By Paolo Falconio –
From a geopolitical perspective, the first element to establish is methodological: in the initial phases of a conflict, analysis must remain hypothetical. War is the domain of uncertainty, information manipulation, and fragmented data. Every strategic assessment must therefore be placed within a probabilistic framework, not an assertive one.
If we observe the conflict at a systemic level, the declared objective of the United States and Israel can be traced back to a regime change strategy. This would not merely involve neutralizing a military threat, but structurally altering Iran’s power architecture and reshaping the regional balance.
This hypothesis rests on three internal geopolitical vectors:
– Elite–society fracture: a significant portion of the urban bourgeoisie and the educated Persian society has long expressed growing dissatisfaction with the current theocratic order.
– Ethnic-peripheral factor: non-Persian areas (Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs of Khuzestan, and segments of the Azeri community) represent potential centrifugal fault lines.
– Interference of third actors: particularly Turkey, a regional revisionist power that fears the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish entity but could simultaneously exploit possible Iranian centrifugal dynamics to expand its influence, especially in the Azeri-Turkic sphere. A necessary caveat: Turkey strongly opposes any Kurdish enclave and is well aware that, after Iran, it could be next.
Within this framework, the hypothesis of using the Kurdish component as a land wedge to support an air campaign fits into a classic hybrid warfare logic: pressure from above (technological superiority) and destabilization from below (territorial fragmentation). It would not be an improvised operation, but one coherent with a multi-level strategic framework.
However, the evolution of the conflict suggests a possible shift in the strategic objective.
Alongside regime change (a transformative goal), a more limited objective appears to be emerging: the temporary neutralization of Iran’s capabilities. In this perspective, the aim would not be to refound the political system, but to massively degrade military, industrial, and logistical infrastructures, thereby disabling Iran’s power projection for a period of five to ten years.
This would amount to a high-intensity attrition warfare strategy: wear down, destroy, delay. Not to build a new order, but to freeze the existing one.
Yet this option appears more as a strategic way out — a containment solution — than as a definitive result. Material destruction does not automatically eliminate political will or the systemic resilience of a state-civilization like Iran, endowed with historical depth, identity cohesion, and asymmetric adaptive capacity.
A third dimension also emerges: the decapitation strategy. The so-called “cutting off the head of the snake” — the systematic elimination of political and military leadership — aims to produce disarticulation of the chain of command, internal psychological shock, and symbolic delegitimization of the regime.
It is a strategy with high media impact and short-term operational returns. However, at the geopolitical level, its effectiveness depends on the nature of the targeted system: in strongly institutionalized and ideologized regimes, leadership is often replaceable; indeed, eliminating top figures may reinforce internal cohesion through the dynamic of martyrdom.
At this point, two considerations must be made.
– First, resorting to the way out presupposes a short timeframe for the cessation of hostilities — measured in days. Otherwise, this conflict carries a high risk of bogging down the contenders.
– Second — and this is my personal view — this attack, which lacks a recognizable strategic or tactical rationale, or at least one that is immediately recognizable, does not seem to rest on a solid basis for achieving the strategic objective. This means it could fail, and that behind it may lie poor advice from neoconservative circles.
– Returning to the analysis, let us examine the criticalities.
Starting from the last point: as I have tried to explain over the past two months, Iran’s power system is complex. It is not Iraq in 2003. It is a system that for some time has been in the hands of the military and the Pasdaran (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), who function as a state within the state. They possess a military component, a police arm, and above all they embody the industrial and oil system that sustains Iran’s economy.
The clergy remains important, but it does not directly control the levers of power.
The killing of Ali Khamenei did not paralyze Iran, nor did the elimination of other top figures. This is clearly evident from Iran’s response. On the contrary, it granted an 86-year-old man, terminally ill with cancer, a martyr’s death in a world where martyrdom carries immense value. It seems someone confused Khamenei with Maduro.
Khamenei was a prominent figure, a spiritual guide for a significant part of the Muslim world. Was it truly necessary to kill him? The religious factor, at the popular level, retains substantial weight in that region. One speaks of Shiites and Sunnis, certainly, but they remain Muslim brothers. Confessional fractures exist, yet in the face of aggression against a major Islamic country and one of its leading spiritual figures, those fractures could diminish in collective perception. One should recall the genesis of Al-Qaeda and reflect on how certain dynamics arise precisely from conflicts that transcend national borders and assume an identity dimension. There is therefore a dangerous transversality in the post-conflict scenario.
