The Great Game Revisited: A Twenty-Five Year Strategic Balance of Power in the Middle East
- abuerfanparsi
- Aug 20
- 4 min read

A compelling framework for understanding the last quarter-century of conflict in the Middle East is to view it as a protracted Great Game between two distinct and opposing power blocs. The first is an imperial bloc, spearheaded by the United States and Israel, and quietly supported by the Gulf monarchies and, in certain critical instances, Turkey. This coalition, by virtue of its overwhelming technological and financial superiority, has consistently held the strategic initiative, instigating wars and shaping the region through immense force. However, its fundamental hostility to the aspirations of the native populations has prevented it from fully dictating outcomes on the battlefield, revealing a critical vulnerability beneath its material strength.
Arrayed against it is a resilient anti-imperial bloc, a heterogeneous alliance of both Sunni and Shia militant movements—from Hamas and Algerian Islamists to Hezbollah and the Yemeni Ansarallah—with the Islamic Republic of Iran standing as its sole revolutionary state anchor, providing crucial resources and strategic depth. Cognizant of its inability to prevent the wars launched by its adversaries, this bloc adopted a strategy of working through the chaos they created. Its method has been to use the fait accompli of invasion and instability to gain a foothold in the hearts and minds of tormented populations, thereby altering the strategic equation. The objective is to dictate a battlefield where mass faith and revolutionary zeal overcome a technological disadvantage—a large-scale application of the IRGC’s "faith over firepower" doctrine that achieved the miraculous liberation of Khorramshahr in 1982.
The strategic objectives of these blocs are diametrically opposed. The imperial bloc seeks to fundamentally colonize and vassalize the Middle East, ensuring its subservience to American and Israeli interests. The anti-imperial bloc’s goal is the complete expulsion of American power from the region and the severe weakening, if not destruction, of the Israeli state. While the first bloc operated with immense cohesion and a financial outlay of dozens of trillions of dollars, the second was critically hampered by two factors. First, the persistent Shia-Sunni sectarianism within its own ranks prevented the ideal of a fully unified Ummah from mobilizing its hundreds of millions of potential constituents. Second, and crucially, it failed to secure the consistent, strategic sponsorship of the world's other major anti-American powers, Russia and China, who never provided financial and military support to the resistance axis with the same consistency that America afforded to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
Grasping this profound imbalance in resources and cohesion makes it clear that the anti-imperial bloc could never realistically hope for a total victory over its adversary. Its best-case scenario was always to create a strategic stalemate—an equation that would render the imperial vision of a "New Middle East" politically and militarily untenable, indefinitely postponing its realization. It was the unparalleled military genius of Qasem Soleimani, a commander of historic caliber akin to Salahuddin Ayyubi or Khalid ibn al-Walid, who, against all conceivable odds, nearly achieved this in the late 2010s. Through a combination of strategic brilliance and force of will, he created a reality where a cash-strapped, sanctioned, and non-Arab Iran appeared to have decisively checkmated imperial ambitions in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.
However, while empires can be forged by military genius, they are sustained only by economic prosperity and state capacity. The strategic architecture Soleimani built ultimately surpassed the long-term capabilities of the Iranian state to maintain and hold. The sobering decision by the Iranian leadership in June 2022 to drastically reduce its military footprint in Syria and Lebanon was not a reformist betrayal but a pragmatic recognition that Iran’s current economic state could not, as the saying goes, "hold two—let alone three—watermelons in one hand." This leads to the somber realization that the monumental effort in Syria—where for a decade, twenty billion dollars outmatched two trillion—may have served not to prevent, but merely to delay the "Zionization" of the country, a process which may yet proceed.
The ultimate conclusion, therefore, is not one of defeat but of miraculous, against-all-odds resilience. The sheer fact that after twenty-five years of a unified onslaught from American, European, Israeli, Turkish, and Khaleeji forces, the resistance axis still stands with strongholds from Tehran and Kabul to Sana'a, Baghdad, Beirut, and Gaza, is a testament to the extraordinary bravery of Islamic revolutionaries of all sects. They have secured historic, seemingly miraculous victories—the 2000 liberation of southern Lebanon, the 2006 humiliation of the IDF, the eventual liberation of Afghanistan, Yemen’s epic defiance of Saleh, the Saudi coalition, and then America itself, and the stunning Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Faced with such overwhelmingly negative odds, any other force in human history would have been erased from the map in far less time.
That they have not only survived but produced figures of global stature like Khomeini, Nasrallah, al-Houthi, Soleimani, and Sinwar proves they represent the only truly vital force in a decaying global order. They possess that rare collective quality, seen in the Prophet's Companions or the first generations of the French and Russian revolutions, which transforms the most downtrodden societies into a human tsunami capable of conquering the world and setting fire to the palaces of tyrants. This undeniable vitality begs the obvious, haunting question: what would have happened if the entire Muslim Ummah had united behind them? The answer is as profound as it is simple, and its terrifying content is precisely why imperialists continue to pour more money into pro-colonialist dictatorships in the region than even into the Zionist project itself.
This article is written by a friend of mine from Bosnia and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the Website), nor does it represent an agreement with these perspectives.
Comments