Tiberio Graziani, president at Vision & Global Trends, the International Institute for Global Analysis, based in Rome, warned that “The U.S. military operation against Iran cannot be reduced to a single goal. Rather, it is the result of the intertwining of a long-term strategy of restructuring the Near and Middle East, a current phase dominated by the centrality of energy, and increasingly explicit global competition with China. Nuclear power, military potential, and regime stability are operational variables; the real objective therefore remains Iran’s geopolitical function, namely its ability to act as an autonomous player in an international system in transition.”
Writing in Analisi Difesa magazine, Graziani warned that “Questioning the ‘true objective’ of the U.S. military operation against Iran risks being misleading if the question is posed as a choice between discrete options—regime change, destruction of military potential, demolition of nuclear facilities, or something else. In reality, the U.S. action should be viewed within the context of a much longer historical cycle of confrontation, which in the post-Cold War period has taken on a coherent configuration, divided into successive phases that serve the same strategic purpose. …
“The European Union’s reaction to the U.S. operation against Iran cannot be understood without first making a preliminary observation: the EU, as it stands, is not an autonomous geopolitical actor, but a fragmented political and institutional space, lacking a unified decision-making chain on security and global strategy. This structural condition determines a response that, rather than operational, will be predominantly discursive, normative, and symbolic.”
