America intervenes, hold on to the rails

So, one thing has been cleared up: Trump is not the isolationist he's often made to be. Saturday's attack on Iran with 'fait accomplice' Israel is a logical follow-up on an arc that dates back to Trump 1.0, when he ordered a drone attack that killed Iran's Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. The June 2025 attack on Iranian nuclear facilities - that Trump declared to have 'completely and totally obliterated' - was a shove to test the negotiation table. The latest act of war is a cessation of negotiations.

An intervention on this scale doesn't have a single cause but multiple, layered ones. The cited one - Iran's nuclear development capabilities - is the least convincing. But Trump hasn't been big on 'need to convince for action' at home or abroad. So, his purported bid to act as catalyst for 'regime change,' and appeal to the Iranian people 'to take over their country' - even as the attack has killed civilians, including almost 150 in a primary school in Minab in southern Iran - is as waffling as it seems. Whether the 'preventive' war - a war started to stop a war that hasn't started - declared by Benjamin Netanyahu will convince Israeli voters to repose their electoral faith in him after charges of fraud and bribery will be known in a few months' time. In the US, mid-term elections also can find a MAGA-neocon narrative.

With the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the strikes, the Islamic regime will find itself weakened - and thereby more liable to take a leaf out of Israel's 'Samson doctrine': perceiving existential defeat, 'take everyone down' with it. This isn't just bad news for Iranians, many of whom who have endured decades of sufferance of a despotic regime, but for the region and beyond. For all its closeness to Tehran, Beijing is unlikely to take a detour from its 'China First' project to take on the US and its Gulf 'bases' and come to Iran's help beyond providing 'market-testable' armaments. India, on its part, can be silently thankful that its latest show of friendship in the form of a prime ministerial visit to Israel was with the belligerent side, and not with its other, 'more dependable' ally that appears to be badly hit - and will, on its part, cause further hits across the region.