For more than half a century, the Saudi monarchy maintained its security through a network of American military bases, defense pacts, and integrated radar systems. This architecture offered Riyadh a simple transaction where it hosted American forces in exchange for regime protection under a Western security umbrella.

That entire architecture, however, began to collapse when the United States and Israel launched attacks against Iran. In response to the attack, Tehran executed a war of attrition across three fronts: air, sea, and ground. Through relentless saturation, Iran systematically degraded and isolated the spider web of forward U.S. bases and surveillance networks that were aimed at protecting the region.

Nowhere was this more evident, perhaps, than inside Saudi Arabia, where Iran initiated an unrelenting aerial campaign. By targeting the state with continuous waves of cheap $20,000 Shahed-136 delta-wing drones alongside Fattah and Khyber Shekan ballistic missiles, Tehran forced Riyadh and its American defenders to fire off their finite, multi-million-dollar missiles, such as Patriot MIM-104 interceptors, to counter low-cost incoming threats.

At forward Saudi bases like Prince Sultan Air Base, for example, saturation waves severely damaged airfield infrastructure and the early-warning tracking systems. Demonstrating to the Saudi populace, particularly tribal leaders, that the expensive Western defense umbrella was fundamentally incapable of securing Saudi airspace.

Exhausting ground-based air defenses, however, was only one part of Iran’s strategy. The second part, the sea, was explicitly designed to trap the naval forces protecting Saudi maritime trade into the same asymmetric encirclement.

Heavy American warships, such as USS Abraham Lincoln, designed for open blue oceans rather than the shallow, restricted green waters of the Persian Gulf, provided Tehran with the ideal assets to systematically weaken Washington’s naval capabilities.

By exploiting the American navy’s minimal room for maneuver and its finite defensive munitions, such as a mere 96 missiles in the Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells of accompanying Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, Iran was able to effectively neutralize these multi-million-dollar vessels inside the Gulf corridor.

By pairing low-cost drone swarm boats and fast attack craft alongside Ghadir-class midget submarines and high-speed supercavitation torpedoes like the Hoot, Tehran completed the entrapment. In doing so, however, Iran not only severed the Western maritime shield and brought commercial transit through the Persian Gulf to a standstill but directly crippled Saudi Arabia’s economic stability.

With Saudi airspace breached and American-protected sea lanes paralyzed, the third part of Iran’s strategy entailed weaponizing the broken covenant between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi tribes. Ironically, it would be this internal breakdown that provided Iran with its most dangerous political leverage against the Crown Prince.

For generations, the domestic stability of the House of Saud rested on an unwritten sacred covenant, where, in exchange for unconditional military and political loyalty, the ruling family guaranteed local autonomy and financial patronage to the kingdom’s tribes.

In his drive to centralize power, however, Crown Prince MBS systematically dismantled this centuries-old relationship. By sidelining traditional tribal leadership, stripping their financial patronage, and forcing rapid cultural westernization, MBS replaced a pact of mutual reliance with centralized, Western-supplied military control. Thereby, unintentionally, severing the social contract that had long insulated the crown from internal revolt.

It was precisely this abandonment of the tribal covenant that allowed Tehran to build its ground front. Recognizing the political value of the rift created by MBS’s reforms, the Iranians quietly cultivated cross—border tribal ties, turning a long-standing discontent into an active operational network.

When full-scale conflict erupted following the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, that quiet groundwork paid off. Disenfranchised tribal elements across southern and eastern Saudi Arabia, for example, became Tehran’s eyes and ears on the ground. By feeding real-time intelligence on Western military deployments, including AWACS radar vectors and the position of Patriot missile batteries, these internal networks turned Saudi Arabia’s domestic territory into a clear operational space for incoming Iranian and proxy strikes.

The fallout of this tribal alienation, however, didn’t stop in Tehran; it extended directly to Yemen. Along the rugged southwestern borders of Najran and Jizan, this deep-seated anger directly empowered the Houthis, who share longstanding tribal lineage and customs with the local Saudi border population. By tapping into these same alienated cross-border networks, Houthi missile and drone units received the real-time targeting data needed to bypass Western-supplied air defenses and strike critical Saudi infrastructure with devastating precision. The recent Houthi attack on the Saudi Airport in Riyadh and Aramco oil facilities laid bare the strategic cost of MBS’s betrayal and the tribal anger.

Today, as Houthi and Iranian strikes batter Saudi airfields and critical infrastructure, a sustained maritime blockade in the Gulf has sealed the trap. Stripped of early warning capabilities and betrayed by its own periphery, Riyadh has lost all operational control over the interior. Thereby leaving the state vulnerable from within and surrounded from without.

In the end, by exploiting Mohammed bin Salman’s decision to trade the ancient tribal covenant for a Western technical shield, Tehran systematically dismantled the monarchy’s security architecture. By choking the skies, sealing the sea lanes, and weaponizing the tribal anger from within, Iran has left MBS holding an umbrella over a bankrupt and isolated throne.

