Transcription
So today I want to make a prediction. A specific, concrete, falsifiable prediction about what the world looks like when this war is over. Not a vague statement about the global order changing. Not a general observation about geopolitical trends. A specific claim about five specific countries that will not exist in their current form when this war ends.
Five nations whose borders, whose governments, whose internal political arrangements, whose fundamental character as states are going to be so profoundly altered by this war and its consequences that the countries that emerge from this period will be almost unrecognizable compared to the ones that entered it. And I want to be clear about what I mean by not existing in their current form. I am not talking about countries being erased from the map. I am not talking about formal dissolution or territorial partition in every case. I am talking about something more subtle and, in some ways, more significant. I am talking about states whose internal coherence, whose governmental legitimacy, whose economic foundation, whose social contract is going to be so fundamentally transformed by the pressures this war is creating that calling them the same country will be, in any meaningful sense, inaccurate. The name on the map will be the same. The reality will be entirely different.
So let us go through them one by one, because each story is distinct. Each transformation is being driven by different forces, and each outcome, when you understand it clearly, tells you something essential about where the world is going.
Before I go through each country, I want to give you one piece of historical context that frames everything I'm about to say. Because state transformation of the kind I'm describing has happened before in this region. And the last time it happened, the consequences lasted a century. The year is 1916. The British and French empires, in the middle of the First World War, drew a line on a map of the Middle East in a secret agreement known as Sykes-Picot. That line divided the territory of the collapsing Ottoman Empire between British and French spheres of influence. It created borders that had nothing to do with the ethnic, religious, tribal, or economic realities of the people who lived there. It drew Iraq as a single country, containing Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish populations that had never seen themselves as part of the same political community. It created Lebanon as a French mandate, artificially balancing Maronite, Christian, and Muslim populations. It drew Syria across tribal lines that still produce conflict today. 110 years later, we are still living with the consequences of those lines on that map. The borders created in 1916 are the borders that are now being challenged by the pressures of this war. And what replaces them will define the region for the next century. That is the scale of what we are talking about. That is the weight of these five stories.
Country one: Lebanon. Lebanon is not waiting for this war to transform it. Lebanon was already one of the most fragile states on earth before the first strike of Operation Epic Fury. A nation that has not had a functioning government in any real sense for years. A nation where the electricity grid works for perhaps four hours per day on average. A nation where the banking system collapsed in 2019 and depositors lost access to their savings, in many cases permanently. A nation where the currency lost 90% of its value in less than three years. A nation where Hezbollah, a non-state military actor, has more effective power than the national army. Lebanon was already a failed state in almost every meaningful measure before this war began. And this war is delivering the final blow.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's most powerful political-military force, is deeply embedded in the conflict on the Iranian side. Its leadership has been significantly degraded. Its weapon stockpiles have been targeted. Its financial supply lines from Iran have been disrupted. And its political position within Lebanon, which was already complicated by the country's sectarian divisions and its economic catastrophe, is becoming more contested as ordinary Lebanese citizens ask the question that Hezbollah has always feared most: Was it worth it? Was Hezbollah's strategic alignment with Iran, the alignment that brought Israeli and American firepower to bear on Lebanese territory and infrastructure, worth the price that Lebanon is paying? That question, increasingly being asked openly, is the question that ends the political arrangement that has defined Lebanon for three decades. Hezbollah's dominance rests on its ability to deliver security and services to its constituency. A degraded, financially weakened, militarily diminished Hezbollah can do neither as effectively. And a Lebanese political system that has always been paralyzed by sectarian balance is not suddenly going to produce effective governance to fill the vacuum. What fills the vacuum in Lebanon when Hezbollah's power recedes is not a functioning liberal democracy. It is a different kind of disorder. A reconfiguration of the sectarian power balance, external powers competing for influence, and a humanitarian situation that goes from catastrophic to something beyond the vocabulary of normal crisis management. The Lebanon that emerges from this war will still be called Lebanon. But the Lebanese state as a coherent political entity, which was already barely surviving, will have been definitively ended. What replaces it will be something new, fragile, and almost certainly managed by external powers – France, Saudi Arabia, potentially Iran in a reduced capacity – rather than by Lebanese institutions that have demonstrated no capacity to manage anything.
Country two: Yemen. Yemen is perhaps the clearest case of a country that has already ceased to exist in any meaningful sense, and whose post-war configuration will simply make that reality official. The Yemeni civil war, which began in 2015, has already divided the country into at least three distinct zones of control. The Houthi north, allied with Iran, controlling Sana'a and the most populous parts of the country. The internationally recognized government south, nominally allied with Saudi Arabia, but itself fractured between multiple competing forces. And the area controlled by the Southern Transitional Council, which wants independence for southern Yemen and has the backing of the UAE. Three Yemens, effectively, each with its own governance, its own military forces, its own economic arrangements, its own external patrons. This war is making those divisions permanent.
