June 24, 2025
Not many realise it yet, but this epoch has somewhat unnoticeably reset the global equations. From South Asia to continental Europe, old doctrines have almost cracked and tested to their extent. New templates are emerging and being stress-tested. The status quo could only hold for so long. These are interesting times to be alive – especially at this age, when history seems to turn every quarter.
The past few years brought almost the “best” of America – its tools, its society, its intelligence, its alliances – into contact with the “best” of the Middle East: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Qatar, the UAE – though perhaps not yet Saudi Arabia. Even the Zionist core, tested to its doctrinal limits, revealed what lies beneath. Hamas and its resistance architecture and ideology – long sold to the West and the Americans as ‘contained’ – emerged as their most asymmetrical and existential threat. No neat exit. No off-ramp. Israel’s handling of the war only cemented Hamas’ ideological transformation. It has internalised the Hezbollah model at tactical level, but with full operational and strategic autonomy.
Hezbollah was always Israel’s benchmark threat. Israel had close to 500 intelligence analysts across its major intelligence communities focusing on Hezbolllah. A plethora of research was done on Hezbollah in the past 20 years, even behind doors and in academia by the whole west. In contrast, Israel put only approximately 50 analyst for Hamas. The result was that it took one and a half month for Israelis to contain Hezbollah and eliminate 300-350 of its main commanders and now hunting for affiliates. Hamas, on the other hand, is still to be figured out – battered but nowhere gone. Now Hamas-style resistance will evolve past that – not in sheer capacity, but in political imprint and permanence.
The West spent almost 35 years meticulously studying, profiling, and even translating the entire corpus of the resistance – from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al-Qaeda – to devise a winning strategy and shape the Middle East for the Zionist project. The post-October 7th has laid everything bare of that project, as well. This, now, crystallises in the voicing of the emerging “No-Day-After” doctrine, which is essentially a set of desperate cries. The West and the Zionist project have exhausted all their doctrinal limits: the Begin Doctrine has shown its limits, the Samson Option has been bombed by Mossad’s own tactics, and the oldest “Periphery Doctrine” has reached its edge. Iran has imposed a cost of strategic proportions on the pinnacle of Israeli firepower – the “Dahiyeh Doctrine”. With the “regime” still intact, Israel’s MABAM (Campaign Between Wars) has rattled. This might well string Pakistan–Iran–Türkiye into a counter-balancing natural bloc, sharing convenient intelligence and arms, at least. This is a big military market for Pakistan. And, no matter how much the Zionist flunkies want to separate the files of Pakistan and Türkiye from Palestine, the Israeli government’s own Commission for the Evaluation of the Defense Establishment Budget and the Balance of Power – more commonly known as the Nagel Commission – reflects the Israeli strategic calculus moving forward: the Jewish state cannot afford to lose even one major war. That conclusion quite explicitly mentions an inevitable collision path with Türkiye over Syria’s potential for a Sunni powerhouse in Israel’s backyard.
Israelis cannot help themselves with their obsessive “Firepower and Mobility” doctrine, which has no use in an increasingly asymmetrical periphery. What worked for Israel thus far is “Intelligence Dominance” and Cyber Pre-emption and Dominance. This is partly due to the 30-year Israeli focus on cyber capacity building, for which Netanyahu played a major role. However, as the world moves into the AI age – and given what the Chinese have established in the EW domain aided heavily by AI and ML within the recent Pakistani response architecture against Israeli systems – there are legitimate voices among statecraft arguing for establishing strategic dominance in AI as well. How this translates into asymmetry is a question for another time, but in any case, this strategy of escalation management via dominance of thresholds has seen its limits, too. This Iranian episode was the first war with a state for this Israeli generation. Israel exploits grey zones: assassinations, limited airstrikes, cyber ops – all without triggering war. Its mastery of “how far is too far” defined its rhythm with Hezbollah and Syria. But this didn’t work with Iran. Iran leaned into its millennia-old attrition strategy – instantly and remarkably. A strategy no Israeli doctrine has a way out of yet.
Therefore, Israel, for its part, will remain stuck in a post-October 7th trauma loop. Despite its vast firepower, it finds itself trapped in a reactive posture, its political confidence in slow erosion. It is learning – stubbornly – that it cannot hegemonise this region, only frighten it. But the region is no longer frightened. It has matured. It reads the room. Israel is now the big, scary bully with its cover blown and core hollow – begging for legitimacy, feared but not believed. Its “Ba’al HaBayit” doctrine will no longer work. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” strategy has reached its tipping point. And as the Nagel Commission has alluded to: “little is stable in the Middle East — today’s friend could be tomorrow’s enemy.” Expect these friends and enemies to hedge for alternative power structures and military sources. This will always make Israel to fear the power, not the purpose. If Israel hits at capabilities around its edges, there can only be so much a force can do. It is already draining itself and its overlord empire beyond their breaking point.
After almost five decades, Israel has not come out of its “Jewish Paradox”, and still trapped in a Catch-22 Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldman before he died:
“I don’t understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out.”
“But how can you sleep with that prospect in mind,” I broke in, “and be Prime Minister of Israel too?”
Who says I sleep? he answered simply.
– The Jewish Paradox by Nahum Goldman
Now on Iran. Iran’s strategic arc – built on ideological sprawl, proxy networks, and deep positioning – may have reached terminal overextension. From an arrogant regional vision, it now finds itself recalibrating, possibly downsizing, possibly collaborating – and humbling. It has hit the outer edge of its project. At home it will figure out why its decades worth of deterrence fell to age old military strategies, well known and well documented. Israeli campaign was a text book example of North-Korea and China focused “left-of-launch” doctrine and Cold War era “strategic paralytic strike” short of nuclear conflict. If Iranians learn anything, it will reflect in their next shopping spree for fighter jets, air defence, EW, and ECCM and integration. Iranians are smarter than what happened to them. Some of them will surely figure out.
But the real doctrinal lesson will be Syrian. Already crisis-riddled Islamic movements across the region are learning – quietly and irreversibly – that ideology without arms and cunning cannot survive in this new arena. Generations in Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan are internalising this. That is why, I guess, these movements are on the verge of a metamorphosis. Not because they failed the stress-test – but because the architecture that brought them this far has kind of hit its limit. Their Da’wah has reached its saturation point. The next phase will integrate at mass mobilisation and figuring out hard power.
Pakistan’s trajectory, in contrast, is being institutionalised. What began as doctrinal deception and strategic improvisation is now being systematised. The deception is doctrine. The military-industrial convergence is about to reach critical mass. One key matrix that can illustrate or juxtapose this is that across the big three Israeli defence conglomerates and the rest of the military startup ecosystem, there are close to 15,000 to 17,000 engineers employed. In contrast, there are a total of 7,000 to 8,000 engineers, I guess, across all major Pakistani defence conglomerates. The situation is almost similar in Türkiye as well. This parity will bridge inevitably and amazing things will follow. That is why, partly, Pakistan’s alignment with China is deepening – hedged, carefully, with the Americans. This is no longer experimentation. It is posture. This can shape the Middle East and Asia-Pacific in the coming decades – if the Americans manage to keep things under control.
The world has reset. There’s no turning back.