This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.
I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress.
And this war is dumb as hell.
I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.
Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.
But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.
The Situation
We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.
First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.
More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.
In practice, given that Iran did not and never has posed an existential threat to the United States (Iran aspires to be the kind of nuclear threat North Korea is and can only vaguely dream of being the kind of conventional threat that Russia is), that meant that a ground invasion of Iran was functionally impossible. While the United States had the raw resources to do it, the political will simply wasn’t there and was unlikely to ever be there.
Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.
Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.
In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal.
That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).
But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.
Which leads us to
The Gamble
The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.
The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.
In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.
But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on. These sorts of governments can collapse, but not often. It certainly did not help that the United States had stood idle while the regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its opponents, before making the attempt, but I honestly do not think the attempt would have worked before.
The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.
As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.
The problem is that once the gamble was made, once the dice were cast, the Trump administration would be effectively giving up control over much of what followed.
And if administration statements are to be believed, that decision was made, without knowing it, in June of last year. Administration officials, most notably Marco Rubio, have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing. Essentially, Iran would assume that the United States was ‘in’ on the attack.
That is notable because Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.
The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the last several weeks where things explode in Iran and there is initially confusion over if the United States or Israel bombed them. But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.
So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.
But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.
Which is the case here. Because…
The Trap
Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.
The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.
And the scale here is significant. 25% of the world’s oil (refined and crude), 20% of its liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz which links the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Any of those figures would be enough for a major disruption to trigger huge economic ripples. And even worse there are only very limited, very insufficient alternative transport options. Some Saudi oil (about half) can move via pipeline to the Red Sea and some Emirati oil can move via pipeline to Fujairah outside of the Strait, but well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely.
And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.
And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.
Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.
But the trap here is two sided: once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war without suffering its own costs. Doing so, for one, would be an admission of defeat, politically damaging at home. Strategically, it would affirm Iran’s control over the strait, which would be a significantly worse outcome than not having done the war in the first place. And simply backing off might not fully return shipping flows: why should Iran care if the Gulf states can export their oil? An Iran that fully controls the strait, that had demonstrated it could exclude the United States might intentionally throttle everyone else’s oil – even just a bit – to get higher prices for its own or to exert leverage.
So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.
The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.
Under these conditions, both sides might seek a purely military solution: remove the ability of your opponent to do harm in order to create the space to declare victory and deescalate. Such solutions are elusive. Iran simply has no real way of meaningfully diminishing American offensive power: they cannot strike the airfields, sink the carriers or reliably shoot down the planes (they have, as of this writing, managed to damage just one aircraft).
For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve. Since Iran could launch underwater drones or one-way aerial attack drones from anywhere along the northern shore the United States would have to occupy many thousands of square miles to prevent this and of course then the ground troops doing that occupying would simply become the target for drones, mortars, artillery, IEDs and so on instead.
One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.
Meanwhile escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising. For one, it would require many more ships, because the normal traffic through the strait is so large and because escorts would be required throughout the entire Gulf (unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the ‘zone’ of Houthi attacks was contained to only the southern part of the Red Sea). But the other problem is that Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait.
It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva, to account for the Arleigh Burke’s better air defense. Iran would pick their moment (probably not the first transit) and try to distract the Burke, perhaps with a volley of cheap Shahed-type drones against a natural gas tanker, before attempting to ambush the Burke with a volley of AShMs, probably from the opposite direction. The aim would be to create just enough confusion that one AShM slipped through, which is all it might take to leave a $2.2bn destroyer with three hundred American service members on board disabled and vulnerable in the strait. Throw in speed-boats, underwater drones, naval mines, fishing boats pretending to be threats and so on to maximize confusion and the odds that one of perhaps half a dozen AShMs slips through.
And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort.
But without escorts or an end to the conflict, shipping in the Gulf is not going to return to normal. Container ships are big and hard to sink but easy to damage. But while crude oil tankers are hard to set fire to, tankers carrying refined petroleum products are quite easy to set fire to, as we’ve seen, while tankers of liquid natural gas (LNG carriers) are essentially floating bombs.
The result is that right now it seems that the only ships moving through the strait are those Iran permits and they appear to have a checkpoint system, turning away ships they do not approve of. A military solution this problem is concievable, but extremely difficult to implement practically, requiring either a massive invasion of Iran’s coastline or an enormous sea escort operation. It seems more likely in both cases that the stoppage will continue until Iran decides it should stop. The good news on that front is that Iran benefits from the export of oil from the Gulf too, but the bad news is that while they are permitting some traffic, precisely because high energy prices are their only lever to make the United States and Israel stop killing them, they are unlikely to approve the transit of the kinds of numbers of ships which would allow energy markets to stabilize.
Just as a measure here, as I write this apparently over the last three days or so Iran has let some twenty ships through their checkpoint, charging fees apparently to do so. That may sound like a lot, but it is a quantity that, compared to the normal operation of the strait, is indistinguishable from zero. The Strait of Hormuz normally sees around 120 transits per day (including both directions). That scale should both explain why five or six ships a day paying Iran to transit is not going to really impact this equation – that’s still something like a 95% reduction in traffic (and all of the Iran-approved transits are outbound, I think) – but also why a solution like ‘just do escorts’ is so hard. Whatever navies attempted an escort solution would need to escort a hundred ships a day, with every ship being vulnerable at every moment from when it entered the Strait to when it docked for loading or offloading to its entire departure route. All along the entire Gulf coastline. All the time.
Likewise, even extremely punishing bombings of Iranian land-based facilities are unlikely to wholly remove their ability to throw enough threat into the Strait that traffic remains massively reduced. Sure some ship owners will pay Iran and others will take the risk, but if traffic remains down 90% or just 50% that is still a massive, global energy disruption. And we’ve seen with the campaign against the Houthis just how hard it is with airstrikes to compromise these capabilities: the United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities. Cargo ships are too vulnerable and the weapons with which to attack them too cheap and too easy to hide.
There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States.
Peace Negotiations?
Which brings us to the question of strategic outcomes. As the above has made clear, I think the Trump administration erred spectacularly in starting this war. It appears as though, in part pressured by Israel, but mostly based on their own decisions (motivated, it sure seems, by the ease of the Venezuela regime-change) they decided to go ahead on the hopeful assumption the regime would collapse and as a result did not plan for the most likely outcome (large war, strait closure), despite this being the scenario that political leadership (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio) were warned was most likely.
The administration now appears to be trying to extricate itself from the problem has created, but as I write this, is currently still stuck in the ‘trap’ above. Now this is a fast moving topic, so by the time you actually read this the war well could have ended in a ceasefire (permanent or temporary) or intensified and expanded. Who knows! As I am writing the Trump administration claims that they are very near a negotiated ceasefire, while the Iranian regime claims they have rejected both of the United States’ interlocutors as unsuitable (‘backstabbing’ negotiators), while reporting suggests Israel may feel it in their interests to blow up any deal if the terms are too favorable to Iran.
That is a lot of uncertainty! But I think we can look at some outcomes here both in terms of what was militarily achieved, what the consequences of a ‘deal’ might be and what the consequences of not having a deal might be.
The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives for this war, but I think it is fair to say the major strategic objectives have not been achieved. Initially, the stated objective was regime change or at least regime collapse; neither has occurred. The regime very much still survives and if the war ends soon it seems very plausible that the regime – able to say that it fought the United States and made the American president sue for peace – will emerge stronger, domestically (albeit with a lot of damage to fix and many political problems that are currently ‘on pause’ coming ‘un-paused’). The other core American strategic interest here is Iran’s nuclear program, the core of which is Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium; no effort appears to have been made to recover or destroy this material and it remains in Iranian hands. Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.
When the United States did this in Kazakhstan, removing about 600kg (so roughly the same amount) it required the team to spend 12 hours a day every day for a month to remove it, using multiple heavy cargo planes. And that facility was neither defended, nor buried under rubble.
Subsequently, administration aims seem to have retreated mostly to ‘fixing the mess we made:’ getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the ships moving again. They do seem to be asking for quite a bit more at the peace table, but the record of countries winning big concessions at the peace table which they not only haven’t secured militarily but do not appear able to do so is pretty slim.
Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal sooner rather than later. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence. This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes. That’s going to be a hard negotiating position to bridge, especially because Iran can ‘tough it out’ through quite a lot of bombing.
And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Strategic Implications
So my conclusion here is that the United States has not yet achieved very much in this war on a strategic level. Oh, tactically, the United States has blown up an awful lot of stuff and done so with very minimal casualties of its own. But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.
None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.
So the true, strategic gains here for all of the tactical effectiveness displayed, are functionally nil. Well what did it cost?
Well, first and foremost, to date the lives of 13 American soldiers (290 more WIA), 24 Israelis (thousands more injured), at least a thousand civilian deaths across ‘neutral’ countries (Lebanon mostly, but deaths in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc) and probably at least a thousand if not more Iranian civilians (plus Iranian military losses). The cost of operations for the United States is reportedly one to two billion dollars a day, which adds up pretty quickly to a decent chunk of change.
All of the military resources spent in this war are in turn not available for other, more important theaters, most obviously the Asia-Pacific (INDOPACOM), but of course equally a lot of these munitions could have been doing work in Ukraine as well. As wars tend to do, this one continues to suck in assets as it rumbles on, so the American commitment is growing, not shrinking. And on top of spent things like munitions and fuel, the strain on ships, air frames and service personnel is also a substantial cost: it turns out keeping a carrier almost constantly running from one self-inflicted crisis to the next for ten months is a bad idea.
