Interview
01JLP Décryptage
The architecture of deterrence in the Middle East has crossed a critical threshold with the recent exchanges of direct strikes between Iran and Israel, bringing the region out of the era of “shadow war”. How does this development redefine the mechanisms of deterrence and the conditions under which a crisis can now tip into open conflict?
Gérard Vespierre
Allow me to begin with the second part of your question. We cannot tip into an open conflict…! We are in a fully open conflict! Not since 28 February 2026, but since 2025 and what was called the 12-day war in June…. Eleven days of Israeli bombing of Iranian territory, after the destruction of Iran’s air defence systems. Then one day of American bombing of the nuclear sites…. We were at war last year. We are even more so in 2026, with 40 uninterrupted days of American-Israeli bombing and 13 nights of American bombing during a ceasefire….. Of course, there is a fundamental difference in the ‘management of wartime’ between a continuous, permanent war, lasting for more than four years in Ukraine, and the military operations in Iran. The latter take place within ‘windows of time’: 12 days, then 40 days, then 13. But the scale of the destruction (more than 10,000 targets hit), the elimination of leaders, including the highest-ranking one, and Iran’s regional responses lead us to speak of war in the true sense.
Let us now return to the first part of your question, concerning the exchanges of direct strikes between Israel and Tehran. The first took place in April 2024, after an Israeli strike in Damascus on an official Iranian building, killing senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards. The FUNDAMENTAL strategic fact of the Iranian response, involving 300 drones and missiles launched at Israel, was almost entirely ignored. For the first time in contemporary history, a non-nuclear power, Iran, was carrying out a large-scale conventional attack on a country possessing nuclear weapons… Israel has approximately 80–90 nuclear warheads, as well as delivery systems, land- and sea-based missiles!!! Tehran dared to take such a decision because its military and political command knew that their country would not face a nuclear response…!!! This amounts to saying that it is now established that a ‘non-nuclear’ country can launch a major conventional attack against a nuclear-armed country. It also means that the nuclear umbrella is not a total guarantee… The concept of the nuclear umbrella should therefore be narrowed to a potential conflict between two countries that both possess nuclear weapons….
Consequently, this validates the concept and deployment of anti-missile and anti-drone systems, each with different levels of capability and performance.
These situations also lead us to consider the possibility of one nuclear power attacking another—an ultimate act of intimidation—with a limited number of conventional, non-nuclear warheads, without necessarily risking a nuclear response…. Are there not holes in that umbrella? Vast questions….!
The direct strikes between Iran and Israel did not merely bring those states out of the shadow war, as you put it. It seems to me that those strikes brought the global military sphere, and the realm of nuclear deterrence, into a vast grey area…!
02JLP Décryptage
The war in Ukraine has marked the return of industrial warfare and territorial conquest in Europe. Beyond the military outcome of the conflict, how does this brutalisation of power relations compel the European Union to rethink its model of power, long based on economic influence and law, in the face of the return of military logic?
Gérard Vespierre
If you will allow me, I shall interpret your expression ‘industrial warfare’ as meaning ‘large-scale conventional war’.
In the military field, as in many others, one must be very cautious and meticulous in the use of words and concepts. To do so, we must move from the realm of ideas—‘the return of large-scale conventional war’ in Europe—to a concrete analysis of the situation. Russia did indeed initiate a conflict, without any real cause, by invading Ukraine with a powerful conventional military force estimated at 180,000 troops. Four and a half years later, Russia’s positions in Ukraine differ very little from what they were at the end of 2022…
Consequently, Russia has demonstrated that it could not contemplate a conflict of the same kind—‘large-scale conventional war’—against a European area of 450 million inhabitants, or even 520 million including Great Britain, when it has been unable to dominate a country of 40 million, Ukraine. Attack a Baltic country? Forces would have to be assembled, and that would be detected, so proportionate deterrent actions, political and otherwise, could be undertaken.
On the other hand, it can initiate and wage a hybrid war of destabilisation through unclaimed cyberattacks, flights and possibly strikes by unidentified drones, or even acts of sabotage of all kinds. That is what national armed forces, NATO structures and populations must prepare for.
03JLP Décryptage
What we are observing is less a process of ‘deglobalisation’ than a fragmentation of globalisation into variable spheres of cooperation, in which middle powers such as India, Brazil or the Gulf states trade their alignment. How does this variable geometry of ‘transactional non-alignment’ challenge the effectiveness of sanctions regimes and the West’s ability to impose an economic order?
Gérard Vespierre
I do not see any precise facts that substantiate this question. Every state is transactional, I dare say, by nature. India is a member of the BRICS while conducting very active security and military cooperation with the United States through the QUAD and the 2+2 meetings, which bring together the defence and foreign ministers. Purchases of American military equipment and technological cooperation began in the 2010s. New Delhi must consolidate its alliances while taking account of its rivalry with China.
India has also signed the IMEC agreement (India–Middle East–Europe Corridor), designed to compete with China’s Belt and Road routes.
Among the ‘middle powers’, therefore, there is a strategy that might be better described as ‘keeping two irons in the fire’, or pursuing both ‘at the same time’, rather than alternating bargaining.
04JLP Décryptage
The weakening of universal institutions such as the United Nations is now an established fact. The real break lies in the proliferation of ad hoc coalitions and minilateral security agreements. To what extent does this dynamic constitute a pragmatic response to the impotence of multilateralism or, on the contrary, an accelerator of systemic instability?
Gérard Vespierre
The mission of preventing wars is not among the objectives of the United Nations, for the simple reason that decisions to go to war are made by states, and by states alone, according to their interests. The institution has no means of opposing them. The states engaged in warlike initiatives are themselves, moreover, part… of the United Nations.
Historically, as early as the 1960s, the United Nations was unable to prevent any conflict in the Middle East or Africa.
The security alliance, for example, that has just been concluded between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye is primarily designed to deter the Islamic Republic of Iran from contemplating coordinated actions against Saudi Arabia that would entail its participation. As a regional alliance, it is not an accelerator of instability—quite the opposite. It is intended to be a deterrent.
The security rapprochements in the Pacific region between India, Japan, Korea and Australia are intended to deter China from embarking on a Taiwanese adventure….
05JLP Décryptage
In an international system where crisis-management mechanisms are increasingly out of sync, which current flashpoint—whether maritime, financial or linked to the collapse of a pivotal state—now presents the highest risk of triggering an uncontrollable domino effect? Through what mechanisms could this crisis spread far beyond its original theatre?
Gérard Vespierre
The highest risk has been, is and will remain the… politico-ideological risk. The First and Second World Wars, including the Japanese imperialist vision. The wars in the Middle East revolve around a religious issue…. The outbreak of the war in Ukraine stems from ideological and political considerations involving the idea of a Greater Russia, a return to Empire and an exacerbated Russian nationalism.
In the context of the war in Ukraine, what reason could Russia have for extending the geography of the conflict westwards? To weaken the European Union, to try to reduce or even sever the link between the United States and Europe. That would stem from a geostrategic intention, a conceptual vision, but by no means from a real risk related to potential European aggression against Russia that Russia could pre-empt. NATO’s tanks are those of each member state. Since the end of the Second World War, no European tank has headed east. We can add, however, that Russian tanks were seen in the Berlin Blockade in 1948, in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968… and heading towards Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, in 1979…. A decennial rhythm….
There is no threat of Taiwan invading China; no one is prepared to wager that the reverse is impossible. Beijing’s threat stems from a political and ideological vision, in the name of absolute centralism.
The risks of war and its extension are therefore relatively invariant, and are structured around the pairing of ideology (secular or religious) and border disputes.
