This piece in published in partnership with the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS).
The Iran war points to a strategic vacuum extending well beyond military affairs. It reflects a broader failure to align actions with long-term objectives—a pattern also visible across trade, finance, and technology policy, from erratic tariff decisions to the AI bubble.
Donald Trump had the intuition that social dislocation demanded reindustrialization, in the wake of the global financial crisis. However, his chaotic inconsistencies reveal a broader cultural and institutional malaise, evident since the Bush years, and mirrored across Europe. This systemic paralysis runs deeper than any single leader and obstructs substantial reorientation.
Amid the educational crisis, the capacity for strategic planning informed by science and humanities has receded, giving way to geopolitical agitation, economics driven by inflated assets, and generalized improvisation.
Tactical Successes, Strategic Vacuum
The Iraq war was supposed to serve as a textbook example that the pursuit of regime change without a viable alternative can plunge a whole region into chaos. Yet, the same logic persists, without a coherent plan either to mitigate the immediate consequences of the war or to manage its aftermath. Excluding a ground offensive was supposed to put aside the specter of the Iraq fiasco in the eyes of the American public. However the current narrative rather points to the lasting legacy of the Bush era, despite Trump’s inconsistent efforts to strike a balance between neoconservative circles and the public’s rejection of long wars.
This instability erodes rational calculation across the international system, as negotiations led by real-estate moguls prove episodic and unreliable. Meanwhile, the weaponization of finance accelerates defensive reactions among emerging powers. Alternative payment arrangements and bilateral trade mechanisms are expanding. What was designed as leverage undermines the monetary architecture that long sustained US trade deficits.
The Lost Intuition About Manufacturing and the Social Fabric
War also exposes material limits. The experience of Ukraine has demonstrated that Western industrial capacity struggles to sustain prolonged conflicts and especially a war of attrition, as production lags behind operational requirements. Europe, in particular, remains strategically dependent, lacking cohesion and sufficient manufacturing depth.
Donald Trump centered his discourse on the impasse facing his country and the need for systemic change. His intuition was that social fragmentation stems from deindustrialisation. The difficulty lies in execution. Tariffs, without serious industrial analysis, aggravate the very instability they seek to cure, especially when they turn into sanction weapons wielded erratically.
Trade wars were launched in the name of reshoring, yet without a coherent long-term framework linking workforce development and manufacturing technology. Constant shifts leave firms unable to plan capital-intensive investments. When the rules change continuously, for geopolitical reasons or as a result of legal rulings like that of the Supreme Court, reindustrialization efforts become rhetorical.
The AI Bubble and Financial Distortion
Simultaneously, vast liquidity flows into artificial intelligence without weighing the limits of existing architectures and relegating promising research. The scale of the speculative enthusiasm surrounding AI reflects a financial structure shaped by the printing press. Asset inflation has distorted price signals, encouraging capital to chase scalable digital opportunities while physical production systems often remain undercapitalized.
Circular funding models and passive investment flows sustain high valuations often disconnected from business models. While artillery shortages reveal supply-chain fragility, capital concentrates in data centers, based on today’s state of technology, rather than reflecting on future advances in efficiency. The imbalance resides in the absence of coordination between financial allocation and strategic necessity. Over the long term, investment and credit waves sustain unproductive firms and delay adjustment. Resources are misallocated while machine tooling and applied engineering struggle to attract patient capital.
Europe in Strategic Limbo
The problem is particularly acute in Europe, where overregulation constrains entrepreneurial planning. Military rearmament is discussed with insufficient supply-chain strategies. Fiscal pressures narrow policy space. The continent risks combining strategic posturing with declining productive autonomy. More troubling is the human capital dimension. With the technological retreat, engineers and scientists have been relegated by social hierarchies dominated by bureaucracies and managerial symbols. The attempt to substitute skilled labor with AI-driven systems often reflects short-term cost minimization rather than industrial realism.
Geopolitically, a push for autonomy had started to gain some momentum since Ursula von der Leyen’s full alignment last summer in trade negotiations—and, above all, since Donald Trump’s fanciful claims on Greenland, barely concealing his desire to blow up NATO. Yet beneath the rhetoric of strategic and technological independence, much of Europe appears to be waiting for signals of renewed transatlantic oversight, contingent on electoral shifts and military adventures. This, too, reflects a systemic transformation spanning two generations, shaped by bureaucratization and questionable organizations providing conferences. Industrial leadership and the opposition to the Iraq War now seem a distant echo.
The Iran war serves as a stress test of a broader Western model. Military action, trade wars, and technological speculation unfold without anticipation. Despite the demonization of tarif policies, Trump’s assessment that social stability depends on industrial strength was correct. The failure lies in transforming that intuition into disciplined, long-term strategy at the state level. Like Gorbachev, his intuitions for reform have stalled in the face of deep-seated interests, institutional paralysis, and erratic execution. Without a renewed spirit of humanism in foreign policy, industry, finance and education, activism will fail to mask a profound cultural crisis.