{"id":174714,"date":"2026-03-09T10:27:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T18:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=174714"},"modified":"2026-03-13T09:29:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T17:29:27","slug":"zineba-riboua-trumps-middle-east-operation-epic-fury-is-the-logical-conclusion-of-trumps-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=174714","title":{"rendered":"Zineba Riboua: Trump’s Middle East: Operation Epic Fury is the Logical Conclusion of Trump’s Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zineb Riboua’s essay<\/a> explains Trump\u2019s strategy, legitimizes the war, and frames it as structural rather than impulsive.
\nHer biggest move it makes is rehabilitating Trump as a coherent actor rather than a chaotic one. The foreign policy establishment tends to describe Trump as erratic. Riboua rejects that frame entirely. Her argument is that Epic Fury is not an improvisation but the logical end point of a regional project that includes the Abraham Accords, the IMEC trade corridor, Gulf sovereign wealth integration, U.S. troop reductions, and the neutralization of Iran’s proxy network. The war, in her telling, is a structural prerequisite, not a reckless escalation.
\nHer reading of the word “deal” is central to the piece. Under Obama, a deal meant mutual concessions. Under Trump, a deal means the other side accepts his conditions. Once you accept that definition, the war stops looking like a surprise and starts looking like the next step after Iran said no. That is genuine intellectual work. It changes how you read the entire sequence of events.
\nShe builds a vision of the regional order Trump wants to create and calls it “Pax Silica,” a phrase worth examining. The idea is a Middle East organized around trade corridors, logistics networks, technology flows, and Gulf capital, all integrated into American-aligned economic blocs connecting the Indo-Pacific to Europe. Iran, in this framework, is not simply a hostile state but a structural spoiler. Its proxy network, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, Shiite militias in Iraq, gives Tehran what amounts to a veto over Arab normalization with Israel and the United States. Arab governments might want integration. Iran raises the cost until they hesitate. Epic Fury, she argues, removes that veto.
\nThe Palestinian dimension of her argument is worth slowing down on. She points out that Iran’s leverage over the Palestinian cause is not incidental. Tehran, a Shia, non-Arab regime, captured moral leadership over a cause rooted in Sunni Arab identity by making itself the principal armed sponsor of Palestinian resistance. That gave Iran a propaganda weapon it could deploy against any Arab government moving toward normalization, framing cooperation with Israel as civilizational betrayal. If Iran loses operational control over Palestinian armed factions, that weapon weakens. Stabilizing Gaza becomes politically necessary not just for Gaza but for the entire regional architecture.
\nHer logic reduces to a clean chain. Trump wants to leave the Middle East. Leaving requires a stable regional order. Iran’s network blocks that order. Therefore Epic Fury breaks the network. She compares this to Nixon’s Vietnam strategy or Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union, escalation used to enable eventual disengagement.
\nThe essay is well-constructed and aimed at a specific audience, people inside the foreign policy conversation who believe the war is impulsive. She is telling that audience that this is not chaos. It is structural strategy.
\nThe problem is the assumption the entire argument rests on. Riboua assumes that weakening Iran’s proxy network will produce the stable economic order she describes. History suggests that outcome is genuinely uncertain. Power vacuums rarely produce integration. They produce competition for the vacuum. Iraq after 2003 is the obvious counterexample. Removing a disruptive actor does not automatically create the conditions for the order you want. Someone else fills the space, or the space stays ungoverned and becomes a different kind of problem.
\nShe also builds Trump as a more coherent strategist than the evidence might support. The commenters on the piece raise a fair challenge. Does Pete Hegseth think at this level? Does Trump? The essay describes a theory of the campaign that might reflect Pentagon planning, or Riboua’s own analytical framework, or both. That is not a fatal flaw. Governments often pursue coherent strategic outcomes through incoherent decision-making. The question of whether Trump consciously pursues the Pax Silica vision or stumbles toward it matters less than whether the outcome is real. But the essay might overstate the degree to which a single unified vision drives the administration.
\nThe China piece she wrote<\/a> alongside this is the sharper of the two. Her argument there, that Epic Fury damages China’s ideological positioning as much as its material interests, cuts closer to something genuinely novel. Xi’s narrative of Western decline rested in part on Iran’s endurance under sanctions. If Washington removes an adversary in seventy-two hours, the narrative cracks. Beijing faces a messaging trap: condemn the action and look powerless, accept it and undermine the sovereignty doctrine it sells to the developing world. That is a real dilemma, even if she overstates how dependent China’s global strategy was on Iranian survival.
\nTaken together, the two pieces represent a coherent argument that the war reshapes not just the Middle East but the terms of great power competition. <\/p>\n

Zineb Riboua writes Mar. 4, 2026<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Three Reasons Operation Epic Fury Is Catastrophic for Xi<\/p>\n

First, the Iranian counterweight is gone. In 2021, Xi told senior Party officials that \u201cthe East is rising and the West is declining,\u201d that America was \u201cthe biggest source of chaos in the present-day world,\u201d and that China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was central to that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor, and above all, to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of CCP\u2019s dogma of inevitability, which rested on Iran\u2019s ability to endure, and Epic Fury removed the foundation in a single afternoon…<\/p>\n

Second, Xi\u2019s own story is collapsing from the inside. The story he told 1.4 billion people, that America is a declining power incapable of decisive force projection, does not match what happened in seventy-two hours over Tehran…<\/p>\n

Third, the energy math turns against Beijing. China bought 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year and takes over 80% of everything Iran ships. Half of China\u2019s total oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zineb Riboua’s essay explains Trump\u2019s strategy, legitimizes the war, and frames it as structural rather than impulsive. Her biggest move it makes is rehabilitating Trump as a coherent actor rather than a chaotic one. The foreign policy establishment tends to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[183],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iran"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174714"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175482,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174714\/revisions\/175482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}