Advanced non-nuclear weaponry enough for deterrence

New Straits Times

24-06-2025

TODAY'S warfare has become a lucrative multi-sector enterprise, spanning semiconductors, satellite constellations, and private security, with contractors and mercenary firms now plugging battlefield gaps in real time.
The US military-industrial establishment for one, thrives on perpetual motion.
Conflict is not a failure of diplomacy — it is the business model: a profit-driven ecosystem fed by dollar dominance, endless war cycles abroad, and technological intimidation.
At its core lies the US dollar's "exorbitant privilege," allowing the system to borrow cheaply and spend endlessly, sustaining a machinery that now runs largely on autopilot.
Add to this a revolving door between Pentagon officials and defence firms, and a constant inflation of threats to justify spending, and the result is clear: even absurd provocations are greenlit, not from necessity but from momentum.
As Iran's leadership put it with cutting clarity, the US is no longer striking strategic targets — it is striking at mere smoke.
In an era of advanced non-nuclear weaponry, from Russia's hypersonic arsenal to Iran's drone precision — the deterrence logic that shaped the Cold War no longer applies.
Why deploy weapons that guarantee mutual annihilation when conventional strikes can now deliver scalpel-like precision and massive strategic disruption, disabling satellites, air defences, or command grids, without radioactive fallout or indiscriminate civilian destruction?
In this light, any state that still pursues collective punishment under the guise of deterrence is not defending itself.
It is exposing itself. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the US–Israel doctrine, where obsolete logic conceals deliberate brutality.
Iran, too, is divided, but its fracture line runs differently. On one side are patriotic factions seeking strategic sovereignty and civilisational dignity; on the other are compromised elements aligned with foreign interests.
Teheran just demonstrated this: state security forces recently arrested alleged Mossad-linked operatives, including those reportedly tasked with supplying missile targeting data.
The recent escalation has acted as a national x-ray, revealing who responds to national imperatives and who follows imported scripts, as explored by EMIR Research in "Deterrence Unscripted: What the Iran–Israel Escalation Really Revealed."
In this sense, the war is not just defensive. It is diagnostic. A purge of illusion.
What, then, does it mean for the US? It will push global audiences, especially in the Global South, into open narrative opposition against American-led coalitions.
The US will not lose only militarily. It will lose morally, discursively and civilisationally.
Meanwhile, Israel — whose political time is already expiring — may find itself truly alone. Once buffered by the US, it now stands exposed.
The Zionist project, as argued by EMIR Research in "Zionism at the Edge: The Terminal Overreach of a Fading Project", has entered its final, unsustainable phase.
Its survival, once premised on external support, now hinges on a system: the US war engine, itself in terminal entropy.
Ironically, Trump's current strategy may be to delay rather than confront. Let the deep state drain its ammunition, burn its credibility, and reveal its own dysfunction.
Some now expect Russia or China to intervene directly. But that outcome is unlikely and deeply dangerous.
Both powers understand that open escalation would trigger cascading consequences on the scale of a nuclear event, drawing the entire world into catastrophe.
Russia, in particular, has demonstrated a different doctrine under Vladimir Putin: limited, ground-based intervention aimed at specific strategic objectives, as it did in Syria against ISIS.
But that model is neither necessary nor appropriate here.
What this moment reveals is not merely a geopolitical contest. It is a struggle between those rewriting the story of power, and those clinging to a script that no longer fits the stage.