‘How Ukraine and Iran rewrote the rules of war’

This is apropos a letter to the Editor titled ‘How Ukraine and Iran rewrote the rules of war’ carried by the newspaper on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and yesterday.

The experiences of Ukraine and Iran are likely to influence strategic thinking across the globe. Some major powers may conclude that conventional military superiority is no longer sufficient to guarantee desired outcomes. Some smaller powers may conclude that international law alone cannot guarantee security. Both conclusions risk producing the same result: increased reliance on nuclear weapons.

For nuclear-armed states, the temptation may arise to rely more heavily upon nuclear deterrence when conventional coercion proves insufficient. For non-nuclear states, the lesson may be that survival ultimately requires acquiring a nuclear capability of their own. Such a trend would be extraordinarily dangerous.

For this reason, the long-term lesson of these conflicts should not be nuclear expansion but renewed nuclear disarmament. A stable international system cannot permanently rest upon a hierarchy in which some states possess ultimate weapons while others do not. Lasting security requires moving toward a universally applied and verifiable framework that reduces and ultimately eliminates nuclear arsenals.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026