Maximum Pressure, Minimum Strategy. What Is the Iran War For?
Iran is losing the military war and winning the economic one. The Gulf is absorbing the consequences. And Washington cannot explain what comes next.
We are entering the fourth week of the Iran war. The United States has spent three weeks bombing Iranian oil infrastructure. Last Friday, it lifted sanctions on Iranian oil to contain the price surge its own bombing campaign created. If you can hold both of those facts in your head at the same time and still explain what this war is for, you understand it better than the people waging it.
The contradictions are not incidental, they are becoming the war’s defining feature. Every stated objective has been undercut by a subsequent action, and every action has produced consequences that contradict the objective it was meant to serve. So let us assume serious threats that require intervention, all of which have been discussed by the administration. Let us take them at face value.
Let us assume the most generous version, that this was a war for the liberation of the Iranian people. Millions took to the streets in January, and the regime killed at least six thousand of them, with credible estimates running far higher. That was real, and it was significant. But the United States has now killed thousands more, displaced three million, struck a girls’ school in Minab, bombed a sports hall during practice in Lamerd, and the IRGC claims it is still producing missiles even as its infrastructure burns. The people who were protesting for freedom are now sheltering from American bombs. Liberation does not usually arrive this way.
If the reason was nuclear, that would be serious. Iran had been enriching uranium for years, and by early 2026 it had stockpiled enough for as many as ten weapons if further processed. But on February 27, Oman’s foreign minister announced that Iran had agreed to cap enrichment, accept full verification, and downgrade its stockpile. Talks were set to resume five days later. They never did.
And then there is the Gulf, which was never part of the calculation to begin with. The Gulf states did not ask for this to happen in their neighborhood. Qatar’s Ras Laffan, the largest LNG facility in the world, has been struck repeatedly. Saudi refineries in Riyadh have been hit. The UAE’s Shah gas field is on fire. Kuwait dismantled a Hezbollah cell targeting its critical infrastructure. These countries were not consulted before the strikes. They are living with the consequences of a decision they did not make.
And then, on Friday, March 20, President Trump posted that the United States was “getting very close to meeting our objectives” and considering “winding down” military operations. He listed five accomplishments: completely degrading Iran’s missile capability and launchers, destroying Iran’s defense industrial base, eliminating Iran’s navy and air force including its anti-aircraft weaponry, never allowing Iran to get close to nuclear capability, and protecting Middle Eastern allies including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. The same day, his administration deployed 2,500 additional Marines to the region and as I mentioned above lifted sanctions on Iranian oil. The next day, he threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened within 48 hours. Winding down and escalating in the same breath. The Iranian people were not on the list of objectives, and that is not an oversight. It is consistent with a president whose foreign policy instincts have always been realist rather than ideological, concerned with capabilities and threats rather than governance and transitions. But it does clarify something that the millions who took to the streets in January deserve to hear stated plainly: this war was fought over what Iran could do, not over what Iran could become. The people who believed they were the purpose of it were not.
There is a pattern to wars launched without a theory of their own conclusion. They begin with clarity and end with improvisation. The Iran war has reached the improvisation phase in record time, and the distance between the stated objectives and the observable reality is now so wide that even the administration’s allies have stopped trying to bridge it. It is worth going back to the beginning, because each decision along the way narrowed what came next, and by February 28 there were no alternatives left.
A Decade of Narrowing Options
To understand what is happening now, you have to understand the sequence of decisions that made February 28 almost inevitable, because no single one of them was irrational, and yet taken together they produced an outcome that nobody planned and nobody can control. This is how great powers stumble into wars they cannot finish, not through a single catastrophic miscalculation but through the steady accumulation of individually defensible choices, each one foreclosing the options that might have prevented the next. And we would be remiss not to start a decade ago, because that is when the first and perhaps most consequential bet was placed.
In 2015, the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. It was the liberal institutionalist bet, the wager that you could bring a revolutionary state into the rules-based order through negotiated constraints. It had real limitations. It did not address Iran’s ballistic missiles. It did not address the proxy network. It did not address Iran’s regional behavior. The Gulf states and Israel hated it for precisely those reasons. But it was a mechanism. It capped enrichment. It established verification. And for the duration of its functioning, the nuclear clock was stopped.
