Different, Deadly Games

With the American-Israeli assault on Iran, the die is cast.

By Hamid DabashiMarch 16, 2026

• Politics

A Triangulated Game

IN THE PERSIAN EPIC poem the Shahnameh (the Book of Kings), completed in 1010 CE by the master poet-storyteller Abolqasem Ferdowsi, we read the account of how the game of chess came to Iran during the reign of the Sassanid king Anushirvan (reigned 531–79 CE). As a test of wits, the Indian sages sent the game they had invented without any instructions, challenging their Persian counterparts to figure it out or else declare fealty. No one at Anushirvan’s royal court could crack it except his wise and brilliant vizier Bozorgmher, who decoded the game and, in turn, invented one of his own, backgammon, which he sent back to India, telling the sages, wit for wit, that life is comprised not merely of meditation, like chess, but also of chance, like his own backgammon! It was, apparently, a civilized moment in world history, when potential adversaries might test each other’s minds rather than dropping bombs on schools and hospitals.

On February 28 of this year, President Donald Trump of the United States and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel waged an unprovoked and illegal war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the writing of these words, upwards of 1,000 Iranian civilians have been murdered in the conflict. Among the fatalities are at least 168 primary schoolchildren, teachers, and parents at Shajareh Tayyebeh in Minab in Southern Iran, an act that appeared like an extension of Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza over the past two years.

Iranians have a very long historical memory. In their minds, this invasion is now compared with the Alexander campaign of 334 BCE, the Arab conquest of the seventh century CE, the Mongol invasion of the 13th, or the Russo-Persian Wars of the early 19th century. But if the Alexander invasion eventually led to the rise of the masterpieces of Persian Alexander romances of Ferdowsi, Nizami, and Jami; or the Arab conquest eventually gave rise to the glorious Iranian dimensions of Islamic civilization; or the Mongol invasion prepared the groundwork for the splendors of Persian art, architecture, philosophy, and poetry; or even the Russian encounter brought Iranians Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, what accompanies Trump and Netanyahu’s invasion of Iran? Perhaps the yet-to-be-fully-studied Epstein files!

How is this war being played out? How are we to understand it in the context of regional geopolitics and the domestic politics of the three belligerent parties? To come to terms with the unfolding events, we need to understand the triangulated game that Trump, Netanyahu, and, before his demise, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been playing at the heavy cost of raining death and destruction on millions of human beings. It’s a deadly game we are watching on our news feeds these days, and chess and backgammon are not the only apt metaphors. We also have poker, a game of confidence and deception. Trump thinks he is a master manipulator and bluffer with a big-enough stack of chips to force all to fold. He played that game in Venezuela and succeeded. He tried it with Greenland and Canada and lost. He thinks he can bluff his way through life and remain luxuriously afloat. So far, Iran has not folded. The state did not collapse after Israelis and Americans assassinated Khamenei and his family and scores of other officials. The ayatollah appears to have engineered a defense mechanism that is working well to defend his homeland. Meanwhile, in the clumsy chess game Netanyahu plays, he fancies himself King David, seducing Trump to move his army like a coquettish queen, with Germany and the United Kingdom his bishops, knights, and rooks, and the American army his pawns. Israel supposes that it knows how Iranians are playing, but it does not. They are playing an entirely different game, a desperate match of asymmetrical backgammon. Their hands are tied because the entire regime is a calamitous theocracy having shot itself in the foot for 40-plus years, crushing its civil society rather than putting it to good use.

Three military forces—one outgunned and reduced—have entered a deadly battlefield with no end in sight: Iran defending its territorial integrity and political sovereignty; the United States flexing its military muscle, itching to return to action after the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and from Iraq in 2011; and Israel ever expanding the nonexistent frontiers of its garrison state deeper into Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran. It is hard to exaggerate the historic significance amid the bald-faced vulgarity of two nuclear powers waging war on a country on the pretense that it might, in the future, develop nuclear capabilities. Whatever their stated goals and presumed strategies, these three parties are playing three vastly different games on a shared board, entirely oblivious of what the others are playing.

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Trump Playing Bad Poker

Trump thinks he is a smart poker player. He is not. He is transparently clumsy, and though his behavior is unpredictable, it is generally safe to bet on TACO: “Trump Always Chickens Out.” He does not have the moral courage, the political imagination, or the perseverance to last beyond a bit of bluster and a huff and a puff before turning around to rush to another atrocity.

Trump deludes himself that he has a poker face. But his hand is doomed. The United States under Trump is a deeply fragmented nation. Israeli agents and supporters, as well as propaganda outfits like The New York Times, are in the business of projecting a unified front on behalf of Israel and manufacturing consent for war with Iran on behalf of their favorite garrison state. But the harder they try to stage such consent, the weaker and less convincing their case becomes. Repeated polls show that the majority of Americans oppose this war. More importantly, the MAGA base is falling apart, and the growing popularity of voices like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens reveals how the America First agenda is increasingly at odds with Israel First. Militant Zionists like Ben Shapiro may have met their match in far-right nationalists such as Tucker Carlson.

