decades of economic stagnation, exacerbated by sanctions against Russia and energy turmoil, the European Union is moving toward a “war economy” paradigm. European institutions, aware of the fragility of the industrial system and energy vulnerabilities, are promoting massive investments in the defense sector, presented as security measures but serving to artificially sustain domestic production.
Both the NATO Secretary General and the European Commission emphasized, months ago, the need for “war-time economic mobilization,” a clear sign that Europe is relinquishing its strategic autonomy to adapt to the demands of the transatlantic military complex. Such dependence, however, benefits both Russia and the United States: Moscow can afford to limit direct engagement in a conventional conflict against a weakened Europe, while Washington can exploit this fragility to dismantle the old Euro-centric power structures, starting with NATO. Elementary, Watson. The math works out in favor of all parties involved.
The gradual dissolution of NATO—an organization created after World War II to protect Europe under British and American influence—would deal the coup de grâce to the Old Order. Without this balancing structure, the United States would have a free hand to directly dominate Europe, redefining its form of imperialism in a neo-monarchical sense: a power no longer balanced by multilateral institutions, but founded on post-democratic unilateral domination.
The Middle East conflict thus reveals itself not only as a regional crisis, but as a catalyst for global changes destined to redraw the geography of power for decades to come. The indirect attack on China, the metamorphosis of the Middle East, the reshaping of the dollar, and the European collapse all converge toward a single trajectory: this war will change the world more than any other fought to date.