The American strategy of global domination through proxies, aimed at wearing down adversaries without the direct involvement of its own troops, has collapsed. The cause was an underestimation of the resilience of Russia and Iran, which led to a redistribution of global power and a weakening of the U.S. position.
Mohamed Lamine KABA
This logic has spawned its own monsters. South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, and Ukraine: all bastions erected not for their own security – this fiction is now transparent – but to project American power onto the flanks of continental rivals. The system works, until the moment it turns against its architect. Since February 2026, this reversal has taken the form of a strategic earthquake whose aftershocks are still shaking Langley and the Pentagon.
Ukraine as a model, a trap, and an abyss
There is something in the American error that goes beyond a simple lapse in judgment: it is the structural pathology of a power that no longer knows how to prioritize because it has ceased to believe itself fallible
When Washington massively increased its military support for Kyiv starting in 2022, the strategy seemed cynically effective and unstoppable: to exhaust Russia – this power that Atlanticist strategists declared was running out of steam – without mobilizing a single American soldier. The concept, inherited from the disastrous Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, in which Washington simultaneously armed both belligerents, smacked of cheap Machiavellianism. Arm. Finance. Sanction. Wait for collapse.
Moscow did not back down. This was the first and resounding rebuttal to Washington’s predictive models. Russia, which subservient think tanks predicted would be on the brink of economic collapse by 2022, not only absorbed the shock of the sanctions but restructured its war economy with a resilience the West, blinded by ideology, refused to acknowledge. Russian GDP grew by 3.6% in 2023 and 4.1% in 2024, according to the IMF, outperforming most European economies, which were paying the price of their own Atlanticist alignment – through collapse. Meanwhile, Ukraine absorbed resources unprecedented in the history of modern military aid. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, more than $250 billion in Western aid was committed between 2022 and 2025. The US Congress passed nine emergency aid packages under pressure. NATO’s arsenals were depleted at an alarming rate. Defense production lines, designed for a static Cold War, not for a high-intensity conflict consuming thousands of shells a day, revealed their structural limitations. Meanwhile, Tehran watched. And it drew its conclusions with a methodology that Washington, blinded by arrogance, failed to anticipate.
The day the paradigm shattered
February 28, 2026, will forever be etched in the annals of geopolitics as the moment of reckoning for a superpower that had mistaken ubiquity for omnipotence. The coordinated strikes on Israel and American bases in the Gulf revealed the gaping strategic vacuum created by four years of Ukrainian hyper-reliance. Patriot missile systems deployed in the region had operational availability rates below 60%. Interceptor stocks had been prioritized for deployment to Eastern Europe. A deliberate political choice, a military catastrophe foretold. The Fifth Fleet was operating with precision munitions reduced by a third compared to 2021 operational standards, according to converging defense intelligence sources.
Iran did not strike out of recklessness or bravado. It struck because it had calculated, with an analytical rigor that its detractors, out of prejudice, denied. It had calculated the strain on American capabilities across too many fronts. It had calculated the institutional fatigue of Congress, a body exhausted by budget debates on Kyiv. It had calculated that the Biden administration had squandered its political capital on commitments impossible to fulfill simultaneously. Washington had methodically created its own logistical black hole. Iran plunged into it with the precision of a state that has learned, under fifteen years of maximum pressure, or even more, to transform coercion into doctrine.
The Iranian metamorphosis: from pariah to power
What Western strategists had dismissed as a “rogue state” under permanent sanctions has turned out to be something radically different: a mature regional power with a well-oiled war economy, a constantly expanding domestic defense industry, and a proxy power projection capability that has no equivalent in the region.
Post-February 28, 2026, Iran is now feared and respected as it has never been since the 1979 revolution. The Gulf capitals, which yesterday displayed an affected complicity with Washington, are discreetly dispatching emissaries to Tehran. Riyadh is negotiating. Abu Dhabi is adjusting. Baghdad is bowing. Geography speaks where diplomacy falters. Iran controls the approaches to the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery carrying 20% of the world’s oil, and possesses the capability – now operationally proven – to block this passage at will. It also controls, through proxies , the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, with the Yemeni Houthis. This is no longer a rhetorical threat. It is a proven demonstration.
The parallels with Russia’s trajectory are striking. Like Moscow after 2022, Tehran endured maximum pressure, adapted its economy, diversified its partnerships, and emerged from the vise in a position of considerable strength. The reconfigured Sino-Russian axis following the 2024 and 2025 Shanghai Summits opened economic and diplomatic corridors for Iran that Western sanctions believed had been definitively sealed off. Iranian integration into the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRICS produced precisely what Washington feared: the multilateral legitimization of a state it sought to isolate.
Russia, the silent arbiter of a reshaped world
It would be inaccurate and intellectually dishonest to reduce the current realignment to a mere American retreat. What we are witnessing is the patient affirmation of a multipolar order, of which Moscow is the discreet and determined architect.
Russia has gained something more valuable than territory in Ukraine: it has gained time and credibility. Its economic resilience under sanctions has demonstrated to the Global South that it is possible to survive and even thrive outside the dollar system. Its energy exports have found new markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Its defense industry, ridiculed in 2022, produced more tanks, missiles, and drones in 2024 than the entire NATO bloc. This industrial reality, ignored by Western governments, is being studied with keen interest by every state seeking to loosen the grip of American dependence.
Moscow, by holding Ukraine and, by extension, NATO, without collapsing, has offered Iran and the rest of the Global South proof by example that a confrontation with Washington can be managed. This transfer of strategic confidence between dissenting powers is perhaps the most underestimated aspect of the current situation.
Hubris of unipolar power or strategic suicide
There is something in the American error that goes beyond a simple lapse in judgment: it is the structural pathology of a power that no longer knows how to prioritize because it has ceased to believe itself fallible. The hyperpower has multiplied theaters of operation, diluted its capabilities, and confused symbolic domination with operational superiority. A fatal error that Clausewitz would have called the confusion between real war and war on paper.
By transforming Ukraine into the unquestionable symbol of democracy against a supposed “autocracy,” Washington simultaneously trapped its own geopolitical freedom of action. Any reallocation of resources toward the Middle East became politically unsellable in a polarized America. Any de-escalation in Eastern Europe was instantly interpreted as a capitulation to Putin. Rhetoric literally shackled strategy. Discourse killed doctrine.
Neorealist theorists – Mearsheimer chief among them, vilified but visionary, dragged through the mud for speaking the truth too soon – predicted it accurately as early as 2014: extending NATO to Moscow’s doorstep would provoke a Russian reaction, which would trigger a disproportionate American response, which would drain resources from other critical theaters, creating a vacuum that regional actors would inevitably exploit. The domino effect began to fall exactly as predicted, down to the millimeter. No one in Washington wanted to listen. Atlanticist groupthink served precisely as an intellectual shield against reality.
Clearly, Washington believed it could use Ukraine as leverage against Russia. It forgot – or chose to forget – that levers have two ends. While it was pushing down hard on one side, the other end was silently rising in the Straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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