Six months have passed since the war against Iran began. Two explicit campaigns have been launched by United States. The first, lasting twelve days, was fought to destroy the nuclear programme and the command structures around it. The second lasted forty days, and was fought to break the state that houses them. Both were declared successes on the day they ended. On the morning of the September session of the GSPN Monday Consultations, a meeting between Iran and the Gulf states on the Hormuz corridor was called off before it even started. The fighting might have slowed, and the institutions might have spoken, but nothing is settled. The questions about who has won, or what has happened operationally, are no longer the most important.
What is more telling is that most powerful military coalition in the world has spent six months bombarding Iran and has not obtained strategic victory on any account. The nuclear programme has not been eliminated. The government has not fallen. The missile and drone capability persists. The one unambiguous shift in the balance now benefits Iran outright, it holds a measure of control over the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz that it did not hold before.
Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 both showed what follows when force is used to remake a political order. Taken together they suggest something consistent. Force is able to destroy. It is not able to govern. What is different now is where the line has been drawn. For more than four decades the hostility between Washington and Tehran was managed below the conventional threshold, through sanctions, through diplomacy, and through the threat of force rather than the use thereof. That threshold has now been crossed.
This does not mean that the restraints have collapsed. The Security Council still meets and the language of international law still remains in use. States still feel the need to justify what they do within it. But subtler changes are underway. The centre of gravity has moved away from a shared understanding of what may be done and to whom. It leans now towards something more contingent, decided by those with the capacity to decide it.
Legitimacy, in this context, begins to matter as much as capability. A state that has crossed such a line presents a practical case, and every government in the region has registered it. Global South states have said for years that the rules are applied differently depending on who is being measured. This is now understood around the world.
The consequence runs deeper than a failed campaign. This moment is best measured by what it created. A war intended to destabilise Iran has produced a surge of nationalism there. A war intended to disarm it has produced an argument for acquiring a weapon. Serious analysts, including one speaker at the September session of the Monday Consultations, have proposed that an Iranian deterrent might steady the region, by making any further attack on it too costly to risk. Non-proliferation has held for decades on a shared understanding that possession invites danger rather than confers safety. Six months of this war have made serious cases for the opposite.
The institutions sit awkwardly in this. The United Nations, with an incoming Secretary-General about to take office, has no obvious route into a conflict that both parties treat as bilateral. The European Union secured the original nuclear agreement and its economies are exposed, yet it is not at the table. The world has a vested interest in a multilateral approach. Chances of such an approach are steadily diminishing.
What is being proposed instead is a settlement overseen by global superpowers. States that can directly impact and determine the situation. The United States, Russia and China. There is strategic logic here, but also real costs. An arrangement of that kind resolves the war by dividing the world into spheres of influence, and finds its agreement where those spheres overlap. It would confirm a distribution of authority in which most of the world are spectators of decisions that determine its conditions. This is a multipolar, not a multilateral approach.
For the Global South this is a familiar position. It did not choose this war. It was never consulted. It will not be present at whatever settles it. Yet, the world is nonetheless paying for it, in fuel, in freight, in food, in the cost of borrowing, and in the erosion of the mechanisms through which smaller states exercise what influence they have.
The war has settled nothing, and that is not a neutral outcome. Force has failed to achieve strategic outcomes. This failure teaches lessons that no state intended to teach. That restraint is optional. That guarantees do not hold.
Whether the international order retains its shape will depend less on how this war ends than on what is concluded from it. The rules have not disappeared. They are losing their hold.
It is now clear that this war will not simply decide the fate of Iran, but the terms on which any state may be treated in the foreseeable future. Whereas a multipolar settlement would end the fighting by dividing the world; a multilateral one would end it by binding those who did the fighting. At the moment of writing, the first appears to be available, whereas second does not. For the Global South the detail of this arrangement holds a lot in stake. Its task is not to simply choose a pole, but to insist, in common and in public, that rules which apply to everyone are the only rules that hold. Order is not simply what strong decides to do, it is what is broadly agreed upon.