The Butterfly Effect is a totally forgettable movie starring Ashton Kutcher from the early noughties, but it did popularise a chaos theory concept that has since escaped mathematics and found its way into LinkedIn posts. The term refers to the idea that even the flutter of a butterfly’s wing could cause a tornado elsewhere. As far as real-world examples go, the events of October 7, 2023 are the perfect case study, causing ripples big and small across the globe.That day, a terrorist organisation’s desire to imbibe a little culture by paragliding into a music festival ended up rewriting the world order. The story that followed could have been directed by Quentin Tarantino: gory, non-linear, with all threads interconnected and a few perverts thrown in. Israel’s furious response, with help from Uncle Sam, led to the dismantling of Iran’s Axis of Resistance, tangentially hastened Trump’s return to the White House, and reminded Russia, China, and even Europe who is Daddy.Here’s how Oct 7 reshaped the globe.
Chapter 1: Axis of No Resistance
Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise that Hamas leaders were “dead men walking” sounded, at the time, like the sort of thing politicians say when the cameras are on and adrenaline is high. One seldom expects a politician to keep his word. Netanyahu went above and beyond.With the benefit of hindsight, it echoed an older, cruder American warning: George Bush promising to smoke enemies out of caves. This was the kind of language modern states pretend to have outgrown.Sun Tzu once said: “If you wait by the river long enough, you will see your enemy’s corpse float by.”After Oct 7, Israel decided to stop waiting by the river.Eschewing any notions of constraint, no matter how many international bodies or nations condemned it, Israel set about dismantling, dismembering, decapitating, decimating, and, to borrow a word from Derrida, deconstructing what is known as the Axis of Resistance.Its air power erased entire neighbourhoods. Commanders were hunted irrespective of geography, no matter where they were based: Palestine, Iran, Qatar, or Yemen.
Leaders of each organisation, including Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah, were targeted using tactics that seemed lifted from John Wick and James Bond. Particularly illuminating, for sheer audacity, was the pager attack that maimed Hezbollah fighters across the region.By early 2026, even Iran was tottering, with internal protests threatening Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime, which only a few years ago had seemed impregnable.If Khamenei’s rule ultimately unravels, October 7 will be remembered as the red-letter day that dragged the Axis into the open, forced a confrontation its patrons were unprepared for, and turned Iran’s proxies into the Axis of (No) Resistance.
Chapter 2: The Don returns
May we live in interesting times.Ostensibly a Chinese curse, the phrase was popularised by Austen Chamberlain, whose son Joseph would win the Nobel Peace Prize, and whose other son Neville would be meme-fied forever for his premature celebration of peace. And history has obliged, courtesy the return of Donald Trump to the White House.While it would be a stretch to say Oct 7 alone caused his return, it was certainly one of the straws that broke the carefully crafted coalition that had brought Democrats back to power in 2020.There were, of course, other factors: an inability to recognise that their President could not speak without falling asleep; his successor, who could not complete an interview without breaking into laughter; an obsession with identity signalling over material reality; pronouns over prices; and moral performance over lived experience.Add to that economic gaslighting that insisted everything was fine while voters’ bills said otherwise, a culture of speech policing that turned free expression into a grievance, and the quiet arrogance of assuming entire voter blocs had nowhere else to go.Trump distilled this problem into a brutally simple campaign line: Kamala is for they/them, I am for you.Yet Democrats kept sleeping at the wheel. Unlike the caterpillar struggling to break free from its cocoon, they had forgotten how to be pugilistic, having grown accustomed to manufacturing consent in the post-Obama years.Oct 7 shattered that illusion.Older Democrats were aghast as younger ones celebrated Hamas as freedom fighters. Younger voters could not understand why Biden was not stopping Israel’s war machine, one largely funded by America.Harris inheriting the nomination only made things worse.To progressives and anti-war liberals, Harris sounded like Biden with a softer tone but the same substance. To foreign-policy hawks and pro-Israel conservatives, she sounded hesitant, constrained, and insufficiently forceful. She occupied the narrowest and most uncomfortable position in American politics: not progressive enough for the left, not hawkish enough for the right.Her campaign even ran contradictory messages: one ad in Michigan highlighting humanitarian suffering in Gaza, another in Pennsylvania emphasising unwavering support for Israel’s military response.Her abject performance was most evident in Michigan, where Arab American and Muslim voters hold sway. Many backed Trump, believing he might actually do something about the war, opted for third-party candidates, or simply abstained.This collapse was not merely a reflection of foreign-policy discontent, but a symptom of deeper structural drift within the Democratic Party. Trump did not need to win hearts. He merely needed Democrats to lose them.And that loss ushered in a return of American imperialism in a form few had anticipated. One that China, Iran, and Russia had not prepared for.
