By Laala Bechetoula
Abstract
The 2026 war involving Iran, Israel, and the United States constitutes a systemic rupture in the architecture of international relations. Beyond its military dimension, the conflict exposes the erosion of Western strategic monopoly and the emergence of a condition this article terms fragmented multipolarity — a system characterised by distributed power, persistent instability, the absence of equilibrium, and the simultaneous failure of existing theoretical frameworks to account for observed dynamics.
This article situates the conflict within three competing theoretical frameworks — structural realism (Waltz), offensive realism (Mearsheimer), and neoliberal institutionalism (Keohane) — and demonstrates that while each captures elements of the crisis, none accounts for its systemic consequences. It further argues that classical Western international relations theory suffers from a deeper deficit: the exclusion of non-Western analytical traditions — notably Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of civilisational decay, Malek Bennabi’s concept of civilisational readiness, and Gramsci’s interregnum — which together illuminate dimensions of the current rupture that structural, offensive, and liberal frameworks cannot reach.
The paper concludes that contemporary geopolitics has entered a post-hegemonic phase in which power persists but control dissipates, and that the construction of an adequate analytical framework requires drawing on the full breadth of global intellectual traditions — not merely those produced within the Western academy.
Keywords: Fragmented Multipolarity; Structural Realism; Offensive Realism; Neoliberal Institutionalism; Iran War 2026; Energy Geopolitics; Chokepoint Warfare; Systemic Instability; Ibn Khaldun; Malek Bennabi; Gramsci; Post-Hegemonic Order
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- Introduction — The Empirical Shock
On 18 March 2026, Brent crude futures closed at $147.30 per barrel — a 78.8% increase from the $82.40 recorded on 1 January of the same year.[1] Lloyd’s of London reported that war risk insurance premiums for Persian Gulf transit had risen by approximately 4,200% from pre-conflict baselines.[2] The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 20.5 million barrels of petroleum liquids pass daily — roughly 21% of global consumption — became, for the first time since the 1980s, an active theatre of military operations.[3] Three successive United Nations Security Council draft resolutions on the conflict were vetoed by permanent members.[4]
These are not theoretical propositions. They are empirical facts. And they constitute a challenge not merely to policy but to the analytical frameworks through which international relations are understood.
The 2026 Iran war is, in this sense, not only a geopolitical event. It is an epistemological event. It reveals that the dominant theoretical paradigms of international relations — structural realism, offensive realism, neoliberal institutionalism — each illuminate a dimension of the crisis but none, individually or collectively, accounts for its systemic dynamics. The conflict demands, in short, a new concept. This article proposes one: fragmented multipolarity — a condition in which multiple centres of power coexist without producing equilibrium, stability, or coherent governance, and in which the analytical tools inherited from the Western academy are necessary but insufficient.
The argument proceeds in ten stages. Sections 2 through 4 subject classical theories to the empirical test of the 2026 war, steel-manning each before identifying its structural limits. Section 5 introduces chokepoint warfare as a missing variable. Section 6 analyses Iran’s distributed power model. Section 7 defines fragmented multipolarity and differentiates it from existing alternatives. Section 8 draws on Ibn Khaldun and Gramsci to provide non-Western and critical theoretical anchors. Section 9 examines China’s posture through the lens of Malek Bennabi’s civilisational readiness. Section 10 proposes the foundations of a new analytical framework. The conclusion reflects on the end of strategic monopoly and the imperative of theoretical pluralism.
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- Waltz Revisited — Structure Without Stability
Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism remains the most parsimonious account of international order. His core propositions are well known: the international system is anarchic; its structure is defined by the distribution of capabilities among units; and this structure constrains and shapes state behaviour in ways that tend toward balance.[5] No theory of the 2026 conflict can proceed without engaging Waltz, and none should dismiss him lightly.
2.1 The Strongest Waltzian Case
A Waltzian reading of the 2026 war would emphasise that the conflict confirms the persistence of anarchy as the ordering principle. No supranational authority prevented it; no institution overrode sovereign calculation. The war is, in this view, a predictable consequence of the distribution of capabilities: a rising regional power (Iran) with nuclear threshold status provokes a balancing response from the dominant power (the United States) and its regional partner (Israel). The system works as Waltz predicted — not by producing peace, but by producing structural responses to shifts in capability.
