It poses the most significant geopolitical threat to the West.
Kenin Spivak’s response to my piece, “Striking Iran Would Be a Mistake,” reflects a familiar but, I believe, strategically short-sighted instinct within American foreign policy: the belief that forceful action against a dangerous regime, if justified morally or militarily, must also be wise geopolitically. But as I argued, and will expand upon here, the deeper question confronting the United States is not merely whether Iran goes nuclear, but whether the geopolitical structure of Eurasia becomes locked into a sinocentric configuration—one that fuses Iranian energy, Russian military-industrial depth, and Chinese strategic coordination into a single bloc capable of overturning the Western-led order.
The real catastrophe is not Iran’s enrichment centrifuges—it is China’s encirclement of the West.
This is not to diminish the dangers posed by an Iranian bomb. Tehran’s theocratic regime is expansionist and anti-Western, and has shown every willingness to use proxies to destabilize the region. But Spivak’s formulation treats Iran in isolation—as though it is 2006 again and the global balance of power is unchanged. That world is gone. The fusion of Iranian technical ambitions with Chinese strategic shelter is already underway. A preemptive U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear infrastructure would, at this late stage, likely do little to halt the regime’s ambitions, but would almost certainly drive Tehran even more deeply into the arms of Beijing. Far from deterring the rise of a regional nuclear power, such a move would cement a Eurasian entente built on American overextension and diplomatic myopia.
The geopolitical framework that undergirds my argument is not novel. Over a century ago, Halford Mackinder warned that whoever controls the “Heartland,” the vast Eurasian core stretching from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, controls the world. What makes that logic urgent again is the rapid rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, its expanding naval presence in the Indian Ocean, and its increasingly formalized energy and defense arrangements with both Iran and Russia. Iran is not a rogue outlier in this vision—it is a strategic keystone. Its geography makes it indispensable; its isolation from the West makes it pliable.
A Eurasian bloc anchored by Beijing, powered by Russian resources and Iranian energy corridors, and flanked by sympathetic regimes across the Global South represents a tectonic shift in the global order. It would give China uncontested access to Europe’s eastern flank, allow it to control chokepoints from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bosporus, and fatally weaken the United States’s ability to project force across either the Indo-Pacific or the Middle East.
Spivak may rightly ask: Is the U.S. to do nothing, then? My answer is the opposite. We must do something—but the “something” must be coherent within a broader strategy that takes China, not Iran, as the principal adversary. A realist strategy does not confuse the enemy’s lieutenant for the general. It isolates the lieutenant, contains his movements, and prevents him from integrating fully into the enemy’s battle plan. A strike on Iran, without this broader vision, would achieve the reverse.
My critics may assume that my caution reflects a Christian moralism or isolationist timidity. But the tradition I write from, rooted in both the strategic realism of Cold War prudence and the moral realism of Augustinian statecraft, knows the difference between restraint and surrender. The Cold War was won not through preemptive strikes, but through containment, competition, and the patient exploitation of internal contradictions within our adversaries’ camp.
And to be fair, oversteps happened during the Cold War that we are still paying for. Africa is a disaster due somewhat to our overeagerness. Rhodesia was in every way preferable to what followed, and Israel was on the right side of that conflict. We have treated the world as our toy too often, with misadventures like Odyssey Dawn and the resulting chaos that has followed. Who knows what bills will come due from writing hot checks in Libya.
The current goal must be to prevent the solidification of a Eurasian axis that would not be dislodged without global war. That means isolating Iran economically and diplomatically, perhaps, but also offering off-ramps, as Nixon did with China, that prevent it from becoming wholly dependent on Beijing. It means strengthening regional coalitions among Arab states and bolstering India as a counterweight, as even now China is supporting Pakistan in the conflict with India. Goals must reflect the American interest and the survival of the West, with the U.S. as its champion. Therefore, the Middle East cannot be allowed to drift into the gravitational field of Chinese hegemony. But the method of preventing that drift is not a kinetic strike that does nothing to deter China and everything to accelerate Iranian dependency on it.
One final point, which speaks to my perspective as a Christian realist: I do not see Israel as a theological sibling. I see it as a civilizational partner, a bulwark of the West in a region hostile to its deepest commitments. The survival of Israel is not simply a moral imperative but a strategic one. A Eurasian order dominated by China, with Iran as a vassal and Russia as an enabler, would not only endanger Western energy routes and political influence, but it also would encircle Israel with regimes emboldened by American weakness and strategically aligned against the liberal order that Israel helps embody in the region. Israel would then face the difficult choice of siding with its soul or acting out of mere survival necessity.
Leo Strauss understood this danger. For Strauss, the West was not merely a cultural label; it was a philosophical inheritance grounded in the tension between Jerusalem and Athens. The destruction of that inheritance at the hands of Eurasian autocracies would not only be a defeat for America or for Israel—it would be a defeat for the very possibility of ordered liberty.
It has been suggested, if perhaps obliquely, that to argue against a strike on Iran is to argue for Israeli restraint. But that assumes the only form of solidarity with Israel is to endorse its every military option, regardless of broader consequences. I reject that premise. The true measure of alliance is not flattery but foresight. The strategic goal we share with Israel is not a theatrical show of resolve, but the long-term containment of a civilizational threat. That threat is not Iran alone, but the architecture of power that binds Iran ever more closely to Beijing and Moscow. To prevent that alignment from becoming permanent is not to restrain Israel, but to preserve the very strategic environment that makes Israeli sovereignty viable.
In choosing to strike Iran now, without a coherent Eurasian strategy, there may be the possibility of a tactical victory. But we would likely lose the world that would make such a victory meaningful. It is far better to contain Iran within a global strategy aimed at keeping Eurasia divided and China constrained. That is the imperative demanded by reality. That is the only path that secures the interests of the United States, of the West, and of the small but vital state of Israel. This is not in spite of any differences, but because of our shared civilizational fate.
The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.
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