You could argue these costs would be worthwhile it they resulted in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program – again, the key element here is the HEU, which has not been destroyed – or of the Iranian regime. But neither of those things have been achieved on the battlefield, so this is a long ledger of costs set against…no gains. Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
The next side of this are the economic consequences. Oil and natural gas have risen in price dramatically, but if you are just watching the commodity ticker on the Wall Street Journal, you may be missing some things. When folks talk about oil prices, they generally do so via either $/bbl (West Texas Intermediate – WTI – one-month front-month futures) or BRN00 (Brent Crude Oil Continuous Contracts). These are futures contracts, meaning the price being set is not for a barrel of oil right now but for a barrel of oil in the future; we can elide the sticky differences between these two price sets and just note that generally the figure you see is for delivery in more-or-less one month’s time. Those prices have risen dramatically (close to doubled), but may not reflect the full economic impact here: as the ‘air bubble’ created by the sudden stop of oil shipments expands, physical here-right-now prices for oil are much higher in many parts of the world and still rising.
Essentially, the futures markets are still hedging on the idea that this war might end and normal trade might resume pretty soon, a position encouraged by the current administration, which claims it has been negotiating with Iran (Iran denied the claim). The tricky thing here is that this is a war between two governments – the Trump administration and the Iranian regime – which both have a clear record of lying a lot. The Trump administration has, for instance, repeatedly claimed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia was imminent, and that war remains ongoing. The markets are thus forced to try and guess everyone’s actions and intentions from statements that are unreliable. Cards on the table, I think the markets are underestimating the likelihood that this conflict continues for some time. Notably, the United States is moving assets into theater – an MEU, elements of the 82 Airborne – which will take some time to arrive (two weeks for the MEU which is still about a week out as I write this) and set up for operations.
In either case, while I am not an expert on oil extraction or shipping, what I have seen folks who are experts on those things say is that the return of normal operations after this war will be very slow, often on the order of ‘every extra week of conflict adds a month to recovery’ (which was Sal Mercogliano’s rule of thumb in a recent video). If the war ends instantly, right now, ship owners will first have to determine that the strait is safe, then ships will have to arrive and begin loading to create space in storage to start up refineries to create space in storage to start up oil wells that have been ‘shut in,’ some of which may require quite a bit of doing to restart. Those ships in turn have to spend weeks sailing to the places that need these products, where some of the oil and LNG is likely to be used to refill stockpiles rather than immediately going out to consumers. For many products, refineries and production at the point of sale – fertilizer plants, for instance – will also need to be restarted. Factory restarts can be pretty involved tasks.
This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028.
Meanwhile, disruption of fertilizer production, which relies heavily on natural gas products, has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices – and food prices have already been elevated by the impact of the War in Ukraine – are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. After all, a 25% increase in the price of food in a rich country is annoying – you have to eat more cheaper foods (buy more ramen, etc.). But in a poor country it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food and hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.
I am not saying this will happen – the equally big spike in food prices from the Ukraine War has not touched off a wave of revolutions – but that it increases the likelihood of chaotic, dynamic, unsettled political events.
But it does seem very clear that this war has created a set of global economic headwinds which will have negative repercussions for many countries, including the United States. The war has not, as of yet, made Americans any safer – but it has made them poorer.
Then there are the political implications. I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.
Again, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it certainly seems like there is an open door to a future where this war is the final nail in the coffin of the American-Israeli security partnership, as it becomes impossible to sustain in the wake of curdling American public opinion. That would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel if it happened. On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s. But a future president might well cut off spare parts and maintainers for those F-35s, refuse to sell new ones, refuse to sell armaments for them, and otherwise make it very difficult for Israel to acquire superior weapons compared to its regional rivals.
Economic coercion is equally dangerous: Israel is a small, substantially trade dependent country and its largest trading partner is the United States, followed by the European Union. But this trade dependency is not symmetrical: the USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. Absent American diplomatic support then, the threat of economic sanctions is quite dire: Israel is meaningfully exposed and the sanctions would be very low cost for the ‘Status Quo Coalition’ (assuming the United States remains a member) to inflict under a future president.
A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory. As Thucydides might put it, an outcome like that would be an “example for the world to meditate upon.” That outcome is by no means guaranteed, but every day the war grinds on and becomes less popular in the United States, it becomes more likely.
But the United States is likewise going to bear diplomatic costs here. Right now the Gulf States have to shelter against Iranian attack but when the dust settles they – and many other countries – will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty. Coming hot on the heels of the continuing drama around tariffs, the takeaway in many places may well be ‘Uncle Sam wants you to be poor,’ which is quite a damaging thing for diplomacy. And as President Trump was finding out when he called for help in the Strait of Hormuz and got told ‘no’ by all of our traditional allies, it is in fact no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated, no matter how powerful you are.
Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran. I said this at the top but I’ll say it again: the Iranian regime is odious. You will note also I have not called this war ‘unprovoked’ – the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades. That said, it is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it. But I think it is fair to say this war has been a tragedy for the Iranian people and a catastrophe for the Iranian regime.
And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?
And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.
In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer.
> Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important
Perhaps this should be not UNimportant?
This looks like a typo: “Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important”.
Yes obviously a typo. But it’s consistently irritating that the first replies to Bret’s well-thought out posts are pedants pointing out typos rather than engaging with the substantive material. 10 points for proofreading, -50 for comprehension.
Eh….given the name of the blog i am fine with it.
Is there some better way we should be reporting typos?
Also, “primal scream issued into the avoid” in the penultimate paragraph. There were a few others I saw but didn’t make particular note of.
Well said.
Reading this was a lot more insightful than the major media outlets. Thanks!
I would love to hear your thoughts on how this war will affect on-going Russo-Ukrainian war.
When you say that Iran was not a major strategic priority, are you aware of the statements made by Steve Witkoff, one of the US negotiators who was part of the talks with Iran just prior to the start of the war? It was pretty widely reported about three weeks ago; here’s one link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-steve-witkoff-iran-enriched-uranium-11-nuclear-bombs/. A couple of key quotes:
> Witkoff said that the uranium could have been enriched to the weapons-grade level of 90% within a week to 10 days.
> “Both the Iranian negotiators said to us, directly, with, you know, no shame, that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60% [enriched uranium], and they’re aware that that could make 11 nuclear bombs, and that was the beginning of their negotiating stance,” Witkoff told Fox News.
(Paragraphs starting with > are quotes from the CBS news article, except for my own addition in brackets; I can’t seem to get WordPress to do proper blockquote formatting, so old-style email quoting it is. Rest of this comment is my own words.)
If Witkoff is accurately reporting what the Iranian negotiators said, that changes the strategic picture for the US. Because if the US’s strategic goal had been to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and now Iran is a week and a half away from being able to create 11 nuclear warheads, then suddenly the strategic picture becomes urgent, and a half-planned effort now becomes better than a fully-planned effort next month.
The existential threat to Israel, of course, is obvious: if Iran had developed functioning nuclear weapons, some, perhaps all, of them would have been launched at Israel. But Iran also had the range to reach most of Europe: they launched two missiles at the American military base on the island of Diego Garcia. One failed mid-flight, but the other one was intercepted by countermissile fire, presumably because it looked like it could have reached its target. Diego Garcia is farther from Tehran (2,361 miles) than Berlin (2,200 miles). (Note, I have not personally verified those distances, but I have no reason to believe they’re in error). It would be unwise of any country within 2,000 miles of Iran to assume that they would be safe from a nuclear-armed Iran led by Khamenei.
In my opinion, if Mr. Witkoff was accurately reporting what the Iranian negotiators said to him, then Iran was a much more urgent strategic priority for America than you seem to believe it was. I suspect that it was when Trump saw the reports from his negotiators that he said, “That’s it, we’re pulling the trigger now, we can’t afford to wait.” And, of course, if Trump shared that info with Netanyahu (which I believe he did, or else Netanyahu had received similar strategic assessments from Israeli intelligence), then the reason for Israel to launch the attack right away was even more obvious. Even if your assessment is correct that the war would be a political misfire for Israel and they can gain at best a pyrrhic victory, when someone’s choices are a possible pyrrhic victory or likely nuclear annihilation, he’s going to choose the first option.
“if Iran had developed functioning nuclear weapons, some, perhaps all, of them would have been launched at Israel.”
Citation needed
I think that’s where the “US committed to this war in June 2025” bit comes in – at that point it was obvious to everyone in Iran that the only defence against another round of air attacks and so ad infinitum was their own nuclear deterrent – which is the big lesson of the second Trump administration; the US won’t defend its allies and will launch decapitation strikes on its enemies, so just in case, we better get a bomb.
As for Iran inevitably using its bomb as soon as it has one, Israel is also a nuclear power and unlike Iran, has meaningful defences – Iran would be in the same position as the Soviet Union vis-a-vis NATO in the 1950s, they would probably hurt their enemies quite badly, and certainly be annihilated in return. Of course, if you think Israel will kill you whatever you do, why not preemptively go down swinging?
That reasoning only holds up if you assume that the situation “Iran possesses nuclear arms” instantly and with 100% certainty becomes “Iran uses nuclear arms on Israel”. Which is not proven, and in fact there’s very many indications that the opposite is true.
Firstly, Iran already possessed a variety of non-nuclear weapons capable of attacking Israel(or Europe), and did not fire them except in response to an Israeli attack.
Secondly, very many countries around the world possess nuclear weapons, all but one of which, the United States, have not used them to attack another country. In fact, there’s even a majority-Islam country (Pakistan) possessing nuclear weapons, which was involved in several wars and did not use their nuclear weapons.
Also, the US already once used the justification of “This dictatorial regime can never be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction” to invade another country, and achieved nothing except untold human suffering as Iraq collapsed into chaos. So I’d treat the US statements in that regard as a priory untrustworthy.
I think you make some points that are interesting, but this part doesn’t make any sense:
“In fact, there’s even a majority-Islam country (Pakistan) possessing nuclear weapons, which was involved in several wars and did not use their nuclear weapons.”
Pakistan, for all its problems and all the flaws of its governing structures, probably never had a political leadership quite as bad as the Mullahs.
That sentence is there because there’s people who argue that the reason Iran is different from other nuclear countries because of the Islamic concept of jihad. So it’s a pre-emptive counterargument.
