Two governments, one American and one Iranian, have made the same fundamental choice. Their citizens are paying the price. The slogan which has echoed through Iranian protest rallies during more than a year, was shouted in Ahvaz by retirees before shut offices of pension funds, in Tehran by teachers before shut ministries, and in the industrial south by workers: “Enough warmongering, our tables are empty”. It is the sentence that breaks through the haze of geopolitics with the harshness of experience. It is also, incidentally, the most accurate political analysis of this conflict that has ever been provided.

The Iran-US war which officially started on 28 February 2026 did not come out of nothingness. It came as the culmination of a long, drawn-out hemorrhage, one to which neither Tehran nor Washington was prepared to admit that it had dealt itself a self-inflicted wound. On either side of this encounter, the decision to arm the state or to feed the people had already been taken, without trumpeting or other warning, long before the first shot was fired.

In America, they enacted that decision into law. A few months after Congress muscled through the biggest-ever reductions to Medicaid and federal nutrition aid, Congress approved military expenditures of $901 billion in the next fiscal year. At least 15 million citizens would lose healthcare coverage as a direct consequence, according to the estimates of the Congressional Budget Office. The reasoning was in its defense: everything that has nothing to do with military or border security is on the chopping block. The aerospace and defense industry, in its turn, has recorded an increase of more than 21 per cent since early last year - a market message that speaks louder than any budget speech as to the direction American priorities were already taking before the bombs hit.

The welfare-warfare transition in Iran has had another, no less destructive form. The latest budget submitted by President Pezeshkian poured almost 150 percent more money into security and proposed wage increases of only a little over two-fifths of the inflation rate. This, in a country whose food prices had increased 72 percent annually by December 2025, and whose Iranian rial had depreciated by about 40 percent, following the 12-day clash with Israel the previous June. The priorities of the Iranian state were not a secret, they had been spelled out in each and every line of its budget and the(https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-malnutrition-catastrophe-economy/32499190.html) had declared that 57 percent of Iranians were already malnourished to some degree.

The conflict is not historically important, as the United States and Iran are rivals, but the candor with which population in both countries are now identifying the trade-off their governments have chosen. Some Iranian participants in the December 2025 protests sang the song, stating that the government is preoccupied with other proxies instead of its internal requirements, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, My Life for Iran”. These are not the mottos of a foreign-backed destabilization program. They belong to those languages of a people who have seen their hospitals fall and their savings melt away as their government financed militia operations in four countries.

These decisions will now be compounded with the costs of this conflict. Since the attacks of 28 February, millions have been forced to flee and thousands of people have been killed already. The energy infrastructure of the region is under acute strain, endangering food security and economic stability of South Asia and the developing world including Pakistan, which imports almost 60 percent of its petroleum in the Gulf and depends on the region remittances to keep its balance of payments afloat.

The lesson, and the tragedy, is that this was not necessary. It was adopted incrementally, by bureaucracy, and with conscious awareness of the repercussions. Governments do not often declare trading health of their citizens with military posture. They just tend to spend that amount of money every year, and wait till the reckoning arrive.

It has arrived.

Hammad Mubarak Bhatti is an Alumni student of Government & Public Policy at the National Defence University (NDU), Islamabad. He can be reached at hammadmubarak580@gmail.com