“There is great disorder under heaven: the situation is excellent”. So proclaimed Mao Zedong in an attempt to ideologically mask his inability to protect China from a state of permanent civil war. It is doubtful that his successors in Beijing are still willing to trumpet that boastful maxim of their former “Great helmsman”.

China, in fact, is one of the big losers in the new conflict that has broken out between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a clash that no longer (if it ever did) has only local dimensions, but indirectly involves a vast region stretching seamlessly from the China Sea to the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.

With the attack by Israel and the United States on Iran, and the latter’s response, the involvement of many local actors could become direct. Iran not only shares a long border with neighboring Afghanistan but has always considered Afghanistan its eastern province, where, among other things, most of the population speaks the same language (Dari is a local version of Farsi, the official language of Persia). Furthermore, Iran has always had much better relations with India than with Pakistan. However, Delhi, which meticulously cultivates good relations with the Taliban in Kabul, could only rejoice at their conflict with Islamabad. It also signed a blank check a few days ago to Israel, with which it shares a long history and a common hostility towards Muslims, whom both countries would like to get rid of – or at least reduce to a state of impotence. 

China, which has excellent relations with both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and good relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, finds itself in a situation that is embarrassing to say the least. The same, and perhaps more so, applies to Saudi Arabia itself, which now has a military cooperation agreement with Pakistan that, in theory, would oblige it to intervene in support of Islamabad against Afghanistan, which is, in a way, its ideological godchild since Riyadh thought it could use it… against Iran. 
‘Great is the disorder under heaven’, as we can see. But few think the situation is excellent. Perhaps Netanyahu thinks so, as he thrives on chaos. Since the certified idiots of Hamas gave him the opportunity, he has begun to reshape the Middle East along lines that his predecessors in past decades always dreamed of but never dared not only to do but even to say out loud. 

Before the pogrom of October 7, 2023, Iran was the ideal enemy for Israel, and vice versa. The two countries had been very close during the Cold War, united not only by their membership in the pro-American bloc but also by being two “fortunate” islands – along with Turkey, which did not consider itself a Middle Eastern country – in a sea of Arab countries despised by both. So much so that even after the Ayatollahs – virulently anti-Israeli in appearance – took power, Tel Aviv helped Tehran against Baghdad in the long and bloody war between the two from 1980 to 1988. 

Even during that conflict, and without interruption after its conclusion, Israel and Iran hurled curses, threats, and attacks, both direct and indirect, including terrorist attacks, at each other, to the point that public opinion in both countries and worldwide became convinced of the existence of their unquenchable mutual hatred.
However, it is not certain that this was really the case. There is another hypothesis that few have considered, because anything counterintuitive and nuanced disturbs our inner desire to deal with the well-ordered reality of black and white, of friends and enemies, of right and wrong.

As we have seen in the case of the war between Pakistan and Afghanistan, reality is far from simple and unambiguous. This applies to people, and even more so to politics, where what is left unsaid and what is said almost always count more than what is said.
The other hypothesis – certainly unspoken and, indeed, the opposite of what is said – is that Israel and Iran designate each other as irreconcilable enemies largely for domestic political reasons, i.e., to consolidate internal consensus in the face of a common enemy. An enemy, of course, who would play the role of an existential threat to the other.

The existence of existential enemies at the gates is, one might say, consubstantial with the history of Israel. In 1948, the surrounding Arab countries had sworn to throw the Jews into the sea but did not succeed. In 1967, they tried again, and the outcome was worse. They tried again in 1973 and eventually concluded that there was no way around it; Israel was there to stay. Egypt, which was the most hostile, resigned itself to signing a peace treaty. Missa est. 

After 1973, the existential danger was, so to speak, over. And Iran, let us remember, had always been on Israel’s side against the Arabs in all the above cases. 
What upset the balance in Israel was Russian immigration during the Gorbachev era and after the collapse of the USSR. Between 1989 and 2006, a third of the 1.5 million Jews who fled Russia and other territories of the former Soviet empire went to Israel, fundamentally altering the character of the country's population. The newer arrivals replaced many Palestinians (but also many Sephardic Jews and, above all, Mizrahim) at the bottom of the social ladder, and were one of the driving forces behind the intensification of colonization in the West Bank. The internal balance of the country had changed, and a new cohesion had to be built between groups of different, if not incompatible, origins, languages, social positions, and even religions (with an exponential growth of the ultra-Orthodox). 

