The system always writes back

All geopolitical decisions come with an agenda. What it rarely comes with is an ending.

Robert Jervis, the late Columbia scholar of international relations, warned that complex systems do not simply absorb interventions but instead metabolise them. Individual actors make rational decisions, but the resulting outcomes are irrational as no one can see the whole board. Statesmen aren't chess players. They are nodes in a vast, interconnected system that they cannot fully read, and the system, invariably, writes back.

This is uncomfortably clear in few contemporary cases:

The goal of the US sanctions against Iran, including oil embargoes, removal from SWIFT and maximum pressure campaigns, was to isolate and capitulate Iran. The systemic effect was something that Washington did not foresee: Iran strengthened its strategic relationship with China, signing a 25-year cooperation agreement that made Beijing a part of Iran's economy. It provided Russia with Shahed drones, which turned the tide in the battle in Ukraine. Instead of giving up the nuclear programme under pressure, Tehran has started to speed up the process, making its stockpile of enrichment material more weapons-worthy than ever. The pressure meant to foreclose options opened new ones. The sanctions did not weaken Iran's leverage, rather they multiplied it.

On the other hand, Israel was determined to wipe out Hamas. The systemic effect spread across the entire region in ways no single decision-maker had authorised. The Houthis' attacks on shipping in the Red Sea caused delays in trade routes, sending commercial vessels on expensive detours that sent tremors throughout the world commodity markets. Hezbollah opened a sustained northern front. And in April 2024, Iran for the first time in decades struck Israeli territory with missiles and drones. We saw one military operation did not contain a threat but instead regionalised it and drew in actors who had maintained careful distance for years. The system absorbed the action and redistributed its consequences far beyond the original theatre.

Closer to home, the India-Pakistan nuclear deterrence framework shows Jervis's stability-instability paradox quietly. Since 1998, nuclear weapons have been able to deter the two countries from a full-scale war but it has always allowed instability to flourish under it – be it Kargil, the 2001-02 standoff, Uri or Pulwama. All episodes were calculated by rational thinking of actors who knew that the floor under the nuclear house would not break. The war is prevented by the bomb for the skirmish. When there is deterrence, the tip of the escalation ladder is frozen, but every rung below is highly accessible.

What connects these three cases is not a failure of intelligence or miscalculation in the conventional sense but something more structural and unsettling. Washington, Tel Aviv, Islamabad, New Delhi played rational roles in their own strategic perspectives. The irrationality emerged at the systemic level, where actions collide with other actors, other pressures, and other histories that no single capital can fully account for. But a sanction is not only an economic tool, it is a pressure that is spread out in a network of states, alliances and rival calculations. No military operation is ever limited by the goals that are stated. We know that power, that too in a complex system, does not travel in straight lines but folds up, piles up and emerges at an unintended location.

Jervis was not arguing for paralysis. He was arguing for humility, the kind that asks not only what we intend, but what this will set in motion, and where it will land, and on whom. That question is pertinent in an era where one crisis is leaving a trail of another crisis that follows in the wake of the first one, with less warning and more urgency. It is the minimum requirement of responsible statecraft.

The system has always written back. The difference now is the speed and scale of its reply.