The skies over West Asia are lit up by the twilight phenomena caused by missiles. The ground below is enveloped by an unmistakable sense of doom and gloom. The initial US-Israel campaign targeted political and military infrastructure in Iran. In retaliation, Iran fired ballistic missiles at every country in the region barring Oman, and targeted US military bases including the Central Command in Qatar that manages operations stretching from Egypt to Kazakhstan.
The US believes it can decapitate the leadership of the Iranian regime—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the President and the Supreme Leader—and open the gates for another popular regime. The thesis is challenged by history as, typically, foreign intervention tends to rally the masses around the national flag. From Iraq to Egypt to Tunisia, such hope has been frequently flattened. That said, the fact that this Iranian regime has conducted brutal reprisals over the past few years could provide a motivation.
The possibility of escalation is writ large—the air spaces over Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar have been shut. Surgical strikes are sold as limited and precise for specific objectives. But assumptions are finally assumptions. The strikes and the failure of dialogue and diplomacy have normalised the choice of force as the first, not the last, resort. The strikes symbolise regime messaging from 30,000 ft—shock, awe and uncertainty—which is all too familiar in West Asia.
The context is laced with irony and history. On Saturday, as US and Israeli forces bombed Iran, Donald J Trump asked Iranians to oust the authoritarian regime and seize control. The seeds of authoritarian misery were originally propagated by the US and the UK. In I953, the CIA and the MI6 orchestrated Operation Ajax to crown the authoritarian Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the monarch. Mohammed Mossadegh, duly nominated by the Iranian Majlis, was ousted as he promised the nationalisation of oil companies, especially the Anglo Iranian Oil Company that is now known as BP.
Karma turned up in 1979. The Shah found himself in the crosshairs of a revolution engineered in Paris that had granted refuge to Ayatollah Khomeini. The tragedy of Iran is that every few decades, regimes that arrived with the promise of liberty actually tightened the shackles on people. If the Shah unleashed his secret police Savak on the people, the Ali Khamenei regime has used IRGC’s Intelligence Organisation for political retribution.
The military campaign is not without its share of ironies. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon designed the gendarme doctrine to dominate regions using local powers, without putting American boots on the ground. To sustain the Shah’s rule as a ‘regional gendarme’ the US pumped dollars. Even today, Iran’s air force flies F14 Tomcat jets last seen in Top Gun, F4 Phantoms and F5 fighters, besides Bell 212 copters. The bunkers being scoped by missiles on the Zagros mountain range, home to home to Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes, were designed by the US to serve the Shah. The assets being vapourised were built with US dollars.
The missiles over the skies in West Asia illustrate the yo-yo of diplomatic imagination. For decades, Tehran and Washington have circled the other in a dangerous dance of covert operations, cyber attacks, proxy clashes and sanctions. Iran designated the US as ‘the regime of Satan’ and the US put Iran on ‘the axis of evil’. Diplomacy did light up hope at times—the 2015 nuclear deal abbreviated as JCPOA, promised a rule-based path for Iran’s reintegration into the global economy.
Hope was shredded by distrust and the agreement was dissolved in 2018 by Trump. Israel was never reconciled to the idea. After all, both the US and Israel are bound by the Begin Doctrine—that no other regional player could go nuclear, as was illustrated in Operation Opera on the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981, Operation Desert Fox in 2003 and Operation Midnight Hammer conducted by the US in June 2025.
Following last year’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in Fordo, Trump nudged Iran to come to the table for a deal. A maxim drawn from the Hadith (2526) says, “The worst amongst people is one with the double face.” Iranians repeatedly refer to the nuclear fatwa, Khamenei’s ruling against weapons of mass destruction, and assert they have no intention of using uranium for a bomb. The Israelis and Americans frequently refer to the term ‘taqiyah’ to point out that the fatwa is tactical, and cite the use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war despite fatwas. Equally, the Iranians cite Israel’s undeclared nuclear power status. Trust has been a missing ingredient through the talks.
Barely 24 hours before the first missiles were fired, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, foreign minister Oman and a key mediator in the US-Iran talks, said, “Peace is within reach.” Iran had agreed to not enrich, re-blend its stockpile and accept monitoring. Trump, however, was not happy: “They’re not getting to the right answer.” Nobody quite knows what the right answer is/was. Just as nobody can explain the paradox of the department of war coexisting with the board of peace.
The conflict carries consequences for India and others—energy prices, shipping costs, risk premiums and capital flight. The strikes may be presented as deterrence. But deterrence is not static and thresholds can be tested by non-state actors through acts of terrorism. The absence of answers in the dialogue of the deaf has propelled the return of the ghosts of diplomacy—shock, awe and uncertainty.
Read all columns by Shankkar Aiyar
SHANKKAR AIYAR
Author of The Gated Republic, Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12 Digit Revolution, and Accidental India
(shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com)