As well as being one of the greatest chess players of all time, Garry Kasparov is a Russian dissident, a bestselling author, and—as of this April—a Substacker. Kasparov’s blog is called The Next Move, and it’s all about its author’s great cause: the fight for a free society. To subscribe, click here.
We’re honored to republish this essay, an analysis of the global chessboard after Israel’s strike on Iran’s nuclear program. We hope you find it as clarifying as we did.
—The Editors
Pour one out for Ben Rhodes. In some ways, The World as It Is is a perfect title for the longtime Obama foreign policy adviser’s memoir, because the illusion of the status quo is all that Rhodes and his fellow travelers could ever stomach in geopolitics. But it was always just that: an illusion. Rhodes never really looked at the world as it is; he simply imagined a facade of post–Cold War stability. The historic Israeli military campaign against Iran that began last week represents another crack in that facade, joining the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, and the Arab Spring.
After spending the past year and a half knocking out one Iranian proxy after another, Israel has dealt the Islamic Republic a heavy blow in recent days. Not just militarily, but politically too. Israeli forces killed a number of senior officials in Tehran, including the chief of staff of the military, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force, and a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And that was just in the first few hours. I suspect that the occupational hazards associated with employment in the Iranian government will continue to grow with each passing day.
Now that the Islamic Republic is severely weakened, the alarmist foreign policy commentariat is apprising us of the unacceptable risks, raising their well-worn red flags. (Or should I say white flags?) “Escalation!” “Global war!” And the ultimate enemy of the status quo: “regime change!” In the shadow of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, I don’t doubt that Rhodes and some like him had good intentions, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with.