Let us now look at the newly announced objective: the systematic destruction of every Iranian capability. Undoubtedly, the United States and Israel possess the capacity to reduce Iran to rubble. However, it is worth remembering that Iran ranks among the world’s leading countries in university scientific training in fields such as engineering and physics. This means human capital, technical resilience, and reconstruction capacity. It is not a backward and dependent reality, but a society with widespread expertise and a solid state structure.
Moreover, it is difficult to imagine that China and Russia would remain passive spectators. We might witness, at the end of operations, a massive economic and military intervention aimed both at wearing down the West and consolidating an alternative axis in the global balance.
As for Iran’s posture, neither the decapitation of leaders has paralyzed the chain of command nor has it prevented the existence of an operational leadership capable of planning strategy.
First, the Iranian leadership’s statements about a long war, and the consequent logic of calibrated attacks designed to maximize media impact while preserving offensive capacity.
Particularly striking is the immediate extension of all Gulf states as potential targets of missiles and drones. This is a clear signal: the conflict does not remain confined but becomes systemic. Gulf monarchies lack significant autonomy in terms of ammunition and prolonged defense; moreover, they respond to delicate internal balances and public opinions that are not irrelevant.
Their involvement is especially significant. These petro-monarchies have an increasingly urgent need for stability to transition from hydrocarbon-based economies toward diversification. This requires foreign investment. Who will invest in a Middle East in flames? All this at the risk of severe internal tensions.
The issue then becomes stark: either the United States extends full and continuous military protection to the entire area, assuming the costs and risks, or the Iranian message prevails. And the message is clear: be careful whom you align with, even in light of the Abraham Accords, because it is far from certain that you will truly be protected.
Ultimately, the idea of neutralizing Iran through devastation risks producing the opposite effect: expanding the conflict, radicalizing regional positions, and strengthening antagonistic alliances.
This war is also triggering an energy crisis that goes well beyond the Strait of Hormuz. Qatar has closed one of its main gas liquefaction facilities. Significant increases in energy prices are expected.
This conflict appears to be based on the concept of resilience. How long will the United States and Israel be able to maintain pressure, considering also ammunition limits? And will the Iranian population rally around the flag, or will minority uprisings be triggered?
We are speaking of a proud people, an empire for three thousand years, with a philosophy of martyrdom (Ashura) and a society that has resisted economic strangulation since 1979.
It would be shortsighted to dismiss all this as mere propaganda. It is a cultural structure that generates a very high threshold for collective suffering and merges with the national pride of a people who perceive themselves — not entirely without reason — as heirs to one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
All this makes betting on an internal collapse of Iran not impossible, but rather risky.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the war in Ukraine to the east and a Middle East in flames would have potentially catastrophic energy and economic consequences, and we are not particularly known for our capacity to endure hardship.
If this war has become a war of attrition, then the initiative has been lost, because Tehran is not the United States’ primary enemy nor its most formidable adversary. This war could produce a partial winner: Israel, which might obtain a disengagement between Iran and the Palestinians — though that link was already severely compromised. But at what cost? The risk of Iran rising as the Islamic nation that repelled the “Great Satan” and becoming a regional reference point.
The question therefore arises: what is the strategic and tactical rationale of this attack? Experts offer no clear answer.
Everyone else loses. By this I mean the systemic nature of the conflict: global energy risk, religious radicalization — including new waves of terrorism — strengthening of the anti-Western axis, erosion of European stability. Above all, the United States risks seeing the perception of its hegemonic role diminished in practice. Iran is not a peer-scale actor for the U.S., and the cost in terms of arsenal deployment could prove critical in other theaters, especially the Indo-Pacific.
It bears repeating: strategic victory over Iran can only be achieved through regime change or fragmentation. Conversely, for Iran and its regime, survival is sufficient to claim victory.
If one question remains open, it is this: does a realistic path toward regime change truly exist under current conditions? Or is the entire operation moving within an unresolved contradiction between political ambition and systemic limits?
Moving from tactics to strategy means remembering that in war it is not enough to destroy: one must know what will be built afterward. And on this point, at present, the answers seem worryingly absent — not helped by the U.S. track record in previous Middle Eastern interventions.
As Clausewitz taught, destruction is the means; the political outcome is the end. And the two almost never coincide automatically.
