Abandon all hope, all Ye that enter here

The rules based international order has broken down and the world is now run on might makes right basis.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here

Dark times. Just as I was about to sign off for the day yesterday when the news broke that Iran had fired some 200 missiles at Israel. The attack went on for an hour and thankfully only one person seems to have been killed by falling shrapnel and none of the missiles that made it to the ground came down on anything important.

Israelis were celebrating in the streets last week our Tel Aviv bureau reported as dozens of Hezbollah big wigs were killed in their beds. Yesterday, it was the turn of the Persians; Iranians were dancing in the street, our bureau in Tehran reports.

We are locked in a cycle of death and counter strikes. Now everyone is on tenterhooks as Israel said it will respond with another round of strikes in revenge for the revenge, in revenge for the revenge, in revenge for the revenge… and so on. We were supposed to have gotten past this following the end of WWII and the Helsinki Declaration in 1975. That was supposed to usher in a golden era for humanity. It was the start of building a new world order based on international law and “values”. It sorta worked for a while, but the programme has been thrown out of the window now.

The question this morning is: has the touted “wider regional war” started? You can only have so many counter strikes before you lose count and you are actually in a war. It looks like that now, or at least very close to it. Israel has attacked three countries – Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – in as many days.

However, our Tehran bureau was very specific: the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in their statement as the missiles were still arriving that the attack was a retaliation for the Lebanon strikes and not the start of a war, adding if Israel escalates it would too.

Our Iranian bureau chief is adamant that Tehran doesn’t want a regional war as it can’t win. Iran would be destroyed if the combined force of the US and Israel attacked it without restraint. And the mullahs are well aware of that, so they play a balancing game between shows of strength but pulling their punches to prevent a full war. In the April missile attack on Israel, it transpired that Iran let the Americans know the attack was coming two days ahead, to keep casualties to a minimum. Not this time though. So, we have clicked up a ratchet notch.

As for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is a lot of speculation, especially from the Arab talking heads, that he has been deliberately provoking Iran, hoping for exactly this missile strike. They say that he now has a “historic opportunity” to bomb Iran directly and that his goal here is to target the six nuclear facilities that are enriching uranium. Iran has promised to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth” and owning an atom bomb would do the trick.

The logic of this argument is very persuasive: Iran with a bomb is an existential threat to Israel and here is a chance to definitively counter that threat. If this is correct, then Israel will strike these facilities (and more no doubt) very soon – with US backing.

The irony here is that, as we have been reporting, Iran under the new president Masoud Pezeshkian has actually been backing away from Russia and signalling very strongly in the last month that it would like to go back to getting the JCPOA sanctions lifted. That is more important to Tehran than joining Russian President Vladimir Putin in some sort of apocalyptic show-down with the West. This is a missed opportunity, but Israel has zero interest in taking this path.

The conflicts in both the Ukraine and Middle East have wax-stripped away a veneer that we live in a “rules based order”. Putin’s war in Ukraine is totally unjustified, even if he does have legitimate security concerns. But likewise, Netanyahu’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza is likewise beyond the pale, even if Israel does have the right to protect itself after the October 7 attacks. And the collective West has the power over Israel to stop its aggression, but the West just continues to supply it with weapons.

Our Persian reporters have been joking, pointing out the similarities between the two conflicts. Putin didn’t invade Ukraine; he launched a “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine. Israel hasn’t invaded Lebanon’s south; it has launched a “limited military operation” to take out “terrorists”. Both are acting out of the needs of their own perceived security needs. But this road runs out pretty quickly.

“Terrorism” has become a catch-all word to justify any act of state-sponsored violence these days that technically violates international law. To attack another country, you either have had to have been attacked, or get a UN mandate. Putin had neither of these. Netanyahu could legitimately argue that Hezbollah’s missiles were an attack.

A lot of civilians have died in both conflicts, who’s families won’t care a monkey’s about these niceties. But what is going on has little to do with international law. The fact that Israel has occupied Palestinian lands in open defiance of a dozen UN resolutions, or the Washington calling for a ceasefire with one hand, but dishing out a new $8.7bn arms package for Israel on the same day that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy got his $8bn package highlights that the world is still run on the “might makes right” basis. Putin has been playing the same game with the annexation of Georgian and Ukrainian territory and wars with both those countries. Both Putin and Netanyahu have been indicted by the ICC and no one cares or can do anything about it.

There are some surficial similarities with the Ukrainian and Israeli conflicts, but the big difference is the difference in military power. Israel is fully armed with the best arms the US has to offer (and its Iron Dome systems are actually better than anything the US has). But the US is refusing to provide Ukraine not only with all the arms it wants – Zelenskiy left New York with no US commitment to anything on his victory list – but it can’t even get permission to use what it does have on Russia, which is pounding it with impunity. Nowhere is this clearer than with F-16s: Israel has 225 F-16s and Ukraine has nine.

Nukes play the key role here. If the Arab analysis is right, then Israel is going all out to prevent Iran from getting the bomb and how it does this is just a matter of PR, the need to dress it up in “acceptable” terms. However, as Russia does have the bomb (and more of them than the US), Washington will never let Ukraine actually win its war for fear of cornered Russia’s first strike retaliation. Putin understands this full well which is why he regularly rattles his nuclear sabre. Note the timing on the latest sword clattering: Putin loosened Russia’s rules on first strikes just as Zelenskiy was sitting down with Biden in Washington to read him his “victory plan.”

And it worked. Commentators keep saying that the Kremlin only understands force, but it seems that so does the White House and it is taking Putin’s threats seriously. Netanyahu could well achieve his goals, but it looks increasingly likely that Zelenskiy will not. Our columnist Leonid Ragozin argues that the obviously misnamed “victory plan" is just a ruse to prepare the ground for opening ceasefire talks with Putin later this year, because he realises that the West will always only provide him with some, but not enough support.

The irony here is that Putin started his war in order to get away from this raw might makes right way of running the world. That’s what he means by multipolar world. As we reported, in 2008 Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs drew up concrete plans for a new post-Cold War pan-European security deal that was presented by then president Dmitry Medvedev on his first foreign trip – to Brussels. It was simply dumped in a bin. That was another missed opportunity.

There was another chance to strike a deal at the start of 2022, when Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov and his boss Sergei Lavrov did two months of diplomacy, basically asking for the same thing, but were told to talk to the hand by the West. Putin is still offering the same deal, well a much worse deal of course, based on the Istanbul deal from 2022, but with terms that no one will accept now.

What would the world look like if the Helsinki principles were abandoned and the West took this deal? Pretty ugly. If that is a good idea in the first place is an entirely different debate. However, the way things are being run now is based simply on violence, bombs and war, and sure that is worse? The only other way out of this cul-de-sac I can see is to give both Ukraine and Iran nuclear weapons and that is clearly not a good idea either.