When American and Israeli forces struck Iran in February 2026, Western commentators immediately began asking how long the conflict would last and what the “exit strategy” was, or arguing that the United States should no longer involve itself in futile “forever wars” in the Middle East. This “no forever wars” stance reflects a modern Western demand for finite wars, juxtaposed with their adversaries’ “long war” mindset. From the communists’ “protracted conflict” to the Iranian regime’s apocalyptic jihad, the West’s authoritarian enemies see war as including continuous subversion and influence, blurring the lines between war and peace. To realistically face its future, the West must come to terms with this “total war” approach.
The Anti-West Axis
The axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea has already been “at war” with the West for decades. Anti-West ideological slurs such as “colonialism” and “imperialism” mask a universal conflict between nations in economic and cultural competition, increasingly coordinated to amplify their collective challenge to U.S. power. Off the kinetic battlefield, foreign malign influence operations have progressively targeted U.S. civil society through proxy funding of nonprofits, coordinated disinformation, and orchestrated activism to erode domestic support for American policies and sow internal divisions. These actions continue the war of subversion that began in the Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States, when communist powers saw themselves in a “protracted conflict” against “imperialist” adversaries. Sunni Muslim Islamists — from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Salafi ISIS — and the Shiite Iranian Islamic regime, deeply influenced by the Left, adopted their methods for the prosecution of their own “forever war”: jihad.
The Eastern War Continuum
Prussian military theorist Carl Clausewitz expressed the Western military tradition: war was a continuation of “politics by other means” — a rational, finite instrument concluded by treaty. Post-World War II Western strategic culture assumes that peace is the default state and war is the aberration. The fall of the Soviet Union reinforced this assumption. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 “The End of History” argued that the collapse of the USSR heralded the triumph of liberal democracy and the obsolescence of great-power conflict. While the West projects its finite concept of war onto the East, in the post-Cold War competition, the East continues to live by the doctrine of protracted conflict. Mao Zedong’s 1938 On Protracted War argued that weaker forces defeat stronger ones by stretching conflict across time and space — making war long, costly, and exhausting the enemy’s patience. Leninist doctrine added that peace between capitalism and socialism is always tactical, never final.
In this spirit, Islam’s protracted conflict is jihad, a holy war waged to conquer non-Islamic land. Jihad is only interrupted by sulh, a temporary peace treaty, or hudna (truce) — both tactical instruments, not permanent resolutions. Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution institutionalized this framework. Both Shia and Sunni Islamists share the conviction that jihad is a forever war, a divinely ordained struggle with no off-switch until ultimate victory or the end of days. Khomeini made the doctrine explicit: “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.” And: “The Quran commands: ‘War! War until victory!’ A religion without war is a crippled religion.” His successor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, reaffirmed it in 2014: “Battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist…This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it…This requires a difficult and lengthy struggle.”
Sunni Islamists draw from the same mandate. Sayyid Qutb, the leading ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote that “Jihad… was not something accidental to the particular period which witnessed the advent of Islam. It is a permanent need, inherent in the nature of the Islamic faith,” describing it as “an unending state of war because truth and falsehood cannot co-exist on this earth.”
Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Brotherhood, declared in his tract on jihad: “By jihad, I mean that divinely ordained obligation which is reflected in the following saying of the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) and which Muslims are to carry out until the Day of Judgement… Whoever dies without struggling in the Way of Allah, or wishing to do so, dies a Pre-Islamic Jahiliya death.” These writings still animate today’s Sunni networks — whether in Qatar’s clandestine patronage of Brotherhood-linked groups or among Salafi extremists — for whom a truce is merely hudna, a tactical pause in the eternal fight.
This theological engine of perpetual jihad has been reinforced by its intersection with postmodern leftist thought. Professor Waller Newell’s prophetic 2001 essay “Postmodern Jihad” showed how al-Qaeda’s ideology fused radical Islamist calls for a return to seventh-century purity with European postmodernist ideas — Heidegger’s rejection of modernity, Sartre and Fanon’s celebration of purifying revolutionary violence. The result is a hybrid mentality in which both Shia and Sunni jihadis, like their leftist fellow travelers, view negotiation or peace as betrayal — ensuring the war continues indefinitely.
Insights for the 21st Century from the Cold War Scholars
Cold War scholars who studied communist subversion produced a body of work that can be instructive to the West in the twenty-first century. They identified patterns still apparent in Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence operations and Western vulnerability to them.
Stefan Possony recognized that in the West: “The military tradition has failed to recognize that war is a subcategory of conflict, and that conflict is a sociological process which the strategist seeks to influence.” If war is understood purely as organized armed violence between states, a vast range of adversarial activities — propaganda, infiltration, economic pressure, political subversion, cultural warfare — fall outside the scope of strategic response. Once conflict is understood as a sociological process, all its instruments are weapons to be countered. Possony enumerated the non-battle arsenal that dissolved the differentiation between war and peace: demoralization, immobilization, infiltration, disorganization, diversion, provocation, treason, paralysis, and surrender. “These non-battle techniques,” he wrote, “must be regarded as preparations, substitutes, supplements, and continuations of battle.”
