India, June 19 -- The war that the US and Israel launched against Iran on February 28 is now - at least on paper - ending. Or is being paused for now. On June 17, the two warring sides signed amemorandum of understanding (MoU)electronically, and they will sign it in person on June 19 in Switzerland. The temporary end to the war will run for 60 days, but the hard questions are yet to be settled, including the Iranian nuclear capability issue. After 107 days of fighting, the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and hundreds of others, including children, and the choking of the maritime route for a sizeable share of global energy commerce, US President Donald Trump is ending this war roughly where he began it - with both sides bloodied, of course. It is important to state the obvious lest we forget amid the news cycle tomorrow: Washington chose to fight an unnecessary war, and lost the war. In choosing, and losing, a needless war, it put the security of nations and people in danger that had no part in it. Let's consider, first, the choice of going to war, and the manner in which it played out. It was started on flimsy grounds, without a clear plan, and with outcome-expectations that bordered on the delusional. Consider, next, what the war achieved against what it set out to do. The most obvious outcome of the peace MoU is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump counts as a bigvictory. But the fact is that Iran closed that Strait in response to the American-Israeli attack; so, the reopening does no more than undoing the harm Trump's war caused. On the nuclear question - the US's most clearly stated purpose to start the war - things look worse than when the war started. In 2018, Trump abandoned an agreement that capped Iranian enrichment at 3.67% underInternational Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection. The war ends with roughly 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% in Iran's possession. Washington says weapons-grade uranium will be "diluted"; Iran says it is open to discussing this. We will have to wait to see how that goes. Another aim of the war - never statedofficially but definitely hoped for - was overthrowing the Iranian regime and replacing it with a more pliable regime. Here, too, the war produced the opposite result. InDecember, Iran's cities were filled with Iranians turning against their Islamic rulers. The US-Israeli war gave that embattled regime the tool to turn the tide on the popularbacklash. A government challenged from within before the start of the war now rules from a position of recovered legitimacy, no longer sanctioned and billions flowing in for reconstruction. Forget regime change, even basic reforms that the popular uprising in Iran was championing now seem a tough ask. The agreement, from the American perspective, should read like a loser's surrender terms. According to reported accounts of the agreement, Washington is likely to lift sanctions, grant waivers for Iranian fuel exports, and persuade its regional partners to create a reconstruction fund for Iran worth hundreds of billions of dollars. I will repeat the point so that the irony is not lost on anyone: The Gulf States took Iranian missiles for letting Washington strike Iran from their soil, got little protection in return, and are now being asked to fund Iran's reconstruction. It is possible that American taxpayer money too will go into that kitty. Some victory that is. Until recently, Europe and India took it for granted that the US was the custodian of the global order, and of the commons that came with it. That assumption now stands thoroughly belied. Washington withdrawing from the system it had built was one thing. It has now gone further, from neglecting the global commons to actively damaging it - in this case, the Strait of Hormuz. The custodian of the old order has now become its worst enemy. India watched the war from anuncomfortable position. When Russia invaded Ukraine, New Delhi could treat it as a distant war and even profit from thisdistance, buying discounted Russian crude while declining to take sides. The war against Iran, fought not too far from our shores, allowed no such luxury of detachment. It entered the Indian economy through the price of fuel, the lives of our sailors lost in West Asian seas, and through the threat to the lives and livelihoods of the nine million Indians in the Gulf. More worrying is the question of where India will find itself once the dust settles. For a decade now, New Delhi has invested heavily in an axis comprising the US, Israel and the UAE. It is this axis that the war has embarrassed. Washington looks clueless and silly, Israel's regional standing is now heavily contested, and Pakistan has waltzed into a season of diplomatic influence won without firing a shot, temporary as it may be. India's choices were perhaps a function of pure necessity - owing to its material inability on shaping geopolitics around it. But India has no reason to stay faithful to an embarrassed axis - it must reopen serious channels of communication with those sides it can work with, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran. What the war has exposed will not end with it. For decades, countries such as India learned to work within the imperfect order the US underwrote and counted on Washington to keep its fundamentals intact. Washington has clearly gone rogue, against the order it built. There is no one to discipline it and nothing yet to replace it. For India, and for others who once built their plans on a (reformed) world maintained by Washington, the task now is to learn to live in an orderless world, and build a new order. That is the real work this war leaves behind for Delhi....