War that wasn’t: How the West got the Israel-Iran conflict so wrong
In the Middle East, power is not always linear – sometimes bold action resets the game.
In the early days of this overt round of the ongoing Israel-Iran combat, pundits and prognosticators lined up with remarkable confidence to deliver their verdicts: the Middle East was on the brink of a full-blown regional war.
From CNN panels to X threads, from Instagram reels to Canberra press briefings, the narrative seemed set in stone.
There would be a chain reaction: Sunni Arab monarchies dragged in, Hezbollah launching from the north, the Houthis from the south, Syria lighting up once more. The Strait of Hormuz would close. Oil would spike. And Tehran would unleash waves of asymmetric revenge through a web of proxies from Beirut to Sanaa. Some predicted a war lasting months. Others spoke in terms of years.
Yet here we stand, 12 days later. No Arab nation has joined the fray. The Strait of Hormuz remains open. No ground invasion of Iran has occurred. The oil markets remain remarkably steady. Tehran has neither launched a regional war nor exacted the cataclysmic reprisals so confidently predicted. No new front has opened with Israel, even as it already holds the line across seven existing flashpoints. There was one small attack on one US base but nothing else. In fact, the response from Iran – a heavily telegraphed barrage largely intercepted by air defences – resembled not vengeance but performance: a bruised regime saving face, not escalating war.
What, then, accounts for this collective miscalculation?
In part, it reflects the enduring Western habit of seeing the Middle East through three flawed lenses: fear, fatalism and faith. Fear, that the region will always spiral towards violence. Fatalism, that the ancient hatreds and alliances are immutable and primed to explode. And faith – not religious, but ideological – in diplomacy, de-escalation and process as panaceas for even the most intractable conflicts.
These lenses distort more than they reveal.
Western observers, conditioned by decades of conflict and media shorthand, expect titanic struggles and lopsided outcomes. We see escalations as inevitable. What we don’t often see – or acknowledge – is the role of deliberate restraint, especially by leaders we have grown accustomed to villainising. Indeed, it falls to two of the most polarising figures in global politics – Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump – to have demonstrated what one might call a Churchillian clarity: that strength need not lead to recklessness; and that deterrence, if credible, can be more effective than devastation.
When the Israeli Prime Minister authorised the precision strikes on Iranian military leadership and nuclear infrastructure, and when the US President’s foreign policy architecture signalled unequivocal support for such a move, the chorus of condemnation was swift and familiar.
Critics invoked the spectre of 2003 and the quagmire of Iraq. Opinion pieces warned of regional blowback and a united front of adversaries. Analysts claimed Netanyahu was playing with fire. The phrase “all bets are off” became a common refrain.
Yet the region did not burn.
Iran’s response was largely ineffective. Hundreds of missiles and drones were intercepted, with many not even reaching Israeli airspace.
Not only did Israel’s defence infrastructure hold firm – bolstered by regional co-ordination including reported assistance from Jordan and indirect support from US Central Command – but the spectacle of a trillion-dollar, decades-long Iranian investment in nuclear weapons being reduced to ash was met with little more than muted theatrics.
This was not war. It was deterrence. And it worked.
A major reason things worked out to the advantage of Israel, the US and the West is simple: Trump said to the Iranians they had a final 60 days to work through a peaceful negotiation about their nuclear weapons program. The Iranian leadership refused to co-operate. Netanyahu, with Trump’s blessing, acted on the 61st day. No Syria-style “red lines” that were ignored and that undermined American deterrence. Trump negotiated first, then acted as he said he would.
One must ask, then: how did so many get it so wrong?
Let’s be specific. The BBC ran headlines predicting “an uncontrolled spiral”. Former Obama officials suggested the region was “on the brink of Armageddon”. MSNBC ran segments comparing the situation with July 1914. Australia’s Lowy Institute warned that a single miscalculation could “ignite the entire Middle East”. Major think tanks in Europe forecast oil at $200 a barrel. None of it happened.
Even the usual cascade of “expert threads” on social media offered maps of presumed Hezbollah war plans, scenarios of US evacuation from bases in Iraq, and speculative alliances forming from Cairo to Kabul.