Following the Second World War, the United States established itself as the primary Western power in the Middle East, taking over from declining European empires. Yet for nearly four decades, the Soviet Union checked Washington’s ambitions by building powerful alliances across Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and South Yemen. The region was a volatile arena of Cold War competition, repeatedly reshaped by anti-colonial movements and revolutionary shifts.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution, however, shattered that balance by destroying the primary military pillar of Washington’s Gulf strategy. Faced with losing its central regional anchor, Washington issued the Carter Doctrine, declaring that the United States would use direct military force to defend the Persian Gulf and secure its energy flows. To enforce this, Washington elevated Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies from financial partners into its primary local security anchors, replacing Iran as the region’s sole co-policeman.

Throughout the 1980s, this new Gulf security model operated under the constant shadow of Cold War rivalry, as Washington competed directly with Soviet influence across the region. That rivalry prevented the United States from acting with total impunity, as Moscow continued to arm key regional allies and balance American power.

That constraint, however, vanished with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 and the emergence of unilateral dominance, allowing Washington to turn a localized security pact into an era of unchecked military intervention.

Today, however, that architecture of absolute control lies in ruins. What Washington once treated as a permanent regional order has collapsed under the weight of its own strategic overreach. From its military retreats in Iraq and Afghanistan to its failure to contain Iran and the complete breakdown of deterrence in the Red Sea, the United States no longer possesses the power or the credibility to dictate outcomes across the region.

How, then, did a global superpower lose its regional dominance so rapidly? What strategic errors triggered its downward spiral? To answer that, we must examine the systematic breakdown of the three core pillars that sustained American power: military supremacy, economic dominance, and moral legitimacy.

For decades, American military power projected total air and naval superiority across the globe. Powered by platforms like fifth-generation F-35 fighters and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers such as the USS Abraham Lincoln, Washington maintained an unchallenged monopoly on high-tech warfare. Yet, this high-tech armor masked a profound structural vulnerability: the Pentagon’s total unpreparedness for 21st-century industrial warfare.

Never was this vulnerability more evident than during Washington’s confrontation with Iran, where the United States sent its 20th-century ‘great armada,’ built for high-seas blue waters to fight in the narrow, littoral green waters of the Persian Gulf.

In addition to its unpreparedness for the realities of 21st-century asymmetric warfare, Washington remains plagued by chronic maintenance and manufacturing bottleneck issues across its industrial base. In the case of critical raw elements like germanium and gallium, Washington finds itself largely dependent on strategic rivals like China to build precision guidance systems, radar arrays, and advanced defense missiles.

This dependency, in turn, makes sustaining any prolonged conflict functionally impossible as U.S. forces face rapid inventory depletion, a structural reality that Iran fully exploited through its multi-tiered war of attrition.

By deploying inexpensive, mass-produced drones and ballistic missiles across sea, air, and land, for example, Iran forced Washington’s carrier forces into an unsustainable mathematical trap. Compelling multi-billion-dollar carrier strike groups and land-based air defense batteries to expend finite $2,000,000 interceptors against virtually endless $20,000 drones.

In addition, because these high-tech interceptors cannot be rapidly replaced, every missile launched represents a permanent drawdown of U.S. combat readiness, thus creating a direct strategic opportunity for its rivals.

Washington’s military presence in the Middle East, however, was only as sustainable as the financial system that funded it. American regional dominance had always rested largely on monetary control, specifically, the petrodollar and central authority over global banking through its SWIFT network. This monetary monopoly gave Washington a potent diplomatic lever, including the power to freeze foreign central bank reserves, impose unilateral sanctions, and cut entire nations off from international trade.

However, by repeatedly deploying this leverage, Washington signaled to the broader global financial community, and not just targeted states, that relying on U.S.-controlled financial structures carried a severe sovereign risk.

Thus, while Iran was forced to seek alternative settlement mechanisms to survive sanctions, untargeted energy exporters like Saudi Arabia and the UAE also began diversifying their options. By expanding de-dollarized oil and gas clearing, settling in local currencies with major buyers like China, and participating in multilateral digital currency platforms such as Project mBridge, these nations have effectively begun to insulate key energy markets from exclusive Western jurisdiction.

At the same time, the fiscal discipline required to maintain a reserve currency eroded at home. Decades of unbudgeted foreign wars and continuous force projection not only pushed the annual U.S. federal budget deficit past $2 trillion but also drove the total national debt beyond $41 trillion. Washington now spends vast financial resources to maintain a waning regional presence, right as the monetary levers that once underwrote its leverage lose their enforcement power.