Of course, none of us were under any illusions about this. The IAEA dutifully reported each quarter that Iran was meeting its enrichment limits, but it also reported, each quarter, that it could not determine whether Iran had undeclared nuclear facilities or materials. Iran’s cooperation on inspections was, in the Agency’s careful language, not always “timely”. German intelligence found over a hundred attempts by Iran to procure illicit nuclear and missile technology in the first two years of the deal. And Iran continued building ballistic missiles, which the JCPOA never touched. The opposition to the deal, in the Gulf, in Israel, and in parts of Washington, was screaming that we were being played, and their arguments were not without merit. But for the Obama administration, having a flawed mechanism was still better than having no mechanism at all, which is what came next.
In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew. Maximum pressure replaced the JCPOA, and the theory was that sanctions would either force a better deal or force the regime to collapse. Neither happened. What happened instead was that the constraint on enrichment disappeared. Iran began stockpiling sixty-percent-enriched uranium, enough, by early 2026, for as many as ten nuclear weapons if further processed. The mechanism was gone and the clock restarted, faster than before.
I want to be honest about something here, because the temptation with a timeline like this is to draw a straight line from A to Z and call it inevitable. It was not inevitable. None of this was neat. At every point along this chain, different decisions were possible. The JCPOA could have been renegotiated rather than abandoned. Maximum pressure could have been paired with a credible diplomatic track rather than deployed as a substitute for one. Reality is messier than any retrospective account can capture, and I do not want to flatten it. But what I do want to say is that the direction of travel was consistent even if the path was not. At every fork, the option that preserved a mechanism for managing the Iran problem was rejected in favor of the option that destroyed one. And eventually you run out of mechanisms. February 28 is what happens when you run out. But before we get there, the road passed through several moments that each narrowed the options further, and all of them unfolded against a backdrop that deserves to be named plainly.
For the better part of a decade, Iran’s proxies operated across the region like a neighborhood mafia. In Iraq, they ran militias that were stronger than the army and answered to Tehran, not Baghdad. In Syria, they propped up a regime that had gassed its own people and turned the reconstruction into a patronage network. In Lebanon, Hezbollah maintained a parallel state with its own army, its own foreign policy, and its own wars. In Yemen, the Houthis overthrew the government in the north, splintered the country, and brought on a Saudi and Emirati intervention that became a war of attrition that no one in the West truly understood or paid attention to. These were not resistance movements. They were competitors to sovereignty itself, organizations that collected taxes, recruited children, destroyed governance, and undermined every international effort to stabilize the countries they operated in. And the international community did not ignore it, that would almost be more forgivable. It tried. It tried earnestly. The United Nations sent envoys and negotiated frameworks and staffed offices across the region, and in Yemen it worked within the system until the system swallowed it whole, until a majority of its local staff ended up in Houthi detention with no resolution and no leverage and no way to even retrieve its own files, let alone negotiate for a country. When your mediating body cannot free its own employees, the word “diplomacy” starts to sound like a courtesy rather than a capability.
And I want to say something here that I think is important because in writing about the consequences of this war, I do not want to accidentally absolve the regime that made it inevitable. Iran is not the victim in this story. For a decade, Tehran armed, funded, and directed networks that hollowed out sovereign states from the inside, and it did so with a patience and discipline that nobody in Washington fully appreciated because Washington only ever looked at Iran through one lens, which was Israel. The impact on Yemen, on Iraq, on Lebanon, on Syria, the slow strangulation of countries that were trying to build something that was never urgent enough to drive American policy. It was background noise.
And behind all of it, there was a larger architecture that is only now becoming visible. Iran was not operating alone. It was operating within a set of relationships with Russia and China that were collectively working to undermine the American-led order, to weaken NATO, to demonstrate that sovereignty was negotiable and that the rules-based system was a fiction maintained by a power that no longer had the will to enforce it. The bitter irony is that the United States is now doing some of that work itself, fraying its own alliances, alienating its own partners, calling NATO allies cowards for refusing to join a war it started without consulting them. The order is being dismantled from both ends, and the people caught in the middle, the Gulf states, the Yemenis, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, are left trying to navigate a world where neither the architects of destruction nor the supposed guarantors of stability can be relied upon.
