Welcome to the Jungle: The War on Iran as a War on Global Order

For decades, policymakers spoke confidently about a “rules-based international order.” It was supposed to be the defining achievement of the post-World War II era: a system of international institutions, treaties, and diplomatic norms designed to prevent the kinds of catastrophic conflicts that devastated the first half of the twentieth century.

The entire framework rested on an uncomfortable assumption: that the most powerful countries in the world would voluntarily abide by rules they themselves helped create.

Today, that assumption is collapsing.

Across Southwest Asia, tensions between Iran, Israel, and the United States have erupted into a conflict whose consequences are already reverberating far beyond the region. Airstrikes, missile exchanges, covert operations, sanctions regimes, and proxy warfare have turned the region into the epicenter of a much larger geopolitical struggle.

Yet the conflict unfolding across Southwest Asia is not just another regional war. It is something more profound: a test of whether the international system still operates according to rules — or, more alarmingly, a confirmation that the world has, quietly and then loudly, returned to the law of the jungle, where power ultimately determines what is permitted.

For many observers across the Global South, the answer is becoming increasingly clear.

The Epicenter

The current war escalated rapidly after US-Israeli joint military actions targeting Iranian infrastructure and leadership triggered retaliatory strikes across the region. Within days, the conflict had spread across multiple fronts, drawing in state and non-state actors and raising fears of a broader regional war.

Iranian authorities have reported more than 1,200 deaths following missile and air strikes across dozens of cities.

In Lebanon, Israeli strikes have killed hundreds of people, including women and children, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Hospitals and medical facilities have also been damaged in several attacks, with humanitarian organizations warning that healthcare infrastructure is collapsing under the strain of continuous bombardment.

At the same time, the war in Gaza continues to cast a long shadow over the region.

Since the outbreak of the conflict following Hamas’ October 7 attacks in 2023 — which killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel — the humanitarian toll in Gaza has been staggering. Palestinian health authorities report tens of thousands of deaths, the majority of whom are civilians. Large parts of Gaza’s infrastructure have been destroyed, and millions of Palestinians remain displaced.

Human rights organizations, international legal scholars, and several governments have described the campaign as constituting genocide.

The scale of human suffering has transformed the conflict into one of the defining moral crises of the 21st century.

Beyond the immediate devastation, the conflict has revealed a deeper shift in the nature of modern warfare.

Iran’s growing arsenal of drones and low-cost missile systems has exposed a fundamental weakness in the military doctrine of technologically superior powers.

The economic imbalance is striking.

A single Iranian drone can cost a few thousand dollars to produce, while the interceptor missile used to destroy it may cost hundreds of thousands or even millions. This asymmetry allows weaker actors to impose massive financial costs on militaries that rely on advanced defense systems.

In effect, modern warfare is being reshaped by economics as much as technology.

The implications extend far beyond Southwest Asia. Ever since the Russian war on Ukraine, militaries around the world have been increasingly confronting the same dilemma: how to maintain deterrence when adversaries can exploit the cost imbalance of modern weapons systems.

Inside Israel, the war has accelerated debates over the country’s long-term security doctrine.

Israeli political discourse increasingly reflects calls for broader regional deterrence, particularly against Iran and its network of allied groups across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

These developments signal a potential clinical death of the long-sought diplomatic track for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as some factions within Israeli politics are reviving discussions around completely annexing the West Bank.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has indicated that the region could face wider instability as Turkey could eventually become involved in the geopolitical fallout.

The underlying reality is undeniable: the geographic scope of the conflict is widening.

A Fractured Western Pole

For the United States, the conflict reflects a deeper pattern in its foreign policy.

Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has maintained a vast global military footprint, intervening directly or indirectly in countries across multiple regions.

Supporters argue that these interventions defend allies, protect global stability, and prevent hostile powers from reshaping international order.

Critics argue something very different.

They see a pattern of intervention that has destabilized entire regions, from Iraq to Afghanistan and Libya, while reinforcing the perception that American power is frequently exercised through military force and economic coercion.

The current crisis in Southwest Asia has revived these debates with renewed urgency.

For many governments across the Global South, the question is no longer whether American power exists, but whether it is applied consistently with the principles Washington claims to defend.

Yet, perhaps one of the most revealing moments of the current crisis came not from an adversary of the United States, but from one of its closest allies.

Reports emerged that the United Kingdom declined to share certain intelligence with the United States regarding maritime attacks on vessels linked to Iran.

British officials reportedly expressed concern that the information could be used in operations that might violate international law.

The significance of this hesitation cannot be overstated.

The United States and the United Kingdom have historically maintained one of the closest intelligence partnerships in the world. The so-called “special relationship” has been the cornerstone of Western intelligence cooperation for decades.