That doesn’t help much if the argument is “Muslims who personally have a very strong commitment to Jihadist ideology would approach the use of nuclear weapons differently than most other people, including Muslims who don’t have such a strong personal commitment.”
Personally, I have a lot of strong disagreements with both the average Jesuit and the average “It’s God’s will that the Rapture should happen soon” Fundamentalist preacher, but I’d be a lot less worried about nuclear weapons in the hands of the former than the latter.
The biggest mullah of them all, the late Khamenei, had issued a fatwa against the development and use of nuclear weapons. Either the Iranians take their religious leaders seriously or they do not. The Iranian strategy up until now was to threaten nuclear breakout in exchange for sanctions relief, which culminated in the JCPOA and which Iran was reasonably happy with. I imagine that calculus may have changed.
“Either the Iranians take their religious leaders seriously or they do not.”
Apparently they did not, because after the fatwa there’s decades of development. While Khameinei was leader, which meant *he* didn’t mean it either.
I don’t think we can say anything with respect to that particular fatwa.
Charitably, there may be extra wordage not usually quoted that reconciles what people say about it, with what Iran did after it was proclaimed.
Or, maybe it was just political sloganeering, not intended seriously.
> That reasoning only holds up if you assume that the situation “Iran possesses nuclear arms” instantly and with 100% certainty becomes “Iran uses nuclear arms on Israel”.
That has been the assumption of most of the analyses I’ve seen over the past two decades. It could be wrong, yes, but I personally think it’s correct.
However, what I believe about Iran’s intentions doesn’t matter at all to the analysis, really. What does matter, a LOT, is what Netanyahu believes about Iran’s intentions. And it’s clear that Netanyahu believed, and still believes, that a nuclear-armed Iran run by Khomeini would have been a threat to Israel’s existence.
“> That reasoning only holds up if you assume that the situation “Iran possesses nuclear arms” instantly and with 100% certainty becomes “Iran uses nuclear arms on Israel”.
That has been the assumption of most of the analyses I’ve seen over the past two decades. It could be wrong, yes, but I personally think it’s correct.”
Why do you think that a nuclear-armed Iran’s first move would be to invite its own destruction as a functioning state? Israel has nuclear weapons, it has the delivery systems to use them against Iran, and it would be extremely likely to use them to retaliate against Iran in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack.
Iran has been “about to have nuclear weapons” for an eternity now.
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions
Except intelligence assessed that they were not in fact building one, and there’s more to having a bomb than having uranium.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/jun/23/Tulsi-Gabbard-Iran-nuclear-weapon-Donald-Trump/
“Possessing SNM precursors” and “possessing deliverable nuclear arms” are not interchangeable statements. It may take a week and half to enrich the SNM to weapons grade levels, but then it will take additional time to actually prepare the material for use in a physics package. The enriched UF3 will have to be processed to extract the metal, which itself will then have to processed to whatever physical form will be required. This means an additional delay of a few days to a couple of weeks before the first core is available.
And that leads to the big questions… Does Iran have a (tested?*) design for a deliverable weapon (physics package, arming/fusing/firing system, and the bomb or warhead structure) that they have sufficient confidence in to manufacture and deploy? Have they produced the non nuclear components and are just awaiting the SNM?
Neither is impossible. A crude (by our standards) design can be developed and tested without SNM. And even a multi kiloton fizzle is a politically viable weapon. (Adding the margins to *ensure* it works paradoxically can increase the chance of a fizzle.) They don’t need a high yield weapon, even as low as 5-8 kilotons in an urban area will produce sufficient damage to be unacceptable.
The real question is how they intend to deliver it. Air drops are out of the question. And we have the demonstrated capability to intercept MRBMs and TBMs. There are various ways to potentially attempt to evade those interceptors (highly lofted trajectories or maneuvering warheads) but those are significant technical challenges in their own right… Not impossible, but we simply don’t know.
So far as I’m aware they don’t have a tested design, which adds some delay. Not sure how much, though.
As for delivery, airdrop is obviously out, but they can still hold the threat over Israel with an MRBM. Interception rates aren’t perfect and Israel currently willfully lets through missiles targeted at open ground. The threat of getting a single nuke through in a mass conventional decoy bombardment is still a reasonably potent one.
I am personally pretty dubious that Iran is as crazy as their propaganda implies. They seem to have been behaving as rational actors who are advancing their interests and don’t want to all die even if some of them are willing to be personally martyred. They’re also not too committed to nuclear weapons given that they were willing to sign the JCPOA.
I am much more inclined to believe they’d use nukes as a shield like literally everyone else with nukes, even North Korea. This would still be bad because they’d be emboldened to step up their proxy wars, but it’s not the same as nuking Israel (and probably although not certainly failing because of Israel’s missile defenses).
Iran probably developed a viable warhead design sometime in the 2003-2012 timeframe, tested it (at Parchim) to the extent possible without actual nuclear explosions, and put it in a filing cabinet against future need. It is reasonable to assume that there are many copies hidden in many filing cabinets around the country, and not reasonable to assume that this knowledge can be destroyed by aerial bombardment.
Based on the performance of other nuclear powers with their earliest designs, there is a 75-80% probability of it developing full yield (probably 10-20 kilotons) on the first shot, and ~90% of it developing at least half a kiloton or so.
Iran’s policy for the past 20 years seems to have been to maintain the capability to develop a modest nuclear arsenal on short notice, but not to actually do so until absolutely necessary. It is more likely that we have convinced them it is absolutely necessary to develop a nuclear deterrent, than that we have eliminated their ability to build a modest nuclear arsenal on short notice. Maybe we’ve bought six months; we’ll see.
Well, 1/2 kiloton still spreads radioactive material a good distance around. Not as bad as a full yield, but not desirable either.
“If Witkoff is accurately reporting what the Iranian negotiators said, that changes the strategic picture for the US.”
No, it doesn’t.
Hi Bret, I would like to thank you for articulating all this.
I had a gnawing doubt that the move might not be good for Israel in the long run, but wasn’t sure how.
I really appreciate how you articulated the perils.
(Being in Germany right now, I do get the feeling that Germany would have to be dragged kicked and screaming into any sort of action against Israel (sanctions, any sort of military intervention against Israel would be absolutely unthinkable, especially given their nuclear deterrence).
Yep. Trump took Venezuela as his mental model for how Iran would work: decapitate the government and end up with a successor more willing to play ball with the USA. (Possibly but not necessarily by way of a popular revolution, in Iran’s case.) Absent that kind of regime change, the war only leads to worse scenarios. And here we are.
I’m not sure I agree that last year’s suprise attack locked us into war at a time of the Israeli government’s choosing, though. Say that Israel killed Khamenei and (with last year in mind) Iran inevitably retaliated with strikes on American bases and allies. An America that really *hadn’t* supported the decapitation of the regime could have responded by seriously punishing Israel as well as Iran, signalling that it hadn’t been involved and wanted deescalation. We’ve played the proportionate-but-deescalating retaliation game with the Islamic Republic before.
Shipping would have frozen temporarily in Hormuz as soon as the bombs flew, but if Iran thought that:
* the US was actually trying to stop Israel from continuing its agenda of violent regime destabilization;
* after some initial US counter-retaliation for Iran’s revenge strikes, the US wasn’t going to keep hammering at Iran; and
* a significant diplomatic worsening of Israel’s position had just become possible, after it tried to drag its military patron into an unwanted war,
I imagine it would have wanted to keep full closure of the strait on reserve as a threat.
Maybe that just shows my strategic naivete. But that’s the scenario I’d have tried to work toward if I were a US policymaker who wanted to make last year’s attacks but was reluctant to be dragged into subsequent military adventures by a junior partner. Some damage would have been inescapable, but there’d have been some chance of avoiding THIS much damage.
As it is, though, I think we’re at war right now because our government liked the odds of regime change, not because Israel in any meaningful way forced our hand.
This sounds like the sort of story that maybe could be sold, but to do so would require strong negotiating links. One of the things that I remember standing out to me from the 12 day war was how many negotiators were targeted.
What if Trump just needs to survive the midterms better than in 2018 and wanted a small victorious war to somehow boost his odds? After all, per Clausewitz (drink!) war is always political. 😉
I mean the article shows that US government is just strategically careless to start this war, alright, but what if there is more to the war’s real goals than cannot be seen through pure military (strategy/operations/tactics) optics? Those US guys just can’t be that stupid? Or can they?
Still, that June 22, 2025 US strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities made the US involvement with the next Israeli strike and thus 2026 Iran war inevitable is a strong case against that midterms scenario. But again, it can show Trump can plan bit ahead for his small victorious wars.
Still a dumb war, because its political impact is also likely to be catastrophic. You don’t win the midterms on “I blew up the ayatollah and his missile launchers’ if gas is $5 a gallon.
I listened to a podcast (Conflicted with an American host and a Saudi British host who used to be a MI6 spy in Al Qaeda) and the Saudi guy was so optimistic about this going well for the US.
He made the point, not addressed here, that the US military did account for the closing of the strait. (Which makes sense, they’ve been wargaming war with Iran for decades) Iran’s plan A to block the strait was sinking some old ships in a critical channel and physically blocking it. The US sunk those ships on day 1. Plan B was small high speed boats carrying torpedoes and anti ship missiles. Iran built a few hundred of these. They all got blown up on days 2 and 3. Plan C was mining the strait and attacks with submarines. All of the mine layers and subs were also destroyed in the first few days.
So now, Iran has plan D, a “soft”‘ closure accomplished through the use of drones and missiles.
And it works.
But the destruction of A, B, C, suggests that the US military knew what they were doing.
The Saudi British host was also convinced that the US next step was to seize Kharg island (an island about a third the size of Manhattan at the north bend of the strait) and then fortify it. This island is where Iran loads almost all of its oil on tankers. Losing it would be a significant blow to the regime’s finances.
