Iran war exposes US power crisis, could reshape global order: Escobar

Pepe Escobar, speaking from Bangkok's Mandarin Oriental hotel, laid out a stark reading of the military escalation unfolding across West Asia. The offensive against Iran, he argued, was meant to be surgical and swift—a calculated strike designed to collapse Tehran's government within days by eliminating its political, military, and religious leadership. It failed almost immediately.

The Iranian state had prepared for exactly this scenario. Escobar described a succession structure with four layers of replacement leadership already positioned and ready to activate. When the initial strikes came, these backups moved into place without hesitation. The government's defensive architecture, he explained, operated as a decentralized mosaic rather than a centralized command—no single point of failure, no single target that could paralyze the whole apparatus. Tehran's response came quickly, and it was regional in scope, not confined to Israeli territory. American military installations across the Gulf—in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia—suddenly found themselves under pressure. Several lost operational capacity, Escobar said, which meant Washington's ability to project power in the theater had been drastically reduced.

But the war itself, in his reading, was never really about Iran alone. It was a strategic contest of historical proportions, one that pulled in Russia, China, the BRICS bloc, and what he called the Global South. The immediate objective—regime change—had collapsed. What remained was something messier and more consequential: a regional conflict that was reshaping the balance of power across an entire geopolitical zone. Iran's stated aim, Escobar argued, was to expel the United States from the Persian Gulf and West Asia entirely. That was not retaliation. That was a bid to alter the correlation of forces.

Escobar was harsh about the architects of the war. Donald Trump, he said, lacked strategic vision and was manipulated by external interests—a man with the mentality of an insecure three-year-old, megalomaniacal and narcissistic. Benjamin Netanyahu's government, he argued, had its own agenda, and the United States was being used to serve it. The war belonged to Israel first, to Trump's administration second. He called it the "Zionist Washington-Tel Aviv axis," a partnership responsible for destabilizing West Asia and sabotaging any genuine diplomatic path.

The indirect negotiations between American and Iranian representatives, mediated by Oman, had been a smokescreen, Escobar claimed. The military offensive was already decided before those talks continued. When the White House later tried to open a ceasefire channel and resume negotiations, Tehran refused. There was nothing left to negotiate, the Iranians had said. The diplomatic window had closed.

The economic consequences could be severe. The Strait of Hormuz, Escobar stated flatly, was now effectively blocked. This was not a peripheral event. It was a trigger for brutal increases in maritime shipping costs, insurance premiums, and energy circulation. The impact would ripple through the global maritime security industry, concentrated largely in London. If the blockade persisted for weeks, it would hit derivatives markets, logistics chains, and energy flows worldwide. Economies dependent on Persian Gulf supplies would face mounting pressure. The political cost of the war for the West would deepen.

China, he noted, had more room to maneuver than Japan or South Korea. Beijing had reserves, alternative routes, and greater capacity to reorganize its energy purchases. Iranian oil was not decisive for Chinese energy security. But the real pressure would fall on the global financial, logistical, and security networks that underpinned maritime commerce—not on an immediate collapse of Chinese supply. This reinforced his larger thesis: the war was not merely a regional military dispute. It was an offensive against the emerging international order in which China, Russia, and BRICS played growing roles.

In Escobar's final framing, Iran stood as the vanguard of the Global South's resistance to an international system marked by chaos, plunder, and imperial control. The war was against Iran, against Russia and China, against BRICS, against the entire Global South. If Iran held and imposed high strategic costs on the United States and Israel, the result could permanently alter American military presence in the region. If it did not, the risk was deepening devastation comparable to other prolonged Middle Eastern conflicts. The outcome, he suggested, would reshape the global order itself.