The Struggle for Power in the Middle East

With Washington and Tel Aviv’s joint assault on Iran, all eyes have been focused on the conflagration in the Middle East. As of this writing, Iranian counterstrikes have hit American embassies, bases, radar installations, and other facilities, as well as non-American sites, in Iraq, Oman, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Cyprus. American aircraft carriers in the region may be vulnerable to Iranian and, possibly, Chinese missiles. An American invasion of Kharg Island, an Iranian territory in the Persian Gulf, appears imminent. Israel is taking massive fire as well. A major oil refinery in Haifa was damaged by an Iranian missile strike. Tel Aviv and other cities are enduring barrages of cluster munitions. Israel has invaded Lebanon, raising the specter of a repeat of the genocide in Gaza. Tankers have been hit, and the Iranians are reportedly placing mines in the Persian Gulf.

These bombardments, like the attacks on desalination plants in both Iran and its enemy countries, underscore the war’s toll on innocent civilians. Some 180 people, most of them children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile fired by the Americans hit a girls’ school in Minab, Iran. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, meaning natural gas, oil, petroleum, plastics, grains, fertilizers, and a whole range of goods and services will likely continue to spike in price, or else become unavailable altogether.

But there is much more to the story than the scenes of destruction and chaos playing out on the evening news. There is the historical backdrop to American and Israeli aggression in the Middle East. And then there are Iran’s neighbors, whose numbers are not limited to the countries surrounding the Persian Gulf. To Iran’s east and northeast lie Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan, for example. Russia lies to Iran’s north across the Caspian Sea. NATO-member Turkey borders Iran to the northwest. And Azerbaijan and Armenia lie to Iran’s north. In August 2025, some two months after the United States “totally obliterated” Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity, President Donald Trump brokered a much-touted “peace deal” between Armenia and Azerbaijan, countries that have been at loggerheads for more than a century.

Whether a made-for-television signing ceremony can end decades of ethnic tension and bloodshed remains to be seen. When the Russian Empire, which had incorporated much of current Azerbaijan and Armenia, fell to the Bolsheviks, several years of Azeri-Armenian fighting followed, until the Soviet Union captured the territories again. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Azeri-Armenian fighting resumed. Before the rise of the Bolsheviks, Armenians in the former Ottoman Empire suffered genocide at the hands of Turkish zealots. Some estimates place the number of murdered people at one and a half million.

The suffering continues into the present. In Nagorno-Karabakh, a heavily Armenian part of Azerbaijan, Armenian Christians have been subjected to ethnic cleansing, particularly since the Azerbaijani military invaded and captured the region in September 2023. This precipitated Trump’s peace deal, although that appears to have been much more about American politics than Caucasian peace. In October 2024, during the presidential campaign, Trump promised to end the Azerbaijani pogrom against the Armenians. But this was the same Donald Trump who, during his first term in office, increased U.S. aid to Azerbaijan, which some analysts say encouraged the Azerbaijani government to resume its persecution of Armenians in 2020 during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. (The Armenians had conquered the disputed territory during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, which stretched from 1988 to 1994.) As usual, Trump was uninterested in the details. He sees maps geopolitically.

The global stakes are enormous, to be sure. If, as Washington and Israel are hoping (probably in vain), a pliant Zelenskyy-type regime can be installed in Tehran, then Iran and the Caucasus would be lost to the People’s Republic of China, which covets the region as a major component of the Five Nations Railway Corridor connecting Iran and China via Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. A Washington-controlled Iran would also put American might within striking distance of Gwadar Port in Pakistan, which China wishes to incorporate into its Belt-and-Road Initiative in order to gain access to the Arabian Sea. Turkey, Armenia’s neighbor to the west, has also injected itself into the region, as Azeris are ethnically Turkish, and Turkey seeks to aggrandize its regional power against Russia, Syria, and Iran. Armenia and Azerbaijan thus find themselves at the crossroads of major currents of planetary political power.

