The question posed by the last twenty-four hours is not whether Donald Trump or Iran is “winning” the war, or whether the latest actions represent an escalation or a walking backward. Both questions assume that someone is choosing. What is underway is a broader dynamic propelling events as if automatically—a condition in which what has been set into motion generates events beyond the control of those supposedly in charge, and to which they respond not by revising them, but by widening the chaos.
After five days of pause, the U.S. resumed strikes on Iran late on July 29. CENTCOM claimed it attacked dozens of IRGC targets in retaliation for Iran’s attack on the Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan the day before. Iranian officials reported that the strikes killed three members of one family on Qeshm Island, and further announced the hardening of their control over the Strait of Hormuz. Five months of bombardment have achieved the opposite of the stated objective.
Nor will the theater stay inside its borders. Egypt’s cabinet confirmed that a drone caused fires aboard two gas vessels at its Damietta Port—the first attack on Egyptian soil since the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran began, and the first time the war has spread to the Mediterranean. Add the U.S.-Saudi strikes on Iraqi militia groups the day before and the Houthi naval blockade in the Red Sea, and the picture comes starkly into focus: a rapidly expanding scope of conflict.
Despite this, the war is not going well, and no one is in control of it. CSIS reported July 29 that U.S. Patriot interceptor stocks have fallen from 2,330 in February to around 800, and THAAD from 452 to under 280—a situation that is now leaving U.S. security in other locations in doubt. The frustration is spreading upward. NBC News reports that President Trump erupted at cabinet members last week; one source called him “exasperated,” and a U.S. official conceded that the administration has “had a series of tactical victories” but is “facing a strategic defeat without clear policy guidance or a decision about where this is going.” An offramp is needed but the mature leadership needed to take it is lacking.
This is exactly the danger Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned about in her July 29 webcast: “the trust level is so completely broken down,” she lamented. “If I were the Iranians and I would look at the U.S. offers of negotiation, I would say, ‘Wait a second, they broke it three times in a row now without announcement, and while we were negotiating in good faith. Why should we trust them for a fourth time?’” The mechanism of diplomacy by which any settlement could be reached has been dismantled.
A similar situation is unfolding in Europe. During a large Russian barrage overnight on July 29-30, a cruise missile crossed roughly 90 km into Poland and detonated in a field. NATO scrambled Polish F-16s and support aircraft, and a senior NATO official told CNN that alliance forces were seconds from firing on the missile before assessing it would fall on its own. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte characterized it as “yet another reckless act by Russia”—further adding to the hysteria currently propagating through European nations. Additionally, Russia’s Foreign Ministry released a new statement warning against Ukraine’s expanding strikes on Black Sea shipping infrastructure, which have again caused the Caspian Pipeline Consortium to suspend loading.
Former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar, in an article titled “US conjoins the wars in Eurasia, West Asia,” also describes the broadening scope of these conflicts. He notes that the Pentagon itself quietly extended the war against Iran to the Caspian Sea last Friday when it struck Bandar Anzali—Iran’s largest Caspian port and the hub of its trade with Russia. Ukraine’s attack on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian the next day, therefore, “is anything but a stray incident,” he noted, and “could well be a calibrated move by Washington.” Nour News, an outlet close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reaches the same conclusion: Washington is activating new actors from Yemen and Lebanon to Ukraine, in events that “may, in fact, be interconnected parts of a coordinated design.”
That the U.S.-Iran war and the Ukraine-Russia war are becoming one is no longer inference. At the same time, neither of these were ever isolated events in the first place. Rather, they are part of the same neocolonial policy aimed at maintaining a unipolar order and crushing all opposition to it. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a July 29 interview, the West’s earlier attempts to “dismember” Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union have again reappeared over the current conflict.
But this old order has broken down. What remains is multipolar chaos, and the necessity, as Zepp-LaRouche has argued since the Ukraine war began, of a new security and development architecture to replace it. “If this thing is not stopped,” she warned, “we are so close to a catastrophe of human history that I can only say people who are concerned must step forward and express their views.”
That is the topic which will be taken up at the July 31 EIR Roundtable Dialogue, whose lead panel is titled “A Dialogue of Civilizations: Development or World War III.” Tune in and join the effort to create a different path before it is too late.
