Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, spoke of a Trump-Xi summit following a US defeat in Iran. He stated this as a warning. He may have understated the speed at which events are unfolding.
As of this writing, the United States and Israel have been at war with Iran since 28 February 2026. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated in the opening strikes. The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas ordinarily passes — has been effectively closed for nearly three months, with a dual blockade now operating: Iran blocking Gulf shipping and the US Navy blockading Iranian ports. Oil prices surged from seventy dollars a barrel to over a hundred. Global shipping has been rerouted. Parts of Asia face fuel rationing. The Islamabad talks between JD Vance and Iranian officials collapsed in April. On 18 May, Trump announced the postponement of a scheduled attack on Iran following urgent requests from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And on 14 and 15 May, Donald Trump flew to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping — the first visit by a sitting US president to China in nearly a decade — delayed by more than a month because of the Iran war.
Wilkerson’s scenario, offered as a cautionary extreme, has arrived. Not as a defeat in the formal sense — the US military did destroy significant Iranian infrastructure and kill Khamenei, which it will call victory. But as a strategic condition indistinguishable from the one he described: an unresolved conflict, a closed strait, an economy-disrupting energy crisis, and a flight to Beijing to stabilise the relationship with the one power whose cooperation is now indispensable.
Xi warned Trump at the Great Hall of the People that mishandling Taiwan would put the relationship in ‘great jeopardy’. He invoked the Thucydides Trap. China, Scott Kennedy of CSIS observed, came into this meeting ‘far more confident than in 2017’. It had successfully beaten back Trump’s tariff escalation the previous year by wielding control over rare earth minerals. It was watching the Iran war — and the US Navy blockading tankers bound for Chinese ports — with calculation, not panic. Trump told Fox News that Taiwan was ‘the most important issue’ for Xi. He described the island as 59 miles from China and 9,500 miles from the United States and suggested both sides should ‘cool it a little bit’.
This is the world the warnings were about. It has arrived on schedule.
There’s a peculiar anguish in watching an avoidable catastrophe unfold with the unhurried confidence of something that always believed itself inevitable. The arguments for war with Iran were not the arguments of madmen. That is what made them so dangerous. They had internal coherence. They emerged from a theoretical architecture refined over decades by serious thinkers working within a tradition of scholarship. And that is precisely why dismissing them as lunacy was never adequate — they were the logical output of a system of premises that needed to be interrogated at a depth the policy conversation almost never reached.
John Mearsheimer’s theory of “offensive realism” holds that great powers are structurally compelled to pursue dominance, not from malice but from the inescapable logic of an anarchic international order. In such a world, relative gains matter more than absolute ones, security is always provisional, and the only rational response to a rising peer or a threatening adversary is pre-emption. Apply that framework to Iran in its weakened post-sanctions, post-Gaza state — its regional proxies degraded, its air defences exposed, and its supreme leader elderly — and the calculus writes itself. A window of opportunity. A weakened adversary. Strike now or face a nuclear-armed Iran in two years. The people who made this decision were not irrational. They were operating inside a logic that the structures of American foreign policy have been producing, without interruption, for thirty years.
Glenn Diesen, hosting Mearsheimer in a conversation that now reads as prophecy rather than analysis, framed the situation with precision: the West was climbing the escalation ladder against Russia and Iran simultaneously, with all-out war as the destination toward which each rung leads. Theodore Postol, the MIT physicist, had calculated that Iran could construct between ten and twenty nuclear weapons — the very capability the strikes were designed to eliminate. Trita Parsi, one of the most acute observers of the Gulf, had argued that a war with Iran would not merely fail strategically; it would mark the terminal moment of American primacy.
Are we now inside that terminal moment? If so, the vital question is what that means — and whether the transformation it forces can be generative rather than just destructive.
The framework that generated the problem cannot generate the solution. This is not a counsel of despair. It is a precise statement of where the real focus lies.
How the Madness Works
The question that matters most is not strategic. It is civilisational. How does an intelligent species, possessed of historical evidence it could not lack, capable of modelling consequences with considerable precision, equipped with institutions expressly designed to prevent exactly this kind of cascading catastrophe — how does it walk into the fire it can see coming?
The answer is not in the psychology of individual figureheads, though that psychology of orthodox “leadership” is worth examining, as I have done on many occasions. It’s in the configuration of the system they inhabit. Decision-makers operate inside institutions with sunk costs and organisational memories that can’t easily change direction. They operate inside domestic political ecosystems that reward aggression and punish moderation. They operate inside an information environment shaped by defence contractors, think tanks, and media organisations whose funding structures create powerful incentives toward a particular reading of threat. They operate inside an alliance system — NATO above all, but also the US-Israel relationship with its peculiar immunities — that has spent decades cultivating a professional class whose identity and budget depend on an adversary existing. Remove the adversary, and the machine has no purpose. The machine, therefore, does not want to remove the adversary. It has no motive to do so.
