From Manoeuvre To Position: A Gramscian Lens On The Chronic War In West Asia

The missiles that struck Tehran recently marked the opening of a new and terrifying phase in the long shadow war between Iran, Israel and the United States. 

Coordinated strikes targeted nuclear sites at Natanz Nuclear Facility and Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, along with missile factories, air-defence batteries and leadership compounds. 

Reports indicate the death of Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the initial barrage. Hundreds have died. Iran responded with ballistic missiles aimed at Israeli military installations and US positions in the Gulf. Hezbollah opened a second front from Lebanon. Oil prices spiked as shipping hesitated in the Strait of Hormuz. 

President Donald Trump described the operation as a “decisive pre-emptive strike” against what he called an existential nuclear threat. 

Israeli leaders called it unavoidable self-preservation. Iran’s surviving command vowed unrelenting retaliation. The region stands on the edge. One further escalation could ignite a wider conflagration, drawing in neighbouring states and sending shockwaves through the global economy. 

This crisis is not sudden. It is the latest eruption of a chronic affliction that has plagued humanity since the first granaries were built roughly ten to twelve thousand years ago, with the rise of settled agricultural societies. War is not a genetic destiny. It is a cultural invention, born when settled societies created surpluses worth stealing and defending. 

Yet in the modern era, particularly in the Middle East, the disease persists not only through open violence but through something more insidious: the quiet, patient construction of consent. Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of the war of manoeuvre and the war of position offer the sharpest tool to understand why this conflict feels eternal. 

Gramsci, imprisoned by Mussolini and writing his Prison Notebooks in the 1920s and 1930s, recognised that revolutionary strategy could not be the same everywhere. In Russia in 1917 the state superstructure was weak and gelatinous. The Bolsheviks faced a brittle autocracy with few intermediaries between the Tsar and the masses. A swift frontal assault, the war of manoeuvre, was possible. The revolutionaries concentrated their forces on seizing the state apparatus directly, exploiting the crisis of the First World War. 

In the advanced capitalist democracies of Western Europe, however, the situation was entirely different. Here the ruling class had built a dense network of political and cultural institutions, trade unions, social-democratic parties, newspapers, churches, schools and voluntary associations, that anchored bourgeois hegemony deep within civil society. 

These trenches protected the state from direct assault. A sudden uprising, Gramsci argued, would be swallowed by this resilient superstructure. The revolutionary party therefore required a very different strategy: a long, patient war of position. 

Gramsci defined the war of position as the struggle to win spontaneous consent from the masses to the direction imposed by the dominant group. Hegemony, he wrote, is achieved when the ruling class succeeds in presenting its worldview as common sense, so that subordinate groups accept the existing order as natural and legitimate. The supremacy of a social group, Gramsci explained, manifests itself in two ways, as domination and as intellectual and moral leadership. Domination rests on coercion; leadership rests on consent. 

When consent is strong, coercion can remain in the background. The ruled defend the system themselves. 

In the Middle East today, Western powers, led by the United States and its closest ally Israel, wage both wars simultaneously, but the war of position is the more decisive and enduring. The war of manoeuvre is unmistakable. American aircraft carriers patrol the Gulf. Israeli jets deliver precision strikes on Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure. 

Sanctions strangle Iran’s economy. Cyber operations disrupt power grids and financial systems. Proxy militias clash on multiple fronts. These are the direct, violent blows intended to weaken or destroy the adversary’s capacity to resist. 

Yet the war of manoeuvre alone cannot explain the persistence of Western dominance or the longevity of the conflict. Gramsci’s insight is that real power lies in the war of position, the slow, cultural conquest of civil society. Over decades the West has constructed a powerful hegemonic narrative in and about the Middle East. 

Global media, Hollywood, think tanks, social-media algorithms, universities and NGOs work together to shape perception.

Iran is consistently framed as an irrational, apocalyptic aggressor. Israel is portrayed as a besieged democracy fighting for survival. American military presence is presented as the guardian of international order, freedom of navigation and regional stability. 

Sanctions are described as smart or targeted pressure to encourage reform and protect civilians. Rulers who align with Western interests are called moderates and partners for peace. Those who resist are branded extremists, terrorists or rogue regimes. Criticism of Israeli policies is frequently equated with anti-semitism, narrowing the space for legitimate debate. 

This narrative is reinforced through aid programmes, educational exchanges, civil-society initiatives and cultural products. Over time large segments of populations, both in the region and globally, internalise these frames as common sense. Resistance begins to appear unreasonable or immoral. Gramsci observed that when hegemony is strong, the active consent of the dominated classes makes domination lighter and more stable. Force becomes secondary because people police themselves. 

Gramsci warned that such power is especially dangerous because it conceals the underlying violence. Resources continue to flow northward. Instability and poverty remain concentrated in the South. Ordinary families in the Middle East bear the human cost, shattered homes, lost loved ones, ruined futures, while distant capitals plan the next phase. The old imperial hunger for control is masked by the language of democracy, human rights and counter-terrorism. 

Yet Gramsci was never fatalistic. He insisted that hegemony is never total. It is always contested and incomplete. Counter-hegemony can be built through patient cultural and political work: creating alternative narratives, forging new alliances, developing organic intellectuals who challenge the dominant common sense, and organising collective action that exposes the contradictions of the existing order. When subordinate groups begin to see the system as unjust rather than natural, the consent that sustains hegemony starts to erode. 

The chronic plague of war in the Middle East is not humanity’s inescapable fate. It began when we first stored grain and claimed land. It grew stronger with every empire and every justifying ideology. Today Western supremacy sustains it through both the war of manoeuvre and the war of position, missiles in the sky and consent in the mind. But what we invented as a species we can still dismantle. Stronger international institutions, equitable economic relations, accountable leadership and fresh narratives of shared human destiny can gradually weaken the old hegemony. The missiles will fall silent only when we refuse to accept the disease as normal. The true remedy is a new common sense in which cooperation feels more instinctive than domination.   

The question is urgent and inescapable. Will we continue to feed the plague or will we finally undertake the long, patient work of healing? The choice belongs to every one of us. The moment to make it is now. 

 Dr. Harjeet Singh is an Assistant Professor of History with the Department of Education, Akal University, Bathinda, Punjab. He writes on Sikh Empire, Historiography, Social, Philosophical and Cultural Issues.