Golam Kibrea retweetledi
What have we learnt so far? What are the surprises? What has been discovered about the shape of the world?
Here’s the five most important.
1 — The most important discovery is that Iran is a great power. This is a real discovery that was not known to the Iranians themselves; specifically, they could not be sure in advance that a strategic victory over the US was achievable. It is a fundamental discovery about the polarity of the system: there are now four great powers in the world and this structure will have very important consequences going forward.
2 — The idea that you can secure strategic objectives with the air weapon due to the precision-strike revolution has been debunked. The ‘combined-arms orthodoxy’ has been vindicated and proponents of strategic air war have again been proven wrong.
3 — We have learnt that Warden’s decapitation idea does not work against highly-institutionalized states. This was always the position of the serious scholars, but recent Israeli successes had sown some doubt about the thesis. These doubts have now vanished.
4 — We have learnt that a mature precision-strike regime is defense-dominant. Specifically, we have learnt that a great power can deny a global maritime power access to its near-abroad, curtailing the latter’s ability to project power.
5 — As a corollary of the above, the US command of the global commons is gone. The US is no longer a maritime hegemon that can guarantee access to even the most important chokepoint in the system. This is a development of great significance in the history of capitalism.
English
