“Battles are the principal milestones in secular history,” Winston Churchill observed in his biography of the Duke of Marlborough in 1936. “Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth. … But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.”

In time, the latest round of fighting between Iran and Israel will supply further evidence that war is the most important engine of history. Iran’s 46-year campaign against Israel has been a product of the Islamic Republic’s congenital hatred of the Jewish state, not to mention a font of unmitigated misery and chaos for the peoples of the Middle East, including Iran itself. The devastating Israeli response against Iran’s proxy forces after 7 October 2023, and against the Islamic Republic itself, will change the future of the Middle East in ways that Churchill would have readily understood.

It may be months or years before we know the full ramifications of Israel’s military campaign. It would certainly be premature to announce an end to the conflict and foolish to write off Tehran’s fanatical regime entirely. But it is already safe to say that Iran’s defeat and disarmament has gravely diminished its credibility and radically altered the balance of power in the Middle East for years to come. The doomsday predictions of a noisy segment of the West’s political and intellectual classes have not been borne out. The Third World War has not broken out, nor is it about to.

On the contrary, the most malign power in the Middle East—a regime that has consistently agitated for the destruction of Israel, harassed and murdered international Jewry and dissidents, undermined freedom of navigation and free economic exchange, and spread jihadist terror across the Middle East and beyond—has been dealt a series of blows from which it will not soon recover. Its networks have been smashed, its nuclear ambitions have been degraded (although by how much remains unclear), its rigid control over its people has weakened, and its prestige has been crushed.

An altered strategic and political environment in the Middle East arises from an analysis of psychological factors as well as material ones. The attacks on Iranian nuclear, military, and ideological targets have been delivered, not primarily by the “Great Satan” of the United States, but by the “Little Satan” of Israel, which the Iranian regime treated with contempt. It would have been vastly preferable if its now-smouldering nuclear program and military apparatus had been the exclusive work of American airpower. To suffer this stinging defeat at the hands of the tiny Jewish state has been a particularly shocking humiliation.