Before the War Begins, and After It Ends: Iran in the Architecture of Great Wars

The problem with major wars is not simply that they leave questions unanswered, but that they often invite explanations that appear more complete than the evidence allows. The wider the war becomes and the more complex its trajectories grow, the more likely it is that narratives will emerge promising to explain it through a single cause. With repetition, that cause gradually comes to appear as the only possible truth.

The war on Iran has not escaped this temptation. Explanations have divided between those who view it as a war aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, those who link it to the restructuring of global trade and energy corridors, and those who interpret it through the lens of domestic political calculations or the struggle among major powers over the shape of the international order.

Every major war generates more than a conflict on the ground; it also opens a parallel struggle over how the war itself should be interpreted. As its consequences expand and its dimensions become increasingly intertwined, competing explanations emerge, each searching for a single key through which the entire conflict can be understood.

The appeal of such explanations does not necessarily lie in the strength of their evidence, but in the simplicity of the narrative they offer. They give the reader the impression of possessing a single key to an intensely complex event, even though reality is far too layered to be reduced to one variable or a single motive.

The central flaw in this mode of explanation is a methodological confusion between the outcome of an event and its original intention. A war on the scale of the American-Israeli-Iranian confrontation will inevitably reshape patterns of trade, energy flows, and alliances, regardless of whether such restructuring was an intended objective or merely a secondary consequence of a conflict driven by other motives.

Once these effects become visible, it is easy to portray them as though they had constituted the plan from the outset. A more precise question would be: Is there operational evidence-decisions, documents, or official statements-demonstrating that this restructuring was a premeditated objective? Or is it more accurately understood as a later consequence rather than a foundational cause?

The problem, therefore, is not that these explanations are necessarily wrong. It arises when they become self-contained accounts, with each presented as the definitive cause of the war, or when outcomes are retrospectively interpreted as intentions. In reality, each explanation captures only one part of a much more complex picture.

Major wars rarely arise from a single cause. They emerge from the interaction of multiple layers that differ in nature, degree of influence, and level of evidentiary support. Their consequences are also frequently read retrospectively as goals that had been planned from the beginning. In this process, what the war produced becomes confused with what caused it, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between foundational causes and outcomes generated by the course of the conflict.

Can any one of these explanations, taken in isolation, adequately account for the war on Iran? Or does the deeper problem lie in the search for a single cause in the first place?

Who Explains the War… and Who Shapes It?  War: Between Event and Interpretation

Portraying Israel and the U.S. administration as a single, fully coordinated actor assumes a level of convergence in interests and planning that is analytically misleading. While the alignment of interests between Washington and Tel Aviv is both real and well documented in many respects, it does not necessarily imply prior coordination around a specific commercial or trade-related objective.

More importantly, any reductionist economic explanation obscures a set of distinctly Israeli drivers that are unrelated to commercial calculations. These include the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishments that view Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat, the domestic political dynamics surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and the transformation of Israeli security doctrine in the aftermath of October 7. These constitute direct and substantially better-documented drivers than any presumed “commercial blueprint.” Ignoring them in favor of a single economic explanation impoverishes the analysis rather than deepening it.

The preceding discussion can be distilled into two foundational layers of analysis. The first is the direct threat layer, rooted in the advancement of Iran’s nuclear program, the evolution of its missile capabilities, and Israel’s assessment that the resulting danger is existential rather than merely potential. The second is the Israeli domestic context layer, which encompasses the political calculations of Netanyahu’s government and the post–October 7 transformation of Israeli security doctrine-from managing threats to seeking their elimination at the source.

Built upon these two foundational layers are three additional analytical layers, without which any explanation of the war remains incomplete.

The Third Layer: The Regional Strategic Objective

This layer extends beyond immediate military calculations to a broader strategic objective: weakening the regional network that Iran has built through its allies and proxy actors, while reshaping the regional balance of deterrence in favor of Israel and its partners. This objective cannot be reduced to a single war or military campaign. Rather, it reflects years of incremental intelligence and military efforts directed at degrading the infrastructure of Iranian regional influence, both before and during the outbreak of open hostilities.

The Fourth Layer: The Geoeconomic Dimension

The geoeconomic dimension extends beyond the strategic importance of the trade corridors discussed above. It encompasses the potential reconfiguration of commercial routes and regional alignments, including the consolidation of Israel and the Gulf states as emerging security and economic hubs, and the redirection of trade, shipping, and investment toward partners regarded by Washington as more stable and reliable.

Yet this remains the least substantiated analytical layer in terms of prior intentionality. The same methodological challenge applies here: distinguishing between an outcome that is structurally likely to emerge from a major war and an objective that was deliberately planned before the conflict began.

The Fifth Layer: The Broader International Context

The analytical picture is completed by an external layer that extends beyond the immediate belligerents. This includes strategic competition between the United States and China over influence across global energy and trade corridors, the deepening Russian-Iranian partnership as a response to their shared experience of Western isolation, and Washington’s efforts to preserve its position as the principal security guarantor in a region where the economic weight of other powers continues to expand.

This international layer does not directly drive the war itself. Rather, it defines the broader strategic context within which the consequences of the conflict are interpreted once the fighting has ended.

Conclusion

The value of this analytical framework lies not only in explaining the war on Iran, but also in reconsidering how contemporary wars should be understood more broadly. As the international system becomes increasingly interconnected, single-cause explanations become progressively less persuasive. Contemporary wars no longer unfold within separate security, economic, or political spheres; instead, they represent points of convergence where multiple processes interact simultaneously, generating consequences that often extend far beyond their original motivations.

Accordingly, the most important analytical question is not the search for the one true cause of war, but rather identifying the level of analysis to which each explanation belongs and determining the weight it deserves within the broader interpretive framework. An explanation that is valid at one analytical level may become misleading when presented as a complete account, just as an explanation that accurately describes the consequences of a war does not necessarily explain why the war began.

From this perspective, the war on Iran reveals more than a crisis in the Middle East; it also exposes a crisis in the analytical tools used to understand contemporary conflict. As reality becomes increasingly complex, the need grows for analytical frameworks capable of accommodating that complexity rather than reducing it to simplified narratives. Perhaps the most urgent task facing scholars today is to resist the temptation of the single explanation, for the first casualty of reductionist analysis is not accuracy alone, but the ability to perceive reality in its full complexity.