Now, while the saudi host talked about how easy it would be for the US to seize the island (and I believe it, one small island is much easier to get than a whole country) neither host explained why the Marines needed to do so are just now leaving the US. Presumably, if this was a well thought out plan, they should have been in place before February 28.
He also believed that this war was decided on October 11 2022. He said that even with a Harris presidency, this war would still have happened.
It was wild to here how optimistic the hosts were when describing this conflict.
They called it the first imperial war as Iran had threatened the current global “imperial” system of the US and this was that empire smacking back. (They didn’t mention Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan.
Problem for the Saudis and the UAE is that by running with the wolves they put at risk their own oil and gas infrastructure – mostly located well within Iranian drone and missile range. No oil for Iran is no oil for them. This may not deter them – the current Saudi leader is not exactly known for making good calls on policy.
The US might be content with a ritual victory. Israel wants a wrecked Iran (and Lebanon, Syria, Iraq …)
I feel like this conflates tactics and strategy.
I don’t think anyone has argued that the US military is not highly competent on a tactical/operational level. It would be very surprising if their plans hadn’t included measures to secure the strait. These kinds of decisions are made by professional military planners.
Those same military planners will have communicated to political leadership that, while they were confident they could prevent options A-C, option D would be impossible to fully contain
Political leadership then refuses to listen (and/or fails to appreciate the strategic significance of this fact). Thus you end up in this mess.
Same with Kharg Island. Sure tactically/operationally they can take it, probably have plans for doing so. But that’s further escalation, and how does it change the fundamental strategic picture?
Honestly those tacticool podcasts are nothing more than propaganda: just to remind that limited damage to the Ras Laffan site caused shortages that will take YEARS to recover and that totally shifted lthe andscape of LNG production and distribution.
Everybody involved in this mess is a liar and an incompetent.
Oh, I’m pretty sure that yes, the US Military knows what they’re doing. But they’re currently taking their orders from people who don’t. Yes, of course the US Military knew that Iran would close the Strait. But their bosses at the political level were convinced that Iran wouldn’t, and they didn’t listen to anyone who told them it would.
As for the US seizing Kharg Island and getting Iran into economic difficulties – yes, of course that’s the plan right now. But re-read our host’s comments on financial difficulties during war time. Besides, for the Iranian regime, it is a war *for its very survival*. Are you going to give up your own survival and agree to your destruction because you’re running into *financial difficulties*?
And, the new Supreme Leader of Iran is a guy from whose perspective Trump, the people who work for him, and the country they lead are the people who killed his father. Is he going to worry about financial difficulties? (“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. But I’m tight with money right now, so please tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”)
As for “He also believed that this war was decided on October 11 2022. He said that even with a Harris presidency, this war would still have happened.” (I assume you mistyped “2023”.) That’s just completely, incredibly, mind-bogglingly delusional. Unless the guy was simply lying, of course. The only people who might seriously believe that would be either 1) people who don’t know much about US politics at all (perhaps because their main specialty is Al Qaeda rather than the USA); 2) right-wingers who are too convinced that “everyone clearly agrees” with the “obvious rightness” of their own ideas, and 3) left-wingers whose judgment is too clouded by their low opinion of mainstream Democrats.
I don’t think the forces being deployed right now could hold Kharg Island against a massed small boat attack supported by several hundred Shaheds. I’m also not convinced it will cause Iran to surrender, and frankly I don’t think it’s the best method of shutting down Iran’s oil exports. The US could set up a distant blockade outside the strait and intercept all the oil without exposing forces to Shahed bombardment. This has the advantage that we don’t risk damaging the infrastructure, which means we don’t put Iran into a sunk cost position where they can’t get their oil exports back even if the war ends.
Blockades only work if the blockaded party is willing to cooperate. All it will take is couple of suicidal tanker crews not cooperating – and now the US is responsible for massive ecological catastrophe.
There is no good end for the US.
That’s nonsensical; we don’t have to blow up the ships to stop & board them. Cargo ships are absolutely terrible for military purposes, and also, it is rather rare to have crews which are suicidal. And if they are, they can just dump the oil wherever. Also also, that doesn’t benefit Iran so they have little reason to try.
“Iran’s plan A to block the strait was sinking some old ships in a critical channel and physically blocking it.”
This sounds improbable. Even a very large tanker won’t draw more than 20-25m. If you look at a chart, the Strait of Hormuz is over 100m deep in its most constrained part, the shipping channel around the north of the Musandam peninsula. For comparison, the entire southern North Sea is less than 50m deep and has many large wrecked ships in it, very few of which are dangers to shipping.
The Strait of Hormuz is also pretty wide and therefore blocking it up would take a lot of ships. Historically blockships have really only been used for very constrained sea areas like harbour entrances.
I think you should discard everything else that this podcast said.
I’d love our host to opine on my almost certainly naive view about what a hypothetical modern version of the Romans would do in this kind of situation:
To me, this looks like a situation that you cannot solve through military power alone, or even mostly, but an insane level of applied engineering could make a difference – dropping in an army of engineers and building alternative infrastructure to transiting the straits, feels like exactly the sort of crazy thing that the Romans would do.
And sure, maybe this would be a level behind Ceasar’s Rhine bridges, or the circumvallation of Alesia, or the Masada ramp, but the USA is an empire with capability far beyond Rome’s peak.
If the USA spent 1-2 billion a day on building infrastructure, instead of blowing infrastructure up, what could be achieved?
I am pretty sure that the Roman response would be to depopulate the region and import new inhabitants.
Interestingly, the Romans did have this problem – dealing with a hostile state in Persia – which they managed primarily through diplomacy for a long time, and then primarily through war for a long time.
Historians generally regard the diplomatic approach as more successful.
The gods seems to agree with the historians, given they struck an Emperor with lightning when he tried to wage war against Persia :þ
I think Roman capacity to build infrastructure into hostile territory was aided by the fact that the armies they needed to cross into that territory could effectively walk across one bridge, and their enemies did not possess the means to keep blowing up the bridge (and the vehicles that transport the construction materials) from several miles away.
The technological capabilities are higher across the board, and that greatly increases the logistical pressures even on the much stronger power.
Also, the Roman borders existed on the edge of the territory they were moving into to build bridges. They didn’t have to ship troops and materiel hundreds of miles from the home land.
I suspect the Romans would do things the hard way if they considered it a vital strategic interest and dispatch sufficient ground forces to secure the strait.
It would create a lot of targets for Iranian missiles.
There is already an east-west pipeline (‘petroline’) running from the persian gulf coast to the red sea. It has been the target of the Houthis in the past, but as far as I know, it’s currently open, despite the war with Iran. Apparently it was built in response to the Iran-Iraq ‘tanker’ war, but it rather illustrates the fact that engineering solutions can make sense in scenarios like this.
What is the possibility that, political power in the US – against Trump’s administration – will go for a presidency change? As someone outside of the US, having no clue about how it works, is it likely such political conflict within the US itself, will make the US stop the war.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem very likely for structural reasons, at the very least until the next election and I would consider it extremely unlikely even afterwards.
There’s only two lawful paths to removing a President; Impeachment and the 25th amendment. Impeachment requires a majority vote in the House of Representatives and a 2/3rds vote in the Senate. Both are currently majority-Republican, and the Senate uses a phased election system where only a third of the membership will be up for election, so I’m not actually sure it’s possible for Democrats to take a 2/3rds majority this year. Trump currently has a death-grip on party loyalty because he’s got a diehard base that votes in the primaries that decide who the Republican candidate in the general election is. This might collapse if the Republicans take too bad a loss in the election, but so far it’s holding
The 25th Amendment is actually harder; it requires a majority vote of the Cabinet (all appointed by Trump and committed to the war) to initiate, and if Trump disputes it requires a 2/3rds vote of both houses to permanently remove him from office. It’s really intended for when the President is in a coma or suffering from dementia so severe he doesn’t notice he’s been removed from office.
Technically, Trump can’t deploy the military for more than 60 days without authorization from Congress, but odds are good it’s forthcoming or he’s just going to cite inherent Article 2 powers and the Supreme Court will back him. The odds of a military coup or mass strike do not appear high.
As for a popular revolution, most of America still believes in elections and aren’t likely to rise up unless Trump overreaches by canceling them.
“Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic” – when you consider that Israel has for quite a long time, presented itself as representing _ALL_ Jews, whether or they they wish it to, you realize that Israel has been driving this antisemitism. Or in other words, Israel is using Diaspora Jewish communities as “Human Shields” for its policies, which means it values those Jewish lives as less than it values those policies which reflect almost perfectly, the policies that antisemitic regines in europe used to expell the Sephardim (and Muslims) from Spain in 1492, and the Ashkenazim from England in 1290, etcetera.
Bigotry is ultimately the fault of the bigots, not their targets.
I accept the line of argument that points out that Israel, aside from all its other horrible acts, has also openly allied itself with right-wing antisemites around the world. But I don’t accept the line of argument that because Israel is bad, they’re to blame for bigoted haters hating Jews.
The Likud regime certainly is no stranger to peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories when when the targets of those conspiracy theories are, say, George Soros or Volodymyr Zelenzky.
This is above and beyond a conspiracy theory popular among Israeli hyper-nationalists, which blames the Holocaust on Palestinians.
“when you consider that Israel has for quite a long time, presented itself as representing _ALL_ Jews, whether or they they wish it to, you realize that Israel has been driving this antisemitism.”
If some insane African dictator – some Idi Amin type – was putting himself forth as “The Only True Representative Of The Black Race Worldwide”, and if you disagreed very strongly with him and his policies, I would still not regard going round punching random black people in London as an acceptable way for you to behave, and if you did this, I would blame you, not the Idi Amin type.
