Farah Jan in The Conversation:
Two and a half millennia ago, Thucydides recorded the Athenian empire at its most confident in his “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Athens then destroyed Melos and launched the Sicily Expedition with overwhelming force and no coherent theory of governance for what came next. The lesson, then and now, is not that empires cannot destroy. It’s that destruction and governance are entirely different enterprises. And confusing them is how empires exhaust themselves. The U.S. military can destroy the Iranian regime. The question that the Iraq precedent answers – with brutal clarity – is what fills the power vacuum when it does?
…Washington has a preference; it does not have a plan. If the objective is eliminating the nuclear program, then why does Iran still hold an unverified stockpile of weapon-usable uranium eight months after the 2025 strikes? The strikes have not resolved the proliferation question. They have made it more dangerous and less tractable. If the objective is regional stability, why has every round of strikes produced a wider regional war?
Washington has no answer to any of these questions – only a theory of destruction.
More here.
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