No one can say we did not see it coming. For months, the warning signs had been accumulating, positions had been hardening, and negotiations with Iran seemed less like a sincere diplomatic process than a narrative framework designed to legitimize the inevitable. This weekend, the inevitable happened. The United States and Israel declared war on Iran. And as always in a Middle East that no longer breathes, the event is both brutal in its form and perfectly coherent in its logic.
To understand what is unfolding, one must begin where the map is easiest to read: the Strait of Hormuz. This tiny corridor, barely twenty-one kilometers wide at its narrowest point, alone concentrates nearly 20% of global oil production, including that of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Above all, no less than 45% of China’s energy consumption passes through it.
Iran, a coastal state, is both its natural guardian and potentially its gatekeeper. After the Venezuelan episode, one need not be a grand strategist to grasp that Washington is engaged in a systematic effort to secure the world’s strategic resources. Gulf oil, much like that of Latin America, is considered far too valuable to remain in the hands of actors Uncle Sam deems unreliable.
It must also be said that the American domestic calendar was far from insignificant. The Epstein affair, which the administration had been trying to downplay, continued to poison the media agenda with a persistence that White House communicators struggled to contain. Congressional hearings, including the almost caricatural appearance of the Attorney General, the highly publicized appearances of the Clinton couple, Bill Gates’ “apologies,” the arrest of Prince Andrew, and the spectacular resignation of the head of the Davos Forum all shook public opinion without, curiously enough, triggering the cascade of indictments that revelations of such magnitude would normally have produced. In such a context, a large-scale military operation offers the immediate advantage of recalibrating the agenda. That is never a coincidence.
For Israel, however, the story is different — much older and far more existential. Iran has made the destruction of the Jewish state a matter of doctrine, from Khomeini to Khamenei, without ever wavering. But beyond the rhetoric, Tel Aviv’s objective in striking Tehran through this understanding with Washington is not merely to neutralize a direct adversary. It is to cut off the head of the snake in order to decapitate the entire ecosystem it finances. Hezbollah, Iran’s principal armed proxy in the region, thus finds itself orphaned from its patron, at least temporarily. In Lebanon as in Gaza, this repositioning offers Israel room for maneuver it has not enjoyed in years.
Moreover, cracks within Iran’s domestic front were already visible. The targeted attacks of recent months, combined with apparent support for protest movements bloodily repressed at the end of 2025, had considerably weakened a regime that, like all dictatorships, projected an extravagant image of unity against external enemies while steadily eroding from within.
Within the great fracture between the Sunni and Shia worlds that has structured the region’s geopolitics for centuries, Tehran’s humiliation provokes no anguish among Arab capitals allied with the United States. Quite the opposite: it elicits discreet approval. Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo all had their own disputes with Iran, its proxies, and its regional hegemonic ambitions. For these countries, the American-Israeli operation accomplishes part of the work they either could not or would not undertake themselves.
Some denounce this unilateralism, rightly so. But unilateralism died long ago; it merely lingered on life support in a handful of multilateral speeches and conference halls. When Russia denounces violations of international law, one is tempted to recall what it has been doing in Ukraine for years. When China pleads for respect for sovereignty, thoughts immediately turn to Taiwan and the South China Sea. As for the UN Security Council, paralyzed by veto powers, it has become little more than a theatrical stage where great powers proclaim their noble intentions before proceeding to do exactly what they had already decided to do. The Iraq War and Russian annexations in the Caucasus and the Black Sea demonstrated this before. The Iranian episode confirms it today.
For Morocco, the context is far from neutral as well. In 2018, Rabat severed diplomatic relations with Tehran after documenting explicit Iranian support for the SADR and the Polisario Front, facilitated through Hezbollah and with the overt complicity of Algeria’s Mouradia establishment. Iran, jointly with Morocco’s neighbors, described the Kingdom as an “occupying power” on its own Saharan territory. The weakening of the Iranian regime is therefore not, for Rabat, some abstract geopolitical development.
Yet one question remains unavoidable: what comes next? Military interventions in this region of the world have a long and painful tradition of disastrous aftermaths. Iraq in 2003 remains the harshest lesson. Destroying a regime is infinitely easier than ensuring the transition that follows. What one must hope now is that the regional escalation remains contained and that, amid this turmoil, the Iranian people finally emerge as the true beneficiaries of the equation.
After more than fifty years of theocratic dictatorship, deprivation, repression, and Western sanctions that have impoverished and suffocated one of humanity’s oldest civilizations, Iranians deserve better than to serve merely as the playground for others’ ambitions. May Iranian women regain their freedom. May the imprisoned, the executed, and the exiled finally be rehabilitated. May this great people rediscover themselves beyond the grip of their jailers.
There is a cruel irony in all this, one history may well remember. Chess was invented in Persia, and from there came the expression “Sheikh Mat” — “the king is dead” — which traveled through the centuries to become the “checkmate” the entire world now knows. With the death of Ali Khamenei, the board has been overturned. What remains to be seen is who will pick up the pieces, and in what order.
Zouhair Yata