Perhaps nothing has damaged American hegemony as decisively as the complete collapse of its moral authority. For decades, Washington, aided by Western media and think tanks, manufactured and weaponized moral narratives to legitimize coups, military invasions, and forced regime changes. Whether through the 1953 coup in Tehran, the 2003 war in Iraq, or the 2011 regime change operations in Libya and Syria, Washington repeatedly used its moral posturing to serve its geopolitical interests.

While Washington long managed to insulate its global narrative from accusations of hypocrisy, that shield shattered with the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. By demanding that Russia adhere to international law while actively shielding its ally Israel from it, Washington exposed its “rules-based order” as nothing more than a hypocritical policy designed only for the benefit of the U.S. and certain allies.

Thus, by the time Washington entered into direct military confrontation with Iran, its moral authority had already been hollowed out. Deprived of the legitimacy that once sustained its global leadership, American moral authority is no longer the rallying force it once was, but a narrative that has lost its power to persuade.

The convergence of military attrition, monetary erosion, and moral collapse marks the definitive end of Pax Americana. This does not mean, however, that the United States will collapse tomorrow; it remains a formidable power. Rather, it signifies that the centuries-old, Western-dominated system is over. Washington’s confrontation with Iran is not an isolated crisis, but rather a symptom of a fundamental structural shift: a new international framework shaped by an Asiatic global order.

Yemen has long been a country fractured by war, divided between a dominant northern core controlled by the Houthis and a fragmented anti-government coalition in the south supported by key foreign powers, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the United States.

Ironically, it is this exact divided state, anchored firmly by the Houthis from the north, that has neutralized the aura of the world’s most expensive military apparatus, closed the Bab el-Mandeb to Western shipping, and sent global energy markets into a tailspin.

The question becomes, however: how could a mountain movement, running along coastal ridges in traditional sandals and shawls while holding cheap rifles as symbols, seize strategic choke points like Mokha and Mayun Island while fighting a massive military coalition? How could they achieve what very few major empires could accomplish?

To begin with, this advance was driven by a deep strategic integration with Iran, which strengthened the military prowess of the Houthis. By providing advanced technical designs, targeting data, and maritime surveillance, Iran helped the Houthis establish vast, deeply buried underground manufacturing facilities across the northern highlands. As a result, the Houthis were able to build an indigenous production ecosystem capable of producing tens of thousands of their own loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and land-based anti-ship ballistic missile systems.

This underground industrial capacity, in turn, allowed the Houthis to maintain endless salvo fire, track maritime traffic, and project lethal power far beyond their borders. Crucially, it also shielded their arsenal from retaliatory air campaigns, rendering their core military infrastructure largely immune to Western coalition strikes.

Yet beyond their modern military hardware lies the continuation of a 1,100-year-old Zaydi warrior lineage that outlasted the Mamluks and turned the region into the historical “Graveyard of the Ottoman Turks.” A society whose doctrine of resistance simply could not be broken by an air campaign alone.

Equally decisive was the internal division within the anti-Houthi camp. This rift was nowhere more evident than between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose competing ambitions further crippled the coalition from within.

For years, the strategic rift between these foreign sponsors turned their proxy factions against each other instead of presenting a unified front, causing the campaign to stall even after an estimated $100 billion to $200 billion in coalition military expenditures. Saudi-backed government units and UAE-aligned coastal militias, for example, spent years competing over port revenues, customs control, and local political influence. All the while creating a vacuum that the Houthis could easily exploit.

Compounding this internal collapse was systematic corruption within the coalition’s military hierarchy, where salary diversions and profiteering prompted senior officers to abandon their posts and publicly denounce the campaign as betrayal from within. In addition to exploiting proxy infighting, the Houthis further consolidated their grip by capitalizing on the broken alliance between Yemeni tribes and their Saudi patrons.

For decades, Riyadh secured its 1,100-mile border and regional influence through direct financial payouts in return for tribal loyalty along the frontier. When Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), shattered that historical agreement by ending the funding, local tribal leaders abandoned their ties to Riyadh. With the patronage system broken and the tribal shield disintegrated from within, the once-secured and fortified buffer became a highly vulnerable front line.

Capitalizing on this opening, the Houthis offered local tribal elders what Riyadh no longer could: administrative stability, local autonomy, and concrete security guarantees. By securing agreements across these tribal networks, the Houthis transformed a shattered Saudi buffer into a core pillar of Houthi power.

Beyond these regional dynamics, however, what also cemented the Houthi victory was the structural failure of Western military deterrence. For decades, Western military doctrine operated on the assumption that carrier strike groups and airpower alone could guarantee freedom of navigation.

The Houthi campaign in the Red Sea, however, completely upended that assumption by placing the United States in an unwinnable war of attrition. By launching low-cost drones and anti-ship missiles from hidden mountain positions and subterranean launch sites, the Houthis forced the United States to respond with multi-million-dollar, finite interceptors.