It was all built on the same assumption: that Israel’s resolve would provoke uncontrollable chaos. That Iran’s threats were not bluff but gospel.
But in this case reality defied narrative. And that’s worth exploring.
Consider this: Iran had every rhetorical pretext to escalate. Its nuclear infrastructure was targeted. Its prestige was wounded. Its deterrence tested. Yet it responded with a gesture, not a war. Why?
Because it was outmatched. Because it was cornered.
And because the lesson Netanyahu and Trump had internalised – and that much of the Western diplomatic class has refused to learn – is that in certain strategic environments, force, credibly and appropriately projected, is more stabilising than endless rounds of negotiation that allow nuclear weapons to be created.
This brings to mind one of history’s most overlooked strategic analogies: the Berlin airlift of 1948-49. When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin blockaded West Berlin, many feared the Allies would retreat or provoke war. Instead, US president Harry Truman – cool, resolute and unflinching – ordered the airlift. For nearly a year, planes dropped supplies over a besieged city, refusing to blink. The result? No war. No Soviet escalation. The West held its ground. A muscular act of restraint became a masterstroke of strategy.
Similarly the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. When US president John Kennedy announced the blockade around Cuba and the Soviet Union sent ships to break the blockade, it was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who blinked. Strength at the appropriate time and place yielded backdown and enhanced deterrence.
Likewise, in 2025 Netanyahu’s strike and Trump’s endorsement were not bellicose spasms. They were calculated lines in the sand, meant to reassert deterrence in a region where deterrence had eroded. Of course, this doesn’t mean the Middle East is pacified.
Far from it. The threats remain: Hezbollah’s arsenal, the Houthis’ posturing, the ever-lurking Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps networks. But what this episode has made plain is that Western prediction models are broken. They are reactive, pessimistic and addicted to narratives of collapse. They interpret every act of strength as provocation and every moment of calm as fleeting illusion. In doing so, they overlook the deeper strategic math.
In the Middle East, power is not always linear. Action does not always yield equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes, bold action – especially when it is disciplined, proportionate and backed by capability – resets the game.
Yet, in policy circles, calls for “de-escalation” dominated. One European foreign minister even remarked that Israel must show “restraint in the face of aggression”, a phrase so absurd it collapses under its own logic. Imagine advising Britain to de-escalate while under V-2 rocket attack in 1944. The sentiment betrays the Western delusion: that process is always preferable to power. That negotiation, however one-sided, is morally superior to pre-emption.
But pre-emption is not always a moral failing. When executed with precision, intelligence and legitimacy – as it was in this case – it prevents greater wars.
It reinstates deterrence. And it spares civilians, infrastructure and economies the toll of prolonged conflict.
This is the paradox many in the West struggle to accept: restrained power can be more humane than endless diplomacy. Especially when that diplomacy serves only to delay the inevitable, embolden aggressors and paralyse allies.
So let us say it clearly: what Netanyahu and Trump achieved in these 12 days was not a miracle. It was leadership. It was clarity. It was Churchillian – not in theatrics but in knowing when to act, and when not to.
And in doing so, they rewrote the forecasts.
No mass war. No Arab uprising. No oil collapse.
Israel no longer threatened with elimination by its most powerful nemesis.
In time, perhaps, this episode will be remembered as a strategic hinge point – the moment deterrence was restored, when the Iranian regime’s aura of invincibility cracked and when the West’s failure to understand the region was once again laid bare.
But until then we would do well to remember the central truth this conflict revealed: In the Middle East – as in eastern Europe and East Asia – it is not strength that endangers peace but weakness and its accomplice, appeasement.
While diplomats hesitated, doomsayers panicked and analysts drowned in their models, Israel acted. With precision, clarity and courage, it didn’t just defy the predictions. It reshaped the strategic landscape of the region – not with treaties or timidity but with resolve. History didn’t just watch. It turned.
Adam Slonim is presenter of the podcast Behind the Headlines and director of the Middle East Policy Forum.
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