Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Raphael Dosson
The Iranian conflict is falling, predictably, into the escalation trap—from what began as a vertically limited, regime-targeting air campaign to a horizontally expanding regional war, with the potential to become one of the most consequential geostrategic crises of the century, carrying far-reaching implications for the global economy and international security. The central question now is whether the systemic and structural conditions are in place for this crisis to escalate into a generalized world war.
Leaders in modern conflicts initiate wars they expect to be rapid, decisive, and limited, with minimal costs—only for them to devolve into protracted wars of attrition in which economic endurance and industrial capacity, rather than initial military success, ultimately determine the outcome. This is the trap the U.S. fell into: a perceived momentum of invincibility—reinforced by the Twelve-Day War with Iran and the capture of Maduro—led it to underestimate the escalation risks of a strategically ill-defined decapitation tactic and the inevitable blockade of the Strait of Hormuz through which one quarter of the global oil supply transits.
The attempt to decapitate the regime has pushed Tehran toward a desperate strategy of survival, relying on disproportionate attrition through large-scale ballistic strikes against U.S. and allied military bases, as well as critical infrastructure in neighboring Gulf states. Coupled with a strategy of compellence through the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran aims to impose maximum economic and political costs on U.S. intervention in order to mobilize global pressure against it. However, this strategy is inherently double-edged: while it seeks to constrain U.S. action, it also risks reinforcing alignment and cooperation against Iran. Either way, the indigestibility generated through the Hormuz blockade, combined with punitive strikes on critical infrastructure, transforms Iran into a world problem and U.S. belligerence into an even larger one.
Yet the strategic ramifications of this expanding regional conflict—set against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions from Ukraine to the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia—do not reflect the systemic conditions that produced past world wars but those of multipolar geopolitics.
A key condition for the emergence of major wars is the involvement of great powers—and, crucially, their alignment through the simultaneous experience of high-salience crises that generate cumulative pressure toward escalation. This pattern was evident in the First World War, where European powers were simultaneously shaped by imperial competition, intense militarization and mobilization, and rising nationalism. It reappeared in the Second World War through the shared experience of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, regime instability, expansionist pressures, and the collapse of cooperative institutions. Such synchronized stress aligns great powers and enables escalation through issue linkage. The configuration of the conflict in Iran, however, lacks this center of gravity. Crises are geographically diffuse, great-power engagement is fragmented across different theaters, and energy disruptions are unevenly absorbed as China, Russia, and the United States pursue diversified strategies. Rather than producing a cohesive group of states experiencing simultaneous and comparable pressures, the current configuration reflects fragmentation—conditions that diverge sharply from those that historically enabled systemic war.
At the same time, it is important to highlight the broader transition in the distribution of power, which generates simultaneity, as major powers concurrently experience role–power disequilibrium: the United States retains a disproportionate role in the system relative to its declining power; China possesses expanding material capabilities but a more limited institutional role; Russia seeks greater influence than its underlying power base supports; and rising middle powers increasingly seek to expand their role within an evolving system. The current moment reflects systemic transition, role–power disequilibrium, regional spillover, and fragmentation—sufficient to sustain a major-war-risk argument, but insufficient to demonstrate the synchronized great-power crisis convergence or a major transition war.
This fragmentation is not merely incidental; it is the defining structural constraint shaping escalation dynamics and state responses in today’s evolving strategic environment. Its logic is precisely revealed in the escalation patterns and interstate dynamics of this Iranian conflict, particularly in the transformation of alliance structures.
In the First World War, overcommitment to rigid alliances and offensive mobilization doctrines generated chain-ganging dynamics and fears of abandonment, constraining Germany’s strategic choices toward the invasion of France—thereby transforming a localized crisis into systemic war. In the Second World War, weak and inconsistently enforced alliance commitments encouraged aggression through buck-passing and deterrence failure, delaying but ultimately amplifying the scale of the conflict.
In both cases, the transformation of these conflicts into world wars can be understood through the role of alliance dynamics and mechanisms—not only in their formal commitments but more fundamentally as systems of expectations about support and behavior. However, an alliance itself didn’t cause war; it structured how local conflicts escalated into systemic wars.
The strategic environment in which the war in Iran unfolds is dramatically devoid of constraining alliance structures, significantly reducing the likelihood that a regional conflict escalates into a systemic world war—whether through fear of entrapment and chain ganging, fear of abandonment and bandwagoning, or clear expectations of allied support or non-response. The involvement of major powers through alliance mechanisms is therefore highly limited—if not absent.
Most notably, NATO—effectively the last remaining institutionalized security alliance—has been unable to provide a unified or decisive response to recent conflicts, whether in Ukraine or Iran, amid growing tensions over burden-sharing and increasingly asymmetric commitments, with the United States openly questioning the value of continued alliance engagement. NATO’s non-response in Iran reflects significant fragmentation of the security architecture and, more critically, a collapse of NATO’s capacity to function as a cohesive actor in a conflict-driven system. The collapse of NATO is also the collapse of European cohesion altogether, effectively marking a return to Europe’s natural state of rivalry, disaggregation, and strategic incompatibility. On the double-edged effect of Iran’s retaliation and blockade, rather than rallying allies into a counter-coalition, Iran’s actions reveal fragmentation, shifting the burden onto individual states—particularly Washington—and constraining escalation.