A defender of Waltz might further argue that the instability observed in 2026 is not evidence of structural failure but of structural adjustment. The system is rebalancing. Hormuz disruptions, proxy activations, and energy shocks are the friction costs of a systemic transition from unipolarity toward a new equilibrium. Give the system time, the Waltzian would say, and balance will reassert itself.
2.2 Where the Framework Fractures
This is the strongest version of the Waltzian argument — and it is insufficient. The 2026 conflict reveals three structural anomalies that Waltz’s model cannot accommodate.
First, the military expenditure asymmetry between the United States and Iran exceeds 134:1.[6] In Waltzian terms, this should produce either deterrence (Iran accommodates) or rapid defeat (the system rebalances quickly). Neither has occurred. Iran’s capacity to sustain strategic resistance through distributed networks, proxy activation, and chokepoint leverage operates outside the capability metrics that Waltz’s model measures. Waltz counts divisions, warheads, and GDP. The 2026 war demonstrates that these metrics miss the operational architecture through which power is actually exercised.
Second, energy interdependence does not moderate conflict, as Waltzian balance-of-power theory would implicitly predict. Instead, it accelerates systemic shock transmission. When Hormuz transit is threatened, the consequences are not contained within a bilateral or regional balance — they propagate instantaneously through global energy markets, shipping insurance, and supply chains.[7] The World Bank’s January 2026 report explicitly warned that economic fragmentation amplifies rather than absorbs geopolitical shocks.[8]
Third, and most fundamentally, the system is not rebalancing. It is fragmenting. Waltz assumed that balance-of-power mechanisms produce equilibrium — that the system tends toward stability even through conflict. The empirical evidence of 2026 suggests the opposite: escalation generates further escalation; disruption generates further disruption; the system does not converge toward a new steady state but diverges into increasing complexity and unpredictability.
Thus, Waltz’s structure persists — anarchy remains the ordering principle, capabilities still matter — but its stabilising function has eroded. The system is structured without being stable. This is the first fracture in classical theory.
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- Mearsheimer and the Paradox of Rational Escalation
John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism offers the most uncompromising account of great power behaviour. States, in his framework, are rational actors that maximise power to ensure survival in an anarchic system. Regional hegemony is the optimal condition; conflict is the inevitable consequence of competition among great powers.[9]
3.1 The Strongest Mearsheimerian Case
The U.S.–Israel military campaign against Iran aligns closely with offensive realist logic. The strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, air defence systems, and proxy infrastructure represent a rational attempt to degrade a rising competitor’s capabilities before it achieves nuclear breakout. Israel’s preemptive posture, informed by the doctrine of preventive war, fits squarely within Mearsheimer’s framework. So does the broader U.S. strategic calculus: if a nuclear-armed Iran would fundamentally alter the Middle Eastern balance of power, then acting before that threshold is crossed is the rational choice.
A Mearsheimerian defender would further note that the conflict’s escalatory dynamics are precisely what offensive realism predicts. When one power escalates, the adversary responds. This produces an action–reaction cycle that offensive realism explicitly describes. The loss of control that observers lament is not a failure of the theory — it is the theory’s central insight: competition among great powers produces tragic outcomes, not optimal ones.
3.2 Escalation Without Dominance
And yet the outcome diverges from Mearsheimer’s expectations in a fundamental way. Offensive realism posits that power maximisation produces relative advantage — that rational escalation, even at high cost, yields strategic gains for the stronger party. The 2026 war does not confirm this.
Escalation in 2026 produces not dominance but diffusion. Iranian proxy networks in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen — documented extensively by the International Institute for Strategic Studies — have activated across multiple theatres simultaneously.[10] The Hormuz disruption imposes costs not primarily on Iran but on the global economy, including the United States’ own allies.[11] Military operations that were designed to concentrate strategic advantage have instead distributed conflict across a wider network of actors and geographies.