Much of this could be traced to just a couple of years after the signing of the JCPOA, when the ink was barely dry on the nuclear deal, and Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones were already being tested in combat for the first time, fired from Yemen at Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It garnered a few headlines, maybe a concerned statement or two, and then everyone got distracted. But the missiles were penetrating defenses that were supposed to be impenetrable. The Houthis claimed the launches. The technology and the targeting told a different story. Tehran was using Yemen as a proving ground, demonstrating what its arsenal could do while maintaining just enough deniability to avoid consequences. That arrangement reached its peak in September 2019, when drones and cruise missiles struck Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq processing facility, the most important oil installation in the world. The Houthis claimed the attack. The evidence pointed to Iran. Production was cut in half overnight. And the United States did nothing. No military response. No enforcement of the security partnership that had underpinned Gulf stability for half a century. In strategic history, the most consequential moments are often non-events, the things that did not happen when they should have. Abqaiq was one of them. That non-response told every actor in the region that the American security umbrella had a hole in it large enough to fly a drone through. The Gulf heard it. Tehran heard it. And the Houthis heard it, which is why they spent the next several years building a military capability that could threaten one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
In January 2020, a US drone killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force and the architect of Iran’s entire proxy strategy across the region. There was momentary panic among the media and the analyst class, an over-calculation of what the consequences might be for the United States, and very little consideration of what Soleimani had meant for everyone else.
In Baghdad, people danced in the streets. In parts of Syria, in parts of Lebanon, in parts of Yemen, people who had lived under the boot of Iranian intervention, who had watched Soleimani’s Quds Force arm the militias that destroyed their neighborhoods and killed their families, were quietly and sometimes not so quietly relieved. The man who had built the machinery of proxy warfare across four countries was gone, and for millions of people in the region, that was not a crisis. It was a correction.
But in Washington, the conversation was not about any of that. There was a discomfort with the act itself, not with the man who was killed but with the fact that the United States had done the killing, and that Trump, in particular, had ordered it. The question was not what Soleimani had done to the region but whether his removal made America safe or unsafe, as if the safety of the United States was the only variable that mattered, as if the people living under the networks he built were not part of the calculus at all. Trump’s supporters saw it as something limited and contained, a strike that did not entangle the country in a wider war. His detractors saw recklessness and escalation. And what almost no one did was ask the Iraqis, or the Syrians, or the Yemenis, or even the Iranians, what they thought. But if you live long enough inside the American policy system, you come to understand something about how it works: the people in the region are the rationale, never the drivers. They are invoked to justify decisions and are absent from the making of them. That pattern did not start with Soleimani, and it did not end with him.
Meanwhile, Iran promised devastating retaliation, but what it delivered was a barrage of missiles at Al Asad airbase in Iraq, fired with advance warning, causing no American fatalities. And then, in the chaos of its own heightened alert, the IRGC shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 shortly after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 people on board, most of them Iranian citizens. The regime ended up killing its own people. The retaliation intended to demonstrate Iranian strength instead revealed Iranian fragility.
And this is where the trajectory bends in a direction that I think has not been sufficiently examined. Deterrence is a psychological construct before it is a military one, and once the psychology shifts, the military balance becomes almost irrelevant. The lesson that Washington and Jerusalem drew from Soleimani was not just that you could strike Iran’s most important military figure and survive the retaliation. The lesson was that the retaliation itself was performative. That Iran would threaten the apocalypse and deliver theater. That the cost of striking Iran was, in practice, far lower than the cost that had been assumed for decades. That calculation, whether it was right or wrong, is the psychological foundation on which every subsequent escalation was built, the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, and ultimately the decision to launch nine hundred strikes on February 28, 2026. Soleimani’s killing did not just remove a general. It removed the fear of what Iran would do in response. And once that fear was gone, the constraint was gone with it. Each unanswered escalation had lowered the threshold for the next, until by February 2026 there were no thresholds left.
Then came October 7, 2023, and the crisis that followed it changed everything. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in the Red Sea, the entire Iranian proxy network activated in ways that demonstrated both its reach and its limits. And over the next two years, Israel systematically dismantled every node in that network. Hamas’s military infrastructure in Gaza was destroyed, at catastrophic civilian cost. Hezbollah’s senior leadership was decapitated, and its forces in southern Lebanon were degraded. The Houthis were hit with sustained American and coalition air campaigns until a ceasefire was signed in 2025. By the time we reached February 2026, the proxy shield that Iran had spent four decades building was in ruins.
In June 2025, the Twelve-Day War crossed the last threshold. Israel and the United States struck Iranian nuclear facilities directly, damaging Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. Iran struck back, a ceasefire was brokered, and the world moved on. But a precedent had been set. Direct military strikes on Iranian soil were no longer theoretical. The taboo was broken.
