Where the Iran war - and NZ - fit into a shifting world order

Friday, 6 March 2026

Reuben Steff is associate professor at Mendel University, Czech Republic. He is author of New Zealand’s Geopolitics and the US-China Competition.

OPINION: In recent days, criticism in New Zealand has followed a familiar pattern. The latest US and Israeli strikes are charged as reckless, destabilising and symptomatic of Donald Trump’s volatility. They are framed as breaches of international law and a further assault against the “rules-based order”.

To be clear: escalation in the Middle East carries real risk, and smaller states are right to worry when major powers resort to force. It sets dangerous precedents.

But getting stuck in the day-to-day outrage of events can leave people captured by ideology — moral certainty on one side, tribal reflex on the other — rather than able to see the deeper and more consistent logic of international affairs.

What we are living through is not merely “news.” It is history in motion: a longer-term human drama in which power, fear, ambition and geography recur with regularity.

What we are witnessing is not simply episodic militarism. It reflects the consolidation of a multipolar international system — and a corresponding shift in US grand strategy with world-historical consequences, including for New Zealand.

From liberal absolutism to multipolar realism

For much of the post–Cold War era, US policy sought to perpetuate liberal primacy: the assumption that American power could sustain a universal, rules-based order, expand democratic norms, and deter all challengers.

The Biden administration attempted to adhere to that framework rhetorically and strategically. It framed global politics as a contest between democracy and autocracy, emphasised multilateralism, and sought to defend a liberal international order as a moral project.

The distribution of material power no longer supports such unipolar liberal absolutism.

China is an industrial peer competitor with increasingly global reach. Russia has demonstrated its willingness to use force to revise the European security order. Iran has built a regional proxy network capable of imposing costs across the Middle East, while edging toward nuclear capability.

It is no longer a world of outright US dominance. As Washington adjusts to structural constraints, rhetorical alignment with universal norms is increasingly treated as optional – and potentially a distraction.

Trump’s foreign policy reflects this structural adjustment. It is more recognisably 19th-century: transactional, balance-of-power oriented and openly interest-based. Alliance commitments become more conditional; burden-sharing is enforced. Adversaries are engaged selectively, sometimes opportunistically. Deals can be reached. Rivals are not automatically cast as metaphysical evil villains demanding a permanent crusade and indefinite regime-change wars.

This is not merely stylistic. Trump’s actions reflect a narrowing margin of US structural advantage. Periods of power transition are historically volatile. If US policymakers judge that relative advantages may erode over the next decade, acting now — even at the expense of rules and norms — can appear strategically rational.

In international politics, credibility is a currency that depreciates fast. Deterrence, after all, depends not only on capability, but on demonstrated willingness to use force at times.

The strikes on Iran fit this logic: they signal that the US is prepared to impose costs on regional actors integrated into the Russia–China–Iran alignment. Trump’s simultaneous willingness to negotiate with Tehran is also consistent with transactional realism. Coercion and diplomacy are not opposites; they are levers. One applies pressure, the other tries to reach a compromise.

This differs from liberal internationalism, which prioritises institutional legitimacy.

Transactional realism prioritises outcomes.

Three interconnected theatres in a multipolar contest

The US–Israeli strikes on Iran can also be understood within a broader arc stretching across three Eurasian crisis zones: Ukraine, the Middle East and the Western Pacific.

In Ukraine, Russia is supported materially by Iranian drones, North Korean munitions and deepened economic alignment with China, the latter being the critical enabler of Russia’s ability to perpetuate the war via shipment of dual-use goods.

The war has become the principal European front in a systemic contest over the balance of power.

In the Western Pacific, China’s military expansion — particularly naval shipbuilding (alongside rapid advances in autonomous systems, including drone swarms) and missile capabilities designed to deter Taiwan contingencies — is reshaping the regional balance. Beijing sees reunification with Taiwan as central to regime legitimacy and to securing a platform for maritime power projection.

The Middle East forms the third front. Iran has spent decades building a proxy ecosystem for strategic depth. The coordinated US–Israeli strikes targeting military and command infrastructure represent a calculated attempt to degrade that network and reassert deterrence.

These theatres are not isolated. Actions in one send signals in the others. In a multipolar environment, deterrence credibility compounds: demonstrated willingness to use force in one region affects calculations not only in Tehran, but in Moscow and Beijing.

In that sense, each theatre is a chapter in the same book — and each strike, sanction, and deployment is read by multiple audiences.

Trump’s engagement with Moscow can also be interpreted structurally rather than sentimentally. If China represents the primary long-term challenger, preventing Russia from becoming wholly subordinate to Beijing has strategic value. Even partial separation complicates China’s ability to consolidate a continental bloc across Eurasia.

Whether this approach succeeds is uncertain, but it aligns with classical balance-of-power strategy: prevent consolidation among key competitors.

Implications for New Zealand and why clarity matters

For New Zealand, the instinct is often to interpret crises through a normative lens: legality, rhetoric and adherence to international law. Those considerations matter. But in a multipolar system, structure increasingly constrains outcomes, and power realities shape what is possible regardless of what is preferable.

New Zealand’s trade routes, intelligence relationships and defence interoperability sit inside a US-anchored strategic system that — though imperfect — has supported Indo-Pacific stability for decades.

If that system weakens through deterrence failure across connected theatres, smaller states will not be insulated. Energy shocks, supply chain disruption and coercion would reach even distant economies.

The question for Wellington is not whether escalation is uncomfortable; it is whether New Zealand understands the trade-offs in an era where liberal primacy has given way to multipolar competition.

If the Biden era was a final attempt to sustain liberal primacy, Trump 2.0 reflects a pivot toward multipolar realism: a more openly transactional approach in which leverage, industrial capacity and credibility matter at least as much as normative consensus.

That is unsettling because it exposes the limits of institutions when great powers perceive core interests at stake.

Many former New Zealand officials and long-standing commentators are understandably uneasy. For decades, the Pacific functioned as a de facto US security zone, confidence in multilateral rules was high, and distance — combined with diplomacy — provided strategic depth.

A world of explicit great-power bargaining, where conflict risk is a recurring instrument, can feel like a retreat from principles New Zealand has defended.

But discomfort is not a strategy. If anything, it is a warning light: it tells us our inherited mental model is being stress-tested. This is precisely why unvarnished clarity is essential. The stakes are trade access, energy security, intelligence partnerships, and the stability of the South Pacific – our region of existential importance – itself.

The era of uncontested Western primacy has ended. A multipolar order is consolidating. New Zealand’s debate — and its policy responses — should begin from that premise, with our eyes raised up from the daily headlines and fixed on the longer arc of history now reasserting itself.