
by Fyodor Lukyanov
June 17, 2025
from
RT Website
Fyodor Lukyanov,
is one of the most
prominent Russian experts in the field of international
relations and foreign policy.
He has worked in
journalism since 1990 and is the author of numerous
publications on modern international relations and
Russian foreign policy.
Since 2002, he has been the editor-in-chief of Russia in
Global Affairs - a magazine conceived as a platform for
dialogue and debate among foreign and Russian experts
and policymakers.
In 2012, he was elected Chairman of the Presidium of the
Council on Foreign and Defense Policy of Russia, one of
the oldest Russian NGOs.
Since 2015, he has
been the Director for Scientific Work of the Foundation
for Development and Support of the
Valdai
International Discussion Club.
He works as a
research professor at the Faculty of World Economy and
Global Politics at the National Research University
Higher School of Economics. |

Fire and smoke rise into the sky
after an
Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot
on June 15,
2025 in Tehran, Iran.
© Getty Images
/ Getty Images
Israel's attack
on Iran, which began last Friday
(13 June), is the culmination of nearly 25 years of relentless
transformation across West Asia.
This war was not born overnight, nor can it be
explained by simplistic moral binaries. What we see now is the
natural outcome of a series of miscalculations, misread ambitions,
and power vacuums.
There are no neat lessons to be learned from the last
quarter-century. The events were too disjointed, the consequences
too contradictory.
But that doesn't mean they lacked logic.
If anything, the unfolding chaos
is,
the most coherent evidence of where Western
interventionism, ideological naivety, and geopolitical arrogance
have led.
Collapse of the Framework
For much of the 20th century,
the Middle East was kept within a
fragile but functioning framework, largely defined by Cold War
dynamics.
Superpowers patronized local regimes, and the
balance - while far from peaceful - was stable in its
predictability.
But the end of the Cold War, and with it the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, dissolved those rules. For the next 25 years,
the United States stood uncontested
in the region.
The ideological battle between "socialism" and
the "free world" vanished, leaving a vacuum that new forces quickly
sought to fill. Washington tried to impose the values of Western
liberal democracy as universal truths.
Simultaneously, two other trends emerged:
-
political Islam, which ranged from
reformist to radical
-
reassertion of authoritarian secular
regimes as bulwarks against collapse
Paradoxically, Islamism - though
ideologically opposed to the West - aligned more closely with
liberalism in its resistance to autocracy.
Meanwhile, those same autocracies were often
embraced as the lesser evil against extremism.
Collapse of
Balance
Everything changed after
September 11, 2001.
The terrorist attacks did not just provoke a
military response; they triggered an ideological crusade.
Washington launched its so-called
War on Terror, beginning with
Afghanistan, and quickly expanded it into Iraq.
Here, the neoconservative fantasy took hold:
that democracy could be exported by force.
The result was catastrophic...!
The Iraq invasion destroyed a central pillar of
regional balance.
In the rubble, sectarianism flourished and
religious extremism metastasized. Islamic State emerged from this
chaos. As Iraq was dismantled, Iran rose.
No longer encircled, Tehran extended its
reach - to Baghdad, to Damascus, to Beirut.
Turkey, too, revived its imperial reflexes
under Erdogan.
The Gulf states, meanwhile, began throwing
their wealth and weight around with greater confidence.
The US, the architect of this
disorder, found itself mired in endless, unwinnable wars.
This unraveling continued with the US-imposed
Palestinian elections, which split the Palestinian territories
and empowered
Hamas.
Then came the Arab Spring, lauded in Western
capitals as a democratic awakening...
In truth, it hastened the collapse of already
brittle states.
Libya was shattered.
Syria descended into a proxy
war.
Yemen became a humanitarian catastrophe.
South Sudan, birthed under external pressure,
quickly fell into dysfunction...
All of it marked the end of regional
balance...
Collapse of the Margins
The end of authoritarianism in the Middle East didn't usher
in 'liberal democracy'...
It gave way to political Islam, which
for a time became the only structured form of political
participation.
This in turn triggered attempts to restore the
old regimes, now seen by many as the lesser evil.
Egypt and Tunisia reimposed secular order.
Libya and Iraq, by contrast, have remained
stateless zones.
Syria's trajectory is instructive:
the country moved from dictatorship
to Islamist chaos and now toward a patchwork
autocracy held together by foreign patrons.
Russia's 2015 intervention stabilized the
situation temporarily, but Syria is now drifting toward becoming a
non-state entity, its sovereignty unclear, its borders uncertain.
Amid this collapse, it is no coincidence that the key powers
in today's Middle East are non-Arab...:
Iran, Turkey, and Israel.
Arab states, while vocal, have opted for caution.
In contrast, these three countries each represent
distinct political models:
-
an Islamic theocracy with pluralist
features (Iran)
-
a militarized democracy (Turkey)
-
a Western-style democracy increasingly
shaped by religious nationalism (Israel)
Despite their differences, these states share one
trait:
their domestic politics are inseparable from
their foreign policy.
-
Iran's expansionism is tied to the
economic and ideological reach of the Revolutionary Guard
-
Erdogan's foreign escapades feed his
domestic narrative of Turkish resurgence
-
Israel's doctrine of security has shifted
from defense to active transformation of the region
Collapse of
Illusions
This brings us to the present...
The liberal order that peaked at the turn of the
century sought to reform the Middle East through market economics,
elections, and civil society... but it failed...!
Not only did it dismantle the old without
building the new, but the very forces meant to spread democracy
often empowered sectarianism and violence.
Now the appetite for transformation has dried up
in the West, and with it, the liberal order itself. In its place we
see a convergence of systems once thought irreconcilable.
Israel, for instance, no longer stands as a
liberal outpost surrounded by authoritarian relics.
Its political system has grown increasingly
illiberal, its governance militarized, and its nationalism more
overt.
The Netanyahu government is the clearest
expression of this change.
One may argue that war justifies such measures -
especially following the October 2023 Hamas attacks. But
these shifts began earlier. The war simply accelerated trends
already in motion.
As liberalism recedes, a new kind of utopia takes its place - not
democratic and inclusive, but transactional and enforced.
Trump, the Israeli right, and their
Gulf allies envision a Middle East pacified through military
dominance, economic deals, and strategic normalization.
The
Abraham Accords, framed as
peace, are part of this vision. But peace built on force is no peace
at all.
We are witnessing the result.
The Iran-Israel war is not a bolt from the
blue.
It is the direct consequence of two decades
of dismantled norms, unchecked ambitions, and a deep
misunderstanding of the region's political fabric.
And as always in the Middle East, when utopias
fail, it is the people who pay the price...
|