Iran, for its part, also apparently sees the potential gains to be had by involving Azerbaijan in the current war. A March 2026 drone attack from Iranian territory into the Azerbaijani territory of Nakhchivan, responsibility for which the Iranian government has denied, may have been a false-flag attempt by a malicious actor to broaden the battlefield, or it may just be that the Iranian government is lying. Either way, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev pulled diplomats out of Iran in protest. Nakhchivan, incidentally, is separate from Azerbaijan proper, nestled precariously between Iran and Armenia. Also, there are more ethnic Azeris in Iran, perhaps as many as 23 million, than in Azerbaijan, which has a total population of under 11 million. A war in Nakhchivan could make things even more difficult for the Americans and Israelis, and also for the Iranians, than they already are.

When I turned to my colleague, Kyoto University associate professor and Neutrality Studies coordinator Pascal Lottaz, for help in understanding the complexities of the Armenian and Azerbaijanian aspects of the Iran situation, he put me in touch with Arthur Khachikian, an Armenian national who holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford. Dr. Khachikian has worked at Stanford on the Carnegie Project on International Mediation and Arbitration, the Macarthur Consortium on International Peace and Cooperation, the Program on Ethnic Conflict in the Former Soviet Union, and the Program on Russian Military Conversion and Privatization. Dr. Khachikian kindly agreed to share with me, and with NOR readers, his wisdom about the Caucasus, Iran, and the long and tragic saga of Washington’s many foreign-policy disasters.

NOR: The “history” of the American assault on Iran is portrayed in the Western mainstream media as having begun in 1979, with the revolution that toppled the American-backed Shah and established the current Islamic Republic. Those with slightly longer historical memories move the starting point back to 1953, when the CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Iranian leader who refused to sell out his countrymen (and their petroleum) to the British and Americans.

However, it seems that the wanton slaughter of innocent people in Iran should be understood as something Europeans have been doing for at least the past 500 years, and Americans more recently. Can you contextualize the ongoing horror in Iran in historical, theological, and civilizational terms?

Arthur Khachikian: I cannot say that I am an expert on Iran, but I can share some history going back at least 200 years. Iran was part of the “great game” between Britain and Russia in the 19th century. In the end, it was partitioned. According to the Anglo-Russian convention of 1907, the northern part became a Russian sphere of influence, the southern part a British one, and the middle a buffer zone that belonged to neither. This was the first instance of such a partition.

The second such instance was in 1941 when Iran was occupied by British and Soviet forces to prevent Germany or her allies from invading Iran and to secure the “Persian corridor” through which the Allies supplied huge amounts of military aid to the Soviets. Thus, Iran has been an area of intense rivalry for Western powers and Russia for at least two centuries.

In 1951 Iran elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil. After a coup organized by British and U.S. intelligence services, Mosaddegh was replaced by Fazlollah Zahedi, a military officer, by order of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Zahedi’s regime was pro-Western. Iranians enjoyed certain Western comforts, but Iran had a very cruel secret service, SAVAC, that was responsible for brutal oppression, arbitrary arrests, and torture. This regime came to an end with the revolution of 1979. During the war, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was stormed, and Iranian revolutionaries seized 66 Americans, keeping 52 of them as hostages.

Ever since, Iran has been the archenemy of Israel and the United States. It does not recognize the right of Israel to exist, and the Western powers and Israel consider Iran to be a sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. The majority of the Iranian population are Shia Muslims. Iran has many allies in the Middle East, from Hamas and Hezbollah to other Shia groups in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

NOR: Trump’s demand for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” fits the pattern of Washington’s way of war. These same terms were imposed on the South during the Civil War, and on Japan at the end of World War II. Obviously, Iran will not surrender, certainly not unconditionally, especially when it holds many advantages, is prepared for a long struggle, and faces an existential threat in American and Israeli aggression. When this becomes clear, what do you think the geopolitical consequences will be for Washington, whose bluff will finally have been called?

Khachikian: The party of war, the party of neoconservatives in Washington and elsewhere, has completely discredited U.S. foreign policy, the ideals of Western democracy, the notion of an international community, and the body of international law. Any hope for benign U.S. leadership in a world of peace and international cooperation is gone. The enormous potential of American political, economic, and cultural leadership in the world has been wasted.