“the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades.” You know, the Hizbullah resistance came into existence because Israel’s government sent the IDF into Lebanon in 1982, and wouldn’t leave, while behaving abusively towards the locals in south Lebanon. In similar situations, the Allied Powers supported resistance movements in Third Reich Occupied Europe during the 1940s. Is it any wonder that Iran, without taking control of these “proxies”, either politically or otherwise, would supply fellow Shi’a resistance movements in their local region? Or are you claiming by extension, that the French, Czech, Polish, Danish, Dutch, Yugoslavian, etc, and even German, resistance movements during that period, were “terrorists”? And another thing, Hizbullah were fighting the IDF, a military armed force. I fail to see how guerrilla warfare against an occupying army constitutes “terrorism”, whereas an armed force using armed might against unarmed civilians, does constitute terrorism, state terrorism, and the IDF by the same standards we judge the Wehrmacht, was and is a terrorist organization, as indeed was the US armed forces in Iraq. Or are you arguing that West Asians aka Middle Easterners, aren’t human? Because that’s the end result of following that train of thought. (You might like to re-read the US Declaration of Independence. That’s where I get this train of thought, and needless to say, that’s probably where the judges in the Nuremberg Trials and the Tokyo trials got their train of thought, regarding armed forces used against civilians populations.)
You complain at length about people being called terrorists in a direct reply to a quote that does not, actually, contain the word “terrorism” or “terrorists”. You might want to pay attention to what the people you’re responding to are actually saying, instead of just mechanically reciting your lines from the standard script.
You’re reading too much into Bret’s one-word aside here. You can act provocatively even towards an aggressor. Or would you say that a kid that says to a schoolyard bully “I’m going to beat you up tomorrow” is not provoking that bully?
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong about your stance regarding Hezbollah and Israel – I am with you at least so far as that Israel is one of the biggest sources of regional instability in the last decade and should be acknowledged as such. But you’re overreacting and shouldn’t immediately accuse him of dehumanising the Lebanese.
The IDF went into Lebanon in 1978 to dig out the PLO, who had just killed dozens of Israelis in the Coastal Road Massacre. But perhaps some people wouldn’t regard the Coastal Road Massacre as terrorism, either, because after all it only killed Jews.
Unfortunately it seems like the political reality of the United States is that ending any war in a way that can be seen as a “loss” is a political disaster, even if that war was started by a predecessor and is very unpopular. After Joe Biden got eviscerated for withdrawing from Afghanistan it seems very unlikely a future president (whether due to impeachment, death in office, or the next election) will want to take the political heat of being the “loser” in Iran.
I enjoyed the first part of this and will come back to it when I have time, but wanted to mention that near the top there appears to be an error. The text said that people in countries are not important, when I believe you meant that they are important. I think there was an inadvertently missing double negative.
Fixed
“Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important,” I think you meant “unimportant” here.
Fixed
Sarah Paine has this concept called a ‘pivotal error’. A pivotal error is one where there is no return to status quo ante and all options are now worse. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is an example she returns to – brilliant on an operational level, terrible on a strategic one. This regime seems committed to do as many pivotal errors as possible in as short a time period as possible. This is what happens when you have a country decide to put the incompetent nincompoops in charge of running the country.
“Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important”
Shouldn’t this be “unimportant”?
Fixed
SMH. Take it from this war college grad and retired flag officer… this will go down as the case study of how not to start a war. However tactically brilliant it has been due to the exceptional capabilities and training of the US military, you don’t go to war with a military, you go to war with all of national power, and the planning and execution has been both strategically and operationally inept. A war college seminar group could do better.
Cynically for war initiation the Trump administration would have been smarter to let Israel got it alone, and if the Iranian response inflicted US casualties they’d have had causus belli and the nation would have been howling for blood.
If they don’t back down, it’s about to get even more catastrophically stupid. If the Marines or 82d are inserted into Iranian territory, it will be extremely difficult to sustain them and they will take a pounding; nothing in the air and sea campaign is doing anything meaningful to attrit Iran’s substantial asymmetrical ground capabilities, on their home ground, with a population that supports resisting an invader. Even a limited objective like the seizure of Kharg island, which would be accomplished tactically (with significant risk) would be strategically and operationally stupid. Iran has de facto closed the Strait, but that’s immediately reversible as it doesn’t appear that they have yet mined it to enable their own continued shipping. Seize Kharg and there’s no reason for Iran to take the shipping equivalent of the nuclear option and release the sea mines and close the straight for real, for everyone.
And setting aside international legality — since there’s no one to enforce those laws — the important legal date for the US is 1 May. Congress has neither declared war nor authorized the use of force in Iran. The War Powers Act gives a president 62 days of carte blanche (48 hours to report, 60 days for Congress to act or wind down) before the ability to employ the military is lost legally. On 1 May, without Congressional action, every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine executing any order other than local self defense is now obeying patently illegal orders.
I fear for the Republic.
Well, the people currently running the show in the USA seem to hate the war colleges as bastions of wokeness.
> Iran has de facto closed the Strait, but that’s immediately reversible as it doesn’t appear that they have yet mined it to enable their own continued shipping. […] release the sea mines and close the straight for real, for everyone.
What does “release the sea mines” actually mean? Go out and put them in the water, or turn on mines that are already sitting there?
It seems pretty achievable to have remote control, at least up to “arm once, disarm once” (and probably even “bob up from the bottom on a cable once”). Which, come to think of it, would also mean that mining was reversible at least as long as you didn’t want to reserve the ability to do it again quickly. Do real mines not actually have that much controllability?
Most mines stay armed once set, which is why there’s been efforts to ban land mines and some sea routes are still closed due to WW2 mines. Even in countries that make efforts to clean up their minefields, that’s more a matter of tracking where they are and detonating them in place.
… but this isn’t World War II. In 1945, you *literally couldn’t* have built a mine that could be reliably remotely disarmed (or armed) by you, but not by the other side. The technology truly didn’t exist. It would even have been a bit tricky (possible, but not trivial) to build one you could remotely disarm *at all* without running wires to it.
Now, you have microprocessors, and you have cryptography that would have seemed like mathematically impossible voodoo in 1945. If you can get a signal to your mine, having it listen *only to you* is a fully solved problem.
As for delivering that signal, I would *think* a modern mine would have a variety of sensors, including hydrophones, and be doing meaningful signal processing just to figure out when to trigger, limited maybe by battery life. You can get a message to that mine. Receiving the communication is no harder than figuring out when to explode, actually probably easier, and can actually use the same hardware.
You can’t necessarily get a confirmation *back*, and might fail to reach a few units with damaged sensors, but I don’t see how you could fail to control the vast majority of them. And in fact the ones you couldn’t reach could probably detect that they were damaged and fail safe.
… at least unless I’m missing something really obvious. I suspect that if I am, it’s something “militarily obvious” rather than “technically obvious”.
Well, the militarily obvious problem is that you have created mines that can be deactivated by an enemy that knows the signal. The signal you have to broadcast to the entire minefield over the air/through the water. So there’s a vulnerability to replay attacks, and if you want to switch the code suddenly the logistics of it all get a lot more complicated.
Oh, the cryptography you could use to have an automatically rotating signal like the authenticators on your phone requires a shared secret, so if the enemy gets their hands on one mine they can get all your activation/deactivation codes forever.
Erm, OK, look, I don’t know anything about warfare, but I do know a fair amount about cryptography. There is no “the message”. Protection against replay attacks is very, very well understood, and there are standard countermeasures. There are no logistics involved in updating; keys and sequence numbers roll automatically.
You can also send messages that only affect specific mines or groups of mines, without disclosing which mines you’re addressing.
This is exactly the stuff I meant you couldn’t do in 1945, but it’s all standard now. A lot of garage door openers get this right nowadays.
If you want protection on easy mode, it’s nice to have the mines know the date and time… which does not take a lot of battery power. If the mines *don’t* know the date and time, then the one-way communication *may* mean that a *few* units are vulnerable to replays of messages they didn’t initially hear.
That isn’t going to be that easy to exploit practically; if the other side wants to put a mine into an actually incorrect state, they need that mine to miss at least two messages, and then they have to replay the older one, and be able to get their replay to the mine in spite of whatever made them miss the original messages. That’s all without knowing which, if any, mines they’re actually affecting. That’s an awful lot of luck to chain together, and again it only applies if the mines have no clocks.
If people aren’t doing this, there has to be a better reason than replay attacks.
The logistically tricky part would be securing the keys while still retaining the necessary access to them. You don’t want to expose the control capability to capture, which means you probably can’t, for example, give every little boat in your navy the ability to manipulate every mine in the vicinity at will. But for this particular application, you can still get a lot of value while locking the key in a vault in your innermost stronghold, which seems pretty simple logistically.
You’re right that TOTP tokens use a shared secret.
You are not right that it’s impossible, or even slightly tricky, to do confidentiality, authentication, and replay protection *without* a shared secret. Avoiding shared secrets is what public-key cryptography is about. RSA was published in 1977.
I mean, obviously you don’t put anything in any one mine that can be used to control any other mine. Once again, that’s standard stuff that any vaguely competent cryptographic application developer understands.
After you do the trivial part and make sure that no other mine contains information that can *control* other mines, you have a slightly trickier problem in arranging that it can’t even *read* messages that aren’t addressed to other mines, or tell which mines those messages affect. That’s a bit less standard… but still solved.
It’s true that garage door openers don’t use any of this, or anything that involves a lot of “weird algebra”. They don’t need it, and it uses ROM, RAM, and battery in quantities that would matter for a half-ounce fob with a $1.00 BOM cost.
That doesn’t mean it’s hard for a quarter-ton, $5000 military device with a DSP in 2026. It wasn’t hard in 2006. I’d have to work out more of the design than I care to spend the time on to decide whether you’d have had to consult a real world expert to tell you how to do it in 1996, but my instinct is to say no.
Military cryptographers probably could have done most of it in 1986; I’m not sure about the “one mine can’t even tell which other mines were supposed to get a given message” part. They probably would have had to use hardware you wouldn’t want to put in a mine, though.
Seriously, the cryptography for that application is not a problem. Even if you count the 20-year military adoption lag, if that kind of remote control isn’t out there right now, has to be a *non-cryptographic* reason.