In January 2026, the largest anti-government protests since 1979 erupted across Iran. The regime responded with mass killings. Trump told the protesters that help was on the way. The US began its largest military buildup in the Middle East since 2003. And crucially, this was the moment when the objective shifted. Before January, the American frame was nuclear containment. After January, the frame became regime change. Nobody announced this shift explicitly. It happened in the space between Trump’s tweets and Netanyahu’s visits to Washington. But it happened, and it changed the nature of everything that followed. In the study of how wars begin, the most dangerous transition is the one from limited aims to unlimited ones, because limited aims can be satisfied and unlimited ones cannot.
In February, Oman mediated three rounds of indirect talks in Geneva. I followed them closely, not out of optimism but out of concern. Ali Larijani, Khamenei’s most trusted adviser, was involved in the process, which signaled that Tehran considered this serious enough to deploy its highest-level diplomatic operator. That mattered. I was monitoring how the axis media treated each round, and the signals were telling. Hardline Iranian outlets covered the talks as a show of diplomatic seriousness while keeping their editorial skepticism high, framing the negotiations as a test of American sincerity rather than a genuine opening. Russian state media carried the proceedings with a tone of cautious hopefulness, emphasizing Iran’s resolve and its refusal to capitulate. Chinese outlets treated it as evidence that diplomacy was the responsible path. Everyone was performing confidence in a process that none of them fully believed in. And the whole time, the same question kept circling: what are we negotiating? This regime has never negotiated in good faith. We should not be at a table with the mullahs.
On February 27, the Omani foreign minister told the world that peace was within reach. The next morning, nine hundred strikes hit Iran and the Supreme Leader was dead. Killing a supreme leader is the kind of thing that historically ends wars, or at minimum opens the space to end them. Instead, the administration said it would not negotiate with the regime, continued striking for three more weeks, and is now negotiating anyway.
Every one of these decisions, from the JCPOA to its withdrawal, from Abqaiq’s non-response to Soleimani’s killing, from October 7 to the Twelve-Day War, narrowed the range of outcomes. And at no point along this chain did anyone articulate what the end state looked like. The JCPOA was about constraining the nuclear program. Maximum pressure was about forcing behavior change. The strikes on the proxy network were about degrading threats. And then suddenly we were in a full-scale war with regime change as the stated objective and no theory of what comes after.
The IRGC Logic
The Islamic Republic found itself in this war in the worst strategic position of its existence. But the IRGC is not the Islamic Republic. It is something older, deeper, and harder to kill. Its proxy network was degraded. Its nuclear facilities were damaged. Its air defenses had been suppressed so thoroughly that the United States is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace. The Supreme Leader was killed on the first night. Forty officials were killed in the opening hours. The IRGC’s ballistic missile launch rate has dropped by ninety percent from its peak. By any conventional military measure, Iran is losing.
And yet the regime is still standing. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told senators this week that the Iranian government “appears to be intact,” although “largely degraded.” The IRGC spokesman told reporters that Iran was still producing missiles even under war conditions. Mojtaba Khamenei has assumed the role of Supreme Leader. The Assembly of Experts has convened. The state media apparatus, though damaged, continues to broadcast. The bureaucratic machinery of the Islamic Republic is battered but functioning.
The regime had forty years to entrench itself amid the population, to grow like a cancer that metastasized into every organ of the state. And to be fair to Washington, it is not as though they do not understand this. The approach that has been quietly discussed, and sometimes not so quietly, is what some analysts have already called the Venezuela model: decapitation followed by coercing what remains of the government into submission. In Venezuela, the United States captured Maduro and handed the country to his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez. The institutional skeleton stayed. The faces changed. Trump has signaled something similar for Iran, suggesting early in the conflict that he was open to working with elements within the establishment, with pragmatists inside the system rather than installing exiles from abroad. Some of those figures have since been killed. But the impulse reveals the recognition, even within an administration that declared regime change as its objective, that you cannot simply delete the IRGC and expect something functional to appear in its place. The question is whether that recognition survives contact with the war’s own momentum.
