The Atlantic's Eliot Cohen starts his article on the consequences of Israel's war with Iran by quoting Winston Churchill from his biography of his beloved ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. 

“Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth … But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.” 

Wars bring change. This has been true since Neolithic tribes fought battles over prime hunting grounds 15,000 years ago. What makes this so ironic is that many wars have been fought to stave off change. The South fought the American Civil War to maintain an economic system based on chattel slavery. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s was horrifically bloody. Still, it ended up with the borders unchanged and Iraq, the aggressor, unable to change anything about its relationship with the Iranian regime.

Many leaders who start wars believing they can control the change end up themselves on the ash heap of history. Hitler believed he could control events and thus the outcome of his wars of conquest. He was mentally ill, of course. His malignant narcissism blinded him to the realities of the forces that had been unleashed 25 years earlier when a pimply-faced kid put a bullet in Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, setting off a chain of events that carried the world along until Soviet Russia dissolved in 1991. 

Not all change is sudden. The "Great Migration" of black Americans from the South to the North lasted over 50 years, profoundly altering the economy, culture, and consciousness of both regions. But the Israel-Iran War has the potential to reshape the entire Middle East.

It's a change that has already begun, thanks to the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020. In light of the Arab states that are part of the Accords, as well as several that aren't but would like to be, Iran's war to "recover Islamic Lands" from the Jews seems like ancient history. The "Resistance" has failed on every level. And "solidarity" with the Palestinians has given way to self-interest. 

Time Magazine:

The problem, for both Iran and the Palestinian cause, is that the rest of the Middle East had already come to the same conclusion. During the two decades Iran was extending its military reach in the name of the Palestinians, the wealthy kingdoms of the Persian Gulf had been making common cause with the Jewish state. 

The fact is, most of the Arab world had made some accommodation or other with Israel. Egypt and Jordan, which share borders with Israel, signed peace treaties with it after suffering repeated military defeats at its hands. The Gulf states aligned with Israel in large part out of a shared enmity for Iran. As home to Islam’s dominant Sunni branch, the kingdoms know Iran not only as radical, but as the nominal leaders of the minority Shi‘ite branch, and thus a rival. Saudi Arabia, custodian of Islam’s holy sites, has its own claim to leadership of the world’s Muslims.

It's hard to fathom the enormity of this change when placed against Middle Eastern history over the last 50 years. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War, with its oil boycott of Western nations that supported Israel, unleashed Arab nationalism that gave us the Iranian theocracy, militant Sunni Islam, and Shiite fundamentalism that have roiled the region and ignited several conflicts, as well as bringing pain and suffering to the West.

The Israel-Iran War promises to not only reshape the politics of the region but perhaps, finally, lift the veil of denial that has afflicted Western "realists" for the last 15 years.

Related: Trump Says He Will Decide Whether to Bomb Iran 'Within Two Weeks.' Why the Hesitation?

Eliot Cohen has spent 35 years sounding the alarm about Iran.

The Atlantic:

When I served as counselor of the State Department during the second Bush administration, I had, among other keepsakes on my desk, an Iranian banknote picked up in Dubai. When I held it up to the light, I could see the sign of an atom superimposed over a map of Iran, with its nucleus roughly over Natanz, site of the major Iranian centrifuge hall. The banknote was a symbol of the determination that successive American governments chose to ignore, preferring to negotiate with a regime whose bad faith and malevolence were plain for those willing to see. The Iranian regime was happy to delay and temporize, but its destination was clearly visible in the expanding overt and covert programs to enrich uranium, design warheads, and develop delivery systems.

Equally visible was Tehran’s desire to destroy Israel. It takes a particular kind of idiocy or bad faith to disregard the speeches, propaganda, and shouts of “death to Israel.” The Israeli lesson learned from the previous century—and, indeed, the Jewish one learned over a much longer span of time—is that if someone says they want to exterminate you, they mean it. And so Israel has acted in ways that have had three dramatic consequences.

War is a tidal wave that, as it recedes after hitting inland, leaves an altered shoreline behind it. At the moment, the new shoreline is unknowable. All we're sure of is that it will have changed from what it was.

Adapting to that new reality is the challenge.