The mainstream analytical establishment—think tanks, foreign policy journals, the broadsheet commentariat—continues to narrate the American confrontation with Iran through the tired lexicon of non-proliferation, regional deterrence, and alliance management. This is, it must be submitted, a failure of interpretation. What is being witnessed is not a war of policy but a war of structure: the violent unwinding of an order that its own architect can no longer sustain, and the deliberate—or at minimum, structurally inevitable—acceleration of that unwinding through the most combustible theatre available.
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