Mr Trump can keep smashing Iran. He can bomb more bases, degrade more launchers, kill more commanders and congratulate himself on televised destruction. He can do all that and still fail. The reason is brutally simple: neither America nor Israel has shown anything like a serious plan—still less a serious capability—for shaping the landscape that would follow Iranian collapse or even Iranian capitulation. They can break things. They have not shown that they can build the order that would have to come next. Reuters’ reporting on Mr Trump’s own Gaza “Board of Peace” plan makes the point by inversion: even in a tiny, shattered strip of land, the plan is long on disarmament and administration, short on political destination. That is not strategy. It is security management masquerading as statecraft. (reuters.com)
The fantasy in Washington and Jerusalem is that enough force can solve the Iran problem. It cannot. Even the destruction of the regime, if it came to that, would not by itself produce order. In the absence of a serious plan by the invaders, any credible ability to shape the aftermath, or any constituted replacement authority inside Iran, the likelier result would be not strategic clarity but strategic anarchy. European officials have already been warned by Middle Eastern governments of the risk of civil war in Iran, while Turkey says it has drawn up contingency plans for a possible influx from across its border and UNHCR warns of rising risks of internal displacement, cross-border flight and onward movements to neighbouring countries.
Nor would the fallout stop at Iran’s frontiers. A collapsed or ungoverned Iran would send shock waves through Turkey, the Gulf and Europe alike: migrants, smugglers, militias, disrupted trade routes, energy panic and a humanitarian burden that no nearby state actually wants to absorb. Gulf states have already described Iranian attacks on their infrastructure as an existential threat, while the broader war is choking logistics, damaging energy facilities and threatening the world economy. In other words, those cheering regime destruction as though it were a clean solution are really flirting with a vast zone of disorder stretching from the Iranian plateau to the Mediterranean and the Gulf littoral.
Worse still, an enfeebled Iranian regime might not disappear at all. It could capitulate formally, lose conventional capacity, and yet survive just enough to regenerate in uglier form—through deniable terror, proxy warfare, maritime disruption and an even more venomous asymmetric campaign. Weak regimes do not always die. Sometimes they rot outward. That is why smashing Iran without a political design for what follows is not strength. It is vandalism with regional consequences.
And that is why the Palestinian angle matters more than another season of kinetic theatre. The difference is not moral decoration. It is strategic depth. A serious Palestinian track would come with something the anti-Iran war does not currently possess: allies who can hold, finance and develop the outcome. Arab states can help anchor, bankroll and legitimise a phased Palestinian entity in a way they cannot legitimise a permanent campaign of destruction against Iran with no political end-state. Saudi Arabia has for years tied peace with Israel to the Arab Peace Initiative, which offered normalisation in exchange for Palestinian statehood and Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory. That was not a fringe Arab gesture. It was the standing offer that the region’s most consequential Arab power kept on the table. (reuters.com)
The present alternative is strategic malpractice. Gaza is still rotting. Mr Trump’s reported framework focuses on Hamas disarmament, tunnel destruction, technocratic governance and phased Israeli withdrawal after verification, but it does not address Palestinian statehood. That leaves the central political vacuum untouched. Gaza under such a formula may become quieter for a while. It does not become settled. It becomes a supervised holding pen with rubble, hunger and memory—exactly the kind of place from which the next wave of nihilism eventually recruits. (reuters.com)
The West Bank is worse, because its crisis is less spectacular and therefore easier to ignore. Reuters reported this month that settler violence rose sharply under the cover of the Iran war, with roadblocks and movement restrictions leaving Palestinian communities more exposed; Reuters also reported earlier UN findings that more than 36,000 Palestinians had been forcibly displaced over a year by settlement expansion and associated violence. This is not noise at the edge of the conflict. It is the conflict. If the Israeli right continues to flirt with de facto eviction, transfer by attrition and the burial of Palestinian political existence, Jordan comes under direct pressure. Amman has already rejected displacement schemes in blunt terms, with Jordan’s king rejecting annexation and displacement and Jordan’s foreign minister saying his country cannot take more Palestinians; Reuters also reported Jordanian warnings that forced relocation would spread radicalism and threaten the kingdom’s survival. Push hard enough on the West Bank, and the shock does not stop at the Jordan River. It ricochets into Iraq and Syria, where borders are already frayed and militias already wait for fresh causes. (reuters.com )
That is the point American and Israeli policy still refuses to absorb: the Palestinian plight is virulently infectious. It travels. It radicalises. It legitimises armed networks that would otherwise look like what they are—violent entrepreneurs with flags. Iran has exploited that reality for decades. The Islamic Republic’s “axis of resistance” was never just about piety or Palestine. It was about deterrence, reach and regime survival. But Palestine gave it moral voltage. Leave the Palestinian question festering, and Tehran gets to launder geopolitical predation through the language of solidarity. Start closing that wound credibly, and Iran’s narrative machinery begins to sputter.