The assumption in Washington was that decapitation would trigger collapse, or at minimum that it would create an opening for the protest movement to fill. That assumption misunderstands how the Islamic Republic is structured. This is not a regime that depends on a single leader the way a personalist dictatorship does. It is an institutional system with redundancy built into its design. The Supreme Leader matters, but the IRGC, the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, the Basij, the judiciary, the Friday prayer network, these are independent power centers that can operate without central direction for extended periods. The system was designed, consciously and explicitly, to survive decapitation. It was born in a revolution that understood how its predecessor died, and it made sure it would not die the same way.
And here is where the conversation in the West goes wrong, and dangerously so. There is a narrative, amplified by parts of the Iranian diaspora and embraced by many in Washington, that the Islamic Republic is an alien imposition on a society that is fundamentally secular, Western-oriented, and waiting to be freed. I understand why that narrative is appealing. There are millions of Iranians who want the regime gone, and their courage, particularly in the January protests, was extraordinary. But that narrative flattens eighty-eight million people into a single story, and the parts it leaves out are the parts that will determine whether this war produces a transition or a catastrophe.
The IRGC is not a foreign army. It is a domestic institution that employs, directly and indirectly, millions of Iranians. It runs construction companies that build roads and housing. It operates telecommunications networks. It controls significant portions of Iran’s import-export trade. It manages pension funds and charitable foundations. For a large segment of the Iranian population, the IRGC is the employer, the landlord, the social safety net.
Meanwhile, people are celebrating the bombs, and I have watched them, in Los Angeles and in Tehran, cheering as buildings come down, and I do not think they have thought about the school in Minab or the sports hall in Lamerd where girls were practicing when the ceiling fell. There is a distance between a headline and a body, and most people live comfortably inside that distance.
The theory was that if you hit the regime hard enough, the people would do the rest, and the regime has been hit, and the Supreme Leader is dead, and the air defenses are gone, and the regime is still there, because it was never just a man or a building, it was a system, and systems do not fall the way buildings do.
I have no illusions about the IRGC, because I watch its smaller version in Yemen every day. The Houthis built theirs in ten years and it is already too deep to pull out by the roots, and the IRGC has had forty. If the system cannot be destroyed from the air, and it cannot, then the question of what comes after requires a coherent answer. It has been asked. It has been answered differently every week. The Venezuela model one day, regime change the next, winding down by Friday. The Twelve-Day War was limited. The Yemen campaign stopped short. Congress is debating the legal authority for this one while it is already underway. None of this inspires confidence that the day after has been thought through any more carefully than the night before.
The Proxies That Calculated
When the strikes hit on February 28, the Axis of Resistance split. Hezbollah activated within days, firing rockets at northern Israel in retaliation for Khamenei’s killing, and it brought ruin on Lebanon for it. Over a thousand killed, nearly a million displaced, the Lebanese government banning Hezbollah’s military activities and ordering arrests of anyone who launched rockets from its territory. Hezbollah entered a war that its own government begged it not to join, and Lebanon is paying the price.
It is worth understanding how diminished Hezbollah was before it made this decision. The assassination of Hassan Nasrallah in 2024 did not just remove a leader. It removed the only figure who had the personal authority to hold Hezbollah’s political, military, and social functions together as a coherent project. Nasrallah was Hezbollah’s public face, its strategic brain, and its bridge to the Lebanese political system for over three decades. Without him, the organization has fractured into competing internal factions that lack both his legitimacy and his discipline. More than a year of Israeli operations had already degraded Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in the south, killed senior commanders, and destroyed weapons depots. And the political ground beneath the organization has shifted in ways that would have been unthinkable even two years ago. Lebanon’s government, under Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, has not simply condemned Hezbollah’s entry into the war. It has demanded the group surrender its weapons to the state, ordered security forces to arrest those responsible for launching rockets, and announced it would arrest and repatriate anyone connected to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The Lebanese state is, for the first time in decades, publicly and forcefully asserting that it does not need Hezbollah to defend its sovereignty, and that Hezbollah’s war is not Lebanon’s war. That is a structural shift, not a momentary reaction.
The Houthis made the opposite calculation. Three weeks into the most existential crisis the Islamic Republic has ever faced, they have issued three statements and done nothing operationally. And while analysts are asking a million question on why, speculation at this stage is counter productive. What we know is that their capacity is degraded, and the gap between their rhoteric and action is big.
