In the end, Iran will emerge devastated from the unjust war that the US and Israel have calibrated together to impose upon it. Yet there is a lingering hope, rising at every hit they take, of Iran prolonging the war, of not keeling over, for the greater good of the world. Iran should do to the US what Ukraine has done to Russia—stall it from having a victory, at least a facile one.

An America entangled in Iran will likely reduce President Donald Trump’s propensity to unilaterally impose his will on other nations, besmirch his country’s credibility to provide security to its vassal nation-states in West Asia and elsewhere, and check Israel from becoming a regional hegemon. Such an eventuality would bolster multipolarity.

This outcome would also serve India’s interests, given its status as a middle power. Yet India chose through its prolonged silence in the initial days of the war, including on the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to abandon Iran too fast, too soon. It spoke belatedly but without displaying even a bit of iron in its foreign policy that has multipolarity as one of its goals. And this, surprisingly, despite Trump arbitrarily slapping tariffs on India, and crafting a narrative, to New Delhi’s umbrage, that it was he who brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan last year. Kowtowing to a temperamental bully turns him benign only temporarily. Think of Adolf Hitler.

American Presidents, particularly since the 1990 Gulf War, have been quick to bomb and invade countries for specious reasons. But they at least sought the UN’s approval or rallied their allies to join them. Trump flaunts his contempt for the idea of national sovereignty, reflected in his threats to occupy nations whose resources he covets, as he has repeatedly issued to Greenland and Canada. He green-lighted the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro of oil-rich Venezuela, over which the US now has veritable suzerainty.

Revanchism drives Trump’s conduct, evident from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference last month. Rubio said Europe should support Trump’s project of “Make America Great Again”, for its success will also revive Western dominance, seemingly undermined because of “godless communist revolutions” and “anti-colonial struggles”. For this common civilisational mission of dominance, the US wants an alliance with Europe, an alliance that is “not paralysed into inaction by fear—fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future.”

Into the future of reinforcing the American dominance—rather, its unquestionable supremacy—Trump, egged on by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, has raced. Iran is arguably the only state in the region still actively and militarily opposed to Israel, a settler colony established in the land of Palestine after its Arab population was killed or expelled from 78 percent of the territory over the decades. The remaining 22 percent comprises Gaza and the West Bank, aka Occupied Palestine Territories.

Iran supports Hamas, which, after having won the election in Gaza in 2006, was blockaded by Israel and Egypt, with America’s support. The hardships the blockade inflicted on Palestinians, and with the promised two-state solution—an independent Palestine side by side with Israel —appearing increasingly elusive, Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. Israel’s response has been genocidal, killing more than 75,000 people and reducing Gaza to rubble.

Beset with the paranoia typical of any settler colony, Israel’s search for security had it persuade Trump to first grant consent and then join it in the bombing of Iran and its nuclear facilities last year. It was then claimed that Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon had been permanently impaired. And yet, months later, even after Tehran had agreed to give up its stockpile of enriched uranium and undergo comprehensive verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Trump and Netanyahu decided to go to war against Iran. Their goal now is a regime change, an instinct with the Americans.

‘Greater Israel’

There hasn’t been in recent times a more unjust war than the one being witnessed in West Asia today. Israel presumably believes the idea of Palestine will wither away with a battered, weakened Iran, and it can then engage in the fantasy of creating “Greater Israel”, an imagining based on a Biblical verse that expands the homeland for Jews all the way to the Euphrates. A host of Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have spoken of Greater Israel in the past two years.

The US hopes to control the energy resources in a devastated Iran, and plug it out from China’s orbit. It will also have no qualms in abandoning Iran in case it descends into chaos, as its predecessors did in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.

The bombing of Iran is illustrative of Rubio’s exhortation not to be paralysed into inaction by the “fear of war”. A facile victory in Iran will inspire America to trigger conflicts in other parts of the world, not least because Trump is “dangerous”, as 200 mental health professionals said in an advertisement they issued in the New York Times in October 2024, because of “his symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder—malignant narcissism.”

This is why the world’s future is better served with Iran prolonging the war at a great cost to itself. It will undoubtedly spawn an energy crisis, put the skids under the global economy, and have inimical implications for the enticing paradises that the autocratic kingdoms have built in West Asia. That may perhaps convince them that Trump’s US can no longer guarantee security and stability despite its military bases in West Asia, and that it privileges Israel’s interests over theirs. It is through its network of military bases worldwide that the US tellingly projects power.

Consequences for India

A destabilised West Asia will have severe consequences for India. Ten million Indians work in the region. They accounted for 38 percent of the $135 billion in foreign remittances India received in 2024-25. Around 50 percent of its crude and two-thirds of its liquefied gas come from the region. India should have sought to dissuade Trump and Netanyahu from lighting the fire in the region.

India didn’t. Instead, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his speech to Knesset, didn’t even mention the genocidal killing in Gaza. His silence tacitly endorses the brutal colonising project of Israel and the US. Through Iran’s refusal to genuflect before the bullies, we might rediscover the value of resistance to injustice —of which India’s anti-colonial struggle was a shining example—and realise that Iran’s existential battle has, without being intended, become a fight for the world to breathe without fear.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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