Chekhov's Gun

Why the Middle East, long a tinderbox, finally exploded

It was a lovely two months. Not since May 13 have I published a single entry relating to the conflict in the Middle East. Thanks to three weeks in Europe, a very special anniversary, and a brief window where it seemed that a peaceful Middle Eastern order could be at hand, I was offered a blissful reprieve from all bad news hailing from the region that has never ceased to give me and other geopolitically-minded researchers headaches. Just a couple weeks ago, traffic was up in the Strait of Hormuz and 47-year archenemies the United States and Iran met directly on the shores of Switzerland’s picturesque Lake Lucerne. The radical, hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) then had other ideas.

Beyond the escalating tit-for-tat in the Persian Gulf, one must ask, was this war, perpetuated by Iranian hard-liners currently resisting a reasonable peace agreement inevitable, or was it avoidable? If one looks at two critical moments, I begin to lean more towards the former.

Back in 2015, you probably remember the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an arrangement signed between the Obama Administration, in concert with other global powers, and the Islamic Republic of Iran to almost completely dismantle the latter’s uranium enrichment program that had long been a constant source of regional instability. Because the United States and Israel have long maintained an unwritten doctrine that Iran successfully weaponizing radioactive material into a deliverable nuclear bomb is such a dangerous outcome that pre-emptive military action would become mandatory, Washington at the time decided to find a diplomatic solution lest this terrible binary ever be reached. The core provisions of the agreement would be the end of multilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic in exchange for Tehran allowing inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) to supervise the de-enrichment process and never, ever, develop a nuclear weapon.

While the agreement was noble, and Tehran continued to comply for quite some time, hard-liners on both sides fiercely attacked the JCPOA. For the most militant anti-Western Iranian factions, such as the IRGC, the deal was a treacherous capitulation to the Great Satan that would dismantle Iran’s defenses. Likewise hostile to the nuclear agreement were hawks in the Republican Party including, to no one’s surprise, our friend Senator Lindsey Graham, who called the JCPOA a “disaster” and a “death sentence for Israel” and dismissed the IAEA inspection regime as a “complete joke.” However, the JCPOA’s executioner was none other than first-term Donald Trump, who lamented, “The Iran deal is a terrible deal. We paid $150 billion. We gave $1.8 billion in cash. That’s actual cash, barrels of cash. It’s insane. It’s ridiculous.” While technically the cash payout was the outcome of an unrelated legal dispute, the optics of the arrangement proved catastrophic for the JCPOA.

Less than three years and one presidential signature later, the Iran Nuclear Deal was dead, and with it the first critical safeguard to prevent war.

In the years that followed, Iran, again snarled by sanctions and with nothing to lose, resumed its uranium enrichment as further diplomacy to resurrect a nuclear agreement went nowhere and the regime’s misconduct grew even more brazen. However, the second critical moment is what I believe made this current nightmare in the Persian Gulf inevitable. On October 7, 2023, 50 years to the day after the Arab invasion of Israel that sparked the Yom Kippur War, Palestinian terrorists from Hamas, a key proxy militia of Iran, unleashed a devastating and horrific ground offensive deep into Israeli territory that slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians and unleashed a conflict that obliterated the Hamas-mismanaged Gaza Strip. This atrocity fundamentally and permanently altered and radicalized Israeli strategic doctrine. While once Jerusalem could believe its enemies could be deterred by self-preservation instinct, Hamas’ miscalculation proved that Iran’s notorious Axis of Resistance meant what they said.

Now, instead of merely deterring threats, Israel will act, despite the widespread condemnation of the international community, to preemptively dismantle threats before they materialize, even if a threat is not deemed imminent. In practice, this doctrine ensures Israel is locked in a forever war against adversaries who will never renounce their ambition to destroy Israeli statehood. Likewise, if any Axis front is attacked, all are bound to retaliate, pulling Israel deeper into the vortex of a multi-front war. The next two-and-a-half years after the 2023 Hamas attack were a series of close calls, managed escalations, and Israeli provocations that even aggravated their closest allies in Washington. Yet somehow, the United States and Iran managed to skirt by with only 28 hostile exchanges due to Tehran’s then-aversion to all-out war with an adversary everyone at the time expected would prevail.

Not anymore.

With the Trump Administration now formally notifying Congress of a resumption of hostilities with Iran, few, if any, expect the conflict, initially expected to only last days, to end anytime soon. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, dangerous men who thrive on conflict and whose bloody grip on power in Tehran would be seriously imperiled by a permanent peace agreement, have nothing to lose in their determination to humiliate the United States into withdrawing from the region— an outcome that would ensure the vassalization of the entire region under their command. Even if Trump wants out, these bloodthirsty barbarians simply cannot allow it.

Returning to my original question, I would describe the Middle East over the past several years, at least since the October 7 attacks but most likely stretching even further back to the collapse of the nuclear agreement in 2018, as existing in the presence of the theatrical notion of Chekhov’s Gun, an object, which may appear irrelevant, that’s bound to detonate at some point. In this instance, the gun was the ever-present specter of all-out war between the United States and Iran. Even though neither side wanted one, mutual red lines (especially relating to the nuclear program) and autonomous allies like Israel and Hamas made the situation highly volatile. Just because the trigger happened to be an infamous meeting in the White House Situation Room where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided dubious intelligence of Tehran’s vulnerability doesn’t mean there were not dozens if not hundreds of triggers that could have sparked the gun to go off.

And detonate, the Middle East did.