Possony also identified how communists politically mobilized alienated individuals to channel personal pathology into political activity, simplifying and abstracting information to sever society from a shared reality. This “revolution of madness” maps onto the contemporary social media ecosystem — mass disorientation, social atomization, the erosion of shared epistemic authority, producing vulnerability to conspiracy theories and their promoters. “Major catastrophes such as war and disease,” Possony observed, “could create greater neuroses” — exploitable by revolutionary actors who do not create the conditions, but aggravate them.
How can the West fight subversion? Geopolitical theorist Strausz-Hupé was concerned with methods of countering rampant anti-Western propaganda. He noted that the Western assumption that “the truth will prevail” through honest, frontal rhetorical persuasion did not hold up to the communists’ pervasive, subconscious methods of psychological warfare. Writing in Protracted Conflict (1959), Strausz-Hupé et al. observed that communists “simplify and sloganize their messages, employ exaggerations, distortions, sensationalism, human interest stories, and scapegoats, and slant the messages according to situations and target.” More crucially, they aimed to divide society into hostile groups and to “atomize” individuals, making them vulnerable to influence and destroying “national consciences in the Free World.” Soviet political warfare used a “guilt complex” to induce Westerners to criticize their own wars as unjust while accepting communist wars as legitimate “liberation struggles.”
Modern “Forever War”: Gibridnaya Voyna and Three Warfares
Today, Russia interprets hybrid warfare as gibridnaya voyna — a seamless, multifaceted military, political, and informational approach to war. As former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Nadia Schadlow has argued, the American tendency to categorize Russian disinformation, economic pressure, and proxy provocations as isolated events “below the threshold of war” has made them difficult to counter. In China, the Three Warfares doctrine — psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare — was formalized in the People’s Liberation Army in 2003. Continuing in Sun Tzu’s line of thought, the doctrine aims to defeat the enemy before physical confrontation, by shaping his beliefs, controlling the information environment, and weaponizing international legal norms. The vehicle for this campaign is the United Front Work Department, Mao’s “magic weapon” that aims to implant favorable views of China in foreign audiences through Confucius Institutes, student associations, and influence operations. (Qatar’s academic influence, media network, and conference circuits are a similar Muslim Brotherhood influence model.)
Chinese, Russian, and Iranian strategic influence places high importance on crafting messages for specific audiences: Russia has depicted itself as a traditional Christian nation to right-wing Americans; China has presented itself as an equitable society to left-wing Americans. In a striking illustration of Possony’s “united front” concept — different labels for different audiences, same strategic destination — Tucker Carlson has endorsed multipolarity, argued that America must share power with China, and characterized Islamic terrorism as a product of colonialism, reproducing verbatim Muslim Brotherhood and postcolonial Left talking points. Left-wing commentators noted with surprise that they agreed with him. During the Cold War, dedicated American communists worked hard to build fronts and amplify Soviet and Maoist propaganda. Today’s “useful idiots” are online, easily pulled into the web of narrative subversion set for them by America’s foes.
The Cost of a Low Pain Threshold
The information campaigns surrounding Operation Epic Fury induce division, disorientation, and distrust. The online anti-war coalition has projected American weakness to enemy nations with a forever-war mentality. These war-weary reactions represent the strategic victory of foreign influence operations, which aim not only to condemn the current war but to destroy its history and moral bedrock. Will the West sustain its will to resist permanent adversaries if it possesses, in the words of Wall Street Journal editor-at-large Gerard Baker, a “low pain threshold” for conflict? The West is faced with adversaries who disregard the cost of individual lives and, in Iran’s case, possible economic ruin, while pursuing power and ideological end goals. The West’s desire for expediency and closure reveals a civilizational vulnerability — one that adversaries have studied, modeled, and systematically cultivated. Possony wrote that historically, many wars were decided not on the battlefield but on “the moral collapse of leadership or troops and populace.”
Sources
Crist, D. (2012) The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran. New York: Penguin Books.
De Atkine, N. B. (n.d.) ‘Historical Considerations in Understanding Iran’s Military and Their Way of War’. [Paper written for ASMEA]
Halm, H. (1997) Shi‘a Islam: From Religion to Revolution. Princeton: Marcus Weiner.
Keegan, J. (1993) The History of Warfare. New York: Knopf.
Possony, S. T. (1970) People’s War: The Art of Combining Partisan-Military, Psycho-Social and Political Conquest Techniques. Taipei: World Anti-Communist League.
Strausz-Hupé, R., Kintner, W. R., Dougherty, J. E. and Cottrell, A. J. (1959) Protracted Conflict. New York: Harper & Brothers.