This fragmentation will cost Republicans and Donald Trump heavily in midterm elections. Active opposition to Israeli warmongering today spans from left to right in the United States and includes some of the center as well. The ruling political parties are failing to recognize and respond to this fact. AIPAC and other Israeli boosters are hard at work to alter or conceal that fact, but the days of unconditional support for Israel in the United States seem to be over. The best evidence for that fact is the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York. Mamdani won by a significant margin to become the first Muslim mayor of the city, refusing to back down from his strong criticisms of Israel and his defense of Palestinian rights. Mamdani’s election has reverberated through the rest of the country and Europe. Trump tried to ingratiate himself with Mamdani, but the battle lines are clear. Even centrist California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democratic presidential hopeful, just called Israel an apartheid state and questioned unconditional military support for it. Kamala Harris’s support for the Biden administration’s pro-Israel policies and her failure to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide cost her significantly, particularly among young voters, according to the party’s own autopsy of the campaign. This kind of blind support for Israel will likely continue to haunt the Democratic Party even as Trump’s lame-duck presidency is only months away.

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Netanyahu Playing Clumsy Chess

Israel’s vulnerability as a settler colony and the clumsy chess game Netanyahu is playing are no less evident. Israel has massive propaganda machinery at its disposal on both sides of the Atlantic to project power and endurance, and, courtesy of American taxpayers, billions of dollars in military aid to massacre Palestinians and bomb Lebanon and Syria at will. Yet record numbers of Israelis are leaving the country as public opinion in Europe and the United States has been turning against Israel. In its character and disposition, Israel has, from its very inception, been a settler colony, dependent on its European and American benefactors. But the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its incessant military campaigns in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Iran have turned it into a garrison state, with fearmongering, forever wars, targeted assassinations, and attempts at regime change integral to its very existence. Nothing could defeat Zionism; Zionism is defeating Zionism.

Cracks have begun to emerge among political elites who previously supported Israel unquestioningly. In Europe, Spain and Ireland offer a counterbalance to the belligerence of Germany and the United Kingdom. This month’s unprovoked war against Iran is exacerbating existing tensions, and there is a definite sense among Israelis that Donald Trump may be their last chance to achieve their long-term goal of complete domination of the region. They will never achieve that goal—the movement for Palestinian national liberation is today stronger than it has ever been. February 28, 2026, may, just may, come to be seen as the fateful day when Americans saw fit to stop funding the genocidal Zionist settler colonial project . The chess game Netanyahu thinks he is playing so cleverly is flipping the board on him.

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Iran Playing Desperate Backgammon

Trump and Netanyahu murdered Khamenei before he had a chance to play this game with them. So, like in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), we only have the ghost of the murdered party, now rising in his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, to play with his living adversaries. At this stage, Iran is equally weakened by the bombardment of missiles and by its own internal dynamics of consistently corroding legitimacy. As an ill-fated backgammon player, the Islamist regime is running out of luck. The regime has, over decades, failed to incorporate a larger segment of its robust civil society (women, students, and labor unions) into the state apparatus or foster a thriving democratic landscape. Legitimate opposition forces and their reformist agendas have been consistently discredited and brutally repressed—to the point that the protofascist Reza Pahlavi, an entirely puffed-up figure with little to no support inside Iran, is being promoted by Stanford think tanks. The kicking and screaming of the Pahlavis are cacophonous and ugly humbug. There are perfectly legitimate oppositional forces inside Iran—women’s rights organizations, student assemblies, and workers’ unions. The ignominy of dancing on the graves of innocent children killed by Israel and the United States in Iran will forever taint the vulgar monarchist thugs and the handful of shameless comprador intellectuals who have rushed to stand with Pahlavi.

The ruling regime in Iran may well be capable of prolonged asymmetrical warfare to withstand US-Israeli aggression. But it will not survive this final fiasco. The ill-fated regime’s resistance would have been infinitely more rooted and principled if the belligerent ruling state had incorporated the enormous resources of its civil society. It never did; it is now too late. A sustained history of brutal suppression, mass execution of political prisoners, successive cultural revolutions, university purges, and point-blank crushing of mostly peaceful protesters has forever marred the legacy of the Islamic Republic.

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What Is at Stake in This Deadly Game?

What is at stake in this confrontation is the future of the entire region, from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent. Israel will not be satisfied with the total destruction and fragmentation of Iran; right now, they are eyeing Turkey and Pakistan. Arab political elites have been so thoroughly subordinated that they stood idly by, or even aided and abetted, as Israel slaughtered Palestinians by the tens of thousands, which gives some sense of what they hope to accomplish in Iran. But they have overplayed their games. The United States might not succeed in helping Iranians get rid of the ruling Islamic Republic, but the Iranian disaster on Trump’s watch may help Americans liberate themselves from the grip of the Israel lobby.

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Featured image: Chess scene illustration from Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh (Baysunghur edition), ca. 1426 CE, is in the public domain. Accessed March 12, 2026. Image has been cropped.