On Theatrics of Assassinations and the Illiteracy of Strategy

There is a peculiar, hard-to-believe affliction that grips the African commentariat in moments of global crisis: a childish fascination with spectacle—their mistaking noise for substance and treating theatrics as grand strategy.

One watches, with a mixture of disbelief and weary familiarity, as otherwise well-educated Africans wax lyrical over the assassination of Iranian generals by the regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, as though war were a Hollywood script, and geopolitics another franchise of the latest James Bond installment.

African public intellectuals forgot a simple, almost elementary truth: wars are not won in the realm of headlines or simple optics. They are also not won on the tactical level.

Wars are won or lost at the strategic level, where hard thinking is required on how to couple your political objectives with your military capabilities.

Killing a general here and, however dramatic, is pure theatrics. Any serious state, any competent military institution, is built with redundancy - layered leadership, institutionalized doctrine, and planned continuity.

The idea that the removal of individuals, however senior or experienced, translates into the strategic collapse of the enemy is strictly James Bond movies stuff and Western media mythology, not the reality of modern warfare.

This is where the analytical poverty of many African commentators becomes glaring.

While these African cheerleaders fixate on assassinations, Iran has quietly and without fanfare shifted the axis of the conflict to where it truly matters: the global economic bloodstream.

By effectively operationalizing control over the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has moved the war into the domain of strategic leverage.

The narrow waterway is not merely a geographic feature; it is one of the principal arteries of global energy supply.

By choking it, Iran is not merely inconveniencing its adversaries; it is destabilizing the entire architecture upon which their power rests.

Iran has effectively achieved Zugzwang, a situation in chess where any move a player makes will worsen their position.

This inability to move forward or backward is why we witness Pedo Trump throwing tantrums like a baby who has lost his toy.

And here lies the deeper, more unsettling implication.

For decades, the Western order, anchored by American financial dominance, has relied on the petrodollar system organized by the Americans and the Saudis. This arrangement ensured global energy transactions were denominated in US dollars, thereby underwriting U.S. hegemony.

After Iran, obviously in concert with its Eurasian allies, begins to transact energy in alternative currencies such as the yuan, we are no longer speaking of a regional conflict. We are witnessing not only the erosion of a financial empire, but a civilizational collapse.

The tragedy here, however, is not merely a decline of the West; history has no permanent victors, but the inability of many Africans to comprehend this.

That educated Africans cannot discern the magnitude of such a shift speaks to a deeper epistemic crisis. How do we in Africa become participants when we don't even understand the game?

We are reminded, inevitably and painfully, of the catastrophic misreading of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

Then, too, many Africans celebrated. They cheered as NATO, under the pretext of humanitarian intervention, dismantled the most advanced state on the continent.

The consequences - state collapse, arms proliferation, and regional destabilization are still with us. They are etched into the Sahel’s unending insecurity and the multiple insurgencies racking Nigeria.

I remember my frantic plea in my column in the New African magazine to educate my fellow Africans on the tragic folly of watching imperialists doing what they have been doing for 500+ years - control other people's resources.

I was called unprintable names by people who should know better.

Yet here we are again, scarcely a decade and a half later, applauding the same script, performed by the same actors, with the same predictable outcomes.

We can’t dismiss this as merely irony; it is a failure of historical consciousness.

Russia’s attritional warfare in Ukraine has exposed the limits of Western military power. By draining NATO’s stockpiles through a prolonged proxy conflict, Russia has achieved what decades of Cold War posturing could not: the exhaustion of Western military-industrial capacity.

Into this historic moment steps Iran, not as an isolated actor, but as part of a broader realignment that includes Russia and China. The result is a convergence of pressures, military, economic, and geopolitical, that the West is increasingly ill-equipped to manage.

We have just witnessed the real-time collapse of NATO.

And yet, in African capitals, the conversation remains tragically superficial even when we face a more immediate, more visceral dimension that ought to command our attention.

Africa is structurally dependent on imports for both consumption and production. Our continent is acutely vulnerable to disruptions in global supply chains. If the Strait of Hormuz becomes a sustained chokepoint, the effects on the continent will not be mere academic abstraction.

It would be disastrous.
We will see this in rising fuel costs, food shortages, and industrial stagnation.

Why does it escape our cheerleaders that the price of bread in Accra, Lagos, or Nairobi is tied, however indirectly, to the stability of that narrow corridor in the Persian Gulf?

So, while some celebrate “victories” defined by the elimination of individuals, the more pertinent question is this: what happens to African economies in three to six months?

Geopolitics, unlike social media, does not reward immediacy. Its consequences unfold with a delay, but when they arrive, they are unforgiving.

There is another dangerous illusion circulating among the African cheerleaders, that overwhelming force, even nuclear force, can achieve a poorly planned war.

This, too, belongs to a bygone era. Iran, with its population of ninety million plus, embodies the enduring truth articulated by Mao Zedong: that nuclear weapons, for all their awesome power, cannot extinguish a determined nation. They may devastate, but they do not resolve the underlying political equation. If anything, they escalate it beyond control.

What we are witnessing in Iran is not merely a conflict, but a transition, a slow, uneven, and often misunderstood shift away from five centuries of Western dominance toward a more contested, multipolar order.

That Africa fails to recognize this moment is not a trivial matter. It is a tragic strategic liability.

In a world where the rules are being rewritten at dizzying speeds, those who cannot read the text will, as always, be written out of it.

And so, before the next round of applause for yet another “successful” assassination, it might be prudent, indeed necessary for Africans, to engage in a more sober exercise.

Not the consumption of algorithm-driven narratives from TikTok or the recycled talking points of Western media, but a deliberate effort to understand the structural forces at play.

Because when the shelves begin to thin, when the cost of living surges, when the external shocks finally reach our shores, the illusion of victory will dissolve with alacrity.

©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.

I am an unapologetic Pan-Africanist who is unconditionally opposed to any form or manifestation of racism, fascism, and discrimination.

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