This is what Mearsheimer has understood with admirable clarity and what his critics sometimes miss: the problem is not the people. The problem is the worldview. And changing the worldview requires something considerably more demanding than changing the occupants of the relevant offices — or, as the last three months have demonstrated, even changing the outcome of an election.
What can be done?
I received a serious query from a friend this morning who asked me, ‘What can actually be done?’ I want to answer this with some honesty about scale, because most analysis of this question operates at the wrong level. It asks what policy adjustment could de-escalate a given situation. That’s a necessary question. But it’s not sufficient. The current situation is not an anomaly — it’s the predictable output of a civilisational order that has been producing exactly this kind of situation for five hundred years. The honest answer must address three interactive levels: immediate, structural, and civilisational.
At the immediate level, the central task now is preventing the Iran conflict from being succeeded by something worse. The Trump-Xi summit in Beijing produced a fragile stabilisation: a three-year ‘strategic stability’ framework proposed by Xi, an extension of the trade truce, a Boeing aircraft deal, and an invitation for Xi to visit Washington in the autumn. This is not a peace proposal. It’s a commercial negotiation dressed in diplomatic language. But commercial negotiation can’t be dismissed — it creates mutual dependencies that raise the cost of the next escalation, and it buys time in which the underlying dynamic can be addressed. Xi’s explicit caution concerning Taiwan and Trump’s equivocal response leave the Taiwan tripwire intact. The work of genuine deterrence clarity — not public bluster but private, credible communication of actual red lines — remains unfinished.
The immediate task in Iran is equally unresolved. A ceasefire is in place, but the dual blockade continues, the strait remains functionally closed, and negotiations mediated by Pakistan have not produced agreement. What the current situation has demonstrated, at enormous cost, is the central argument Parsi and Postol were making before the war: that military action does not eliminate nuclear capability, it accelerates the political will to acquire it, and it does so with the moral authority of a population that has just been bombed. An Iran that was not yet nuclear and had little intention of becoming so is now an Iran with every rational incentive to become so as rapidly as possible. The window for negotiated deterrence — already the more prudent option before February — is narrower, but it remains the only realistic off-ramp. The alternative is permanent military confrontation with a radicalised adversary backed by Chinese and Russian support, which is precisely the strategic overextension that historically precedes imperial decline.
At the structural level, the summit itself is evidence of what Mearsheimer’s framework predicts: that a multipolar world imposes constraints that unipolarity could ignore. China’s ability to threaten rare earth restrictions, to support Iran’s economic survival through alternative payment systems, and to offer Xi as the indispensable interlocutor are nothing more than the expression of a structural reality. The United States needed Beijing more than Beijing needed Washington when Trump boarded Air Force One for China. That asymmetry will not reverse. The Global South’s refusal to endorse the Iran war, the European reluctance to support the naval blockade, and the French and British promotion of an alternative multinational mission — these are all signals of a world in which American primacy is no longer the organising fact of international life.
From Bangkok, from a region that watched the Iran war with the specific anxiety of countries whose energy security runs through the Strait of Hormuz, this is not abstraction. Fuel price surges hit Southeast Asian economies with immediate, felt consequences. ASEAN’s studied neutrality throughout the conflict was not a moral failure. It was the expression of a region that has learned, at considerable historical cost, that subordinating itself to any external framework produces outcomes that can’t be undone. That neutrality is itself a structural fact the next iteration of American foreign policy will need to take into account.
At the civilisational level — and this is where the analysis that matters least in the short term matters most in the end — the Iran war is a symptom of an entire world-system and its operating schema in terminal distress. Industrial economism, as I have been calling it, is the civilisational framework that encodes the world as a field of competition for scarce resources, that mistakes dominance for security, and that treats interdependence as vulnerability rather than as the constitutive condition of complex life. The foreign policy consensus that produced February 28 is not a foreign policy error. It’s a civilisational expression of great precision. It emerged from premises about what power is, what security requires, and what counts as a rational response to a threat — premises that are so deeply embedded in the institutions of the current order that they can’t be seen as premises at all. They present themselves as common sense.
You cannot think your way out of a civilisational crisis using the conceptual vocabulary that produced it.