Another thing to note about the costs for the US (and to a lesser degree Israel) is how horrifically untrustworthy and unstable this makes them look to everyone, allies and enemies alike. You may think Obama overpaid for the Iran Deal (personally I think it was probably the best compromise realistically in view from the negotiations) but Trump’s actions, first in pulling out of a bunch of international deals, but far worse in killing a foreign leader in the middle of negotiations, mean that any future US President will be forced to overpay in any international deal to counter the inevitable and very understandable concern of “What happens when the US just decides to attack us instead” requiring greater costs for the US upfront instead of ongoing benefits. This is another (and perhaps the most emphatic) step on absolutely ruining US soft power and negotiating ability. I would not be shocked to see countries other than Iran rush to put more work into nuclear programmes, reasoning that any other deterrent won’t keep the US from war these days, while traditional allies of the US become harder to work with because they are quite rightly outraged by the US acting in this manner.
Honestly, even with regime change friendly to the US from the first strike, this war may not have been an overall win for US interests.
“Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States”
Good luck convincing Hegseth.
(Sorry, bad pun, I know you meant the country in Africa…)
Hah!
Fun fact: Chad has a Chad-shaped head.
Thank you for your comments about the relatively low strategic importance of the Middle East. I have the impression that in political arguments, even many people who hate each others’ guts and disagree on almost everything else still agree that the Middle East is really vitally strategically important. And I tend to think that they’re all wrong on that.
Re: your comments on market reactions to all this. Given your pro-market leanings, you’ll probably disagree with me on this, but when I hear people talking about how markets supposedly make rational decisions based on supply and demand and all that, I generally want to respond by paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher in a way that she herself would *definitely* have *disapproved* of, and say that there’s no such thing as “The Market”, there are only individual economic actors. These individual economic actors have not only their interests, but also their attitudes, their preferences, and yes, their prejudices. (That, and not any supposed “market rationality” is also, by the way, the real reason by business people as a group tend to get paid more than other professional groups. But I’m getting off topic.)
And, well, the specific individual economic actors who work on “the markets” are usually people who are politically right-wing, who are not too bright in some contexts (although often smart by some measures and always absolutely convinced of their own brilliance), and who have repulsive personalities. So they love someone like Trump, they love someone like Hegseth, they think the more schoolgirls you blow to pieces in their schools, the more awesome and badass you are, and they simply can’t imagine that such clearly awesome and badass actions taken by such clearly awesome and badass people could ever possibly have bad economic impacts on anyone who matters. So they’ll probably underestimate the economic impact of this war until stuff actually starts to physically run out in a lot of places.
This is very well written and argued. My dissention here is mostly in the form of “Yes, and…”. I think that the tactical case is extremely well argued – I hope that there is something that Devereaux has not seen that makes the situation better, but I have no idea what it is.
What I would like to add to the conversation is that the Iranian Mullahs go rather beyond odious. I think we could apply that justly to the Putin regime in Russia and various similar ones. What you have in Iran goes beyond that.
Basically, I do not think that the Mullahs represent a brutal but conventional regime, bound by the logic of realpolitik. They are a fanatical and messianic one. And that is very, very different beast.
The Iranian revolution was the catalyst for basically all the modern era’s _jihad_, the demonstration that a reactionary, bronze-age madness could be foisted on a modern society. It was – and is – proof that the Enlightenment can be defeated. I mean _really_ defeated, you Americans – not people voting against abortion, but a regime that says that virgins may not be hanged so they must be ceremonially raped to allow for the hanging.
There was a hope – and I still hold out for this – that by destroying that regime you would garrotte the confidence of the Jihad, that the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotheshood would be put on notice that they were allowed to exist on sufferance, that the modern world can get rid of them any time it so chooses. That is not an ignoble ambition, and it is not a completely unrealisitc one.
The people of Iran are not just rejecting the Mullahs, _they are rejecting Islam_. Mosques are burning, Zoroastrianism is reviving. That is a lethal blow to the confidence of the Jihad. I have some desperate hope that it is possible to rip out the cancer of the Mullahs by empowering the Iranian people.
There was also a fear – and a fear that I definitely still have – what such a regime might do with nuclear weapons. _Maybe_ it would just use those for blackmail and to maintain a status quo where its jihadi forces operate with impunity all over Eurasia. That would not be fun. But there is really the horrifying possibility that their propaganda really meant what it said, that they would immediately _use_ those nuclear weapons. That when they call their nuclear scientists “nuclear mujahideen” and when Hezbollah marches under flags of a mushroom cloud, that that really does mean what it looks like.
Imagine the consequences of the Mullahs firing nuclear weapons at Israel or America. Imagine the retaliatory strikes. Imagine the wave of terror and chaos that would engulf the world in the wake of that holocaust.
Remember, when the mullahs seek ICBMs, the “I” stands for “intercontinental”. They don’t need ICBMs to hit Israel.
I should say that the idea of nukes as deterrents is one of humanity’s truly fucking stupid ideas. Just read the history of how close we came to global annihilation due to accidents. But this is even stupider.
I am fully aware that this makes the situation even bleaker, since a messianic regime could hang on even when it is absolutely, definitely going to lose. But the above should be born in mind
I also feel the need to speak to the sympathy for the Palestinians. Let’s be clear about what we are talking about here: the Palestinian cause is the cause of Jihad. This isn’t a nationalist movement with secular aims. Preachers of HAMAS do not merely call for the annihilation of Israel; they openly speak of the reconquest of _Spain_. You don’t just see attacks on Israeli civilians in other countries – that would be a scandal enough – you see open attacks on _Jews_.
I am pro-Israel not because I have any particular sympathy for the Israeli leadership – I commend to your attention the work of Israel Shahak and the latest edition of Haaretz – but because I have a very clear idea of what the forces on the other side would do to me and mine if they had half a chance.
I do think that the waning sympathy for Israel has less to do with this current war and more to do with nearly three decades of anti-Israel propaganda and obfuscation of the nature of the jihad, encapsulated by the perfectly parodic “queers for palestine”.
For all the deranged fantasies being written about the march of Iranian jihadists they have consistently behaved like rational actors prioritising the security of their state and their continued existance. The nature of their government is reprehensible, but no more, or less, than that of Saudi Arabia which is a long-term US ally.
As for the waning sympathy of Israel, that has to do with three decades of brutal repression of Palestinians, repeated wars with tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and the fact that the public has been able to see all this happen on their screens every week. Most recently the forced displacement of a million Lebanese civilians in preparation for an operation where Israeli government ministers are openly calling for the conquest and annexation of Lebanese territory.
The Iranian regime has subsumed 20-50% of their economy for decades towards destroying Israel, a country Iran was previously on decent terms with. They are the first country since WWII to pursue a nuclear bomb with the intent to use it offensively. What part of that is “rational actors prioritizing their security”?
Use The Bomb offensively against Israel? And the Palestinian populace just collateral? Doesn’t add up.
The Ayatollahs have never cared about the Palestinians, or anyone. They’re proudly and openly a death cult who only cares about killing Jews.
The Palestinian cause goes all the way back to the beginning of Jewish colonialism in Palestine, many decades before the Iranian revolution, and many decades before the creation of HAMAS. Palestinian Christians have also historically played a big part in it. You might accurately describe people or fractions within the Palestinian cause, but to imagine that the destruction of HAMAS or the Iranian regime would suddenly make the Palestinians happy with their treatment is delusional.
Jews are from Judea. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand the conflict.
Whatever. That was 2000 years ago. Everyone has ancestors from 2000 years ago, many of whom lived in different places, and we don’t generally believe that gives them the right to kick out people living there now.
Exactly. Compare Nathan Goldwag’s comparison of Zionism with various less-talked-about European irredentist movements. https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-banality-of-zionism/
So where are Jews indigenous to? Because the European answer is pretty clearly “not Europe”. And obviously it isn’t the Americas. And congratulations, because of the expulsions from Muslim lands we’ve now listed every places that Jews live, within a rounding error.
If indigeneity is a foundation of the moral right to protect yourself, and you want Jews to be indigenous nowhere, it sure sounds like you don’t want Jews to exist anywhere.
By the way, Jews never stopped living in Israel.
@bagel:
“So where are Jews indigenous to? ”
The lands of Israel/Palestine. I just don’t think that’s all that relevant.
“If indigeneity is a foundation of the moral right to protect yourself, ”
That’s a *very* big “if”, which I do not agree with at all.
@Raphael
Kzikas states there is a moral right to oppose colonialism. So either they believe in some version of “indigeneity as a foundation of the right to self defense”, or they don’t believe that most Palestinians have any claim over Israel (having not lived there in multiple generations). Perhaps you two should figure that out between you.
My advice is to come up with an answer that doesn’t disenfranchise Native Americans.
The issue is that Palestinians are also indigenous to Palestine, and a Palestinian living in a refugee camp on the West bank has a far greater connection to the land than, say, a jewish American who has never set foot in Israel.
And more to the point, jewish existance in Israel looks like it requires the dislocation and disenfranchisement of Palestinians en masse into a permanent underclass without rights, to be violently, brutally, subdued by the IDF when they get restless. That is certainly the explicitly stated policy of the current Israeli government, that will never support an independent Palestinian state but will also never offer the Palestinians living in the occupied territories citizenship or the vote.
There’s a word for this in Afrikaans you might be familiar with. Apartheid.
So why should anyone with any kind of democratic sentiment support jewish nation building at this cost in Palestinian lives?
I do not care where anyone’s ancestors lived 2000 years ago. I don’t in any other situation and I don’t in this one. I don’t know where my ancestors lived 2000 years ago, and I don’t care. It has no moral relevance.
You can’t colonize the place you’re from. Jews never stopped living in Israel, and have been told in no uncertain terms we’re not from anywhere else. Obviously we’re by and large not from the Americas. The European answer is pretty clearly “not Europe”. And congratulations, because of the expulsions from Muslim lands we’ve now listed every places that Jews live, within a rounding error.