The solution - or at least a rough outline of a solution - was found in the creation of a common enemy: Iran. 

On the opposite side, in Iran, there was no immigration (if anything, the opposite), but the need to consolidate the internal front was a consequence of the catastrophic failure of the religious regime. It is true that Iran has never suffered from a shortage of enemies in the Arab world, but the Iranians’ sense of superiority, with more or less intense shades of racism, prevented them from being used as a real boogeyman for the population. Instead, an enemy equipped with atomic weapons, supported by the great Satan of America, built on what in the Iran of the ayatollahs has been presented as the ‘myth’ of the Shoah, is quite another matter. 

Be careful, though: This does not mean that Israel and Iran have agreed to stage a great pretense and occasionally play some petty tricks to give it a modicum of credibility as always in politics, an enemy is also a friend and vice versa - in the sense that enemy A can be used to weaken friend B, who in turn is used to defeat A. Counterintuitive but true. The United States used the United Kingdom to defeat Germany, and, simultaneously, the common war against Germany allowed the United States to definitively defeat the United Kingdom, taking its place as the dominant world power, dismantling its empire, and reducing it to a second-rate power, as Maynard Keynes had understood as early as 1945.

Be that as it may, things changed on October 7, 2023. The political vacuity of Hamas (and its patrons in Tehran) triggered a domino effect, and today another tile has fallen. The ‘Palestinian question’, which Hamas and Tehran boasted of fighting for, has been mortally wounded; but those who believed that someone in Tehran was really interested in the fate of the Palestinians were, to put it mildly, which they do not deserve – grossly mistaken. For future reference (but also to gain a clearer view of the past), let us say that no one has even cared about the Palestinians, least of all the Iranians, who see them primarily as Arabs and, moreover, as borderline heretics, since they are Sunnis. Whether in Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza, or Yemen, Tehran has always used Arab cannon fodder to defend its interests. 

After October 7, Israel no longer needs the Iranian bogeyman: the massacre carried out by Hamas was real, and there was no need to demonstrate its potential threat to the UN by brandishing crude signs about the alleged level of uranium enrichment as Netanyahu did in 2012. 

Above all, after October 7, Netanyahu’s government shifted from a cohesive internal defensive tactic – defense against the Iranian threat – to an offensive tactic, with the launch of the “Greater Israel” cause. Two side notes: it is clear that the offensive choice can also have – and does have – the opposite effect, namely increasing internal polarization at the expense of cohesion; but, at the same time, defense cohesion against an enemy that may disappear or change nature is necessarily weaker than offensive cohesion, which instead arouses pride, hope, and often enthusiasm. Knowing the opposition to the multiple wars that Tel Aviv has launched since October 7 is very weak, the final balance is more than positive.

Let us add another element: if the increasingly frequent attacks on the population of the West Bank, which resemble outright ethnic cleansing, push someone to revolt, then there will be a second Gaza, and the circle will finally close on the ‘Palestinian question’, with all due respect to those who recognize a state that does not exist and will never exist. 

The so-called ‘Greater Israel’ has inscrutable borders, in the true sense of the word. It is not known what it encompasses and how far its outposts may reach. Plausibly, the realistic goal of Netanyahu and his associates is to expand – officially or not, it matters little – into Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and part of Syria, consolidating control of the territory around the Golan Heights. But Netanyahu and his associates will allow the dream of an even greater Israel to linger, fueling the expectations of the ultra-Orthodox who believe that enlarging the country means nothing less than obeying God’s word. 

In the Old Testament, there are various passages that indicate the borders of the “Promised Land”. Today, the most radical Israelis readily refer to those “promises” made by God himself, as recorded in Genesis 15:18-21: “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying: ‘I give this land to your descendants, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates: the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites’”. Transposed onto a map, that ‘promise’ looks something like this.

