Old concepts of international relations, such as spheres of influence and regional power, still apply to the current international world.
Old fashioned ideas of international relations still hold. The war on Iran was not a war but a punitive expedition akin to Gen Pershing entering Mexico to punish Pancho Vila for having raided a New Mexico town and so did not require congressional authorization. Nor was it required by the US invading Granada to keep it from extending its airport so Soviet bombers could land there. Certainly the repeated shouts of “Death to America” and regular assaults on U. S. outposts and American allies by Iran and its own allies over many years warrants a punitive expedition. When Trump said he had won the war after the first day because the US had killed the Iranian leadership and seriously degraded Iran’s military, he should have left. Instead, the US is blockading the strait of hormuz to keep Iran from blockading the strait of Hormuz. A statesman knows when he is ahead.
The old fashioned idea of spheres of influence is also still viable as a concept though people can disagree whose influence is dominated by a major power. A sphere of influence is an area close to a major power where the major power supervises the economics and politics of another power. All of Latin America was a sphere of influence for the United States and so regarded as such in the Versailles Treaty that ended the First World War. Finland was within Russia’s sphere of influence and sided with Germany so as to become independent of that, a goal not achieved until Finland joined NATO after Russia invaded Ukraine. The European great powers were right next to one another and so had to fight wars between them for a thousand years to see which would dominate Europe. They expressed their mutual antagonism by plundering African and Asian countries so as to give one of the other some advantage or just pride. It was an expression of war without major war.though that did not keep wars from happening within the European continent.
Ukraine had shifted from being the major figure in eastern Europe to becoming within Russia’s sphere of influence and even been incorporated into the Russian Empire by Catherine the Great. Ukraine declared its independence from Russia when the Soviet Union disintegrated. It did so in part by giving up nuclear weapons for a guarantee of its independence. It had reasons to remain antagonistic to Russia. The Kulak farmers had died of starvation because of Stalin. Sine elements of Ukraine supported Germany against the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. Especially in its own western parts, Ukraine was more a part of the Austro Hungarian Empire than of Russia. But it remained part of the Russian sphere of influence, its leadership beholden to Moscow, until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, acting through the State Department’s Wendy Sherman, advised on how Ukraine could realign itself with the West, and was successful at that so Putin thought it necessary to recapture Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence. Who will prevail is an open question though Ukraine has held its own because of its own tactics and drone technology and the fall of Orban may allow the European Union to send significant munitions to Ukraine. But a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine is important to Putin. He does not think of a European Ukraine as just an adjustment that came about because of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, boundary adjustments inevitable after a war, as when part of eastern Germany was transferred to Poland after the end of World War II.
Another traditional idea about international relations that remains relevant to the contemporary situation is the idea of a regional power, which means a country that is intimidating and otherwise through economic and military force over other nations in the area without challenging one of the great powers. Sweden was a regional power in the area of northern Europe in the eighteenth century until it clashed with Russia in the Northern War and Russia became the dominant nation in the area. Argentina, Brazil and Chile vied with one another as the dominant SouthAmerican power without challenging the United States as the great power of the western hemisphere.
Which is the regional power in the Middle East? One might think it was Iran, which has a stable regime, ninety million people and an advanced military ad scientific establishment and intimidated the suni arab powers. But the ongoing US Iran war has shifted matters. Israel backed by the US also has stable, economically and scientifically and militarily advanced institutions and has shown the ability to weaken Iran without itself incurring major casualties. The Arab states would prefer to be under the US Israel umbrella and buy Israeli software so as to diversify their economies and make them less oil dependency. The interests of the US and israel differ in that Israel sees Iran as an existential threat which would attack Israel with nuclear weapons if it had them because of its religious convictions while Iran is a nuisance to be reduced every once in a while to put it in its place, so long as the religious party there remains in power. Note that Israel is not challenging Russia as a great power. Replacing the great powers of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe are Russia, China, the United States, and also a now united Europe which has the military might and the political stability but has not yet evolved to go beyond consensus as the way to make collective decisions, as happened when the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation. It did not challenge Russia when Russia brought Syria into its sphere of influence so as to gain a warm weather port there and Russian Jews are influential in Israel-Russian relationships. Russia could not sustain Syria as within its sphere of influence when Assad was defeated and Russia had to use its resources to fight its war with Ukraine.
Another old fashioned concept of international relations is that a regime might end when a side loses a war. The German Reich ended when Germany lost the First World War. The Russian regime collapsed because the First World War was so protracted. The Soviet Union collapsed rather than was mildly reconfigured at the end of the Cold War. Surprisingly, Japan and Germany, under very enlightened tutelage, quickly, which means in a generation, to become democratic rather than authoritarian, perhaps because they were both on the way to do so except for the misadventures of Naziism and militarism.
It is therefore not surprising that Trump might have expected that Iran would undergo regime failure and change if it was seriously diminished militarily and economically. Regime change was listed at first as the war’s top priority but the real reason was diminishing its stockpiles of enriched uranium and other munitions which Trump did accomplish on the first day of the punitive expedition and Trump should have ended while he was way ahead. How that regime change would happen was difficult to predict but an Iranian population, already circumscribed by its religious fundamentalism, might have rebelled. That did not happen partly because of its brutal crackdown on the regime;s opponents. China also outlasted its dissidents by cracking down on Tiananmen Square. The Nazi regime remained organized until the very last when Soviet tanks were in Berlin streets. Those three regimes remained stable in that reverses and atrocities did not foment additional resistance against the regime. Nor had the English King and Constitution been unmoored by the loss of the American colonies and the southern way of life was not dismantled for a hundred years after having lost the American Civil War. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.
Here, however, is a concept of international relations that is well established in the United Nations, the Nuremberg Trials. And international treaties that are arbitrary. And purely rhetorical rather than descriptive and so should be eliminated. That is the idea of the rights of nations. A nation has a right to defend itself or answer an attack . But nations aren’t people even if they are corporate entities. According to Jefferson, only individuals have rights, which means inalienable activities that enhance their individuality (which is what it means to “pursue liberty” and which therefore changes over time, some nations coming to regard health care or education as a right even though those were not included by the Founding Fathers. Jefferson explained why it was prudent to sever ots ties with England, not that the colonies had a right to do so. The only measure for judging a nation’s activities is whether doing so is prudent. So Austria-Hungary didn’t have the right to punishSerbia fo the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It could justly calculate a balance sheet of advantages and disadvantages always taking into consideration that a war is a gamble that might go terribly wrong and that public opinion might weigh in as to whether the war was right or wrong as happened when Churchill went in the Underground to ask people if they wanted to continue the war. There might be times when it is prudent to surrender even if the allies were demanding unconditional surrender from Germany. France could have Napoleon surrender because it would soon enough rise again. Vietnam seemed irrational to insist on fighting with the power of the US given US resources, but it had been fighting its enemies for thousands of years..People in Masada chose to die rather than be conquered.