The Last War of the Unipolar World

Breaking the Atlantic-Zionist chains

Callum McMichael on Iran and the fall of the colonialist Atlantic-Zionist order.

Militarily, sustained Iranian resilience—bolstered by Fattah-2 hypersonic glide vehicles deployed in multiple retaliatory barrages, massive drone swarms of Shahed variants, and deeply hardened underground and mountain facilities—continues to frustrate the high-tech precision strikes that have defined recent U.S.-Israeli operations in the ongoing 2026 war. A decisive Iranian stand, whether through prolonged attrition via repeated missile waves and cluster munitions, diplomatic isolation of the aggressors, or escalation that draws in great-power patrons, signals the limits of American power projection amid intense exchanges across theaters.

Economically, Iran’s deepening integration into BRICS+ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization provides alternative trade corridors, payment mechanisms (bypassing dollar dependency), and energy partnerships with Russia and China. Sanctions, once a unilateral bludgeon, now accelerate de-dollarization experiments—from demands for yuan-denominated oil trades and selective tanker passage through the contested Strait of Hormuz to alternative settlement systems and fees for safe transit—eroding the exorbitant privilege that has long subsidized Western overreach, even as oil prices surge amid supply shocks and global market volatility.

Ideologically, Iran’s narrative of anti-Zionist resistance and Islamic self-determination resonates across the Global South, from Latin American Bolivarian movements to African resource nationalists, framing the conflict not as sectarian but as a civilizational contest against a settler-colonial outpost and an extractive empire.

As the conflict enters its late March phase, Iran continues to demonstrate remarkable endurance. Despite hundreds of U.S.-Israeli strikes on missile infrastructure, launch sites, and command nodes, Iranian forces have unleashed at least nine waves of ballistic missiles in recent days alone, including Fattah-series hypersonics that have impacted Tel Aviv and other central Israeli areas. Cluster munitions have dispersed over Haifa, Bnei Brak, Petah Tikvah, and surrounding suburbs, causing building damage, civilian injuries, and widespread disruption. Missiles have struck residential structures in Tel Aviv, with fragments and direct hits reported in Ramat Gan and other zones, while drone swarms and additional barrages target military and industrial sites. These sustained operations, even with some degradation in launcher numbers, underscore Iran’s ability to maintain pressure through attrition and saturation tactics, keeping Israeli defenses under strain and forcing repeated shelter alerts across the country.

Should Iran prevail—repelling regime-change ambitions, sustaining its strategic deterrent capabilities despite heavy strikes on military and nuclear infrastructure, and upholding resistance momentum across the region—the consequences cascade globally. Russia’s position in Ukraine gains breathing room, as Western resources and attention fracture across multiple theaters. China’s Belt and Road initiatives accelerate without the shadow of an unchallenged U.S. pivot to Asia. Emerging powers—Turkey, India, Brazil—witness the feasibility of strategic hedging, emboldened to pursue autonomous foreign policies free from secondary sanctions or ideological litmus tests. Multipolarity advances not through abstract diplomacy but through the concrete demonstration that revisionist resilience can neutralize hegemonic overreach. The road to a polycentric order, where sovereignty is plural and balance-of-power dynamics replace hub-and-spoke vassalage, shortens measurably with every Iranian missile launched and every oil tanker rerouted or contested under new terms.

This is no utopian projection but a realist assessment grounded in observable shifts. The very fact of the current assault—launched amid faltering U.S. domestic consensus and amid warnings from economists about oil price spikes, inflationary contagion, and supply-chain chaos—reveals desperation rather than dominance.

Prior decades of containment failed to break Iran’s will; this escalation risks fracturing the Atlantic consensus itself, as European capitals grapple with energy shocks and Global South abstentions in international forums expose the illegitimacy of the intervention. Iran’s survival would validate the strategic patience of “Look East” policies, proving that alignment with Eurasian poles yields durable security dividends unavailable through capitulation to Washington.

Yet the deeper stakes transcend even this multipolar horizon. At the heart of Western strategic architecture in West Asia lies a singular outpost whose existence has long served as the linchpin for external domination: the Zionist entity. Its annihilation—through the inexorable logic of regional realignment, demographic realities, and the moral bankruptcy of perpetual occupation—would not merely resolve a localized injustice but dismantle the final redoubt of Western decadence and global domination.

For decades, this state has functioned as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, a laboratory for surveillance technologies exported worldwide, and an ideological vanguard enforcing a Manichean divide between “civilized” Atlantic values and the rest. Its dissolution would sever the umbilical cord sustaining U.S. military overextension, erode the moral exceptionalism underpinning sanctions regimes and proxy wars, and liberate the region—and by extension the world—from the last vestiges of colonial partition and supremacist exceptionalism. In that moment, the multipolar order ceases to be aspirational; it becomes inexorable, a restored equilibrium where civilizations coexist on terms of mutual recognition rather than imposed hierarchy.

Iran’s current ordeal, then, is the hinge of history. Its victory would not only affirm the sovereignty of a proud Persian-Islamic polity but illuminate the path for all peoples seeking emancipation from unipolar tyranny. In resisting annihilation, Iran accelerates the annihilation of an obsolete order. The phoenix rises not in spite of the flames, but through them, heralding a world no longer beholden to a single, decaying sun.