Obviously, that “divine” border is not the only one, and above all, it is totally unrealistic today. However, whatever the borders may be, the “Greater Israel” project cannot be passively accepted by the countries in the region. Among them, Iran remains the most formidable, despite everything. The attacks on nuclear sites in June 2025 and those on February 28, 2026, could demonstrate that: 1) Iran still serves as a boogeyman, insofar as it is forced to react; 2) any capacity or desire for Iranian military action must be eliminated; 3) a possible regime change in Tehran could even restore – mutatis mutandis, of course – the situation of harmony between the two countries that existed before the 1979 revolution. 

If the countries in the region do not want ‘Greater Israel’, they certainly do not want a conflict that would destabilize the entire Middle East, possibly spilling over into South Asia, and which could bring the prospect of ‘Greater Israel’ closer, whatever that means. 

In recent days, many Middle Eastern countries (with the interesting dissociation of the Emirates, increasingly distant from the Saudis and increasingly close to Israel) have reiterated this to the United States and, as we write, are consulting with the European Union and undoubtedly also with China and others to find out what to do. 
But what matters more than all the diplomatic consultations and infinitely more than a vote in the Security Council is, in fact, the attitude of the United States. Or, rather, the absence of attitude. For the second time in eight months, Washington has been caught off guard by Tel Aviv amid negotiations with Tehran, and, as before, it has canceled all ultimatums and followed Israel down the path of conflict. 
Several observations are in order. The first is that the United States is now living day to day, sniffing the air and, above all, the president's changing moods. Who would want to engage in negotiations with Washington knowing that, in the middle of them, they could get shot in the face?

The second observation concerns Trump himself. By now, even those who were inclined to give him credit and treat him as a ‘normal’ president should have realized that he is totally indifferent to the interests of his country and its people, but cares only about his own interests, his visibility, and his ego (which he sums up in the phrase ‘my morality’). It is precisely his “morality” that makes him react when he fears being excluded from the front page of newspapers; and so, if something happens that threatens to undermine him, he must get involved, put his finger in the pie, and perhaps proclaim afterwards that it is all thanks to him. And perhaps even that he did what he did in the name of peace. 

The third observation is that in Jerusalem, recognized as the “eternal capital” of Israel by the first trump administration, Washington’s ambassador is a fundamental Christian who supports Israel’s divine right to take all the territory indicated in Genesis 15:18-21. This certainly does not clarify the United States' position.
The fourth is that Benjamin Netanyahu, an ultra-savvy politician unlike his friend in Washington, did the math and preempted Trump, bombing the ongoing negotiations before Iran, knowing full well that his friend in Washington would follow suit and, in doing so, justify and cover for him. It goes without saying that we will never know whether this had been agreed upon at their meeting a week earlier and whether, subsequently, it was just a game played by both sides. But that is how it went. With all due respect to the other regional players, those in South Asia, China, and the European Union. 

How it will end, no one can say. Iran has never been so weak, but it certainly retains solid capabilities to respond; if it were to start bombing Saudi Arabia, the conflict would most likely spread; but if it were to bomb only the Emirates, avoiding Saudi territory, Mohammed bin Salman, and probably Recep Erdoğan too, would not be so unhappy. Tehran’s proxies, for their part, are now in a very bad position: Hamas certainly wants to capitalize on the recognition offered by Trump, and Hezbollah recently stated that it would not react to a possible “limited attack” on Iran. We shall see. 

But what about the Iranian population, which is extremely nationalistic? What about the Iranian army, cornered by the Revolutionary Guards? What about his father’s son and his grandfather’s grandson, Reza Pahlavi III, who aspires to take up the catastrophically failed torch of his grandfather and father? What about the other regional and global players? In particular, what about South Asia, which is now inflamed after becoming closely linked to some Middle Eastern players? 
Much will depend on the duration and outcome of the ongoing clashes. A short duration and only a relatively disrupted status quo, which means starting over as if nothing had happened. A long duration, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and the involvement of other actors would mean another chapter in the great global disorder, essentially caused by the progressive weakening of the United States, now in the throes of strategic chaos, difficult to govern and difficult to redeem.

Great disorder under the heavens, then, and the situation is abominable.