After one month of hostilities and no exit plans, the lethal costs of the U.S.-Israel joint war against Iran are global. How will the crisis reverberate against the backdrop of elevated U.S.-China relations?

Merging combat commands and cutting 20 percent of active-duty four-star generals have angered many top military officers. Without the support of top military brass and state governments, can Trump 2.0’s ambitious military reform succeed? We shall see.

The organization, which is historically tied to the United States is facing new questions. Donald Trump’s rhetoric has offended America’s European allies, and several of them do not want to get involved in an unpopular war. Unless resolved, such frictions will reduce NATO from a unity platform to a contest of priorities.

The pretext for Trump’s aggression against Iran, in partnership with Israel, is flimsy. As the saying goes, even a gentle rabbit may bite when cornered. The current war is, in some respects, an extreme manifestation of hegemony. And the whole world is paying the price.

The contradictions between the Trump administration’s state strategies and outward actions highlight its new geopolitical interventionist mindset. It claims to oppose prolonged wars, yet it does not reject military means to pursue economic interests. Washington has exposed its hegemonic nature.

The U.S.-Israel war with Iran is exposing widening reluctance among American allies to support the conflict, signaling potential erosion in U.S. global influence. At the same time, moves to bypass the U.S. dollar in oil trade, amid growing Chinese involvement, could challenge the petrodollar and reshape the global energy order.

U.S. strikes on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei redirected American military resources and attention from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. This shift allows China to strengthen its strategic position in Asia while the United States becomes absorbed in a secondary conflict.

Donald Trump is deconstructing U.S. foreign policy through his erratic decision-making and appetite for political theater. The correction likely depends less on any single president but on whether America can build more stable strategic assessment mechanisms, more open decision-making processes and more resilient policy-correction capacity.

Two weeks into the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran - launched on 28 February 2026 with the explicit aim of decapitating leadership, and ostensible objectives of degrading nuclear and missile capabilities, so as to trigger regime collapse - the conflict has instead evolved into a grinding quagmire. What Washington anticipated as a swift application of air superiority leading to internal disintegration has produced the opposite: a politically consolidated Iranian state, depleted U.S. and allied air-defence stocks, Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, and a cascading energy shock rippling across global markets.

The messy crisis in the Strait of Hormuz has clarified how power works in the 21st century. It reminds us that the greatest long-term threat to the United States is not China’s military buildup or Russian aggression, but the gradual fragmentation of the alliance system that has underwritten its global leadership since World War II.