This reveals a paradox at the heart of offensive realism: power-maximising behaviour, when directed against a networked adversary with chokepoint leverage, can produce loss of strategic control. The stronger actor escalates rationally and still finds itself less in control of outcomes than before the escalation began. Mearsheimer’s framework explains the decision to escalate — but not the systemic consequences of escalation. It explains power but not its dissipation.
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- Keohane and the Inversion of Interdependence
Robert Keohane’s neoliberal institutionalism occupies the opposite pole of the theoretical spectrum. Where Waltz and Mearsheimer foreground power and competition, Keohane argues that international institutions — regimes, norms, and cooperative frameworks — mitigate anarchy and enable cooperation even in the absence of a hegemon.[12] Interdependence, in his view, creates mutual vulnerability that incentivises restraint.
4.1 The Strongest Institutional Case
The institutional architecture surrounding the Iran conflict is substantial: the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA safeguards regime, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) framework (however attenuated), the UN Security Council, and multilateral energy governance through the IEA. A Keohane defender would argue that these institutions have not disappeared — they continue to provide information, facilitate communication, and establish baselines for cooperation. The IAEA continues to produce safeguards reports.[13] The IEA continues to publish market analyses.[14] Institutions persist and function, even under stress.
4.2 The Collapse of Regulatory Function
Persistence, however, is not efficacy. The defining feature of institutional performance in 2026 is not absence but impotence. Three Security Council resolutions have been vetoed.[15] The JCPOA framework is defunct. IAEA reporting continues but has no constraining effect on military operations. Norms of civilian protection and maritime security are openly violated. The institutions exist — but their regulatory function has collapsed.
More fundamentally, the 2026 conflict reveals what may be called the inversion of interdependence. Keohane’s central claim is that mutual vulnerability created by economic interdependence incentivises cooperation. The empirical evidence of 2026 demonstrates the opposite: energy interdependence, routed through the chokepoint of Hormuz, transmits instability rather than reducing it. When 21% of global petroleum consumption passes through a single strait that is simultaneously a theatre of military operations, interdependence does not restrain belligerents — it amplifies the systemic consequences of their actions.[16]
S&P Global estimates that 15–18% of global LNG trade transits the Strait of Hormuz.[17] The IEA’s 2025 special report on global energy security had already identified concentrated dependency on maritime chokepoints as a structural vulnerability.[18] The 2026 war confirms that this vulnerability is not hypothetical. Interdependence, under these conditions, becomes a vector of systemic instability — the precise inversion of Keohane’s prediction.
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- Chokepoint Warfare — The Missing Variable
None of the three classical theories adequately accounts for the strategic centrality of geographic chokepoints. Waltz’s structural model treats capabilities as aggregate national attributes (military spending, population, industrial capacity) and does not foreground geography as an independent variable. Mearsheimer acknowledges the stopping power of water but primarily as a constraint on power projection, not as an instrument of asymmetric leverage. Keohane’s institutionalism addresses interdependence but assumes it operates through diffuse market mechanisms rather than through concentrated geographic bottlenecks.
The Strait of Hormuz is the empirical refutation of these assumptions. The Council on Foreign Relations’ February 2026 report identified Hormuz as the single most consequential chokepoint in the global energy system.[19] Its disruption produces immediate, non-linear, and disproportionate effects: oil prices surge, insurance markets freeze, shipping reroutes, and downstream supply chains across Asia, Europe, and Africa absorb cascading shocks.[20]
Chokepoint warfare introduces a dimension that classical IR theory has systematically undertheorised: non-territorial leverage. Iran does not need to project power across oceans or defeat superior military forces. It needs only to threaten a geographic bottleneck to impose costs on the entire global economy. This represents a form of strategic power that is invisible to Waltz’s capability metrics, orthogonal to Mearsheimer’s great power competition framework, and corrosive to Keohane’s cooperative interdependence. Chokepoint warfare is, in this sense, a theoretical blind spot of Western international relations — and the 2026 war has made it impossible to ignore.
