Moroccan academic Dr. Tarek Lissaoui says the recent US-Iran confrontation ended not with an American triumph but with a negotiated pause that reveals how military superiority no longer guarantees political control, and he urges Arab states to draw a hard lesson about self-reliance.
In his latest assessment, published by Rai al-Youm, Lissaoui opens with the old fable of the sticks: one breaks easily, a bundle held together resists even strong hands.
That, he writes, is the law of states as much as families.
From Threats to a Repost
Lissaoui argues the turning point came within days. The United States, he notes, moved from rhetoric threatening to erase a deep-rooted Iranian civilization to a quieter moment on April 8, 2026, when President Donald Trump's official account on Truth Social, and the White House account on X, republished a statement by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
For Lissaoui, this was not a routine media step. It was an implicit acknowledgment that the Iranian paper had become central to crisis management. The episode, he writes, shows that "American power, for all its size, collided again with the truth that military superiority is not synonymous with the ability to produce a complete political victory."
Politicizing Geography and the Suez Moment
Iran's leverage, in his reading, did not come from battlefield wins alone. Tehran succeeded in tying energy security, navigation safety, Gulf stability, and oil and gas markets directly into the conflict equation. Any US escalation became costly not only for Iran but for the global economy.
This is what Lissaoui calls a deep politicization of geography. The Strait of Hormuz, he argues, was again read not merely as a shipping lane but as a knot where empires are tested.
He draws a deliberate parallel to 1956. The Suez Crisis, Lissaoui writes, did not prove that Britain and France could not strike, but that they could no longer turn a strike into stable political sovereignty. The crisis exposed the limits of British imperial power and opened the door to its regional retreat.
Today, he contends, Washington faces a similar revelation of limits.
Lissaoui is careful with language. Calling the outcome an Iranian victory, he stresses, is not celebratory. Iran paid heavy human, political and military costs. In the science of conflict, he explains, victory means a state under pressure, siege and fire prevented its opponent from reaching its highest political goal, forced a retreat from open war to conditional negotiation, and proved that breaking it is not low-cost.
"That is the meaning Arabs should read with a cool mind," he writes.
The Quiet Winners, The Wounded Gulf
The analysis widens beyond Tehran and Washington.
China, Lissaoui argues, is the deepest strategic beneficiary, not because it fought, but because every shake in Gulf security pushes the world toward what Beijing has pursued for years: diversifying energy routes, expanding transactions outside Western grip, and building trade, finance and transport networks not wholly under the US umbrella.
Russia also gains, he adds, citing a Reuters report quoting Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin that Middle East war disturbances have opened new commercial opportunities for Russia despite domestic price concerns. For Moscow, Lissaoui writes, any erosion of US dominance over corridors and energy markets is a chance to expand exports and reinforce its narrative that the West can no longer manage the world alone.
The other face, he warns, is Arab vulnerability. Gulf states that long believed money, alliances and foreign bases could form a firewall suddenly found themselves within range of missiles and drones. Lissaoui states a clear moral position: "We condemn any attack on an Arab state, whatever its source, because Arab peoples' security is not a bargaining chip."
Politically, however, he argues that losing alliances carry prices, and total reliance on external protection, especially when paired with security normalization, does not create sustainable security but deferred fragility that appears at the moment of testing.
More dangerous than direct fire, he writes, is the long investment in sectarian and identity wounds after the war. The region stands at the edge of a new cycle of political exploitation of the Sunni-Shia divide.
His advice to thinkers across the Gulf, Mashreq and Maghreb is to separate two things: recognizing Iran's strategic gain against Washington, and refusing any act that widens internal Arab and Islamic rifts. Reading everything through a sectarian lens is unwise, he says, and so is covering everything with a victory banner.
The Lesson of the Sticks and Morocco's bet
Lissaoui returns to his opening fable for the Arab takeaway.
Nations, he argues, are not built by slogans, speeches or media chatter, but by long work, investment in people, building research institutions, developing industry, formulating a clear security doctrine, and readiness to pay the price of blood when battle is imposed.
The Iranian experience, whatever disagreements one has with it, teaches that sovereignty is not a gift, he writes. The Arab and Islamic region has never been easy for empires to digest, from Iraq to Afghanistan to the Gulf, yet that fact has not become an Arab project of self-strength. It has been lost to divisions and reliance on outsiders.
What is needed, he contends, is not emotional talk of unity but a practical program of clustering: gradual Arab defense integration, an Arab arms industry, food and energy security, intelligence coordination, a less dependent foreign policy, and freezing secondary disputes when existential danger appears. Israel, he adds, by the nature of its settlement and expansionist project, cannot be a guarantor of regional stability but is structurally a permanent detonator.
"Separate sticks break. If gathered, they can change the balance of power, even if after a while," Lissaoui concludes.
He closes with a note on his own country. Morocco, he writes, faces both opportunity and responsibility. Not far from Gulf, energy and trade shocks, it holds geographic position, African depth, and Atlantic and European ties that allow calmer, more independent strategic movement.
To benefit from a post-Hormuz world, Lissaoui argues, Morocco needs political courage with wisdom: diversifying partnerships, strengthening industry, investing in food and energy security, and expanding its defense and technological base. What happens in the Gulf should be read not as a distant crisis but as an alarm bell that the era of free political comfort is over.
Lissaoui says he will continue unpacking these shifts in his weekly program "Economy in Politics," broadcast Mondays at 19:00 Morocco time, 20:00 Jerusalem time, on youtube.com/@TarikLissaoui.