This dynamic, in turn, created a dual strategic crisis where not only was the U.S. rapidly draining its finite missile stockpiles on low-cost targets, but it was doing so while trying to maintain readiness for global flashpoints elsewhere. Ultimately, the Houthis exposed the stark limitations of American air and naval power, forcing Washington to abandon the broader, open-ended war against the Houthis.

Ultimately, the Houthi victory in the Red Sea is not an anomaly; it is a fundamental shift in modern asymmetric warfare. By combining subterranean geography, cheap mass-produced technology, and a deep strategic patience, the Houthis illustrated that high-tech standoff power can be neutralized without defeating it in open battle.

In other words, the Houthis showed they didn’t need to destroy a carrier strike group. All they had to do was make the cost of Western intervention unsustainable.

Watch the short clip to see why the Middle East is in a new order and why the jig is up for much of the old guard, especially MBS and King Abdullah.

Want the full picture? Catch the complete, unedited 90-minute-or-so session and Q&A over on my YouTube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/@AsiaticGlobalOrder

Given the incredible engagement and commentary on my recent articles about Saudi Arabia and Jordan, I’m hosting a non-politically correct, unfiltered, interactive, free live Zoom session this Friday, Sept. 25th.

Please bear this in mind: This is a true give-and-take conversation where the audience is fully involved by not only asking questions but also sharing perspectives.

· Date: This Friday, September 25

· Time: 11:00 AM-12:15 PM ET

· Format: Live Q&A and discussion

· Registration: Free (capped at 40 seats)

You can grab your spot here:

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/JMonrzroT9Kqv1mH62DADw

History shows that a state rarely falls from an external blow; it mainly collapses because its internal foundation has already been hollowed out from within.

For decades, stability across the Arab monarchies depended on an unwritten, ironclad covenant between central thrones and ancient, foundational tribes. In

Jordan, that meant an enduring alliance with core East Bank tribes such as the Bani Hassan, Bani Sakhr, and Huwaitat, who served as the true bedrock of Hashemite legitimacy and internal security.

That covenant was an unwritten contract anchored in mutual protection, tribal loyalty, and Hashemite religious guardianship over Islam’s third holy site, Al-Aqsa Mosque. A foundational pact that had defined the Hashemite kingdom since its inception.

However, King Abdullah broke that covenant when he traded away the foundational social contract for Washington-led alignments and foreign financial backing. Similar to Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, who severed historical ties with his kingdom’s traditional power centers to force a top-down transformation, Abdullah’s abandonment of Jordan’s tribal system left the palace largely isolated.

Be it ignoring the Palestinian issue, abandoning the protection of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, or aligning with Israel and the U.S. against regional actors, particularly supporting the war against Iran, King Abdullah’s policies were seen as a betrayal of a covenant that had defined the land and the people for centuries.

In response to the betrayal, tribal elders, including leaders from Bani Hassan and Bani Sakher, repeatedly urged the monarch to respect the ancient covenant by abandoning his policies, including demanding the removal of American bases in Jordan.

However, following the continuous dismissal of their concerns by the palace, the tribes responded by paralyzing the very machinery the crown needed to maintain the state. From stalling vital public services like water and electricity to controlling the flow of goods across the corridors and provincial transit routes, the tribes successfully broke the crown’s grip over the provinces.

This tribal confrontation, however, did not stay contained within provincial administration; it bled directly into the state’s economic core. Spanning the Bani Hassan in the north, the Bani Sakhr in the center, and the Huwaitat along the southern frontiers, the major tribal confederations began to utilize their control over strategic national trade arteries, such as the Desert Highway, to completely halt commercial traffic and freight shipments across these key corridors.

By enforcing this blockade, the tribes delivered a two-pronged blow: internally, they starved the Jordanian treasury of vital revenues and broke central authority, while externally, they systematically disrupted the overland supply lines vital to U.S. and Israeli logistics.

If the economic and administrative collapse was not enough, the fracture inevitably bled into the final sphere of palace control: the military. Unlike systems where the security apparatus operates as a uniform block, Jordan’s security architecture is strictly stratified into three distinct pillars. At the center of regime protection stands the elite Royal Guard, drawn from non-tribal minorities like the Circassians to ensure unyielding personal loyalty to the throne. Below them sits the regular Jordanian army, composed of the very sons of the East Bank tribes, such as the Ban-Sakher, who were now breaking with the crown, while the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) draws its upper echelons heavily from influential traditional clans like the Majali.

Because of this system, where the regular armed forces and intelligence ranks are filled by the sons of the tribes whose loyalty is more to their tribe than the state, the military can never function as an instrument against the tribes themselves.

When instructions came down from Amman to neutralize tribal pushback or arrest local leaders leading the transit shutdowns, for example, military personnel engaged in passive non-compliance and refused to turn their weapons on their own kin.

For King Abdullah, however, the fracture did not stop at internal defiance. It bled directly into external security vulnerabilities, such as some networks opening unauthorized backchannels to regional actors like Iran. A reality laid bare when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps publicly thanked local contacts and military personnel inside Jordan for their cooperation.

