A War Without a Name: The Iran-Israel Relationship in Historical Perspective
The defining tension in Middle Eastern politics today—and the most combustible pile of tinder—is between the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The defining tension in Middle Eastern politics today—and the most combustible pile of tinder—is between the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Not twenty years since the end of the Great War, in 1936, the British novelist Rebecca West stood on the balcony of Sarajevo Town Hall. She turned to her husband and remarked, “I shall never be able to understand how it happened”. The extraordinary unravelling of Europe’s peace in 1914 has been described as an episode of “sleepwalking”: a layer-cake of incidents, suspicions, and animosities built up over decades, acting in effect to a heap of tinder, lying in wait of the single spark that turned it into a blazing pyre. That spark, it is generally agreed, was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, in Sarajevo—within view of the balcony on which West stood. The assassination did not “cause” the war. Rather, it gave occasion for an event that had played on the minds of Europeans for well over a decade. A great European war was the hypothetical scenario that preoccupied war planners, fuel for the vivid imaginations of fiction writers, and a perennial source of consternation for Europe’s most experienced statesmen. All that was needed was the right spark to light the fire.
The defining tension in Middle Eastern politics today—and the most combustible pile of tinder—is between the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The antagonism between the two countries has existed for more than forty years. It has played out across the region for more than twenty years within the context of the Middle East’s wider tumult. It has not been restricted to diplomacy, either, but has played out through various means: covert, proxy, political and psychological warfare. Observers of this conflict have as a result tended to describe this state of affairs with obscure terms: “cold” war, “shadow” war, or other words that allude to the existence of an active and geopolitically consequential antagonism but imply an ambiguity that plain old “war” never could. Perhaps controversially, I argue that this terminology is used to avoid any substantive discussion of the nature of what is being discussed. It similarly precludes any attempt to describe what is clearly a discernible pattern of events which by the day appears to be snowballing into an unambiguous and extremely dangerous war. This paper seeks to introduce that discussion. In so doing, it aims for clarity about the nature of the Middle East’s current crisis.
With this paper, I try to answer two questions.
The first is this: If this is a war, what is its nature? In other words, insofar as we can speak of different “kinds” of war, what kind of war are Iran and Israel fighting? This demands a discussion of means and ends, a discussion of how Iran and Israel have arrived at those ends, and a discussion of how they have chosen and employ the means at their disposal.
The answer to the second and arguably more important question—Is this a war?—emerges through my attempt to answer the first. However, it is necessary to first put some effort into clarifying what we mean by war, as the experience of the Cold War has eroded the clarity that the term used to have.
In answering these two questions, the ultimate goal of this working paper is to build a scaffolding with which to answer a third question that is top of mind for many and increasingly urgent: At what point should we expect it to take a more recognizable form? In other words, at what point does our cold war go ‘hot’? Or should we assume that it never will?
This paper proceeds in ten sections—each of them short essays—that are distributed over two parts.
The first part considers the nature of the war. Part One considers the linguistic implications of the term and the enduring intellectual impact of the Cold War on our way of thinking about warfare, particularly as it pertains to the Middle East. Part Two considers political warfare and the ways in which certain dimensions of ‘Cold Warring’ are visible in the struggle between Israel and Iran. Part Three considers the ideological dimension of the antagonism, with an extended discussion on what the unique political forms at play—a Jewish state and an Islamic republic—mean for the conflict. Part Four is a brief meditation on the Phony War and the resemblance it bears to the conflict before October 7. Part Five considers the phenomenon of “state death” and the prospects of Iran going down without a fight. Part Six does the same with Israel.
The second, shorter part considers more technical problems. Part Seven considers the Axis of Resistance, Iran’s main strategic construct to fight a “war without a war”. Part Eight considers Iran’s own strategy in the aftermath of October 7 with reference to the Soviet technique of ‘reflexive control’. Part Nine considers Western approaches to the conflict, particularly diplomatic approaches, giving historical parallels for their consistent failures. Part Ten argues that it is a failure of credibility, distinct from the failure of “deterrence”, that has led to an unravelling of the region’s security situation. The paper concludes with some conclusions on the nature of the war and a meditation—admittedly a pessimistic one—on the direction of this war without a name.
Mens, Jay . “A War Without a Name: The Iran-Israel Relationship in Historical Perspective.” Paper, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, 2024.