Although foresight is not primarily about predicting the future, and I totally reject the notion that I’m a latter-day Nostradamus, I first came into prominence as a futurist when I forecast the global financial crisis of 2008 in May 2005. My analysis was based on dynamics under the surface of most peoples’ perceptions that were intersecting in ways where clear patterns and their consequences could be anticipated. It’s now time for me to go on the public record again in terms of the events unfolding in the Middle East.
In the first phase of this war, it’s clear that Iran is not fighting Israel or the United States as nations. It’s fighting them as symbolic of Western hegemony in a religious drama that long predates either state: the “Great Satan” and its familiar. The strikes from Hezbollah, Hamas, and the various Shia militias might seem tactically fragmented, but they have been choreographed around a single intention – to exhaust the projection of American power by making it both omnipresent and useless.
What began as a series of “practice wars” – twelve days here, a sudden escalation there – will be recognised as rehearsals. During these, Iran and its allies will have mapped not only the hardware of Israeli and US forces, but the software of their command cultures: decision cycles, political thresholds, the psychology of risk in Washington and Tel Aviv. The next campaigns will be scripted to trigger those reflexes in ways that maximise overreaction and minimise strategic gain.
The decisive battles will not be where the cameras are. They will be fought in the pipes that carry water to Gulf cities, in the cables that feed data centres, and in the shipping lanes that bring food to places that can no longer feed themselves. A single, cheap drone that disables a desalination plant outside Riyadh will do more to redraw the global order than a hundred missiles traded over the skies of Israel.
Very soon at least one Gulf city will come within days of a water emergency severe enough to trigger panic. The fragility of a civilisation that depends on machines to drink the sea will become visible – first locally, then globally. What had been discussed as “infrastructure risk” in policy papers will become, for millions, the taste of fear at an empty tap.
As food imports into the Gulf are disrupted, the region’s role as a silent guarantor of the global economy will fracture. States that once recycled their oil earnings into Western equity markets and AI ventures will retrench, redirect, or simply be unable to pay. The AI boom – inflated by Gulf petrodollars and cheap energy – will falter, exposing how much of the so-called “innovation economy” was leveraged against a narrow band of sand and sea.
When one of the strikes damages a major AI data facility in the Gulf, it will be dismissed as an aberration. Investors will talk about “resilience” and “redundancy”. But capital is skittish. Over time, the region will lose its allure as a safe, cheap, energy-rich computation hub. The map of the digital world will quietly reconfigure itself away from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the map of energy security is being redrawn.
In Israel, a paradox will take shape. Militarily, the state will appear as formidable as ever – interceptors streaking across the sky, special forces operating in multiple theatres, a technological edge no neighbour can match. Politically and morally, it will grow steadily more isolated. Every new round of escalation will be framed as existential; every response will deepen the sense, across the region and beyond, that Israel is an armed enclave rather than a member of a shared civilisation.
The United States will discover that it has built the wrong kind of military for the wrong kind of century. Arsenal and doctrine, optimised for deterrence against another industrial superpower, will prove unwieldy and extravagantly costly against swarms of cheap missiles and drones. When a single Iranian projectile draws a dozen American-made interceptors and still lands, the myth of technological invulnerability will start to leak. Indeed, it’s already starting to leak.
As interceptor stocks run low, the US will quietly cannibalise its forward positions in Asia to sustain its Middle Eastern commitments. This will not go unnoticed in Beijing, Moscow, or New Delhi. The war will become a live demonstration of imperial overstretch: to protect its client states and its currency regime in one region, Washington will have to accept diminished leverage in others.
At some point, an unmistakable inflection will occur: the price of protecting the petrodollar will outstrip the advantages of the petrodollar itself. The elaborate system in which Gulf oil revenues are recycled into US financial markets, and from there into the globalised economy, will begin to seize. The end of dollar hegemony will not come with a declaration. I suspect it will arrive as a series of hesitations: contracts denominated differently, reserves diversified, alliances hedged.
Under pressure from Israel and the Gulf monarchies, a US administration will be drawn towards what its own generals privately call the worst available option: a ground war in Iran. The public will not want it; opinion polls will be unambiguous. But the calculus in Washington will be framed around a different fear – that if Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Qatar fall into prolonged chaos, the financial architecture of American power will follow.