Stripped of these administrative and security pillars, King Abdullah is now faced with a fundamental structural crisis: a crown that can no longer sustain its internal dominance or project regional stability. Therefore, without a reliable military apparatus willing to crack down on its own people, without tribal support, and with key border networks compromised, the palace’s traditional levers of control have collapsed.

Yet, for the major tribal confederations, their objective is not the destruction of the Hashemite monarchy. Rather, it is to force the palace back to the social contract that had defined the historical covenant between the tribes and their kings for centuries.

To that end, the tribes have increasingly looked to Prince Hamza, the former crown prince. Placed under house arrest since 2021, the estranged half-brother of King Abdullah, and married into the Bani Ahmed, one of the largest and most influential tribes, is widely viewed as the living embodiment of the old order and of King Hussein himself. With his demeanor, speech, and presence mirroring his late father, Hamza is seen by many as the figure who will restore the old covenant and unify the nation.

For the palace, however, this dynamic creates an insoluble trap. That is, keeping the popular Hamza isolated under house arrest only magnifies his mythos as the silenced voice of the tribes, but any move to further suppress him risks provoking the very open rebellion the regime is desperate to avoid.

Yet, regardless of what the palace decides to do with Prince Hamza, King Abdullah finds himself trapped by the very systems he dismantled. Once the central anchor of Hashemite survival and regional balancing, King Abdullah now presides over a state where neither the loyalty of the military nor the protection of the tribes is guaranteed.

For Jordan itself, this cascading crisis has permanently altered the future of the state, leaving three stark outcomes: the king is reduced to a figurehead while the tribes and military govern under a restored traditional covenant; Prince Hamza is brought forward to take the throne and restore the historical covenant; or the ongoing paralysis shatters the central state entirely.

Regardless of which path unfolds, one reality remains fixed: the era of absolute, Amman-centric rule under King Abdullah has reached its end.

That foundational arrangement, however, was torn down by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who, in his quest to centralize control, dismantled the very pillars that had defined Arabian society for more than a millennium.

By cutting off traditional tribal patronage, seizing ancestral lands for expensive state mega-projects, and enforcing a top-down Westernization, such as opening entertainment venues across the ultra-conservative society, MBS severed the very domestic anchors that guaranteed the monarchy’s survival. Thereby, ensuring a multi-front crisis that would leave his regime structurally brittle and permanently exposed.

Socially, MBS severed the regime’s historic ties with the nation’s core pillars, the religious establishments and the tribes, by overriding their authority. At the same time, he was seen as aligning himself with the American and Israeli stance on the Palestinian issue. Thereby marginalizing a core Islamic cause and shattering the monarchy’s standing as the true defender of the soil and faith.

The ramifications of his cultural policies, however, didn’t stop at the political and cultural door; it directly bled into MBS’s military realm.

For Saudi Arabia, nothing in its modern history has so brutally exposed the regime’s total dependence on a Western security umbrella as the American war on Iran and the subsequent Iranian response. Bombarded with massive missile and drone strikes on U.S. bases across the kingdom, Riyadh found the Western defense system completely ineffective in neutralizing the threat.

Far from offering protection, the breakdown of the American defense shield allowed the Houthi forces in Yemen to enforce a total maritime blockade across the Red Sea and seize control of the strategic Yemeni coastline along the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. In addition, because the kingdom relied entirely on its East-West pipeline, constant missile and drone strikes by the Houthis forced a total shutdown of the facilities, which in turn choked off the kingdom’s access to international waters.

This export collapse was compounded by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which severed the kingdom’s remaining maritime oil routes and wiped out state revenue almost overnight. With sovereign reserves already drained by vanity mega-projects and an expensive war, the regime was forced to pass the deficit onto an already alienated public.

Having personally engineered this existential security trap through his launch of the Yemen war and the total reliance on a failed Western umbrella, Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman was forced to turn to both external allies and internal pillars for relief.

In the case of the former, he requested direct military intervention from Washington and its regional ally, Egypt. However, constrained by depleted armament stockpiles and over stretched capacities, the United States declined to step in while Cairo, still reeling from the historical memory of its disastrous 1960s war in Yemen, flatly refused to deploy troops to bail out MBS.

In the case of the latter, MBS turned to the tribes, particularly key southwestern confederations such as the Khawlan bin ‘Amr, Yam, and Qahtan. However, having been stripped of their financial stipends and sociocultural autonomy, these tribes, along with many others, not only rejected the palace’s demands but actively enabled the Houthis to the Crown Prince’s detriment.

In other words, rather than manning the frontier, the tribes abandoned their security roles and allowed the Houthi forces to move openly through key border corridors and thus, leaving Riyadh’s southern flank completely unprotected.