The background matters here. The Red Sea campaign that preceded this war looked a lot like the one Saudi Arabia had been drowning in for years, only now it was America’s turn: expensive interceptors chasing cheap drones, billions spent to contain a militia operating on a fraction of the budget. The administration destroyed much of what needed to be destroyed, but the Houthis were disciplined enough about their losses that the public never registered the damage. What followed was a ceasefire, and what I can say, based on my own reporting, is that the Houthis capitulated because they were weakened, not because they chose peace. The Trump administration, which was under scrutiny for the spending, decided to stop there, believing it had largely met its objectives. The ceasefire gave the Houthis exactly what a weakened force needs most, which is time.
The reason is that the Houthis have undergone a strategic transformation that most analysts have not yet fully appreciated, and I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because describing their calculation is not the same as admiring it. The Houthis are a violent theocratic movement that holds UN staff hostage, runs a coercive conscription apparatus, has engineered a humanitarian catastrophe in the territories it controls, and has built its state institutions on a foundation of repression. None of that is incidental. It is the system. But brutal movements can also be strategically rational, and understanding their logic is not advocacy for their cause. The 2025 ceasefire with the United States changed their calculus fundamentally. They went from a movement with nothing to lose to a movement with everything to lose. They are consolidating control over their territory in Yemen. They are building state institutions on the bones of the ones they destroyed. They are running a conscription system that mirrors the Iranian Basij. They are developing a defense industrial base. They are expanding their influence into the Horn of Africa. In short, they are replicating the IRGC model from 1979, and they are doing it with brutal efficiency and coercive discipline. Entering this war would jeopardize all of tha t. Solidarity with a collapsing patron is not worth the coercive state they are building.
What this reveals is that the proxy model does not function as a mutual defense pact. It functions as a network of rational actors who calculate their own survival independently. The test of any alliance is not whether it holds when the patron is strong but whether it holds when the patron is weak. When the patron is collapsing, the proxies hedge.
And this is perhaps the biggest indicator that the IRGC itself has been weakened in ways that go beyond missile counts and launcher inventories. The Houthis were able to see it from day one. What could be more consequential than the death of the Supreme Leader himself? The IRGC was the Houthis’ backbone, their supplier, their model, their strategic depth. When that back broke, the Houthis were effectively on their own, and they knew it before anyone in Washington had finished writing the first press briefing. The only scenario I can see in which the Houthis reverse course is one in which the IRGC regains its health, and right now that is not the trajectory. Until then, the Houthis have no reason to risk what they have built, and every reason to keep building it. The proxies were not the objective of this war. They had already been degraded before it started. Hamas was dismantled, Hezbollah was decapitated, the Houthis were brought to a ceasefire. Every piece was taken off the board before the strike on the king. But nobody accounted for what happens to the pieces that survived once the king falls. A proxy without a patron is not a defeated force. It is an unrestrained one.
The Gulf Between the Hammer and the Anvil
As for the Gulf states, they have been the shock absorbers of this region for decades. They absorbed the Iran-Iraq war. They absorbed the Gulf War. They absorbed the JCPOA, which they did not want. They absorbed maximum pressure, which did not work. They absorbed Abqaiq, which went unanswered. And now they are absorbing Iranian missiles on their energy infrastructure, the direct retaliation for a military operation they were not consulted about and did not request.
The attacks are not symbolic. They are structural. Iran has hit Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG facility multiple times, causing extensive damage to the largest gas export complex in the world. Saudi refineries in Riyadh have been struck. The UAE’s Shah gas field and Fujairah oil zone have been hit. Kuwait’s Mina Al-Ahmadi, the country’s largest refinery, was targeted. A vessel was struck by a projectile four nautical miles off Qatar’s coast. These are not pinprick provocations. They are strikes on the economic foundations of Gulf society.
The Gulf’s response has been furious but constrained. Qatar expelled Iranian military and security attachés. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said the little trust that remained in Iran has been completely shattered, and warned that Gulf patience is not unlimited. Kuwait arrested a Hezbollah-linked cell. Bahrain announced it had intercepted over a hundred and thirty missiles and two hundred and thirty drones since the war began. Arab and Islamic foreign ministers convened in Riyadh to coordinate a response.