The Houthis have been deeply integrated into Iran's war strategy, launching drone and missile attacks on Gulf shipping, on Saudi Arabian infrastructure, on American naval assets in the Red Sea. They have been struck heavily in response. Their military capability has been degraded, but their political position in northern Yemen, their legitimacy as the defenders of Yemen's sovereignty against American and Saudi aggression, has been strengthened by exactly the same strikes that degraded their military capacity. You cannot bomb a movement into irrelevance in a country where that movement is genuinely seen by its constituency as the only force willing to stand and fight. And in the south, the anti-Houthi forces have used the distraction of the larger war to consolidate their control, to resist reunification pressures, to build the facts on the ground that make a unified Yemen increasingly implausible. The Yemen that emerges from this war will be two or three permanent entities, perhaps with different names, perhaps with formal international recognition of their separation, perhaps simply as frozen conflict zones that everyone pretends might someday reunify. But the fiction of a unified Yemen state will have been abandoned. Not officially. Nothing in the Middle East ever ends officially, but functionally, irreversibly.
Country three: Iraq. Iraq is the country in this list whose transformation is most directly connected to the shifting balance of power between America and Iran, because Iraq is the primary terrain on which American and Iranian influence have competed for two decades. And the outcome of this war is going to determine which of those two forces has a dominant say over what Iraq actually is. Currently, Iraq exists in a paradox that would be comic if it were not so consequential. Iraq is simultaneously an American ally, hosting thousands of American troops and significant American military infrastructure, and an Iranian client state with an Iranian-aligned government, Iranian-backed militia forces that are more powerful than the national army, and an economy deeply integrated with Iran. This paradox has been managed, barely, through the convenient fiction that Iraq is a sovereign state making its own decisions. That fiction has served both America and Iran, because it allowed them to maintain their competing presences without forcing a direct confrontation over who actually controls the country. This war is ending that fiction.
The Iraqi government is under intense domestic pressure from its Iranian-aligned political base to demand American withdrawal. Every American strike on Iranian territory is ammunition for the Iraqi political forces that have been demanding the Americans leave for years. And if America's position in the region weakens as a result of this war, if the argument that American military protection is worth the political cost becomes harder to make, the Iraqi political system will tip toward expelling American forces. An Iraq without American troops is an Iraq under Iranian dominance in a way it currently is not. It is an Iraq where the Iranian-backed militias face no countervailing military power, where Iranian economic and political influence operates without constraint. Iraq does not disappear. But the Iraq that emerges, an Iranian-dominated state in all but name, is so different from the Iraq that American blood and treasure spent 20 years trying to build that it represents a total transformation of the country's fundamental character and alignment.
Country four: Pakistan. Pakistan's transformation in this list is the one that carries the highest stakes and the most catastrophic potential, because Pakistan is a nuclear state, and a nuclear state undergoing the kind of political, economic, and institutional stress that Pakistan is experiencing right now is one of the most dangerous objects in geopolitics. Pakistan was already in crisis before this war began. Its economy had collapsed into an IMF emergency program. Its currency had lost the majority of its value. A civilian government was caught between a military establishment that actually runs the country and a popular opposition movement led by the imprisoned former prime minister Imran Khan, which commands genuine mass support. Its relations with Afghanistan were deteriorating, as Taliban-aligned militant groups conducted cross-border attacks. Its relations with India were tense, in the permanent way that relations between nuclear-armed adversaries with contested borders are always tense. All of that was the pre-war picture.
Now add to that picture the energy shock of this war. Pakistan imports the majority of its oil from the Gulf. At current prices, that import bill is consuming foreign exchange reserves that were already critically low. Add the potential for Pakistan being dragged into the conflict through its defense agreement with Saudi Arabia, a scenario I have analyzed in detail in a previous video. Add the political crisis that economic collapse accelerates. The way that populations under severe economic stress become susceptible to political forces that promise radical solutions. The Pakistan that emerges from this period may still have the same name and the same territory. But the balance of power between its civilian institutions, its military establishment, its Islamist political movements, and its nuclear command structure may be so altered by the pressures of this war that it functions as a fundamentally different kind of state. The optimistic scenario is a military-guided stabilization that maintains nuclear security while managing the economic and political crisis. The pessimistic scenario involves combinations of words that serious analysts use only in private, and that I am going to leave to your imagination. The range between those scenarios is the range within which Pakistan's future is being determined right now by forces that this war has set in motion.