So where are Jews indigenous to? If indigeneity is a foundation of the moral right to protect yourself (anti-colonialism!), and you want Jews to be indigenous nowhere, it sure sounds like you don’t want Jews to exist anywhere.
And that has moral relevance.
The Jews already living in Palestine couldn’t colonize Palestine, and they didn’t colonize Palestine. Other Jews did. Look at the first Israeli cabinet: 12 members, where 1 was from the middle east and 11 were from Europe or North America. Look at how many years it took until Israel got a non-European prime minister.
Colonialism is ultimately a description of how the colonizer interacts with the colonized; A process of colonization was imposed on the Palestinian people, and the nature of that process isn’t changed by the history of the colonizer.
Compare Liberia: The African Americans that founded Liberia had been taken from Africa as slaves much more recently than the diaspora, but they were colonizers, because they interacted with the native population through a system of colonization.
Where are African Americans indigenous to? A new Back to Africa seeking to set up a second Liberia would certainly be colonization, so by that measure they can’t be indigenous to Africa (if we accept the argument that you cannot colonize a place you’re indigenous to).
I’d consider American Jews and African Americans pretty comparable here. Both are long existing communities in America that have faced marginalization and othering. Maybe its just a relatively normal thing for people to be non-indigenous? Where are white Americans indigenous to for that matter? They’re not Native Americans, but if they created a movement like Zionism aimed at Europe they would certainly be colonizers.
@Kzickas Let me be frank. Who was the first leader of the Palestinian? When were they autonomous? What organizing principles do they have besides subjugating Jews?
Jews were given independence for helping overthrow the Ottoman Empire, as part of its decolonization. The plan was for a dozen Arab states, with Jews in them (as they had been for 2500+ years), and one Jewish state, with Arabs in it. Now there are a dozen Arab states with no Jews in them, and one Jewish state with Arabs in it. Sure seems like one of those countries has more commitment to pluralism than the rest.
And if your definition of colonialism is so broad that it means “moving” and “being successful” then it sure makes anti-colonialists seem like real losers.
“What I would like to add to the conversation is that the Iranian Mullahs go rather beyond odious. I think we could apply that justly to the Putin regime in Russia and various similar ones. What you have in Iran goes beyond that.
Basically, I do not think that the Mullahs represent a brutal but conventional regime, bound by the logic of realpolitik. They are a fanatical and messianic one. And that is very, very different beast.”
Someone killed by a merely “odious” regime is as dead as someone killed by a fanatical and messianic one.
“The Iranian revolution was the catalyst for basically all the modern era’s _jihad_, the demonstration that a reactionary, bronze-age madness could be foisted on a modern society. It was – and is – proof that the Enlightenment can be defeated. I mean _really_ defeated, you Americans – not people voting against abortion, but a regime that says that virgins may not be hanged so they must be ceremonially raped to allow for the hanging. ”
First, the founding of Islam was more than a thousand years after the beginning of the Iron Age.
Second, if you would have paid attention, you would have noticed that the anti-Enlightenment forces in the USA have gone far beyond “voting against abortion” by now. They are clearly trying to destroy centuries of Enlightenment-based improvements, and perhaps even thousands of years of people, even when they did horrible things, at least paying lip service to the idea that people should treat each other decently. And unlike the Mullahs in Iran, they have a fairly high chance of succeeding.
“There was a hope – and I still hold out for this – that by destroying that regime you would garrotte the confidence of the Jihad, that the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotheshood would be put on notice that they were allowed to exist on sufferance, that the modern world can get rid of them any time it so chooses. That is not an ignoble ambition, and it is not a completely unrealisitc one. ”
You think that the modern world can get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood any time it so chooses? OK, present a carefully worked out step-by-step plan for doing that.
Besides, if messianic movements are as fanatical and irrational as you say they are, then I don’t see how anything you do can “put them on notice”.
“The people of Iran are not just rejecting the Mullahs, _they are rejecting Islam_. Mosques are burning, Zoroastrianism is reviving. That is a lethal blow to the confidence of the Jihad. I have some desperate hope that it is possible to rip out the cancer of the Mullahs by empowering the Iranian people. ”
Whom, exactly, do you mean by “the people of Iran” in this context? I admit that I do not know much about Iran. But if Iran is anything like the few countries that I *do* know something about, then there’s a *range of political opinions* among the people there. Probably a lot of people who hate the regime, and of lot people who like it. With repression being as brutal as it is, I don’t see how anyone can reliably tell which side is numerically how strong.
From what I’ve heard, apparently in the USA, depending on which circles you move in, you might well spend a lot of time either without meeting anyone in real life who voted for Trump or without meeting anyone in real life who voted for Harris. It wouldn’t make sense to describe the people in either kind of social circles as “The People of the USA”. And I see no reason to assume that Iran is all that different in that regard.
Generally, I pretty much agree with the fictional character of Sam Vimes on the question of whether the concept of “The People” makes sense in the first place.
“I also feel the need to speak to the sympathy for the Palestinians. Let’s be clear about what we are talking about here: the Palestinian cause is the cause of Jihad. This isn’t a nationalist movement with secular aims. Preachers of HAMAS do not merely call for the annihilation of Israel; they openly speak of the reconquest of _Spain_. You don’t just see attacks on Israeli civilians in other countries – that would be a scandal enough – you see open attacks on _Jews_. ”
I do not share your apparent belief that if a demographic group contains a lot of people with horrific political views, that justifies genocide against that group.
Besides, see my point above about cultures usually containing ranges of political opinions. There are a lot of people in a number of European countries who say very horrible things. That would not justify murdering *me*, although I’m European myself.
And, while Israel is doing what it’s doing, I simply don’t see why it should matter all that much what the other side might theoretically want to do. Actual murder usually matters more than hypothetical murder.
“I am pro-Israel not because I have any particular sympathy for the Israeli leadership – I commend to your attention the work of Israel Shahak and the latest edition of Haaretz – but because I have a very clear idea of what the forces on the other side would do to me and mine if they had half a chance.”
Yes, the Jihadists would do horrible things to me and mine if they had half a chance. So would a lot of other groups around the world, some of which, in my estimate, have a much bigger chance of reaching their goals than the Jihadists.
“I do think that the waning sympathy for Israel has less to do with this current war and more to do with nearly three decades of anti-Israel propaganda and obfuscation of the nature of the jihad,”
Yes, when more and more people start to oppose people whom you support, that can certainly only be because of nefarious propaganda. It can’t possibly be because of anything done by the people you support. Keep telling yourself that.
Ah, a cultural crusader. Haven’t seen one of those in a day.
You can only prove things that are true.
If you try to demonstrate that “the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotheshood would be put on notice that they were allowed to exist on sufferance, that the modern world can get rid of them any time it so chooses”…you’ll discover they weren’t, and we can’t. And the whole world will see it.
Similarly, everyone can see that the conduct of Israel and the US in this war is far worse than that of Iran. So telling us about how awful they are reflects poorly on “our” side as well. If he’s the devil, and he’s fighting more honourably than you are…
Personally, I’ve become somewhat unconvinced Iran was previously actually intent on making a nuclear weapon, mostly because, well, why haven’t they done so? They’ve had enrichment capability for quite a long time, sufficient to enrich to weapons-grade, and you can look up the basic principles of a fission device on the internet. The main obstacle to nuclearization is enrichment capability they’ve had.
I don’t know quite what they were playing at with their enrichment, but they’ve passed up multiple chances to make it into nukes. I am told the previous Khameni opposed them on religious grounds.
You can look up the basic principles of a F-1 (Saturn V) rocket motors on the internet too… But “basic principles” are not “actual, functional physical objects in hand”. I am certainly not saying that Iran cannot do so (or has not done so), but going from the former to the latter takes a significant amount of difficult work. (And the same is true of actually building the centrifuges required for enrichment. Looking it up? Easy. Actually doing it in the real world? Hard.)
“Personally, I’ve become somewhat unconvinced Iran was previously actually intent on making a nuclear weapon”
The entire US intelligence community thinks you are absolutely right about this. Every year since 2003 they’ve been saying “no, Iran is pretty much definitely not building a nuclear weapon”. So your position is not way out on the wild fringes – it’s the consensus.
It really is amazing that the Iranians were dancing in the streets when this war started, but Israel (and America) lost public support with Americans.
But of course, the Ayatollahs weren’t just odious to Iranians. They’ve done more than “just” provoke Israel; they’ve proven they have the desire to destroy Israel and are constantly pursuing credible means, nuclear and otherwise. To Israeli planners, that’s the biggest threat; as they say they’d rather be alive to be disliked than dead but fondly remembered. And it’s possible that creates strategic traps for Israel, but it’s also possible that being the US’s most tightly integrated ally in the region is more important to securing the US’s support than public sentiment. After all, the US continues to be allies with the Saudis. And equally, it’s possible that the US public sentiment was already lost and now is Israel’s last chance to shatter the Ayatollah’s genocidal ambitions.
And for all the attention on Israel, many Gulf states wanted the war in the first place:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/28/trump-iran-decision-saudi-arabia-israel/
and *continue* to want the war, despite the cost and the risks:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/politics/saudi-prince-iran-trump.html
And whether or not Trump’s government ever tries to sell this idea to the media, Iran has made itself strategically important by becoming a Chinese client state. They create much of the trouble that continually prevents America from pivoting to Asia. The oil they send in exchange for that support fills China’s strategic reserve that they are building up for the purpose of invading Taiwan. And the threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz – now realized – was meant to be a card to play to prevent the US closing the Strait of Malacca, itself to prevent or stop that future invasion of Taiwan. And all of that beside the fact that Iran has been keeping Russia’s drone warfare alive.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-91-is-the-iran-war-about-china-a/id1794590850?i=1000750309082
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-94-americas-war-not-israels/id1794590850?i=1000752614732
The tight American-Israeli military integration:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-96-the-first-war-israel-fought-in-english/id1794590850?i=1000753991917
And for all that it is indeed difficult to snuff out the drone and missile launches or win the shot exchange, it seems that the air campaign is having that effect because the *crews* are starting to refuse what they see as a certain death sentence. Moreover, Iran pays the IRGC in oil revenues. The fungibility of oil forces Iran to choose between allowing their own oil (paying the IRGC, their regime security) and not allowing it out (economic pressure on the US, their political objective). Their “security fees” are a clever way to try to have it both ways, but if the US takes Kharg Island then to the extent that the Iranian regime still exists they’ll have a very hard time paying the IRGC to shoot protestors.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-99-are-we-winning/id1794590850?i=1000756035796
“It really is amazing that the Iranians were dancing in the streets when this war started, but Israel (and America) lost public support with Americans.”