For MBS, however, this tribal rift created an unexpected and unsolvable military dilemma. On one hand, to secure the border and stop the Houthis, he was forced to turn his security apparatus against the non-cooperative tribes. On the other hand, because those same armed forces, especially the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), were drawn directly kins of these same tribes, ordering an internal crackdown risks an immediate mutiny and a deep structural fracture within the security forces.

With external military intervention off the table and his internal armed forces paralyzed by tribal loyalties, MBS turned to his remaining pillar of defense: the religious establishment. Yet here too, he found no shelter.

While state-salaried clerics in Riyadh issue generic, top-down decrees, local imams and provincial religious leaders across the kingdom have responded with a quiet, deliberate neutrality. By withholding the sermons necessary to legitimize his autocratic rule or frame his war as a sacred duty, the local clergy severed the regime’s moral core, leaving MBS completely isolated.

This convergence of external isolation, tribal detachment, military strain, and clerical silence leaves not only Mohammed bin Salman’s future fundamentally unsalvageable, but threatens the very survival of the dynasty he was entrusted to lead. For the first time in over sixty years, a royal intervention to remove a sitting Crown Prince is seen as the state’s only structural exit.

Such a reckoning, however, is not without precedent. When King Saud’s reckless governance threatened the monarchy’s survival in 1964, the family, senior princes, and religious leadership stepped in to strip him of power and enforce his abdication. Facing total military failure, economic isolation, and domestic abandonment, King Salman, whose ultimate allegiance lies with preserving the dynasty, not his son, may be forced to execute that exact emergency brake to save the House of Saud before the state itself unravels.

Yet, even if Mohammed bin Salman prevents avoids a pre-emptive removal or the King fails to act during his lifetime, the structural trap remains fixed. MBS’s entire hold on power relies not on genuine domestic consensus, but on the personal authority of an aging, ailing monarch.

Therefore, the moment King Salman passes away, the Crown Prince will be left entirely exposed without the monarch’s legal shield. Lacking the sovereign legitimacy to command the bay’ah or unite the kingdom’s core pillars, his attempt to claim the throne will meet with open refusal. Not only from alienated tribal factions and mid-level military officers, but also, from the very rival royals and business elites he purged and humiliated in his rise to power.

Deprived of both internal consensus and external military intervention, his assertion of total power will trigger an immediate, irreversible breakdown within the ruling apparatus.

Either way, if history is any indication, whether through a pre-emptive royal removal to save the dynasty or an immediate post-monarch collapse, Mohammed bin Salman’s political future is effectively over.

As the war with Iran grinds down into its sixth month, the United States finds itself sinking into a deep and inescapable quicksand. From the horrific, demoralizing conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to the rapid, systematic destruction of American command and logistical bases across the region to economic catastrophe caused by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and Bab-al-Mandeb, Washington finds itself locked in a worsening crisis.

President Trump has attempted to address this disaster by various measures, including deploying additional naval strike groups and rolling out recycled economic sanctions. However, these measures have failed miserably because of Tehran’s calculated war of military and economic attrition, leaving the U.S. navigating the most profound challenges since the Second World War.

For the U.S., the crises began with being trapped in an asymmetric exchange, in which it was compelled to shoot down inexpensive, mass-produced projectiles with multi-million-dollar interceptors. Through this, Washington soon learned that its military structure, sustained by a massive spiderweb of bases, was no longer a guarantee of protection.

The combination of an inventory deficit and a geographic dead end meant that tactical interventions by Washington worked against its own interests. That is, rather than weakening Iran, every strike by the U.S. triggered a massive retaliatory tit-for-tat response from an opponent with vast, low-cost, unlimited supplies.

The recent escalation over Larak Island illustrates this trap. After American forces struck Iranian positions across the South, including southern coastal positions, Tehran responded by hitting the same U.S. bases and port installations, including American bases in Jordan and Kuwait, proving once again that every U.S. attack merely triggers a predictable counterstrike that drains vital American munitions without altering the strategic balance.

As severe as Iran’s military war of attrition has proved, its economic strategy has been even more devastating. Designed to drain American financial reserves and force an unsustainable operational burn rate, Iran translated its localized military pressure into global financial paralysis. By exerting asymmetric pressure over the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, Tehran gained ultimate leverage over global supply chains. The interruption of shipping through these two areas has disrupted more than 25% of global oil flows and massive volumes of liquefied natural gas, while simultaneously crippling the trade of critical non-oil commodities like fertilizers and aluminum.

Even the American so-called crippling sanctions have largely become an ineffective weapon against Iran’s strategy of attrition. By largely bypassing the dollar-dominated global architecture, relying on gold and local currency exchange, routing its trade directly through China and Russia while integrating into alternative financial networks like the BRICS banking and mBridge system, Iran has successfully restructured its monetary framework toward alternative currency-trade.

