Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : War is not always decided by the side that fires the first missile. Sometimes it is decided by the side that convinces its adversary that pulling the trigger would cost more than standing down. In the current standoff between the United States and Iran, this quieter form of victory is precisely what Tehran has achieved. Despite overwhelming American military superiority, despite aircraft carriers moving into the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean, and despite the familiar language of deterrence and coercion, Iran has so far prevented a direct U.S. attack. This outcome is not accidental, nor is it a product of fear or retreat on Iran’s part. It is the result of a calculated, multidimensional strategy that exploits global fatigue with war, fractures within Western alliances, domestic pressures inside the United States, and the irreversible shift toward a multipolar world.
If one were sitting in the Oval Office today, faced with the question of whether to strike Iran or step back, the decision would be far more complex than the raw military balance suggests. Iran is not Iraq in 2003, nor Libya in 2011. It is a large, populous, geographically fortified state with deep historical memory, layered alliances, and a proven capacity to absorb pressure while slowly turning it back on its adversaries.
From a purely military perspective, the United States could inflict serious damage on Iranian infrastructure. But timing matters. Any attack launched in the midst of an ongoing Gaza war would instantly fuse multiple theaters into a single regional confrontation. Hezbollah’s posture in Lebanon, Hamas’s survival despite months of bombardment, and the latent activation potential of Iraqi, Syrian, and Yemeni fronts mean escalation would not remain contained. A strike on Iran would not be a discrete operation; it would be a spark in a room filled with gas.
Target selection presents an even deeper dilemma. Hitting nuclear facilities risks regional environmental catastrophe and global economic shock. Targeting leadership would validate Iran’s long-standing narrative of external regime-change attempts and almost certainly unify the population rather than fracture it. Striking conventional military assets might satisfy tactical logic but would fail strategically, as Iran’s doctrine relies on dispersion, redundancy, and asymmetry rather than centralized command structures. In every scenario, the United States would be initiating a conflict whose second and third-order consequences are unknowable, but whose costs are guaranteed.
Economically, the calculus is equally unforgiving. Iran’s strength lies not in its economy but in its ability to disrupt the global economy. The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most sensitive energy chokepoint, and even limited instability there would send oil prices soaring. At a moment when global supply chains are already strained and inflation remains politically toxic in Western democracies, voluntarily triggering an energy shock would be an act of strategic self-harm. Europe, already grappling with immigration pressures, industrial decline, and political fragmentation, has made it clear it will not sign up for another Middle Eastern war that destabilizes markets and fuels domestic unrest. NATO’s reluctance is not ideological; it is existential.
The geopolitical environment further constrains Washington. China views Iran not as a client, but as a critical node in its energy security and Belt-and-Road connectivity. Russia, locked in its own confrontation with the West, has every incentive to see American attention and resources diverted. Neither power needs to intervene militarily to shape outcomes; their diplomatic backing and economic engagement alone raise the cost of American escalation. The Islamic world, meanwhile, is no longer passive. Iran’s framing of resistance, sovereignty, and selective engagement resonates across Muslim societies that see double standards in how nuclear weapons, occupation, and self-defense are judged.
Perhaps most underestimated is Iran’s mastery of narrative warfare. While Washington mobilizes fleets, Tehran mobilizes legitimacy. Iran’s leadership has projected calm, consistency, and defiance without theatrical bravado. There have been no panic signals, no evacuations, no visible fear. This composure matters. It signals confidence not only to allies but to adversaries, suggesting that Iran has already priced in escalation and prepared accordingly.
In contrast, the United States has struggled to manage its own information environment. The most sustained criticism of a potential war with Iran has not come from foreign governments but from within American society itself. Journalists, academics, activists, and digital influencers have shaped a narrative that questions priorities, hypocrisy, and moral credibility. Protests in cities like Minneapolis are not isolated events; they are symptoms of a deeper crisis of legitimacy. When citizens see naval armadas deployed abroad while domestic grievances remain unresolved, the contrast becomes politically explosive.
This internal pressure fundamentally alters presidential decision-making. Any move toward war would have to be justified not only to Congress and allies but to a skeptical public that remembers Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya all too well. The optics of defending foreign demonstrators or foreign governments while struggling to reconcile divisions at home weaken the moral authority required for sustained military action.
Recent American actions elsewhere have only amplified this skepticism. Aggressive posturing toward Venezuela, including overt regime-change rhetoric and economic coercion, has drawn condemnation both internationally and domestically. Instead of reinforcing U.S. leadership, these actions have reinforced perceptions of overreach and selective application of international norms. Each such episode chips away at the credibility needed to rally support for another confrontation.
Against this backdrop, Iran’s refusal to accept externally imposed limits on its missile range or to hand over uranium stockpiles is not mere obstinacy; it is a defense of sovereign equality. The contrast with Israel, which possesses an undeclared nuclear arsenal outside international inspection regimes, is not lost on global audiences. The inconsistency in demands underscores Iran’s argument that the issue is not nonproliferation, but power hierarchy.
Iran’s internal resilience also matters. The Iranian political system was born from mass mobilization, not foreign installation. This history shapes both governance and resistance. The leadership understands that legitimacy flows inward, not outward. That same awareness explains why Iran has focused on endurance rather than provocation, on patience rather than panic.
If one were advising a U.S. president today, the pressures would converge toward restraint. Escalation risks regional war, economic shock, alliance fracture, and domestic backlash. De-escalation risks a perceived loss of face, but that loss is temporary and largely symbolic. War, by contrast, would be irreversible.
This is where Iran’s success becomes evident. By refusing to be baited, by maintaining strategic calm, by aligning itself with broader global trends toward multipolarity, and by allowing the contradictions of American power to surface on their own, Iran has so far won without firing a shot. The fleets can linger, statements can harden, but as long as the trigger is not pulled, the outcome speaks for itself.
In the end, power is not only the ability to destroy, but the ability to compel restraint in an adversary who possesses far greater destructive capacity. By that measure, Iran’s achievement is significant. It has transformed imminence into hesitation, pressure into paralysis, and threat into debate. For a superpower accustomed to dictating terms, hesitation itself becomes the story. And for a regional power long assumed to be on the defensive, survival without submission becomes a form of victory.
The greatest irony is that Iran’s success exposes a deeper truth about the current world order: brute force no longer guarantees compliance, and credibility cannot be enforced by aircraft carriers alone. In a world shaped by narrative, networks, and multipolar constraints, restraint can be the most powerful weapon of all.