That is why a Palestinian track is strategically superior to endless escalation against Iran without a plan for the day after. Bombing Iran may weaken the regime. It may also do something more dangerous: produce a formally enfeebled state that survives just enough to regenerate through a more virulent asymmetric campaign. Reuters reports that the war has already widened, with the Houthis entering the conflict directly, American Marines flowing into the region, and attacks spreading across multiple fronts. A half-broken Iran with damaged conventional capacity but undiminished appetite for sabotage, proxies, missiles, deniable terror and maritime disruption is not a solved problem. It is a more chaotic one. Weak regimes do not always die; sometimes they mutate. (reuters.com)
Meanwhile the economic costs keep spreading. Reuters reported this week that the OECD cut its global growth outlook because the Iran war has nearly halted energy shipments through Hormuz and pushed up inflation; Reuters also reported India warning of rising energy costs, inflation and supply-chain disruption from the conflict. AP quoted the head of the International Energy Agency calling the war a “major, major threat” to the global economy. This is no longer a regional fire with some smoke drifting abroad. It is becoming a world economic event. Mr Trump does not need a seminar on grand strategy to understand that. He only needs to understand gasoline, freight and inflation. To adopt this approach—rather than grandstanding over Cuba or chasing minor ideological quarrels—would present him not merely as an American strongman, but as a world leader capable of shouldering global responsibility. (reuters.com)
There is also a hard truth inside Israel itself. Support for hammering Iran is real; support for Mr Netanyahu is not remotely as secure. Reuters reported that 83% of Jewish Israelis backed the attack on Iran in 2025, yet Reuters also reported this week that the latest Iran war gave Mr Netanyahu no meaningful boost in the polls and left him scrambling to avoid a snap election he could lose. Israelis may support defanging Iran. That does not mean they have signed over their future to a prime minister whose political life has been built on permanent emergency. There is daylight between backing the war and backing the man. (reuters.com)
So the choice is not between idealism and realism. It is between two realisms: one lazy, one hard. The lazy realism says keep bombing Iran and hope shock itself becomes order. That is fantasy with missiles. The harder realism says the only way to drain the Iran-and-extremism swamp is to remove the cause that has fed it most reliably. That means a credible path to a Palestinian entity, under harsh security conditions if necessary, paired with the strongest guarantees Israel has ever had. Such a move would not create paradise. It would, however, create a coalition. Arab states could back it. Europe could support it. America could sell it as order rather than surrender. Even a wounded Iranian regime might take it as an off-ramp it could survive.
Mr Trump likes disruption. Here is disruption worthy of the name. Not another bombing run sold as strategy, but a political shock that brakes a burgeoning world crisis at its source. Keep treating Palestine as a sidebar and the region will go on producing militias, pretexts and oil shocks. Treat it as the hinge, and at last there is a chance to clear some of the gangrene of the past instead of merely cauterising its latest eruption.
Destroying Iran is easy to imagine; replacing it with anything better is the part neither America nor Israel appears remotely equipped to do. What would follow is not a new order, but a spreading vacancy—one that Europe, Turkey, the Gulf and the wider region would all be forced to pay for.