The US-Iran nuclear deal, now framed by the Biden administration as a diplomatic breakthrough, forces an uncomfortable reckoning: what, precisely, was the point of two decades of conflict, sanctions, and regional destabilisation? John Bowen, a veteran Middle East analyst, put it bluntly in a live interview: the agreement raises an inescapable question of what the war was for.
Bowen’s point is not merely rhetorical. It is a cold calculation of cause and effect. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was dismantled in 2018 by the Trump administration, which cited Iran’s non-nuclear activities and ballistic missile programme as justifications for a maximum pressure campaign. That campaign included a drone strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani in 2020, an act that brought the region to the brink of open war. Now, negotiations in Vienna have produced a framework that essentially reinstates the original nuclear restrictions, albeit with more stringent verification mechanisms.
But the human cost remains. The US military intervention in Iraq, the proxy wars in Syria and Yemen, the cyber attacks, the assassinations: all were justified by the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon. If Iran is now being trusted enough to sign a deal, the entire edifice of that policy collapses. This is not a failure of diplomacy; it is a failure of strategy. The war on terror, the axis of evil, the trillion-dollar defence budgets: they were built on a premise that now appears negotiable.
Bowen’s question is also a climate one. The vast energy expended in military operations, the carbon footprint of a permanent war economy, the diversion of resources from renewable energy transitions: these are externalities rarely accounted for. The US military is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels on the planet. Every conflict, every sanction, every proxy war adds gigatonnes of emissions to the atmosphere. The true cost of the war on Iran, had it occurred, would have been catastrophic not only for human lives but for the biosphere.
Yet the deal is fragile. Hardliners in Tehran and Washington are already decrying it. Israel has threatened pre-emptive strikes. The Gulf states are recalibrating alliances. The physics of geopolitics, much like thermodynamics, always tends toward entropy. The question Bowen raises is not just historical; it is a warning. If the war was not for this, then what is the next war for? The climate clock is ticking. We cannot afford another two decades of chaos for a question that should have been asked before the first bomb fell.