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : The confrontation that reshaped the intelligence and military balance in the Middle East unfolded between June 3 and June 15, 2025, when Israel and the United States launched a coordinated campaign against Iran that combined external strikes with what Tehran later described as a deeply embedded internal operation. It was not merely a clash of aircraft, missiles, and naval deployments. Iranian officials and regional analysts argued that it was a war prepared from within, built on years of covert penetration by Mossad, Israel’s world-renowned intelligence service. According to these accounts, networks of cultivated insiders had facilitated the smuggling of drones, communications equipment, and light weapons into Iranian territory.
The aftermath, now firmly in the past, triggered what Tehran called the largest counter-intelligence operation in its modern history, marked by mass arrests, the exposure of alleged cells, the seizure of weapons depots, and the dismantling of clandestine communication networks. By mid-June, the guns fell silent, but the intelligence war had merely shifted into a deeper and more complex phase.
That next phase began after the Davos meetings concluded on January 23, when President Donald Trump ordered the movement of a U.S. armada and flotilla of warships toward the Persian Gulf, positioning them to encircle Iran. The global media and defense circles immediately framed the deployment as the prelude to an imminent strike. Aircraft carriers, submarines, and long-range bombers dominated headlines. Markets trembled. Regional capitals braced. Yet, at the moment when an attack was most widely anticipated, it did not come.
Instead, Washington paused. According to defense analysts, this postponement was not hesitation, but calculation. The delay itself became a strategic instrument designed to induce nervousness and anxiety within Iran’s defense and political leadership, compelling them to move, displace, and conceal what they valued most—missile units, nuclear materials, command centers, and senior civilian, religious, and military figures.
As these movements unfolded, analysts argued, they created precisely what intelligence services seek: patterns. Satellites tracked convoys. Signals intelligence monitored encrypted communications. Human networks reported shifts in routines and locations.
In this reading, the attack was deliberately deferred so that Iran’s own efforts to protect its assets would expose them. Each relocation became a data point. Each new “safe place” became a coordinate. When the moment came, these analysts claimed, targets would already be locked—ready for B-2 bombers, F-35 squadrons, or Tomahawk missiles launched from submarines hundreds of miles away.
Tehran, however, rejected the notion that it was merely a subject of this strategic chess game. Iranian officials emphasized that, in the wake of June and throughout the tense weeks that followed the January naval deployment, the country had dramatically expanded its counter-intelligence posture. With technical and advisory support from Russia and China, Iran claimed to have shifted its focus beyond human networks to the digital and satellite-based systems allegedly used to coordinate covert activity and unrest inside the country.
One of the most striking claims to emerge from this period involved the discovery of large numbers of Starlinked satellite based communication devices, often described in regional reporting as “starlink kits.” These systems were designed to bypass Iran’s domestic telecommunications infrastructure and link operatives directly to external command centers. Through these channels, real-time instructions could be transmitted—where to assemble, which facilities to target, how to provoke security forces, and how to frame events for international audiences once clashes occurred.
The method, as it was later described, followed a tightly engineered pattern. Small groups would initiate acts of vandalism or violence in public spaces. When security forces intervened, they would be fired at by sophisticated automatic weapons to trigger confrontations. Images and reports of these clashes would then be rapidly amplified across global media platforms as evidence of state repression. The objective was not simply to destabilize Iran internally, but to construct a moral and political narrative that could justify renewed external pressure or even direct military action.
Iranian authorities claimed that, working with Russian and Chinese technical expertise, they eventually traced the signal pathways behind these systems. Uplinks and downlinks were identified. Devices were seized. The digital bridge between alleged external coordinators and internal operatives was disrupted. As a result, Tehran argued, the momentum of street-level unrest declined, and the information battlefield tilted back in favor of the state.
Overlaying these tactical maneuvers was a deeper ideological framing articulated by Iran’s leadership. In speeches delivered by the country’s supreme authority portrayed the confrontation not merely as a geopolitical struggle, but as a test of spiritual endurance. When the world turns against the Muslim community, he told followers, divine support alone is sufficient. This religious narrative provided a form of resilience that could not be neutralized by satellites, sanctions, or surveillance.
At the strategic level, another current shaped Western and regional calculations: Iran’s steadily advancing missile and nuclear capabilities, whether acknowledged, denied, or deliberately left ambiguous. The June 2025 exchange also exposed the limits of Israel’s and America’s ability to achieve decisive results without risking serious retaliation.
Iran was not an isolated state on the periphery of global politics. It stood at the intersection of major power interests. Russia and China openly opposed a war that could redraw the strategic map of the region. Turkey publicly accused Israel of pushing the United States toward a conflict that would destabilize the entire Middle East. Within NATO, enthusiasm for opening another major front appeared limited.
Meanwhile, Washington faced pressures far beyond the Persian Gulf. From the Caribbean to South America, shifting alliances and growing resistance to U.S. influence demanded diplomatic and strategic attention. The prospect of managing simultaneous crises across multiple theaters introduced caution into decision-making circles, as military assets and political capital were stretched across competing priorities.
Hovering over all these calculations was the narrow corridor of the Strait of Hormuz. Any disruption there would send shockwaves through global energy markets and supply chains, with consequences reaching far beyond the region.
Iran’s post-June and post-January campaign to loosen Mossad’s alleged grip—through mass arrests, technological countermeasures, and strategic partnerships—which signaled Iran’s determination to contest every layer of the intelligence battlefield, from the streets of its cities to the orbits above its skies.
The United Nations, often dismissed as powerless, remained, in principle, the only forum capable of conferring collective legitimacy on any lasting settlement. Its strength lay not in its bureaucracy, but in the willingness of member states to honor its resolutions and arbitration. If that willingness continued to erode, the world risked sliding from a rules-based order into a raw contest of power.
For now, June’s firestorm belonged to history, and January’s naval chessboard defined the present. Beneath the visible movements of fleets and leaders, the silent war of spies, signals, and counter-signals continued to shape the future—reminding the world that in the modern age, the most decisive battles are often fought far from the front lines, in the hidden spaces between information, perception, and power.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has said there will be no more wars after Ukraine if Russia is treated with respect – and claims that Moscow is planning to attack European countries are “nonsense”.

