General Wesley Clark, former commander of the NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War and Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 1997 to 2000, revealed a disturbing detail in a well-known 2007 interview: shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, he learned within the Pentagon of a strategic plan to launch military operations against seven countries over five years. The targeted countries were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. According to Clark, military interventions aimed at reshaping the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and other strategic regions were outlined in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Iran appears as the final target on this list: all the other countries have already experienced profound upheavals, regime changes, and devastating civil wars. The export of democracy, much like the current narrative of the Iranian nuclear threat, has proven to be a tragic rhetorical cover to legitimize, in the eyes of Western public opinion, a strategy driven by geopolitical and economic interests with a clear objective: containing China and, more broadly, the economic and political rise of the BRICS countries.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Carter, argued in his renowned book The Grand Chessboard that Eurasia is the key to global dominance due to its vast geographical expanse, immense natural resources, and dense population. Brzezinski identified a potential Russia-China alliance as the only true threat to U.S. global hegemony. To counter this, he proposed a five-phase strategy: controlling Ukraine, separating Europe from Russia, subduing Russia, neutralizing Iran, and ultimately isolating China. Current global tensions must therefore be understood within the context of a long-term Western strategy aimed at preserving a declining unipolar order by containing the rise of a multipolar world led by China, Russia, and the Global South. Having stumbled in the third phase — a clumsy attempt at regime change in Russia and its entanglement in a prolonged regional war — Western powers have now initiated the fourth: the destabilization of Iran. Iran represents a strategic linchpin: it has joined China’s “New Silk Road,” become a member of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and strengthened its regional influence. These developments make it, in Western eyes, a significant geopolitical threat to global Western hegemony. From this perspective, chronic and protracted instability — as seen in countries like Libya, Syria, and Lebanon — serves as a functional tool to curb or disrupt the expansion of China’s global influence, which relies on approximately 90% of Iran’s oil exports.

This context sheds light on Putin’s statement that “Russia and Iran are fighting the same forces.” When tensions take on an existential character, international law becomes a malleable tool, as evidenced by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s arbitrary expansion of the concept of legality, declaring that “the U.S. attack on Iran does not constitute a violation of international law.” While a leader like Netanyahu pursues both personal political survival and the elimination of regional rivals, Anglo-American strategists view Iran as the last major Middle Eastern actor to neutralize. Israel, which, as German Chancellor Merz has stated, “does the dirty work for us,” with its 9.7 million inhabitants compared to Iran’s 91 million and a GDP comparable to that of Lombardy, is too small and economically vulnerable to sustain a new regional conflict alone. A direct confrontation with Tehran, in addition to ongoing wars in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and the massacre in Palestine, would be unsustainable without substantial economic and military support from the West.

The current outcome of the war demonstrates this: the truce achieved through U.S. intervention appears more as a temporary pause in hostilities than a framework for shared security. Following the debacle in Ukraine — now virtually absent from the media spotlight — the United States must reassert its military strength to bolster its national economy and the dollar’s role in international trade and as a safe-haven asset, a role that is visibly eroding. For a country whose economy relies on financial dominance, this is simply unacceptable. The real question, therefore, is not how far Western governments are willing to go with belligerent and failing policies, but whether they still have the capacity to envision an alternative. Everything suggests that other options are not even being considered. This is a claustrophobic and dangerously self-referential vision, reflective of a narrow elite increasingly disconnected from the historical, social, and economic realities of the contemporary world. At this point, the open question is dramatic: are they truly capable of leading the world toward a nuclear war?