Thus, the very economic war designed to bankrupt Iran ironically ended up accelerating the depletion of American financial reserves while strengthening Iran’s ability to leverage its military prowess to weaken the American economy.

For the United States, in particular for President Trump, the military disaster and economic catastrophe have triggered a dual layer of failure: domestic exhaustion and severe international backlash.

Domestically, aside from a shrinking baseline of neoconservatives and the pro-Israeli lobby, the architects of every conflict in the region for the past quarter of a century, the American public has turned decisively against the war. Wary of another endless, disastrous Middle Eastern conflict, recent polls show that almost three out of four Americans want the president to pull out and end the conflict.

Internationally, Washington’s escalation has triggered a parallel breakdown, as traditional allies balk at being drawn deeper into an open-ended conflict. By expanding retaliatory strikes to U.S. sites in the region, the world, particularly many Gulf allies, is no longer willing to underwrite Washington’s strategic miscalculations, thereby leaving the United States diplomatically isolated and politically bankrupt.

For an administration desperately searching for an exit strategy, the path forward appears grim. However, history does offer a key to breaking the cycle and finding a viable way out in the form of Emperor Hadrian.

When Emperor Hadrian took the throne in 117 AD, Rome faced the exact three-front crisis in the Middle East that the United States is facing today: military overextension, economic exhaustion, and a hawkish domestic lobby demanding endless war.

Hadrian’s predecessor, Trajan, had launched a massive invasion of the Parthian Empire (ancient Iran), which had become a logistical and financial disaster for Rome. Hadrian, despite domestic criticism, looked at the strategic math and executed a three-step strategic pivot that saved the Roman Empire. Today, that same blueprint can be used by President Trump to transform a geopolitical quagmire into a winning political exit.

First, Hadrian recognized that holding Mesopotamia was a geographic and financial trap that required multiple legions just to garrison, thereby driving Rome toward financial ruin. Similarly, just as Hadrian recognized the hard limits of Roman logistics, Washington must recognize that it can no longer militarily or financially dominate a region that has turned entirely against it.

Second, having accepted those limits, Hadrian ordered a complete, unconditional military withdrawal from Mesopotamia, pulling legions back to a defensible border at the Euphrates and signing a pragmatic peace treaty. That settlement entailed resetting the national frontier, abandoning unviable overextended conquests, and relying on stable buffer zones rather than permanent, bankrupting occupations.

For the United States, this same strategy can be applied directly to the 14-point Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which provides the exact diplomatic framework needed for a clean exit. Under this framework, the U.S. ends the ineffective naval blockade, settles financial terms, and unfreezes Iranian assets.

While modern hawks, much like the Roman elites who accused Hadrian of treason or abandoning Trajan’s conquests, will decry this as giving away too much, the reality is quite different. That is, unfreezing Iran’s capital costs Washington little real leverage, as it provides the essential financial currency needed to unlock a diplomatic currency.

As for removing American forces from Iran’s immediate proximity, the reality is that American bases across the region are not only severely damaged but, by remaining there, leave personnel exposed to retaliatory attacks. Therefore, maintaining these outposts is more of a detriment than a strategic asset.

Hence, exchanging these vulnerable, compromised positions for guaranteed maritime access through the Strait of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb is not surrendering leverage. It is a cold, calculated, and realistic trade, where Washington sheds indefensible liabilities in order to restore global energy flows and preserve its own economic and domestic stability.

Third, beyond military and economic realignments, Hadrian faced intense friction from hawkish military and political elites who viewed his withdrawal as unacceptable weakness. Hadrian, however, neutralized this opposition entirely by pivoting imperial policy away from endless foreign conquest and toward domestic spending and securing the homeland, including the cancellation of public debts and heavy investment in infrastructure.

Today, President Trump faces a remarkably similar situation where a deeply entrenched foreign policy establishment is pushing for another endless war. But just as Hadrian relied on an exhausted public that preferred peace and internal security to foreign ruin, the President holds a similar political advantage: an exhausted public that overwhelmingly prefers peace, economic renewal, and internal security over bankrupting foreign ruin.

Therefore, much like Hadrian, the President now has an opportunity to break the cycle, overrule the hawks, and secure his legacy by choosing strategic retrenchment over unwinnable, endless conflict.

Recent leaks and military reports emerging from Washington paint an increasingly chaotic picture of an administration considering direct military action against Iran. Public threats, combined with White House briefings regarding expanded strike packages and potential land options, suggest a calculation that Washington can force Tehran’s total submission through sheer military weight.

​However, for a United States that had seen its strategic objectives collapse across virtually every conflict since World War II, such an undertaking promises nothing short of a total strategic failure. This has proven particularly true over the past quarter of a century, where every major intervention from the open invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to the covert, engineered regime changes in Libya and Syria ended in defeat or disaster.

