The Israel-Iran war no longer behaves like a conventional war. It resembles a self-sustaining marketplace—one that trades in weapons, data, and influence.
What began as a regional rivalry has matured into an ecosystem of proxy networks and contractors whose profits rise when stability falls.
Nick Berg’s Shadows of Tehran anticipated this shift long before the headlines caught up. His protagonist Ricardo, a child of both Iran and America, grows up learning that power is never just ideological—it’s transactional.
In Berg’s universe, as in ours, hybrid warfare is measured not only in casualties but in currency.
The Israel-Iran War in the Age of Hybrid War
Today’s confrontation is waged across sanctions, drones, and code.
Analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (source: SIPRI) estimate that global military expenditure hit a record $2.4 trillion in 2024, with much of the regional rise linked to Iran–Israel proxy tensions.
Iran funnels resources through groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, while Israel responds with cyber-offensives and targeted strikes.
The result is a hybrid economy of conflict—a network that generates revenue even as it drains public trust. Nick Berg’s novel turns that economy inside out: he shows how loyalty itself becomes a commodity.
From Revolution to Revenues: The Marketplace of Proxies
According to the U.S. Treasury, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Quds Force moves sanctioned oil through front companies and exchange houses, redirecting proceeds to proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen (source: US Treasury).
Meanwhile, Transparency International warns that opaque defense budgets allow corruption to thrive on both sides (source: TI Defence 2024).
Each skirmish resets supply chains for arms, cybersecurity, and surveillance tech. The conflict becomes less about territory and more about market share in chaos.
Nick Berg’s Ricardo would recognize the pattern: the machinery of war disguised as everyday commerce.
Who Profits When Chaos Becomes Routine?
When war becomes routine, profit margins stabilize.
Private security firms, sanctioned oligarchs, and commodity traders all gain from volatility.
According to research by RAND Europe, conflicts often become self-reinforcing as economic factors—such as arms spending, sanctions evasion, and grey-market trade—create feedback loops that sustain instability (source: Rand).
In Shadows of Tehran, Ricardo’s father returns from Vietnam haunted not just by combat but by bureaucracy—the paperwork of destruction. Nick Berg uses that image to suggest a grim continuity: every generation inherits a ledger, not a cause.
The Information Market: Propaganda as Profit
Digital propaganda now runs alongside the guns and rockets in the Iran–Israel conflict.
According to EU DisinfoLab, the Israel-Hamas front has seen “an unprecedented surge in disinformation across social media platforms,” implicating state-actors and large non-state networks in the campaign. (source: EU DisinfoLab)
Meanwhile, the 2024 “Freedom on the Net” report from Freedom House shows how trust online has fallen for the 14th straight year, as content manipulation and censorship erase the line between activism and influence operations. (source: Freedom House)
In that environment, every doctored video, viral post, and outrage-driven donation becomes part of a calculating ecosystem that rewards polarization.
In his novel Shadows of Tehran (order here!), Nick Berg imagined what it would feel like to grow up in a world where truth is the first casualty—and here in real life, it’s becoming currency.
The Iranian Opposition and the Price of Visibility
Amid this machinery, the Iranian opposition and Woman, Life, Freedom movement struggle to make truth audible.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch report that hundreds of activists have been detained or forced into exile for exposing corruption and proxy funding (source: Amnesty 2025).
Their defiance echoes Nick Berg’s theme of resilience—the human cost of refusing silence.
These citizens aren’t just political symbols; they are real-world counterparts to Ricardo’s moral awakening, standing between two collapsing certainties.
When Economics Replaces Ethics
What Shadows of Tehran ultimately warns is that the Israel-Iran war isn’t sustained only by ideology—it’s sustained by infrastructure.
Every drone strike has an invoice; every sanction has a loophole.
When profit eclipses principle, pluralism and tolerance decay, and democracy itself becomes collateral damage.
Berg’s insight is simple but devastating: wars end when they become unprofitable, and they endure as long as someone gets paid. His fiction asks what our balance sheet of conscience will show.
If Hybrid War Redefines Victory, What Still Defines Humanity?
The author of Shadows of Tehran ends where conscience begins: with responsibility.
Hybrid warfare tempts the world to look away—to accept that in chaos, anything goes. But the moral ledger still counts.
Civilians are not statistics. Protesters are not the enemy. And freedom movements must be judged not by their slogans but by how they treat their own people.
Nick Berg’s message is that the border worth defending is not a line on a map, but the one drawn by conscience—the only frontier that keeps civilization intact.