1) Who exactly are these “the Iranians” you’re talking about? See my points elsewhere in this thread about countries having different political views among their populations.
2) America did not lose support among Americans, the current American political leadership did. Yes, right-wingers in many places like to take a “We *are* the country” stance, but that’s just one example of their usual arrogant delusions.
3) Yes, Americans tend to care more about direct impacts on their own country than about what happens oceans away. Yes, that’s more self-centered than people should be, but Americans are hardly alone in that attitude.
4) Have you paid attention during the last quarter of a century? Have you noticed how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned out for the USA? Well, a lot of other people have. So it’s not “amazing” that many Americans aren’t eager to repeat the experience on a larger scale.
5) Some people have this strange and weird thing called “a functioning sense of right and wrong”, and therefore aren’t eager to cheer on people who take pride in blowing schoolgirls to pieces. Though I’ll admit that that’s less of a factor in US politics than it should be.
“To Israeli planners, that’s the biggest threat; as they say they’d rather be alive to be disliked than dead but fondly remembered.”
Congratulations – by spending the last few years, and to a lesser extent, the last decades, doing the things they’re doing, Israel’s political leaders have probably ensured that in a few decades, the Israeli state will be remembered, and not fondly, rather than alive.
“And it’s possible that creates strategic traps for Israel, but it’s also possible that being the US’s most tightly integrated ally in the region is more important to securing the US’s support than public sentiment.”
Unlike some small patch of land somewhere in the Middle East, the non-Russian countries of Europe and the non-Chinese countries of East Asia actually *are* of vital strategic importance to the USA. And that doesn’t stop the US political leadership from doing everything they can to throw us to the wolves. Kissinger once claimed that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics. Well, that applies to many other countries, too.
“And whether or not Trump’s government ever tries to sell this idea to the media, Iran has made itself strategically important by becoming a Chinese client state. They create much of the trouble that continually prevents America from pivoting to Asia. The oil they send in exchange for that support fills China’s strategic reserve that they are building up for the purpose of invading Taiwan. And the threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz – now realized – was meant to be a card to play to prevent the US closing the Strait of Malacca, itself to prevent or stop that future invasion of Taiwan. ”
Iran can’t invade Taiwan. China can try to. And they’re more likely to succeed, more likely to think that they’ll succeed, and therefore more likely to try in the first place, if the US Military is entirely tied down in the Middle East. The US has already started to move military assets from the Asia/Pacific region to the Middle East. That’s not going to be bad for China.
Couple of random notes:
1. This apparently went viral enough to be on the top page of Memorandum, so that’s a new one. Although it does give me real “running into your teacher at the grocery store” vibes.
2. Saw you got an invite to LessOnline. I hope you go! It’s a great event with a great group of people. But also they could really use more experts in non-STEM fields to talk to.
I knew this was was a huge, tragic mistake but I didn’t realize quite how bad it was until you laid it all out so cogently. Thanks.
I appreciate the tagging with ‘Oh no’. Great analysis.
> One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.
I have a tactical quibble here: one of the really interesting, signal features of the war in Ukraine has been the rough air parity. Both sides have high-quality AEW&C and enough Sams and random Manpads scattered around to dissuade flights over their territory. (Russia uniquely has Mig-31s, but their main effect is to keep Ukrainian aircraft further back from the front, while Russian aircraft can fly a bit closer; the fighter superiority matters a lot less than the Sam/Manpad parity.) Suffice to say that this would not be the case during an American land adventure in Iran. Manpads will be a threat, but, if there are any operational Sams or fighters left in Iran at the moment, I’d be surprised if they’re still there by the time boots are on the ground. In that environment, the only reason Shaheds would be getting through is because the US chooses not to engage them because the total cost of the Sidewinder and airframe flight hours comes out as too expensive relative to their target. FPVs are a more serious threat, but there’s no certainty that they’d be able to operate at anywhere near the scale we see in Ukraine when there’s pervasive airborne surveillance; shooting down the drones is probably not going to work, but getting at the drone teams is a real possibility. In Ukraine, drone teams are prize assets and treated as such; taking out the other side’s drone team is a major tactical-operational objective, and it’s realistic for both sides to attempt it – and they don’t have all of the advantages the US would have in Iran.
Not to say this changes much of anything – the ground force would still face massive challenges, and all of Bret’s strategic points are totally right – but I think we shouldn’t over-index on drones in non-peer warfare. They’d be more like an evolution of IEDs: nasty and an attritional thorn, politically bad for a country that values the lives of its soldiers, but not actually militarily relevant if you’re not also facing a peer adversary that can use them to pose dilemmas.
Got reminded of Asimov’s Foundation. Particularly “Merchant Princes”.
How familiar are you with the series, by the way?
A surprising number of Iranian-Canadians believe that even though this lawless and unprovoked war is immensely stupid (C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute), it might be better than leaving the current regime in power in Tehran (example). I just don’t see how the US-Israeli attack could lead to a better situation.
One more thought, about Israel and its potential diplomatic isolation. I suspect that Iran’s actions in the first week of the war, firing missiles at targets in several neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, may end up in the long run being a political/diplomatic gift to Israel (almost certainly an unintended one on Iran’s part), as suddenly Iran is looking more likely to find themselves diplomatically isolated in the MIddle East. Not completely, I’m sure, but a lot more isolated than they would have been had they not attacked neighbors who were previously sympathetic to them.
I also think that had Iran had a functioning leadership in place, the missiles targeted at Iran’s friends/allies/sympathizers (whatever the right word is for any given country) would not have been launched. I suspect that those launches were ordered by people looking at the tactical picture but not the larger strategic picture. Which would mean, if my analysis is right, that those launches happened due to the confusion that Israel caused with their opening salvo: by opening the war with a decapitation strike which took out much of the upper echelons of Iran’s political and military leadership, Israel ensured chaos and confusion among the Iranian military, and allowed them to make a massive diplomatic blunder that would not have happened without that initial decapitation strike. I could be wrong — maybe Ayatollah Khomeini would still have ordered those launches if he had not been killed in the first strike. But your comment about diplomatic isolation reminded me of the thoughts I had on Iran’s likely diplomatic isolation when I first heard that they had launched missiles at Qatar and other nearby countries.
On the possibility of escorting tankers and cargo ships – even if it worked it would slow down traffic through the strait a great deal. To 10% or less of the usual traffic according to Lloyds: https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1156589/Naval-escorts-would-cap-tanker-transits-at-under-10-of-normal-volumes
That’s probably bad enough that it’s not worth even trying.
I do worry that Trumps now best move is to blame Israel for all of this and signal hard to the portion of his base to whom jew and israeli are synonyms (despite most american zionists being evangelical christians).
Its an old and common lie “oh the king only did this unpopular thing because he was tricked by the jews” and I can see large portions of the american far-right gearing up to employ it again.
Alex Jones went from “covering” the war on Iran, to ranting about how Trump was just a poor man trying his best in a bad situation, to ranting about how this could all be prevented if the jews just accepted jesus into their hearts. These are coherent connected thoughts in his mind and the minds of an upsetting number of americans.
You’re so right. Sigh.
A couple points:
First, the key threat from Israel’s perspective is Iran’s ballistic missile program, not because it inherently entails Israel being physically wiped off the map under a barrage of Iranian missiles, but because of the threat to Israel’s “qualitative military edge”, the premise that it must always be able to escalate against any regional opponent to a point where the target lacks the capacity to respond in kind. Obviously Israel does have nukes, but the international norm against nuclear first strike is a genuine constraint that Israel certainly doesn’t want to run the risk of violating, so Iran being able to go tit-for-tat in long-range conventional strike capability would be a genuine existential threat to Israel’s hyper-belligerent strategic posture in the region. Think of how the perception of qualitative Spartan heavy infantry superiority was broken by the otherwise strategically marginal defeat at Tegyra, even before the decisive blow at Leuctra — or, for a more polemically-charged modern comparison, think of how the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale helped shatter the perception of the apartheid-era South African Defense Force’s qualitative battlefield superiority over neighboring African militaries, an important milestone on the road that ultimately led to the end of apartheid and the extension of formal political equality to black South Africans.
Second, any analysis of the strategic balance of this war needs to account for the most extreme option on Iran’s escalation ladder, even more drastic than closing the Strait of Hormuz: rendering the Gulf monarchies more or less uninhabitable by striking at desalination plants. This infrastructure is far too sprawling and complex to be remotely defensible from concerted Iranian missile/drone offensive, and taking these plants offline even for a matter of weeks could easily require rapid mass evacuation of large cities like Doha, Dubai, and Riyadh. (Entirely aside from the longer-term geopolitical ramifications, this would likely require enough mass-scale logistical support from the U.S. military to cancel out its capacity for sustained offensive operations against Iran in the meantime.) As with North Korean use of nukes, Iran would presumably hesitate to play its “erase the GCC from the map” card unless it was under imminent threat of state collapse, but also as with a nuclear-armed North Korea, disregarding the presence of such an important card in the state’s back pocket seems like severe strategic malpractice, which the Trump administration certainly seems to have committed here.