On the other side of the “axis,” Iran has also been largely on its own. First, its ‘axis of resistance’—including Hamas, the Houthis, Shiite militias in Iraq, and Syria—has largely been neutralized by Israel. Second, even its considered partners, such as China, have proven to be unreliable allies, unwilling to risk their global or domestic interests. Russia’s support has been limited and indirect—mirroring U.S. support for Ukraine—while Moscow remains focused on the Ukrainian front and on reconsolidating its resources, avoiding further fragmentation.
The fragmentation has been further entrenched through this conflict by the grand architect of alliance structure: the United States itself.
A growing sense of invincibility has driven increasingly aggressive U.S. foreign policy, reconfiguring the world map and its alignments to serve its interests through the power of the gun—from coercive pressure on key European allies to sovereign intrusion in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, as well as military provocations in Africa and the Gulf. This trajectory has exposed the vulnerabilities of dependence on Washington and the growing risks of bandwagoning, increasingly forcing allies to resist entrapment—particularly as disruptions to global oil flows in Iran place the burden of escalation disproportionately on the United States.
This dynamic is further reinforced when the security and survival of allied states become dependent on the shifting reliability of U.S. commitments. The U.S. war in Iran has already redirected critical military assets, including elements of missile defense systems such as THAAD, from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, leaving countries like South Korea and Japan acutely exposed to regional threats and directly weakening the credibility of deterrence architecture.
This erosion of credibility extends beyond the Middle East. Long central to strategic ambiguity over Taiwan, U.S. security commitments are increasingly being called into doubt, sending a broader signal to allies about the uncertainty of American defense guarantees. The war in Iran already demonstrates this shift in practice, as regional allies face attacks on critical infrastructure with limited U.S. response. This raises a broader question: would the United States respond differently to a Chinese strike on Taiwan’s strategic semiconductor infrastructure than it has to Iranian attacks on regional partners, such as desalination plants in Qatar?
Allies have been left to bear the consequences of the war in Iran. European countries are drawing down their strategic oil reserves based on the “promise” that the U.S. operation would be short and decisive. As the conflict extends beyond the 10–15 days of available wartime reserves, allies are already facing the consequences of a shifting geopolitical order—where an increasing share of transactions is conducted in RMB, and Chinese-flagged vessels transit the Strait freely while those of U.S. allies remain blocked.
Iran’s survival strategy of massive retaliation and unbearable blockade pressure has sought not to trigger major war escalation but to test the limits of U.S. security leadership and exploit growing systemic instability and fragmentation. The war has revealed a significant step in U.S. unipolar decline and a global humiliation of its role as the principal architect of the international order unable to secure its strategic interests. Washington has failed to remove the Iranian regime, ensure navigability through the Strait, defend Gulf partners, or articulate a clear war horizon without triggering broader systemic instability. On the contrary, the conflict has reinforced Iranian nationalism, enabled Tehran to pursue its nuclear ambitions with reduced fear of military constraint, alienated partners, and pushed states across the Gulf, Asia, and Europe to militarize and strengthen their strategic autonomy outside the U.S. umbrella.
More critically, it raises questions about the relevance of U.S. leadership in an evolving multipolar order—where alternatives to the petrodollar system emerge, such as the petroyuan, and where states increasingly prioritize the pragmatic diversification of partnerships to navigate the geopolitical constraints of a fragmented and imbalanced system.
To answer the question posed at the outset—whether the systemic and structural conditions for a generalized world war are in place—the war in Iran exposes the new fragmented dynamic of international relations shaped by the transition from U.S. unipolarity to a more multipolar order. These structural constraints fundamentally alter the conditions for conflict escalation and reshape expectations about strategic behavior in ways not previously observed, requiring renewed analytical frameworks.
The escalation of the Iranian conflict is therefore better understood as a dangerous regional war unfolding within a transitioning multipolar system, rather than the onset of a world war. Its dynamics reflect the structural effects of multipolarity: fragmentation and the weakening of alliance constraints reduce the likelihood that regional conflicts escalate into systemic wars, as seen in earlier periods. The erosion of commitment, the absence of chain-ganging as states hedge to avoid entrapment or abandonment, and the rise of uncertainty and ambiguity in interstate relations undermine the mechanisms that historically facilitated large-scale escalation. This does not eliminate escalation risks; rather, it transforms them into more gradual, indirect, and regionally contained forms of geopolitical competition.
The structural dynamics of multipolarity externalize underlying changes in power across states, extending fragmentation into multiple poles and intensifying conditions of anarchy. As the system becomes more diffuse and less predictable, established expectations of strategic interaction erode, forcing states to confront heightened uncertainty and adopt a more explicit, power-centered understanding of international relations in which pragmatic calculation replaces stable alignment and structured cooperation.