Chapter 3: China and Russia who? Uncle Sam is back
There was a time when MAGA claimed to be about dismantling the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. That illusion is gone. Neocons used to say America doesn’t want to be the Global Policeman. Under Trump, it now wants to be the world’s hafta collector.Since returning to power, Trump has stripped American foreign policy of the pretence that it seeks to do good. In its own way, that is refreshing.The Trump Doctrine is not complicated. It rests on five beliefs.First, Trump does not believe in a rules-based international order. International law, to him, is a fiction sustained by people without power.Second, Trump views foreign policy as transactional. Every relationship is a deal.Third, Trump is driven by revenge. Anyone who has slighted him, or America, will not be spared.Fourth, Trump believes in his own hubris. Expertise is secondary. Doubt is weakness.Finally, Trump believes America should act without apology. As one staffer put it: “We are America, b****.”That is the Trump Doctrine.
At home, this has meant abandoning constitutional restraint and testing how much power truly lies with the executive. American citizens have been deported to random countries, sometimes on flimsy evidence such as tattoos. ICE has taken to the streets like a mildly menacing version of White Walkers, tangling with local law enforcement and suburban mothers alike. There have been removal errors, due process gaps, chaotic deportations, and a flood of undertrained ICE officers.The DOJ, as under Biden-Harris, has been fully weaponised against political opponents, ranging from former FBI officials to national security advisers and attorneys general.Woke policies have been purged from federal government and corporate America. Big Tech, which deplatformed Trump after January 2021, has been brought to heel, even promising to fund Trump’s personal projects. Federal media funding has been cut, while major outlets have been acquired by Trump allies. Universities have been threatened with grant cuts, federal money wielded as carrot and stick.Washington has been transformed into St Petersburg, a living embodiment of the Peter Principle, staffed by loyalists who understand that fealty matters more than competence. The VP is a millennial untroubled by ideological whiplash, even when it includes racist attacks on his own family. The Department of Defence has been rechristened the Department of War, led by a former Fox News host with a drinking problem who struggles to do pull-ups.Homeland Security is headed by a grandmother unable to protect her own handbag. The White House press secretary dismisses all critics as leftists. The Director of National Intelligence has been sidelined to the point insiders joke DNI now stands for “Do Not Invite”. The FBI chief is a former podcast bro who enjoys using federal resources to spend time with his country singer girlfriend.And unfortunately for the rest of the world, America’s dysfunction never stays contained. The Shining City on the Hill’s problems always trickle down.Random tariffs, based on incorrect formulae, have threatened the global economy. Tariffs have also been used to bully allies, to the point no one knows what tariffs they are actually paying.Together, these actions have stripped emerging powers like China and Russia of the illusion that they could challenge American hegemony. That belief, to borrow from Dumbledore, was optimism bordering on foolishness.Bashar al-Assad survived for years with Russian backing, yet Putin was powerless when Syrian rebels overran Damascus. A former Al Qaeda militant, once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, now heads the state, and Trump calls him “beautiful”.
Similarly, China and Russia could do nothing when Trump decided Nicolás Maduro’s dancing had gone too far and had him picked up like a neighbourhood delinquent. This was not the extraction of a terrorist, but the detention of a sitting head of state backed by nuclear powers. Trump even “accepted” the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader Machado.Iran may be next.Trump’s first exposure to foreign policy came during the Tehran hostage crisis, when he could not fathom how a country as powerful as America failed to protect its own people. He never forgot that humiliation.It was evident on June 25, 2025, when Trump, borrowing from Top Gun: Maverick, sent B-2 stealth bombers and other assets to strike three Iranian nuclear sites.Iran’s response, an attack on an American base in Qatar, appeared choreographed by all sides. Casualties were zero.The doctrine has since expanded to America’s allies. Canada was labelled the 51st state. Europe was told to call Trump “Daddy”. Denmark was threatened over Greenland. Zelenskyy was humiliated publicly. Keir Starmer was made to bend, literally. France even moved the G7 summit because Trump wanted a birthday party at the White House, complete with an MMA spectacle.Trump postures endlessly, announcing ceasefires where there is no firing and no ceasing. But truth is irrelevant compared to the story in his head.To borrow Albert Einstein’s words: Future generations will scarcely believe that such a man once walked the face of the earth.But would that walking and talking have been possible without Hamas paragliding into Israel?That is the question that will haunt us, a cruel mathematical equation whose solution began on October 7. If history is written by the victors, then October 7 may come to be remembered not as the beginning of a war, but as the moment the post-World War 2 rules-based international order illusion finally collapsed. One reckless act, one miscalculated spectacle of terror, set off a chain reaction that stripped away moral language, exposed power as power, and revealed that the world never really moved on. The butterfly flapped its wings, and what followed was not chaos, but clarity.
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