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- Iran and the Architecture of Distributed Power
Classical international relations theory is state-centric. It measures power at the level of the unitary state: GDP, military expenditure, population, nuclear capability. Iran’s strategic model operates on a fundamentally different logic.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance 2026 provides the most detailed open-source assessment of Iran’s proxy network: Hezbollah in Lebanon (estimated 30,000–50,000 fighters and a precision missile arsenal), the Houthis in Yemen (with demonstrated anti-shipping capability), and a constellation of allied militias across Iraq and Syria.[21] This network creates strategic depth without territorial expansion, resilience against conventional strikes (degradation of one node does not disable the network), and elastic escalation capacity (the ability to activate pressure across multiple theatres simultaneously).
This model cannot be fully explained by Waltz’s state-level structural analysis, by Mearsheimer’s great power competition framework, or by Keohane’s institutional cooperation paradigm. It reflects something new: power as networked architecture rather than centralised capacity. The 2026 war demonstrates that a state with a military budget 134 times smaller than its adversary’s can sustain strategic resistance and impose escalating costs — not because it is stronger in Waltzian terms, but because it operates through a different organisational logic.
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- Fragmented Multipolarity — Naming the New Condition
The concept introduced in this article — fragmented multipolarity — requires precise definition and differentiation from existing alternatives.
7.1 Definition
Fragmented multipolarity describes a systemic condition in which multiple centres of power coexist without producing equilibrium, in which interdependence transmits instability rather than cooperation, and in which no single actor or coalition possesses the capacity to impose systemic order. Unlike classical multipolarity, which implies a balance among roughly equivalent great powers, fragmented multipolarity is characterised by radical asymmetry of capabilities, heterogeneity of power forms (conventional military, networked proxy, economic leverage, chokepoint control), and persistent systemic instability as a structural feature rather than a transitional phase.
7.2 Differentiation from Existing Concepts
Amitav Acharya’s multiplex world captures the plurality of actors and the decline of liberal hegemony but retains an essentially optimistic assessment of institutional adaptation.[22] [23] Acharya envisions a world of overlapping, coexisting orders in which regional governance mechanisms compensate for the decline of American hegemony. Fragmented multipolarity does not share this optimism. The 2026 war demonstrates that regional orders are themselves sites of fragmentation, not compensation.
Richard Haass’s nonpolarity identifies the diffusion of power away from states to non-state actors — a valid observation — but treats this diffusion as relatively benign, a feature of globalisation’s complexity.[24] Fragmented multipolarity, by contrast, insists that the diffusion of power produces not complexity management but systemic instability. The 2026 Hormuz crisis is not a governance challenge to be managed. It is a structural rupture.
Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver’s regional security complex theory provides a valuable disaggregation of global security into regional subsystems.[25] But it assumes that regional complexes are analytically separable — that events in the Persian Gulf can be analysed as a Middle Eastern security complex with defined boundaries. The 2026 war demonstrates the opposite: Hormuz disruptions cascade through global energy markets, Chinese strategic calculations, European supply chains, and African food prices simultaneously. The boundaries between regional complexes have become analytically untenable.
Fragmented multipolarity differs from all three in its insistence on three features: the structural permanence of instability, the heterogeneity of power forms, and the transmission of disruption across previously separable domains. It is, in this sense, a more pessimistic — and, the evidence suggests, more accurate — diagnosis of the present condition.
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- The Civilisational Dimension — Ibn Khaldun, Gramsci, and the Deeper Rupture
The limits of Western IR theory are not merely empirical but epistemological. The exclusion of non-Western analytical traditions from the canonical frameworks of international relations has produced a discipline that is structurally incapable of recognising certain forms of systemic transformation. Two thinkers — one from the fourteenth-century Maghreb, one from an Italian prison — illuminate dimensions of the 2026 crisis that Waltz, Mearsheimer, and Keohane cannot reach.
