<nettime> Vivek Menezes: The Autumn of the Hegemon

[Patrice Riemens via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hola Aloha,

As the general agreement that the US have been badly 'trumped' in their ill-inspired confrontation with Iran, here's a view from India:

(original to: 
https://www.heraldgoa.in/goa/the-autumn-of-the-hegemon/479150/ )

The Autumn of the Hegemon
Vivek Menezes
O Heraldo, June 21, 2026

The emotional and psychological consequences of this collapse of post-historical illusion are profound. The war on Iran, designed to satisfy the maximalist fantasies of an Israeli partner and collapse the Islamic Republic, has achieved neither.

It was already abundantly clear the USA and Israel were strategically outmaneuvered by Iran in their disastrous war of choice that is still not quite over, but the MOU signed by President Trump this week in Versailles reflects astonishing “sea change” far beyond what anyone previously thought possible, even including the Iranian regime itself.

Here is how their chief negotiator Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf – he is also Parliamentary Speaker – put it in Tehran some days ago: “Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation; it was not even comparable.”

All this past week, the formerly unthinkable has become explicit, as Trump and his ambitious vice-president Vance aggressively defended their new stance, which conspicuously isolates Israel. The draft terms of their agreement signal an unprecedented US retreat from the Persian Gulf and West Asia, which means, in theory at least, all the countries in the region will now have to negotiate their security arrangements amongst themselves.

Uncle Sam is turning away, and the uncomfortable new reality for many is that Iran has won increased leverage on the battlefield, to be reckoned with in any future power alignment. Ghalibaf said it directly: “These blocs are certain to emerge, and in many ways, they are already taking shape. Whatever form they ultimately take, two countries will undoubtedly be at their core: China and Iran.”

Make no mistake, we are witnessing an epochal turn of events, on par with the stunning 1905 military victories by Japan against Russia on both land (at the Battle of Mukden) and sea (when the famous Admiral Tōgō supervised the complete destruction of the Russian Baltic Fleet at Tsushima), forever shattering any lingering myths about European military dominance, and setting off independence movements all over the world.

We are at that kind of historical juncture once again more than 100 years later, as the editors of the promising new online magazine Equator explained on April 24th: “the underdog’s triumph [against Russia] triggered an interior revolution – the psychological emancipation of those long relegated to the status of ‘backward’ peoples – and galvanised leaders from Ataturk to Nehru, for whom the secrets of Western power were not objects of envy and adoration, but tools for collective strengthening. The news of this triumph reverberated across the world.”

Passing through the Suez Canal shortly after Russia’s collapse, Sun Yat-sen was congratulated by Arab workers who, exuberant at the news from the Pacific, mistook the Chinese revolutionary for a Japanese citizen. In that moment of solidarity lay the significance of Tsushima: the outcome transcended mere geopolitical reordering, and instead marked the onset of a world revolution in moral and political consciousness. The secrets of Western military and economic power could be learned, and then deployed against the West itself.

Now, say Equator’s editors, “the catastrophic failure of the American-Israeli war on Iran seems certain to inaugurate another revolution in global consciousness. The most powerful nation in world history has suffered a strategic defeat – a modern Tsushima in the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike at Suez, where the feebleness of old Europe was brusquely corrected by the rising American hegemon, Hormuz erupts in a landscape where the West’s moral and material ‘soft power’ has been incinerated in the ruins of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and undermined by the spectacle of blatant white supremacism and risible incompetence in Washington.”

The emotional and psychological consequences of this collapse of post-historical illusion are profound. The war on Iran, designed to satisfy the maximalist fantasies of an Israeli partner and collapse the Islamic Republic, has achieved neither. Instead, the survival of the Iranian state against the full spectrum of US coercion has clarified the outlines of a post-American world.

What are the possibilities for India in this fast-changing scenario, where it was Pakistan that made best use of subcontinental civilisational connections to play an all-important role mediating between Iran and the US, while the Modi administration bungled badly in giving the impression of backing the losing side?

Do not be fooled by this first impression, because everything that is happening also has healthy dimensions for every country in the region far beyond any myopic zero-sum calculations. All of this is to Indian advantage.

I liked how Nitin Pai of Takshashila Institution framed this as early as March 22 in Mint newspaper, writing about this “watershed moment for how the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries see their security. They can now calculate the actual benefits and costs of the US security umbrella that covers them.

Despite asymmetry in military technology, Iran has been able to impose severe strategic costs on the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia by exploiting economic asymmetry. Even if most Iranian missiles are intercepted above Arab skies, the psychology underpinning the Gulf’s prosperity has been damaged.

And even if, as has been reported, the US did not prioritise Israel’s defence over that of the GCC states, the realization that it might do so is not lost on the region’s elite. We should therefore expect some strategic reorientation, perhaps through a Gulf-led military alliance that might include Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan. The Pakistani military establishment will surely be rubbing its hands in anticipation of the rewards it can secure by offering both military manpower and nuclear weapons.”

Pai accurately predicted that “Trump’s taunts and insults will become harder for European leaders to swallow [as] their economies face crises of Washington’s making. The upshot is that many of these new alignments are opportunities for India if New Delhi plays it right. It is important to remember that Iran is a potential ally in the Kautilyan calculus [and] at this time India’s interests are best served by non-involvement.

Let’s Stay Away and Keep Away (SAKA) from foreign wars. Once the warring world solves its simultaneous equations, it will compute that India is a necessary factor in every solution.”

(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)


-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org