Iran and the United States are likely to turn to a mediator to find a face-saving exit from this crisis. But the consequences will be very serious. The regime of nuclear non-proliferation will fall apart, and more countries will seek nuclear weapons as the only guarantee of their security, which will create enormous risks for the region. The region and the world will continue to drift toward a major international conflict, a polarization between opposing alliances, with peripheral conflicts merging into one major global confrontation.

NOR: The influence of the Zionist state in Israel on American politics and foreign policy is now impossible to ignore. Tucker Carlson, who has been explicit in his criticism of Tel Aviv’s overweening sway in Washington, is, it seems, under CIA investigation. Candace Owens, another critic of Israel, has been subjected to what appears to be a coordinated attempt to discredit her. Joe Kent, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in March on the grounds that the American and Israeli attack on Iran benefitted Israel, not America. Many Americans seem to have rethought, along similar lines, their former support for Israel. Will the shift in American public opinion away from support for Israel have any effect on U.S. foreign policy?

Khachikian: The United States has sponsored many negotiations aimed at a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a solution that would guarantee the security of Israel and the rights of Palestinians in whatever form the parties agree on. The latest attempt was made with the Oslo II peace process in the 1990s. However, the peace process has since been torpedoed by extreme forces and the mass killings of Palestinians following the barbaric Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. We need to return to a peaceful negotiation process with a balanced position on the part of international mediators. What we see now is a very extreme, one-sided position of the U.S. leadership, going as far as claiming the entire Middle East as part of Israel, based on biblical references. This is a recipe for eternal religious war and endless bloodshed.

The foreign policy of the United States is indeed influenced by a powerful Israel lobby, and I believe the influences of any lobbyists from any interest group should be curtailed. Lobbying and campaign sponsorship go against the principles of democracy. Politicians should express the interests of their voters, not those of private sponsors.

NOR: Armenia recently agreed to a Trump-brokered peace deal with Azerbaijan. Armenia and Azerbaijan both share a southern border with Iran. Will the assault on Iran upend the fragile peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia? If so, what does that portend for the Ukraine-Russia conflict to the north? Could the war against Iran spread north through the Caucasus and beyond?

Khachikian: What happened in our region is not peace but a capitulation of Armenia under a foreign-sponsored regime, aided by Western and Azeri forces. Foreign sources have funded hundreds of bloggers, journalists, and media outlets in Armenia, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into our republic to completely control the local media and public opinion. They have convinced some Armenians that the best course of action is surrender and that we have to turn a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing of our compatriots. The dictatorial government has even forbidden us from asking that they be allowed to return home. This is a spectacular example of informational conquest, informational colonization of a small country using Western media funds.

The group that came to power in Armenia promised its people economic prosperity, democracy, and a fair, peaceful solution to the problem of Karabakh. Instead, the new regime caused the surrender of Karabakh and a total capitulation, ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population, repression of political opposition, and arrests of journalists, lawyers, and even the Armenian clergy. Shamefully, the Western media has turned a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing of Armenians and to the vicious repressions by Armenia’s version of Saddam Hussein, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, since this regime is filling its political order. This is not the first or last time the West has put aside its principles and its democratic rhetoric in support of a dictator out of political considerations.

The conflict with Iran has the potential to spread to the Caucasus and involve Azerbaijan and Turkey. The first refugees from the Iran War are already trickling into Azerbaijan and Armenia. Some attempts have already been made to drag Azerbaijan and Turkey into this war. A drone fell on Azerbaijan territory, and a missile was launched toward Turkey. Israel and the United States tried to use the Kurds against the Iranian regime, but the Kurds wisely refused to be used in this way for the third time in the past eight years. The previous two times were in Syria in 2018, during the first Trump administration, and again when President Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in 2024.

The world is on a very dangerous path to a major conflict, to the law of the jungle, to violence and chaos. This is a very unfortunate but entirely predictable outcome of the policies of neocons, who seek global domination and unlimited power instead of equilibrium and cooperation.

NOR: Thank you, Dr. Khachikian, for sharing your insights.

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