The ongoing military tensions in the middle east are not limited to Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium or its desire to build nuclear weapons and associated delivery systems and threaten Israel’s right to exist. Iran has at an enormous cost to its sovereignty agreed to appease the US and Israel and yet the threat of ground invasion of Iran looms as the two-weeks of ceasefire agreed on 08 April comes to an end on 22 April. On April 12, the Russian Security Council warned the US and Israel could use the peace talks to prepare for a ground operation against Iran. Such an assessment was made on the basis of the ongoing troops build up in middle east. More than 50,000 US troops are now positioned in the region which includes 2,500 marines from the 11th Expeditionary Corps, more than 1,200 soldiers from the elite 82nd Airborne Division, Delta special forces, and the 75th Ranger Regiment, one of the Army’s most elite special operations units. Roughly, 500 US Air Force aircraft are stationed at Middle Eastern airfields along with 20 US Navy vessels and additional naval assets moving into the region – USS Boxer and USS George HW Bush, indicates a possible ground invasion.
This conflict is multi-layered with no pre-determined military objective at hand and with no particular definition for victory or defeat. From Israel’s grand strategic objective of creating a Greater Israel to the US strategic necessity to restore the credibility of the petrol-dollar, experts remain uncertain in their predictions about the trajectory of this war. This war represents too many layers – mythology, history, religion, eschatology, geo-politics and economics, great power rivalry, world re-order, and thus poses an analytical challenge to predict the outcome of the war and foreign policy decision making for many. According to former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal, Trump is making the nuclear issue central to the US strategy, when actually the real issue is what the US and Israeli intentions are. The war on Iran did not begin on 28 February, when Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi on 27 February publicly stated that Iran had agreed not to keep enriched uranium on its territory that could be used to produce a nuclear weapon. The war on Iran is part of a historical process that has been in making for centuries – to win, one needs to fight and to fight one needs a reason. Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons is just an excuse to liquidate Iran’s sovereignty, and as a process of grand strategy this is not limited to the sovereignty of Iran alone, but sovereignty of all nations on the planet. According to former commander of NATO’s forces in Europe, General Wesley Clark, he met a senior military officer in Washington in November 2001 who told him the Bush administration was planning to attack Iraq first before taking action against Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. As this phase of the process concludes, the next likely target nation will be Russia.
The grand strategic objective of this military process are not the nations themselves, but their sovereignty. Modern physics as the basis of natural science and its combination with technical science have influenced the political structure of the world through their application to atomic weaponry. Arguably, no nation can claim to possess absolute sovereignty given that all nations are within the range of nuclear weapons. The fact that a nation itself possesses nuclear weapons can hardly reinforce its sovereignty. Sovereignty has now emerged as a key concern for great powers – the US, Russia and China, with in a globalized political structure of the world. In his speech at St Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, 2022, President Putin laid out five principles according to which Russia was going to build its model of economic development and sovereignty protection while stating that, “Sovereignty cannot be segmented or fragmented in the 21st century”. The US National Security Strategy 2025 lays a strong emphasis on sovereignty and states, “The United States will unapologetically protect our own sovereignty”. In its five-point initiative for restoring peace and stability in the Gulf and Middle East Region, China stressed on safeguarding Sovereignty, territorial integrity, national independence and security of Iran and the Gulf states. Trump administrations strategy instead calls for using unconventional diplomacy, America’s military might, and economic leverage to surgically extinguish embers of division between nuclear-capable nations and violent wars caused by centuries-long hatred
The problem being, sovereignty has increasing become a relative term given that reinforcing one’s own sovereignty often comes at the cost of violating others sovereignty, knowingly or unknowingly. Nuclear weapons have now become the biggest enablers and challenger to the very idea of sovereignty. Russia’s special military operations against Ukraine were aimed at arresting this growing threat to its sovereignty and the US emphasis on the European powers to increase their defense spending and provide for their own security is at large aimed at Russia. General Carsten Breuer, head of Germany’s armed forces, is urging Western leaders to “join the dots” on the war in Iran and the Russia invasion of Ukraine. He further argues that by the 2029 there is a likelihood of Russia’s use of force against a NATO member nation. Categorization of Russia as a military threat has been in making ever since the cold-War ended. Beginning with the systematic withdrawal from key agreements that aimed at strategic stability to dismantling of national sovereignty of many nations in the middle east are but stepping stones to attack Russia. For sure, in coming days the US forces will commence ground invasion of Iran, following which in coming years attack on Russia’s sovereignty will commence as part of the process. A globalized world wherein nations are focused on their own sovereignty is producing a contradiction, and perhaps it is this contradiction that we choose to address as the churn within the international system.
Dr Sundaram Rajasimman Lectures at Sichuan Internation Studies University, Chongqing and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at themayandischool@gmail.com