​The most direct examples of this failed modern military intervention came in Iraq and Afghanistan, where in both cases, the United States operated as an undisputed hegemonic power. It possessed vast fiscal surpluses, deep weapon stockpiles, domestic political momentum, and complete access to regional bases. Yet, despite total air supremacy and trillions of dollars expended over two decades, both campaigns ended in strategic failure and eventual retreat.

​As a result, in the years following these failed campaigns and despite persistent claims of dominance, America’s economic and military superiority eroded significantly. From conventional weapon inventories suffering severe depletion, partially due to providing arms to Israel for its war on Gaza and Ukraine’s war with Russia, to a thirty-nine-trillion-dollar national debt, to a domestic electorate with zero appetite for overseas entanglements, the United States’s ability to survive, let alone win a conflict, significantly diminished.

Yet, despite this reality, the Trump administration appears to be convinced that a land invasion of Iran is not only possible, but that it could achieve what the U.S. failed to accomplish in Iraq. That mindset, however, ignores numerous fundamental operational realities that make any ground campaign in Iran not only a physical impossibility, but a death trap not seen since Vietnam.

To begin with, the breakdown of American military supply lines and industrial capacity presents an insurmountable challenge to any ground action. Washington, due to twenty-five years of direct or continuous conflict, no longer possesses the defense industrial base or maritime transport capacity to support an expeditionary force of that scale over oceanic distances. Furthermore, years of proxy funding and stockpile depletion have drained precision-guided munitions and air defense interceptors to dangerously low levels.

However, the shortage of critical supplies is only part of the problem; the other is the manufacturing chain itself. That is, because U.S, defense contractors operate on slow, peacetime-production schedules that can take years to scale up, while remaining dangerously dependent on Chinese raw materials, microchips, and rare-earth materials, American factories cannot simply manufacture replacement weapons for a high-intensity conflict within the required time frame.

Furthermore, as it has been devastatingly proven that the regional ports and forward bases needed to receive and stage necessary supplies, such as Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, are neither safe nor operational against Iran’s strike capabilities, the United States cannot sustain or resupply an advancing ground force. Thereby, guaranteeing a total logistical collapse within weeks, if not sooner, of stepping ashore.

​Beyond this industrial crisis, pure human math presents an even more daunting hurdle to a land invasion. Particularly when attempting to launch a new war simply to retroactively justify one that was already lost, all while ignoring the stark contrast between the Iraq of 2003 and Iran of 2026.

In Iraq, for example, the United States fought across flat desert terrain against a shattered military, in a country of 25 million where a large segment of the population favored the removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Yet, despite these immense advances, the United States ultimately failed by becoming trapped in a costly, decades-long bloody counterinsurgency.

Iran, on the other hand, presents the exact opposite: it is a territory nearly four times the size of Iraq, defined by complex mountainous topography and a population exceeding 90 million people who have already unified behind their government against foreign invaders. A point that became clear following the assassination of the Iranian leader, when tens of millions of Iranians flooded the streets for weeks mourning his death.

Therefore, if the U.S. military failed so completely in achieving its goals in Iraq despite ideal conditions, then attempting a ground campaign through Iran’s mountainous terrain against a unified population and a well-trained adversary will be both bloody and catastrophic. This is especially true when considering that a ground campaign in Iran would require a minimum of 300,000 to 500,000 troops, numbers that Washington simply does not have available.

​Compounding these industrial and manpower limitations is the sheer brutality of Iran’s geography. Iran is effectively a vast natural fortress, shielded by high-altitude mountain chains and surrounded by borders that offer virtually no viable path for a ground campaign.

To the West, the towering Zagros Mountains form an almost impenetrable wall against any thrust from the Persian Gulf or Iraq, funneling advancing forces into narrow passes that serve as ideal defensive choke points.

To the Northwest, launching an assault is a political impossibility, given Ankara’s continuous unwillingness to allow the use of its soil or airspace as a launchpad for American operations.

To the North, even where the strategic access from Azerbaijan might exist, it offers zero utility, given that the border terrain consists of narrow mountain passes where armored columns would face immediate bottlenecking.

To the East, the vast, rugged frontier with Afghanistan represents a logistical dead-end controlled by a hostile Taliban regime with direct military and political ties to Iran. Finally, to the South, any attempt at an amphibious assault through the Persian Gulf forces American ships directly into the saturated firing radius of Iran’s coastal missile batteries and drone networks.

​Hence, when looking at the entire map, it becomes glaringly clear that a land invasion would be a disastrous impossibility. Washington can try to alter this reality by falling back on its default option: a massive, sustained air and missile campaign. However, this strategy relies on a fundamental fallacy that airpower alone can force Iran into submission. However, if air power alone were capable of delivering victory on its own, a ground invasion would not even be under discussion.

Ultimately, it has become clear to all that the United States has already lost this war both militarily and economically. Any further escalation on land or in the air will not alter the outcome; it will only deepen an unwinnable trap of Washington’s own making.

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