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 I'm 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 and country. The internationally recognized government south, nominally allied with Saudi Arabia but itself fractured between multiple competing forces. And the area is 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 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 A 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, not 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 poll.