In the 2019 season two of the TV series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, created by Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland, a corrupt dictator steals the Venezuela election by cancelling voting before election day is over, declaring himself the winner over a strong female opponent. This is unfortunately what happened in 2024. Notably, Maduro's actions were criticized across the political landscape from leftist to rightist leaders and was sadly a rare moment of agreement politically on the manifestation of bad leadership.

At a high level, one can look at the pattern of human history and see that:

• Bad leaders create conflict and oppression while enriching themselves
• Poor leaders fail to address conflict and oppression
• Good leaders prevent conflict and oppression, but are rare and often thwarted by domestic division

It was not hard for me as an author to write a plausible Middle East conflict centered around Iran, Israel, Russia and the United States for two reasons.

First, conflict involving Iran is structurally predictable because the country sits at the center of overlapping fault lines — Sunni-Shia sectarian competition, competition between regional powers (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey), and the unresolved tension between Iran's revolutionary theocratic ideology and the U.S.-led regional security order. Iran has also built a deliberate strategy around "forward defense" through proxy networks — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria — which distributes conflict across multiple theaters and makes escalation difficult to contain at any single point. Add to this the chronic instability created by sanctions, nuclear brinkmanship, and the domestic legitimacy pressures facing the Iranian government, and the incentive structure consistently favors provocation and deterrence-testing over stable accommodation.

Second, the region's most influential nations have at best only had one fleeting and partial window of good leadership across the board. Iran is the permanent stumbling block. The Shah was not good. Khomeini was not good. Rafsanjani was a pragmatist but an authoritarian one. Khatami (1997–2005) is arguably the closest the Islamic Republic has come to a good leader — reformist, dialogue-oriented, intellectually serious — but he was systematically thwarted by Khamenei, who holds actual power. Rouhani was similar. The structural reality is that Iran's Supreme Leader position ensures no elected president can truly govern as a good leader, regardless of their intent.

The closest window would be roughly 1993–1995: Rabin in Israel, Clinton (looking only at foreign policy) in the US, Yeltsin in Russia (early, optimistic phase), and Rafsanjani in Iran as a reluctant pragmatist. It was during this time that the Oslo Accords — landmark agreements between Israel and the PLO, negotiated secretly in Oslo and signed in 1993 and 1995 — occurred. The Cold War had just ended. But Yeltsin was already unraveling, Rafsanjani wasn't genuinely good, and Rabin was assassinated in 1995.

Unfortunately, the Middle East has never had the luxury of simultaneous good leadership across its major actors, which helps explain why the region's conflicts feel structurally permanent rather than contingently resolvable. One bad or weak actor is usually enough to collapse whatever diplomatic architecture good leaders elsewhere are trying to build.

What Must Be Stopped is based on one of a thousand ways that conflict could escalate and occur within these unstable regional dynamics.