As long as Washington sees Iran at the edge of the Middle East rather than the center of “West Asia,” it will continue to fall prey to miscalculations.

On February 28, the United States and Israel engaged in a military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran, eliminating its head of state, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The way the United States imagines Iran’s role in the Middle East may explain why it underestimates how its action may not just destabilize this imagined geographic region, but a much larger swath of territory.

American strategy has relied on a distorted mental map of the “Middle East” that relegates Iran to the margins and obscures its actual position at the center of Southwest Asia. This flawed vision produces strategic blind spots, disjointed policies, and repeated miscalculations that spill over into other conflicts and regions beyond the Gulf.

The American mental map treats Iran as a peripheral “other,” a Middle Eastern oil state whose significance is mostly transactional. Both the United Nations and National Geographic employ the term “South West Asia” or “West Asia.” American foreign policy elites have apparently also tried to reorient Washington’s cartographic myopia.

Ironically, it is an obscure map produced by the CIA in 1996 that makes one realize that Iran is not just about oil, even if US President Donald Trump thinks he can replicate his actions in Venezuela, removing the head of state and directing the natural resources of a sovereign nation. For those unfamiliar with the term, the map illustrates what experts call “border gnosticism,” the tendency to treat artificial lines as definitive markers of influence while overlooking deeper geographic, economic, and cultural flows.

In reality, Iran sits at the heart of Southwest Asia, a continental pivot connecting South Asia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The CIA map, which is open-source and produced annually in book form and on the web, shows that the Caucasus forms a nearly straight axis to the Gulf, with Armenia much closer to northern Iraq than conventional maps suggest, placing Iran squarely along this corridor and underscoring its role as a regional fulcrum. This positioning links Pakistan, India, China, the Caucasus, and the Arab world, making any policy toward Iran inseparable from broader continental dynamics. The recent leadership vacuum in Tehran may invite instability into all of these areas.

Viewing Iran as marginal leads the United States to misread crises, underestimating how instability in one place, whether Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Gulf, spreads across trade, security, and influence. Historical precedents, like the Durand Line drawn in 1893 during the Anglo-Russian “Great Game,” show how artificial borders can have enduring consequences. That line split Pashtun tribal communities between Afghanistan and what became Pakistan, ignoring social and cultural realities. 

Over a century later, members of these tribes joined the Afghan Taliban, illustrating how cartographic distortions influence regional outcomes. Washington’s AfPak construct assumed that Iran could be excluded from stabilizing Afghanistan. But destabilizing Iran in 2026 could ripple outward, threatening both Afghanistan and Iraq, highlighting just how interconnected the region really is. This distorted view leads American strategy to treat conflicts as isolated puzzles rather than as interconnected regional shifts.

This cognitive distortion is reinforced by bureaucratic compartmentalization, producing fragmented strategy and chronic policy failure. US institutions like the State Department carve the region into artificial silos, such as “Middle East,” “South Asia,” “Central Asia,” reflecting colonial thinking and Cold War academic divisions rather than geographic reality. Afghanistan’s isolation, compounded by the failed “AfPak” construct, has long prevented integrated regional planning. At the same time, the same lens reduces Iran to a Middle Eastern oil state instead of recognizing its role as a continental pivot linking multiple theaters of strategic significance.

By forcing complex, interconnected dynamics into rigid stovepipes, Washington ensures diplomacy, security, trade, and conflict prevention operate in isolation, resulting in reactive, short-term policies instead of coherent strategies. This structural fragmentation now collides with the growing influence of special interests and ideological agendas over US foreign policymaking.

The “Middle East” as a strategic concept may finally be obsolete. In its place, a West Asian system is emerging, linked to the economic and technological pull of a rising Asia, the global ascent of the Gulf states, and the blurring of borders between the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean.

As Mohammed Soliman argues in his new book, West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East, the United States must move beyond narrow Middle East constructs toward a broader West Asian framework, integrating historical and geographic realities to build a stable regional order.

America’s narrow focus on oil, sanctions, and regime change distorts judgment by simplifying complex regional dynamics to levers of pressure. Treating Iran mainly as a source of revenue or a target for political manipulation ignores its role as a hub of regional connectivity. Treating Iran like Venezuela misunderstands scale, geography, and consequence. Policies aimed at weakening Tehran or reshaping its politics fail to account for the networks of trade, infrastructure, and influence tying it to South, Central, and East Asia. In short, US policy mistakes complex geopolitical realities for simple economic leverage, underestimating the risks of intervention.

More than a century ago, Alfred Thayer Mahan, the influential American naval strategist, coined the term “the Middle East,” writing in 1902 that “the Middle East, if I may adopt a term which I have not seen, will some day need its Malta as well as its Gibraltar.” The phrase reflected an imperial mindset that reduced geography to a tool of control, an impulse that persists today in subtler but no less consequential forms. Iran is expected to fit “only insofar as it conforms to the direction and sufferance of newly ascendant forces,” as the former deputy prime minister of Iraq, Dr. Ali Allawi, put it, whether financial, ideological, or geopolitical, rather than as an autonomous regional actor in its own right.

That legacy still warps Washington’s strategic imagination. Until the United States relearns how to view geography not as a bureaucratic convenience or a battlefield, but as a web of political, economic, and cultural connections, it will continue to misread Iran, misunderstand West Asia, and stumble from crisis to crisis. Trump’s strikes on Iran will determine the fate of one of the world’s most important states, with fallout that could inflame the entire region.

About the Authors: Tanya Goudsouzian and Ibrahim al-Marashi

Tanya Goudsouzian is a Canadian journalist who has covered Afghanistan and the Middle East for over two decades. She has held senior editorial roles at major international media outlets, including serving as opinion editor at Al Jazeera English.

Ibrahim al-Marashi is an associate professor of Middle East history at California State University, on the board of the International Security and Conflict Resolution (ISCOR) program at San Diego State University, and a visiting faculty member at The American College of the Mediterranean and the Department of International Relations at Central European University. His publications include Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (2008), The Modern History of Iraq (2017), and A Concise History of the Middle East (2024).

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