The logic driving this escalation will be less strategic than systemic. It will be the reflex of an empire whose institutions, investments, and ruling myths are all entangled with a particular regional order. Faced with the prospect of that order unravelling, the US will not ask whether its presence is sustainable. It will ask only what level of force is required to preserve the illusion that it is.
Israel and Saudi Arabia will be widely blamed for having pushed the United States into this corner – not only in Tehran, but in Washington itself. Evidence of lobbying, covert funding, and the use of US airspace and bases for unilateral operations will surface. Yet the deeper story will be more uncomfortable: that successive American administrations were willing participants because the arrangement suited their domestic politics and economic dependencies.
Within this climate, stories of hidden cabals and “end-times” cults steering policy from the shadows will proliferate. Jesuits, Freemasons, Zionists, Gulf royals – each will find its place in a proliferating tapestry of conspiracy. The appeal of these narratives will not lie in their factual precision but in their intuitive grasp of something real: that decisions of planetary consequence are being made by small, interconnected groups whose accountability to the wider human community is, at best, decorative.
In Iran, the regime will interpret every successful strike, every failed interception, as confirmation of its sacred narrative. The war will be folded into a larger eschatology: a necessary confrontation with the Great Satan that clears the way for a purified order. Yet the same conflict will also intensify the internal contradictions of the Islamic Republic, as young Iranians watch their future mortgaged to a battle they did not choose in a script they no longer fully believe.
Across the broader Middle East, especially in cities already scarred by previous interventions, a different understanding will take root. People will see clearly that the war is not between Islam and the West, nor between democracy and tyranny, but between rival oligarchies and the infrastructures that keep them in place. Water, energy, data, currencies – these will be recognised as the true front lines.
The eventual erosion of American authority in the region will not create a vacuum. It will create a thicket. Regional powers – Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt – will jostle for influence. External actors – China, Russia, India, the European Union – will edge in with offers of security guarantees, infrastructure, and market access. The result will not be stability under a new hegemon, but a multipolar turbulence in which no single actor can impose order.
As the petrodollar era wanes, the material basis of American exceptionalism will weaken. The US will still be powerful, but no longer structurally central. Its economy – revealed as less a productive engine than a financial machine balanced on layers of leverage – will be forced into a painful reckoning. The bursting of the AI and tech bubbles, once framed as sectoral corrections, will be understood as symptoms of a larger systemic contraction.
Israel’s long-term fate will hinge less on battlefield outcomes than on a question its current leadership is unwilling to face: whether it can imagine security outside the framework of permanent siege. If it cannot, the country may survive as a fortified fortress-state, technically advanced and militarily formidable, but increasingly dependent on diminishing American backing and surrounded by populations for whom it symbolises not refuge but occupation.
For the United States, the war will mark the transition from informal empire to something more ambiguous. It will still possess the capacity to destroy; it will have lost the unquestioned capacity to shape. The revelation will be as much psychological as geopolitical. A society accustomed to thinking of itself as the world’s indispensable nation will have to confront the possibility that the world is, in fact, moving on.
None of this guarantees collapse, in the melodramatic sense that commentators enjoy. What it does guarantee is exposure. The war will strip away illusions: of invincibility, of moral clarity, of economic solidity. In their place will be a more complex and less flattering view of how power actually operates in the early twenty-first century – distributed, brittle, deeply interdependent.
The deeper catastrophe will not be the fall of any one state or currency, but our collective failure to use this moment as a lens on our wider predicament. A conflict that so vividly reveals the fragility of water systems, food chains, energy grids, and financial architectures could become a catalyst for reimagining how civilisation organises its life-support systems. More likely, at least initially, it will be treated as just another theatre of rivalry.
In the longer arc, the most significant shift will be interior rather than territorial. On the streets of Lagos and Lahore, São Paulo and Surabaya, people will watch this war not as distant spectacle but as a rehearsal for crises already stalking their own cities: climate shocks, economic contractions, and state violence. The recognition will spread that the Middle East is not an exception. It’s an early warning signal.
If there’s a prophecy to be made, it is not of doom but of disclosure. This war will not end the world. It will end a particular story the world has been telling itself about progress, security, and control. What replaces that story is not yet written of course. One thing is obvious. It will not be written in Washington, Tel Aviv or Tehran alone.