8.1 Ibn Khaldun and the Erosion of ‘Asabiyya
Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (1377) proposed a cyclical theory of civilisational rise and decline centred on the concept of ‘asabiyya — group solidarity, cohesion, collective purpose.[26] In Ibn Khaldun’s model, political entities rise when ‘asabiyya is strong — when a group possesses sufficient internal cohesion to act collectively, project power, and establish authority. They decline when ‘asabiyya erodes: when luxury, complacency, and internal division weaken the bonds that sustained coherent action. Crucially, the decline occurs while material resources persist. The state retains its armies, its treasury, its territory — but loses the cohesive force that made these instruments effective.[27]
The application to the 2026 crisis is precise. The United States retains military superiority by every conventional metric — defence expenditure, technological capability, force projection, nuclear arsenal. Yet the coherence required to translate this superiority into strategic outcomes has demonstrably eroded. Three vetoed Security Council resolutions reflect not the absence of American power but the absence of American capacity to build coalitions. Energy market chaos reflects not the weakness of global institutions but their inability to coordinate collective responses. The Western-led order retains its material infrastructure but has lost the ‘asabiyya — the solidarity, legitimacy, and collective purpose — that made that infrastructure function as a system of governance.
Ibn Khaldun’s model captures what Waltz’s structural realism misses: the possibility of structural persistence without functional coherence. A system can remain structured — capabilities distributed, anarchy intact — and still lose the capacity for equilibrium, because the social bonds that enabled coordination have decayed.
8.2 Gramsci’s Interregnum
Antonio Gramsci, writing from a Fascist prison in the early 1930s, diagnosed a condition that resonates with extraordinary precision in 2026: the interregnum.[28]
‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’[29]
The ‘old’ in 2026 is the post-1945 Western-led order: its institutions (the UN, Bretton Woods, NATO), its norms (non-proliferation, civilian protection, freedom of navigation), and its theoretical frameworks (realism, liberalism, constructivism as developed within Western academies). This order is not yet dead — its institutions persist, its norms are invoked, its theories are taught — but its capacity to organise, regulate, and stabilise the international system has manifestly declined.
The ‘new’ has not yet been born. China proposes alternatives (the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Security Initiative) but has not constructed a substitute order. The Global South asserts agency but lacks institutional coherence. Iran demonstrates resilience but offers no systemic alternative. The new order is gestating but unformed.
The ‘morbid symptoms’ are visible everywhere: proxy wars, energy weaponisation, institutional paralysis, the return of atavistic territorial logic, the recoding of geopolitical conflicts as eschatological struggles. The 2026 Iran war is, in Gramscian terms, the quintessential morbid symptom of the interregnum.
Gramsci’s diagnosis cuts across the realism–liberalism divide. It is not, strictly speaking, a theory of international relations. It is a theory of historical transition — and that is precisely what is needed. The 2026 crisis is not a puzzle within an existing paradigm. It is evidence that the paradigm itself is in transition.
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- China and Civilisational Readiness — A Bennabi Reading
China’s posture in the 2026 conflict defies classification within Western theoretical frameworks. It avoids direct confrontation (contradicting Mearsheimer’s prediction of inevitable great power conflict). It leverages interdependence without stabilising it (inverting Keohane’s expectations). It operates within the existing structure but reshapes it indirectly (exceeding Waltz’s structural constraints).
Malek Bennabi, the Algerian thinker whose work on civilisational dynamics remains underappreciated in Western academies, offers a more illuminating framework.[30] Bennabi’s central concept — colonisabilité — posits that civilisational vulnerability is an internal condition that precedes and enables external domination.[31] Conversely, civilisational readiness — the alignment of ideas, people, and material resources within a coherent social project — is the precondition for effective action in the world.
China’s behaviour in 2026 exhibits the characteristics of Bennabi’s civilisational readiness. Beijing does not seek to dominate the 2026 crisis. It seeks to outlast it.[32] China continues to diversify its energy supply routes, accelerate domestic technological development, strengthen alternative payment systems, and build parallel institutional architectures (BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). It absorbs the shocks of the 2026 conflict — including potential Hormuz disruptions that threaten its oil imports — not by confronting the United States militarily but by constructing the internal conditions for long-term strategic autonomy.[33]
This is power as temporal advantage rather than immediate dominance. It is legibility not through Waltz, Mearsheimer, or Keohane, but through Bennabi: the patient construction of civilisational capacity as the foundation for eventual systemic influence. Where the West escalates and fragments, China builds and waits. Bennabi’s framework — developed in the context of decolonisation, not great power competition — proves unexpectedly apt for describing the most consequential strategic posture of the twenty-first century.
