The footage is grainy. The audio is a mess of panicked Arabic and the thrum of an engine that should not be there. But the message could not be clearer: an Iranian drone has struck Kuwait International Airport. The Gulf crisis is no longer a simmering diplomatic row. It is a live fire exercise in state-on-state aggression.
Let us dispense with the fantasy that this is a simple escalation. This is the logic of the twenty-first century Middle East: a region that has swapped the formalities of 1914 for the asymmetries of 1940. For years, we have watched Iran’s proxy network expand like a malignant growth. Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen. Militias in Iraq. Now the tentacles reach Kuwait, a state that has long fancied itself a neutral trading post, a Switzerland in the sand. That illusion is over.
To understand this, we must look not to the White House or the Kremlin but to the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings. Iran does not think in election cycles. It thinks in imperial cycles. The drone strike is a test: how far can Tehran push before the West wakes up? It is the same calculus that drove the seizure of the Stena Impero tanker in 2019, the attack on Abqaiq in 2018. Each act is a little louder. Each boundary is a little further.
The West, of course, will do what the West always does. Convene. Condemn. Sanction. The UN Security Council will issue a statement of grave concern. The EU will express deep alarm. And Iran will smile because its strategy is built on a truth the globalist class refuses to accept: that the old order is dead. The Persian Gulf is no longer a lake patrolled by the US Navy. It is a contested sea where a drone costing a few thousand dollars can shut down an airport costing billions.
Let us not mince words. This is the peace of the graveyard. Every nation in the region knows that the next escalation is not a matter of if but when. Kuwait, a state founded on the principle of avoiding entanglements, now finds itself on the front line. Its airport, that gleaming symbol of Gulf commerce, has become a military target. No amount of oil wealth can buy back that security.
The parallels to the eve of the Great War are uncomfortable but instructive. In 1914, a minor act in Sarajevo triggered a cascade of alliances and miscalculations. In 2025, a drone over Kuwait may be the equivalent. Iran will claim it was a mistake. The US will send a carrier group. Bahrain and the UAE will close ranks. And the rest of us will watch as the old certainties dissolve into the sand.
We are not yet at war. But we are past the point of return. The drone over Kuwait is not a news story. It is a marker. History will look back and note the date, just as it notes the shot that rang out in Sarajevo. The question is whether we have the courage to read the writing on the wall before the wall comes down.