Country: The GCC as a unified entity. I want to use my fifth slot not for a single country, but for the collective project that is the Gulf Cooperation Council, the political and economic union of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Because what this war is doing to the GCC is not transforming one member state. It is potentially ending the coherence of the collective project itself. And here is why this matters so much. The GCC has been one of the great success stories of regional integration in the developing world. Six nations that, despite their differences in size, in political culture, in domestic policy, and in foreign policy orientation, built a framework for economic cooperation, for collective security, for coordinated international positioning that gave each of them more influence and more stability than they would have had alone. That project rests on two things: internal consensus about strategic direction and the American security guarantee. This war is threatening both.
Internally, the GCC members are not aligned on how to respond to this war. Saudi Arabia, whose energy infrastructure is being directly struck by Iranian drones and missiles, is under enormous pressure to respond more aggressively. The UAE, which has built its entire economic model on being a safe, neutral, cosmopolitan hub, is acutely aware that any military escalation involving the UAE directly would destroy the image of safety and stability that its economy depends on. Qatar, which maintains direct diplomatic channels with Iran and whose massive liquefied natural gas exports give it economic interests distinct from Saudi Arabia's oil focus, has its own calculations. Kuwait and Bahrain, smaller and more vulnerable, have their own risk calculus. These different interests are creating fissures within the GCC consensus that are real and growing. And the American security guarantee, which has been the external foundation that allowed the GCC to maintain internal consensus by relying on outside protection rather than having to build its own, is being demonstrated to have limits by this very war. An America that cannot keep the Strait of Hormuz open, that cannot prevent Iranian strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure, is an America whose security guarantee is less absolute than it was. And when the security guarantee becomes less absolute, each GCC member starts calculating its own interests more independently. The GCC does not dissolve. But the coherent, American-backed, internally unified GCC that has defined Gulf politics for 40 years transitions into something more fractured, more independently calculating, more willing to pursue individual national interests even when those interests diverge from the collective. Saudi Arabia pursuing its own deal with Iran. The UAE maintaining its own relationship with China. Qatar expanding its own diplomatic role. The GCC remaining as an institutional framework while its internal coherence, the thing that made it genuinely powerful, dissipates.
And I want to add something that connects all five of these transformations. Because there is a common thread running through every one of them that is more important than any individual story. Every country on this list was a state held together more by external pressure and external support than by genuine internal cohesion. Lebanon was held together by the delicate sectarian balance that the Taif Agreement created and by the unspoken understanding that no single faction was strong enough to dominate all the others. Yemen was held together, barely, by Saudi money and international recognition that papered over divisions too deep to resolve. Iraq was held together by American military presence and American diplomatic pressure that prevented its competing factions from tearing it apart entirely. Pakistan was held together by military institutional discipline and the cohesive force of a shared national project that is becoming harder to sustain under economic and political stress. The GCC was held together by American security guarantees and shared economic interests that are now being stressed by exactly the war those guarantees were supposed to prevent.
When external pressure is what holds a state together, and that external pressure changes or disappears, the state reveals what it actually is underneath. And in each of these five cases, what is underneath is not a coherent national community ready to govern itself. It is a collection of competing interests, competing identities, competing visions that the external pressure was concealing. This war is removing that concealment. And what is being revealed across five countries simultaneously is the true fragility of a regional order that was always more artificial than it appeared.
So there you have it. Five countries, five transformations, one overarching pattern. This war is not just destroying and rebuilding military capabilities. It is redrawing the political map of an entire region. Not by moving borders on paper, but by transforming the internal realities, the governmental arrangements, the power balances, the fundamental social contracts of states that were already fragile and are now being pushed past their breaking points. Lebanon ends as a coherent state, replaced by a new arrangement of competing powers and external management. Yemen formalizes its de facto partition into permanent separate entities. Iraq tips irreversibly from America's orbit into Iran's. Pakistan's institutional balance shifts in ways that could determine whether its nuclear arsenal remains as secure as the world desperately needs it to be. And the GCC fractures from a unified project into a collection of individually calculating national interests.
None of this happens cleanly. None of it happens on a schedule. The Middle East does not change dramatically and all at once. It changes slowly, then suddenly, then in ways that seem obvious in retrospect, but were invisible to almost everyone while they were happening. We are in the slow phase right now. The phase where the pressures are building, where the foundations are weakening, where the political arrangements that held things together are being stressed past their design limits. The sudden phase, when these transformations become undeniable, comes after. And by the time it arrives, the countries I have described today will already be something different from what they are now. The names on the map will be the same. The reality will have changed forever.
Subscribe for more analysis of this conflict and its global consequences explained in simple English. And tell me in the comments, which of these five transformations do you think happens first? And is there a sixth country I should have included in this list?