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- Toward a New Analytical Framework
The 2026 war demonstrates that the construction of an adequate analytical framework for contemporary geopolitics requires a synthesis that no single existing theory provides. The elements of such a framework, drawn from the analysis above, include:
Systemic interdependence as instability vector. Keohane was right that interdependence is a defining feature of the international system. He was wrong that it produces cooperation. Under conditions of concentrated geographic dependency (chokepoints), interdependence transmits and amplifies disruption. A new framework must theorise interdependence as a dual-valence variable: cooperative under diffuse conditions, destabilising under concentrated ones.
Networked power structures. Classical theories measure power at the state level. Iran’s proxy network demonstrates that power can be exercised through distributed, non-state architectures that resist conventional military degradation. A new framework must incorporate network analysis as a core methodological tool — not as a supplement to state-level analysis but as an alternative mode of strategic organisation.
Chokepoint geopolitics. Geography is not merely a constraint on power projection (Mearsheimer) or a background condition (Waltz). It is an active instrument of strategic leverage. A new framework must place geographic chokepoints — Hormuz, Malacca, Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb — at the centre of systemic analysis, not at its periphery.
Non-linear escalation dynamics. Classical deterrence theory and offensive realism assume rational escalation with predictable consequences. The 2026 war demonstrates that escalation in a networked, interdependent system produces non-linear effects: disproportionate consequences, cascading disruptions, and loss of strategic control by all parties. A new framework must integrate complexity theory and non-linear systems analysis.
Civilisational temporality. Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical model and Bennabi’s concept of civilisational readiness introduce a temporal dimension absent from Western IR theory. Waltz’s structure is essentially static; Mearsheimer’s competition is perpetual; Keohane’s cooperation is ahistorical. A new framework must account for the fact that civilisations operate on different temporal scales — that China’s patience, Iran’s resilience, and America’s urgency reflect not merely different strategies but different civilisational temporalities.
Classical Western theories remain necessary for any serious analysis of international relations. But they are insufficient. The task ahead is not to discard Waltz, Mearsheimer, and Keohane but to embed them within a broader, more pluralistic intellectual architecture that draws on the full range of global analytical traditions — including those systematically excluded from the Western academy.
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- Conclusion — The End of Strategic Monopoly
The war against Iran does not signal the collapse of Western power. The United States remains the most formidable military force on earth. Its alliance networks, technological capabilities, and economic weight are undiminished in absolute terms. What the 2026 war signals is something different and, in some respects, more profound: the end of the West’s strategic and theoretical monopoly over the interpretation and organisation of international order.
Waltz explains structure — but not why structure no longer stabilises. Mearsheimer explains the drive for power — but not the loss of control that power produces. Keohane explains cooperation — but not its inversion under conditions of concentrated interdependence. Ibn Khaldun explains the decay of cohesion within materially powerful civilisations. Gramsci names the interregnum in which old orders persist without governing and new orders gestate without being born. Bennabi illuminates the patient construction of civilisational capacity that underlies China’s strategic posture. Fanon and Mbembe remind us that the current order was always, for much of the world, experienced not as liberal governance but as structured domination.[34][35]
The emerging system is structurally constrained, strategically unstable, and theoretically underdefined. It is a system in which power persists but control dissipates, in which institutions endure but do not regulate, and in which the analytical frameworks inherited from the twentieth century illuminate fragments of the whole without comprehending it.
The world is no longer governed by a single paradigm — but by competing logics. The task of the next generation of scholarship is to build a framework adequate to this complexity: one that integrates structural analysis with civilisational temporality, network theory with chokepoint geopolitics, and Western canonical traditions with the intellectual resources of the Global South. This is not an act of intellectual charity. It is a condition of analytical survival.
K.M. Panikkar, writing in 1953, argued that the Vasco da Gama epoch — the period of Western maritime dominance over Asia — had ended, and that its end would compel a fundamental reorientation of world history and world politics.[36] Seven decades later, the intellectual reorientation he called for has barely begun. The 2026 Iran war makes it not merely desirable but unavoidable.
Laala Bechetoula is an Algerian historian, journalist and geopolitical analyst based in Laghouat, Algeria.
5 April 2026
Source: countercurrents.org