In a marathon televised event lasting almost four and a half hours, he was asked by the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg whether there would be new “special military operations” – Putin’s term for the full-scale war.

“There won’t be any operations if you treat us with respect, if you respect our interests just as we’ve always tried to respect yours,” he asserted.

His remarks were in line with a recent comment in which he said Russia was not planning to go to war, but was ready “right now” if Europe wanted to.

He also added the condition,”if you don’t cheat us like you cheated us with Nato’s eastward expansion”.

He has long accused Nato of going back on an alleged 1990 Western promise to then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before the fall of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev later denied the remark had been made.

The “Direct Line” marathon combined questions from the public at large and journalists from across Russia in a Moscow hall, with Putin sitting beneath an enormous map of Russia that encompassed occupied areas of Ukraine, including Crimea.

Russian state TV claimed more than three million questions had been submitted.

Although it was largely choreographed, some critical comments from the public appeared on a big screen, including one that referred to the event as a “circus”, another bemoaning internet outages and one that highlighted poor-quality tap water. Mobile internet outages have been blamed by authorities on Ukrainian drone attacks.

Putin also addressed Russia’s faltering economy, with prices rising, growth on the slide and VAT going up from 20 to 22% on 1 January. One message to the president read: “Stop the crazy rise in prices on everything!”

The Kremlin regularly uses the end-of-year event to highlight the resilience of the economy and, as Putin spoke, Russia’s central bank announced it was lowering interest rates to 16%.

Foreign policy issues were mixed with musings about the motherland, praise for local businesses, fish prices and the importance of looking after veterans.

But the issue of almost four years of full-scale war in Ukraine was never far away and it was often in the background of many of the questions.

Putin again claimed to be “ready and willing” to end the war in Ukraine “peacefully” but offered little sign of compromise.

He repeated his insistence on principles he had outlined in a June 2024 speech, when he demanded that Ukrainian forces leave four regions Russia partially occupies and that Kyiv gives up its efforts to join Nato.

Chief among Russia’s demands is full control of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas, including about 23% of Donetsk region which Russia has not been able to occupy.