For London to hesitate, even briefly, over the legal implications of sharing intelligence with Washington signals a deeper unease.

It suggests that the current geopolitical environment is testing alliances in ways that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago.

At the same time that Southwest Asia is potentially spiraling toward regional war, Europe remains locked in another defining conflict of the century.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has reshaped the continent’s security landscape and plunged relations between Moscow and the West to their lowest point since the Cold War.

Sanctions regimes, energy disruptions, and military escalation have hardened geopolitical blocs.

Russia frames the conflict as resistance against Western expansion and NATO encroachment. The United States and its allies frame it as a defense of Ukrainian sovereignty and international law.

The result is a global system increasingly divided along geopolitical fault lines.

In this environment, every regional conflict risks becoming entangled in a broader strategic confrontation.

A (Global) Southern Perspective

The tension surrounding American foreign policy is not limited to Southwest Asia or Europe.

Across Latin America, Washington’s actions continue to shape regional politics.

The decades-long economic blockade against Cuba remains one of the most controversial sanctions regimes in modern history, contributing to severe economic hardship on the island.

In Venezuela, the United States imposed sweeping sanctions targeting the government of Nicolás Maduro while supporting opposition movements seeking political change, a strategy that eventually culminated in direct military intervention and Maduro’s capture by US forces in 2026.

More recently, security agreements in Ecuador have sparked domestic debate about the presence of foreign military influence and the sovereignty of national institutions.

Caribbean governments have also faced pressure regarding their participation in Cuba’s long-standing medical diplomacy program, which has deployed thousands of doctors across developing nations.

Jamaica’s recent withdrawal from the program, officially framed as a domestic decision, has nevertheless been interpreted by many analysts as occurring under indirect diplomatic pressure.

Taken together, these policies reinforce a perception shared by many governments across the Global South: that American foreign policy often combines diplomatic engagement with economic and political leverage designed to shape internal political outcomes.

These perceptions are contributing to a broader geopolitical shift.

Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, governments are increasingly pursuing more independent foreign policies.

Organizations such as BRICS have expanded their membership and influence, while regional alliances are strengthening.

New financial institutions are emerging outside traditional Western frameworks.

The underlying message is simple: many countries no longer believe that a single group of Western powers should define the rules of global governance.

Instead, they are advocating for a multipolar world, in which power and influence are distributed more broadly across regions.

The danger is that multiple geopolitical crises could converge simultaneously, as Southwest Asia remains volatile, the war in Ukraine continues, and tensions in the South China Sea are escalating, while political instability stretches across parts of Africa and Latin America.

Each of these flashpoints carries the potential to ignite wider confrontation. And in a global environment already defined by mistrust, miscalculation becomes far more imminent.

Back to The Jungle

For decades, the world told itself a story.

It was a story about progress. About the idea that the catastrophes of the twentieth century had forced humanity to evolve beyond the brutal logic of empire and conquest. The United Nations, international courts, humanitarian law, diplomatic conventions – these were meant to be the guardrails of a new global era.

The promise was simple: power would be restrained by rules.

But history has a way of exposing uncomfortable truths.

International law has always been strongest when it constrains weaker states, and weakest when it collides with the strategic interests of powerful ones. The institutions of the global order were never entirely neutral, they were constructed in the shadow of World War II, shaped largely by the powers that emerged victorious.

For much of the late twentieth century, that imbalance remained manageable because the system delivered a degree of stability and prosperity that most countries were willing to tolerate.

Today, that bargain is breaking down.

From Gaza to Ukraine, from Cuba to Venezuela, from the Red Sea to the South China Sea, the world is witnessing a pattern that many governments across the Global South increasingly recognize: rules are invoked when convenient and discarded when they become inconvenient.

That perception – whether entirely fair or not – is reshaping global politics faster than any treaty or summit.

The world is becoming multipolar not through a single dramatic event, but through the slow erosion of trust in the institutions that once defined the international system.

And nowhere is that erosion more visible than in Southwest Asia.

What happens in this region will not remain confined to its borders. The consequences will ripple outward – through energy markets, global security alliances, and the fragile architecture of international law itself.

The deeper question is not simply how the current war ends, but whether the world will still believe that international rules mean anything when it does. Because if that belief disappears, the implications are profound.

The rules-based order was never perfect, but without it, the alternative is something far older and far more dangerous: a world where power alone determines what is possible, a world where diplomacy becomes secondary to force, a world where the jungle, once again, becomes the organizing principle of international politics.

And if that is the direction the world is heading, the war unfolding across Southwest Asia may not be remembered as just another regional conflict it may be remembered as the moment when the illusion finally broke.