The Imaginal Cell Problem
The restraint tradition within American foreign policy — Mearsheimer, the Quincy Institute, Andrew Bacevich, Trita Parsi, the growing cadre of retired military and intelligence officials publicly questioning the trajectory — was right. It was right before the war, during the war, and it is right now about what comes next. It was, and remains, institutionally outgunned. Ideas that favour restraint don’t generate defence contracts. They don’t fill think tank coffers. They don’t produce the Washington access that translates into policy. The ideas exist. The infrastructure to move them into practice does not, or at least not yet. What accelerates the growth of that infrastructure? Catastrophic strategic failure of exactly the kind now unfolding. The emergence of a generation for whom the assumptions of the unipolar decade are not memories but curiosities. The continued refusal of the majority of the world’s population to accept a security architecture designed without them and not for them.
The imaginal cell metaphor, which I have used in other contexts to describe civilisational metamorphosis rather than a neat transition from one world-system to another, applies here with particular force. Inside a chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn’t gradually transform — it dissolves. The imaginal cells that will become the butterfly exist within the dissolving structure, regarded by the immune system of the old organism as foreign bodies to be destroyed. They survive by clustering, multiplying, reaching a density at which the immune response can no longer contain them. The metamorphosis, when it comes, is not gradual. It is sudden — the culmination of a long, invisible process.
The institutional architecture of the old order — the think tanks and alliance structures and defence contractors and political parties organised around a world that’s dissolving — this is the immune system. They attacked voices of restraint before the war. They will reframe the war’s failures as evidence for more force. They will demand that the lesson of Iran be insufficiently decisive action, not structurally misconceived adventurism. This is how immune systems work. The question for those who understand what’s at stake is not how to persuade the immune system to stand down, but how to cluster, how to multiply, and how to reach the threshold of transformation before the old order generates the next war in the series.
What This Means in Practice
Let me be concrete, because a civilisational argument that can’t cash out in anything actionable is a form of aesthetic consolation, and the current moment does not call for that.
At the immediate level: the voices making the restraint case with intellectual rigour need amplification, institutional support, and the kind of sustained strategic communication infrastructure that the interventionist lobby has spent decades constructing. Parsi’s argument that the Iran war marks the terminal moment of American primacy is not anti-American — it’s an argument a serious American strategist should be making on behalf of American interests. The Quincy Institute, the emerging coalition of sceptical retired officials, and the realist tradition in strategic thought are not fringe actors. They need to be treated as the serious intellectual tradition they represent, given media platforms commensurate with their analytical record, and connected to the political actors in both parties who are beginning to ask whether the unipolar playbook has any moves left.
At the structural level: invest in and celebrate the architecture of multipolarity — not as a geopolitical preference for any particular configuration but as the structural condition that constrains unilateral adventurism. Every bilateral agreement, every diplomatic initiative that deepens the web of interdependence between states, is a small increment of structural deterrence against the oversimplifications that war requires. China’s role as an indispensable mediator in the current Iran negotiation is not a Chinese victory over American interests. It’s simply evidence that the world has already moved to a different structural condition and that American foreign policy will function better inside that reality than in permanent, expensive, and increasingly unsuccessful resistance to it.
At the civilisational level: don’t abandon the far-sighted argument. The ideas that reframe the fundamental question — from dominance to stewardship, from security-through-control to security-through-relationship, and from the contracted present to the expanded now as an actual planning horizon — require sustained intellectual work, expressed with sufficient precision and force to survive contact with the arguments they contest. The ecority framework — ecology, security, and integrity understood as a single field of concern rather than competing values to be traded off — is one such expression. Syntrophic inquiry, the trinary of obligations, and the gravity of ghosts as a description of worldviews exerting force from within institutional architecture without ever being named: these are not ornamental additions to a security analysis. They are an alternative epistemology. Different epistemologies, over time and under sufficient pressure, produce different institutions. Different institutions produce different behaviours.
The timescale is uncomfortable. It doesn’t match the urgency of a war in progress or a blockade that’s closing the strait through which energy supplies flow. But the timescale is what it is. Metamorphosis of the depth required can’t be engineered on the schedule of a news cycle or an electoral term. What can be done on shorter timescales is to ensure that when the structural conditions for transformation arrive — and they are arriving faster than the old order can adapt to them — the conceptual infrastructure for a different kind of world is intelligible, available, and embodied by enough people to be chosen.
Lawrence Wilkerson predicted a Trump-Xi summit after a US defeat. He was trying to warn us. The warning was not heeded, and the scenario arrived anyway, dressed slightly differently from the one he described but recognisable in its essential structure.
The question now is not whether the madness had coherence — it did and it still does, and it will produce the next iteration using the same structural logic unless something changes at a level deeper than policy. The question is whether the alternative has been articulated clearly enough, embodied seriously enough, and distributed widely enough to be available when the moment demands it.
That articulation is, for those of us doing this work, the whole point. It was the point before the war. It remains the point now.