Unravelled: How the Iran war triggers a global realignment
Beyond immediate economic chaos and regional instability, the US-Israeli conflict with Iran is catalysing a historic global realignment. From a fractured Middle East and a widening transatlantic rift to China’s burgeoning influence over energy and diplomacy, the war is forcing allies and rivals alike to redraw the map of 21st-century power, observes US commentator Ian Bremmer.
The US-Israeli war with Iran has done much more than destabilise the Middle East, send oil, gas and other prices surging, and disrupt the global economy. It has also left US allies and rivals scrambling to respond to an unpredictable and unreliable superpower, triggering a historic geopolitical realignment that will shift the global balance of power across the next decade.
A fractured Middle East
The war’s effects are most immediate and profound, of course, across the region in which it is being fought. The war has helped persuade many Gulf Arab states that the Gulf Cooperation Council — a loose diplomatic, economic and security arrangement long plagued by infighting — is no longer fit for purpose.
For the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which on 28 April announced its intent to end a nearly six-decade membership in OPEC, the war intensifies its rivalry with the Saudis. The UAE will now more closely align with Israel on intelligence, technology and security in hopes of crippling the regime in Tehran.
Saudi Arabia, in turn, intends to use a tighter military alignment with nuclear power Pakistan, as well as with Egypt and Turkey, in closer coordination with China, to find ways to live peacefully alongside the Islamic republic.
Both these blocs want to keep their close security ties with the US, but we are about to see much less coordination in decision-making across the Middle East. This is the most immediate and striking regional realignment brought about by the war.
Transatlantic rift
Then there’s the flagging transatlantic relationship. At a moment when Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine is fuelling anxieties across Europe, the Trump administration’s decision to focus superpower attention and wage war on Iran — and then to bitterly criticise European leaders for not helping — generates new momentum towards a European collective defence outside US-led NATO.
But countries and regions such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have fewer alternatives to partnership with America than Germany, France and Britain. There is no Asian NATO to tie them to Washington or an EU-like institution to bind them with one another.
US President Donald Trump is unlikely to try to withdraw the US from the transatlantic alliance, and the US Senate could legally block him from such a step if he changed his mind. But his 1 May announcement that the US would withdraw 5,000 of the 36,000 American troops stationed in Germany over the next 12 months, a few days following Iran war criticism from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has further raised alert levels across the continent.
Trump has also ignored European objections to the idea that he might suspend some sanctions against Russia. The result is a growing fragmentation within the Western alliance with deeper European fear that the White House may move towards an eventual US-Russia security understanding. That prospect also raises Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hopes that continuing a war in Ukraine that is now locked in battlefield might lead to a Russian breakthrough as NATO breaks down.
Asian vulnerabilities
Across Asia, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is inflicting heavy economic blows on US allies. Like America’s historical partners in Europe, they are feeling insecure about the Trump administration’s longer-term security and economic commitments.
But countries and regions such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have fewer alternatives to partnership with America than Germany, France and Britain. There is no Asian NATO to tie them to Washington or an EU-like institution to bind them with one another. They also face pressures created by China’s economic, technological and (growing) military power. At the moment, China is acting more assertively against Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party and Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party government. All these factors limit the possibility that America’s Asian allies can follow Europeans towards greater independence from Washington.
... Xi is likely to use Trump’s looming visit to Beijing, and a rollout of pomp and circumstance no US president has ever received in China, to invite him to burnish his own credentials as international peacemaker by explicitly disavowing Taiwan’s independence.
Then there’s China. Aware that the Chinese economy faces slower growth and that the adventurism of Trump in the Middle East and Putin in Ukraine have done them and their countries no favours, Chinese President Xi Jinping has avoided using America’s current distractions to take on new risks. Instead, Xi is likely to use Trump’s looming visit to Beijing, and a rollout of pomp and circumstance no US president has ever received in China, to invite him to burnish his own credentials as international peacemaker by explicitly disavowing Taiwan’s independence.
In return, Xi might pledge sizable Chinese commitments to boost the US economy with a dramatic surge in purchases of US goods. Even Trump’s closest advisors cannot be sure that he would resist that temptation. It is a question that US allies in Asia, and elsewhere, will be watching closely.
China’s green dominance
There’s another important shift involving China that the US war in the Middle East has accelerated. The war has shown Iran’s leaders and the world just how easy and inexpensive it is to close the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz to oil and gas trade. The war has also raised alert levels for other potential bottlenecks, like the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which separates Yemen from Africa, and even the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia.
Everyone needs more energy. That is a near-term benefit for the US, the world’s largest hydrocarbon producer, and for the US dollar.
China is now the world leader in sustainable energy, electric vehicles and batteries, and the critical minerals and reprocessing that support them — and its historic shift towards post-carbon energy production makes Beijing a much more appealing commercial partner for all the world’s major energy importers.
Everyone needs more energy. That is a near-term benefit for the US, the world’s largest hydrocarbon producer, and for the US dollar. But the continuing oil and gas supply vulnerabilities exposed by Middle East turmoil create enormous longer-term opportunities for China.
In all these ways, the still-raging Middle East war will do more to shift international partnerships and the global balance of power than any war we’ve seen since the Cold War’s end.
