The war with Iran is not a regional conflict. It’s a message to the world.

While Europe walks the tightrope, the US and Israel are redrawing the rules. And Beijing and Moscow are watching every move. 

In the weeks and months after 7 October 2023, we observed a desperate attempt by the international community – led by malign actors such as South Africa (International Court of Justice case) and Iran – to pressure Israel into a handicapped response, aimed at crippling its right to self-defence through lawfare and disinformation. It appears these same forces failed to grasp the shift in Israeli thinking caused by the horrors of 7 October – the decision to break free from the equations that characterised previous conflicts. 

On 28 February 2026, the implications became impossible to ignore. The US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion, targeting Iranian missile infrastructure, military facilities, and leadership across nine cities. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and approximately 40 senior members of the Iranian security and intelligence apparatus were killed in the opening wave of Israeli strikes. 

This is not simply a military campaign. Rather, it is a deliberate signal, directed as much at Beijing and Moscow as it is at Tehran: the world order is undergoing a tectonic shift, and the rules are being rewritten by the US and capable partners. The question worth asking is whether anyone in Europe is actually reading it. The evidence, as I will outline below, suggests not. 

Iran’s strategy was that of a chess player who had been setting up its pieces for decades. It armed and funded Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias, building a multi-front regional network aimed at choking Israel and US interests in the region. It enriched uranium past every threshold set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and its successor frameworks. And it did all of this while Western governments, including the Biden administration, continued to treat diplomatic re-engagement as both the means and the end. 

The results speak for themselves. The cancer spread unabated. The Russian invasion of Ukraine. The 7 October attack. Hezbollah’s decision to join the war. Hundreds of drone and missile attacks launched by Iran and its proxies across the region. The Houthis closed the Red Sea to commercial shipping for months, costing the global economy billions. At each juncture, the European response was calibrated, cautious, and largely ineffective, while the Biden administration coupled a big stick with a diplomacy-at-all-costs mentality that Tehran exploited at every turn. 

Why? Because Western foreign policy’s first instinct has been to keep talking no matter the cost. 

If only we could dismiss this as wilful ignorance, a failure to seek out the relevant information. Unfortunately we cannot. These governments have had all the information they needed for years. The more accurate charge is wilful blindness, because drawing the obvious conclusion would require action. As any lawyer will tell you, wilful blindness is treated as equivalent to knowledge itself. That is precisely what we have witnessed: not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of will. 

The answer to this failure is written in US President Donald Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), which admits plainly that American strategy went astray because its elites confused process with power and offloaded strategic responsibility onto allies who never intended to carry it. The NSS replaces that framework with something starker: peace through strength, and the explicit acknowledgement that red lines deter only when they are enforced. 

Operation Epic Fury is the fullest expression of that logic. 

Europe, for its part, continues to confirm everything its critics have suspected. It has chosen impotence dressed in the language of international law. Some European capitals have raised legitimate concerns about the economic consequences of a prolonged conflict. These concerns are real. But they are arguments about cost management, not strategic vision, and they don’t answer the question of what happens if Iran is permitted to acquire a nuclear weapon. This is moral bankruptcy dressed in the language of prudence, and it carries a strategic price that will compound over time. 

This is not a distant conflict for Europe. Iran recently fired ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, a joint US-UK base more than 4 000km from Tehran, revealing a missile capability that puts European capitals within direct strike range. Iran has also been the primary supplier of Shahed drones to Russia, used in thousands of strikes against Ukrainian cities. Iranian intelligence has conducted assassination plots and sabotage operations on European soil, targeting dissidents, journalists, and Jewish communities. That much of Western Europe still cannot bring itself to take a clear side raises questions that go beyond strategic incoherence. 

The strategic significance of what is unfolding extends well beyond Iran. Russia may exploit the shift in international focus away from Ukraine to further its interests in the conflict. China continues to study every Western conflict in forensic detail, examining sanctions architecture, military aid timelines, and alliance cohesion. If the US is willing to back a strike campaign aimed at Iran, what does that signal about its willingness to defend Taiwan? On the other hand, if domestic pressure causes Washington to falter mid-operation, what does that confirm about the durability of US commitments? 

What Beijing and Moscow are watching now is whether the US and Israel will see this operation through, whether Epic Fury and Roaring Lion represent a genuine strategic realignment or a temporary deviation followed by the familiar retreat into managed inaction. Every sustained blow imposed on Tehran forces a recalibration of their risk assessments, while every European call for de-escalation reinforces their existing ones. 

The accusations of escalation, disproportionality, and unilateralism are already reverberating through European foreign ministries and the morally hallowed corridors of the United Nations. What they will not offer is an alternative that has actually worked. 

The alternative has been tried. For years, the West offered Iran negotiation after negotiation, framework after framework, sanction after carefully calibrated sanction. Iran enriched. It armed. It attacked. 

Israel, and now the US, have chosen to forge a different path, to confront this enemy, rather than manage it. What comes next will require diplomacy of the highest order. But that diplomacy is only possible because two countries were willing to first establish the conditions for it through force. 

This war highlights the contrast between those willing to pay the price of confronting reality for the betterment of future generations, and those who have chosen the comfort of pretending it away. One side is acting. The other is issuing statements and convening emergency sessions. History has a consistent verdict on which of those two postures shapes the world – and an equally consistent verdict on what awaits those who wait too long to choose between them. 

• Alon Sackstein is a former strategic research team lead in the Research and Analysis Division of Israel Defense Intelligence. He holds an Executive MA in Diplomacy and Security from Tel Aviv University.