The Kremlin is looking on with concern as Operation Epic Fury unfolds in the Middle East. The US has gone in with its standard “shock and awe” strategy of attacking with overwhelming force. But Russian President Vladimir Putin must be thinking the outcome will not be the short sharp victory that US President Donald Trump pulled off in Venezuela this January, but more likely this will turn into another Libyan debacle.

Trump’s foreign policy strategy modus operandi has crystallised: “sanctions or decapitation”. Sanction those countries you can’t attack as they have nuclear weapons (nominal allies are let off with just tariffs) or decapitate regimes you can attack because they don’t have a powerful military.

Like Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3 where the US government removed the sitting president of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro, the Iranian campaign has already achieved its first goal of killing the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with more than two dozen senior figures from the Islamic State. On March 4 there were unconfirmed reports that the entire 88-member expert council that is tasked with appointing a replacement was also killed in an overnight missile strike.

Trump’s plan is transparent: decapitate the entire Islamic State and then ferment a mass popular uprising to change the regime and install a government that is friendly to the US. An obvious choice for the interim leader is exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi, who grew up in America.

However, the Kremlin will be sceptical of this plan. Much more likely is the country descends into chaos and civil war as happened in Libya following the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi by rebels in 2011 after the Nato-backed attack.

The danger is that Trump has yet again overestimated the power of the US military. While it can do enormous damage in the early phase of the war against overtly military and government targets, when the initial shock phase is over, it will fail to suppress the civil unrest. Iran’s leadership has already activated its Decentralized Mosaic Defence doctrine (DMD) – Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) units are broken into cells that can act autonomously on standing orders without the need for a centralised command – in preparation for exactly this sort of war. If the US doesn’t bring the regime down in a few weeks, Iran could into another Iraq, Lebanon or Afghanistan.

Journalist and bne IntelliNews columnist Leonid Ragozin said in a comment that the Iran strikes have “caused a measure of discomfort in Moscow”, with some hawkish commentators warning Russia could be targeted “in the same manner despite its vast nuclear arsenal”, citing Western talk about a future war with Russia as evidence of intent.

From Moscow’s point of view Operation Epic Fury is being read in Moscow as “a vindication of its own geopolitical strategy, including the aggression against Ukraine”, because it “confirms the Kremlin’s long-held view of the US-led West as a rogue and irrational actor”. That point of view is shared by Beijing which released a blunt statement the day after the war began.

"The US is a war addict. Throughout its over 240-year history, it has been at war for all but 16 years. The US has 800 overseas military bases in over 80 countries and regions. The US is the main cause of international disorder, global turbulence, and regional instability."

Trump has been selling the attack on Iran as a non-proliferation initiative to ensure Iran “never” gets a nuclear weapon, but as bne IntelliNews reported on the eve of the war a de-nuclearisation deal was agreed in Geneva, moderated by the Omanis, that would have brought Iran’s nuclear ambitions to an end.

“A deal was within reach. We left Geneva with (the) understanding that we'd seal a deal next time we met. Those who wanted to spoil diplomacy succeeded in their mission. But it was Mr. Trump, yet again, who ultimately ordered the bombing of the negotiating table,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview this week. The White House simply threw that deal out of the window and the missiles started flying the next day.

The White House disregard for diplomacy and its knee-jerk reaching for miliary power to get what it wants is at the root of Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s objections to the US-led unipolar order, as the pair outlined in a details 8,000 word essay last year.

The Libyan framing of the Iran episode matters because that campaign was a formative precedent for Putin in 2011. For once the international community went to the UN to get authorisation for the attacks (one of the three conditions needed to attack another country unprovoked) and in a rare display of trying to be a international team player, the Kremlin chose to support that effort by abstaining from the vote, rather than vetoing it.

The decision was taken under then-president Dmitry Medvedev that Putin later viewed as a strategic mistake. The UN decision allowed for Nato forces to impose a no-fly order over Libya, but the US overstepped its mandate and flew sorties against rebel positions in decisive military operations that turned the tide of the war. It also put unmarked troops on the ground, similar to those deployed by Russia during the Crimea referendum, to support rebel forces.

Ragozin notes that Gaddafi’s killing, and the chaos that followed, “brought neither democracy nor prosperity” but “plunged the country into a civil war and fragmentation”, becoming, for Putin, “a clear demonstration of what might await him personally and Russia at large” if he tolerated Western-backed “democratisation”.

From the Kremlin’s perspective Operation Epic Fury is more of the same: nominally an effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but in practice yet another attempt by the US to expand its empire. The US imperial “America First” ambitions were laid out in explicit detail in the new National Security Strategy (NSS) released in December and confirmed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “empire speech” at this year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) speech in February.

For Putin the Libyan campaign was another red flag that has decisively shaped his foreign policy. The fears that Libya engendered were soon followed by the first mass of his reign in Moscow when 100,000 people took to the street in late 2011 to protest against the fixed Duma elections of that year and ended in violence.

Putin responded by decisively clamping down on the opposition ahead of his 2012 inauguration. It was a turning point that preceded Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s upheaval in 2014, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s “new rules of the game” speech in February 2021, and ultimately the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In this reading, Russia’s wars, the crackdown on the opposition and arrest of late opposition figure Alexei Navalny in 2021, are all cast as prevention against the kind of Westen interventions Iraq, Libya and Syria and that now Iran is facing. Many commentators have pointed out that Operation Epic Fury is completely illegal under international law, yet the US partners in Europe have gone along with it and Germany in particularly is actively supporting the operation. From Putin’s point of view, this is more of the maxim: “For my enemies, the law. For my friends, everything.”

In the short-term the Iranian war will bring Russia multiple benefits. Oil prices have already risen to over $80 per barrel as of the time of writing, and gas prices have doubled in just four days, bring the struggling Russian budget a badly needed windfall.

The US has also reportedly burnt through five-years of missiles in the first wave of attacks that will deplete supplies of arms available for Ukraine. In particular, the US stocks of Patriot missile ammo that Ukraine depends on has already been heavily depleted.

The bottom line is that from Putin’s perspective the Iranian war is not about making the world a safer place, but a blatant attempt by the US to destroy its enemies and install US-friend governments in adversarial countries. Moreover, given the Libyan outcome, this effort is unlikely to succeed and will probably plunge yet another Middle Eastern country into protracted chaos.

More generally, Isreal’s “preventative” attack on Iran, designed to prevent a war that it just started, will only accelerate, catalyse and strengthen the Global South’s efforts to build the China-led Global Emerging Markets Institutions (GEMIs), a global institutional framework that specifically excludes the Global North.