But notice what they have not done. They have not joined the war. They have not offered their bases for offensive operations. They have not sent ships to escort tankers through Hormuz. They are defending themselves, absorbing the hits, and holding back, because this is a war they did not start and do not want to fight.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan warned this week that Gulf patience is “not unlimited,” that the kingdom reserves the right to take military action, and that the Iranian targeting of Gulf energy infrastructure was “premeditated, preplanned, preorganised and well thought out.” He also said that trust with Iran has been completely shattered and that it will take far longer than the war itself to rebuild. Arab News editor Faisal J. Abbas wrote that many observers, himself included, had breathed a sigh of relief earlier in the war when Iran’s president apologized for the strikes on Gulf targets, but that the apology has been rendered meaningless by the continued attacks. The Gulf wants to see Iran change course, not offer words. And there is a painful irony that Gulf analysts are noting quietly: the Gulf states had spent years working toward de-escalation with Tehran, including the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by Beijing, and all of that diplomatic investment has been destroyed not by anything the Gulf did, but by a war launched by their own security partner without their consultation.
Every administration for over a decade has oscillated between two modes, both of which diminished the Gulf. Accommodation of Iran, which the Gulf experienced as abandonment, or confrontation with Iran, which the Gulf experienced as recklessness. At no point were they treated as partners with sovereign interests of their own. The most dangerous moment in any alliance is when the junior partner discovers that alignment has made it a target rather than a beneficiary. That discovery is happening now, across six capitals simultaneously.
And now Iran is offering them a choice that is designed to split the Gulf from Washington permanently. Araghchi’s formulation, that the Strait of Hormuz is “open, but closed to our enemies,” is not a casual statement. It is a strategic instrument. It tells the Gulf: your problem is not Iran. Your problem is your association with the United States. Distance yourself and the pain stops. That is the most dangerous proposition in this entire conflict, not because the Gulf will accept it, but because the logic behind it will become more attractive with every day that the American commitment looks fragile and the European commitment looks nonexistent. The Gulf was never the consideration in this war. It was the afterthought. The consideration was Israel, which has systematically dismantled the IRGC’s network, but for the US, everything else, the energy infrastructure, the shipping lanes, the alliances built over half a century, was treated as a cost that someone else would bear. Three weeks in, the someone is six countries that were not consulted, are not participating, and are running out of interceptors.
The Strait and the New Order
Everything I have described converges at the Strait of Hormuz, because the strait is where the military conflict, the energy crisis, and the political sustainability of this war all meet.
Before this war, twenty million barrels of oil passed through Hormuz every day. Twenty percent of global LNG. Six hundred billion dollars in annual energy trade. The strait was governed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which guarantees the right of transit passage through international straits. That legal framework, and the American naval presence that enforced it, was the invisible foundation of the global energy market. It was so stable that the world stopped pricing the risk. The most load-bearing assumptions in any international order are the ones that nobody examines until they fail.
The IRGC repriced it on March 2. Traffic dropped by more than ninety-five percent. Over a hundred and fifty ships were stranded. Twenty-one attacks on vessels confirmed. Brent crude above a hundred and fifteen dollars. European gas prices up sixty percent. Iraq shutting down oil fields. Qatar halting LNG production. The largest energy supply disruption since the 1973 embargo.
But here is something that other analysts have noted and that is important because it could easily be missed in the coverage of daily strikes and price movements. The strait did not close because of a naval blockade. It closed because of insurance. When war-risk premiums spiked and major insurers canceled coverage, the commercial viability of transit collapsed overnight. Ships that could not be insured became ships that could not sail. The US Navy can escort a tanker through the strait. It cannot force an insurance company to underwrite the voyage. Insurance, a mechanism that exists entirely outside the traditional military balance, became the instrument that shut down twenty percent of global oil trade. That is a form of power that is new, and we do not yet have a framework for managing it.
According to Lloyd’s List and the Financial Times, the IRGC has established what it describes as a safe maritime corridor through Iranian territorial waters. Vessels that submit to IRGC vetting, registration, and approval can transit. The reported price is up to two million dollars per vessel, paid in cash, cryptocurrency, or barter. Between March 1 and 15, roughly ninety ships cleared the strait under IRGC clearance. The payments are being made. The commercial precedent is established. The IRGC verifies clearances over VHF radio. Multiple governments, including India, Pakistan, Iraq, Malaysia, and China, are negotiating transit arrangements directly with Tehran.
I want to be precise about what this represents, because it is easy to dismiss as extortion and miss the logic behind it. This is a regime that is fighting for survival, and survival requires funding. Iran’s conventional revenue streams are collapsing under the weight of the war. Its oil infrastructure is being targeted. Its trade routes are disrupted. What the IRGC has built at Hormuz is not a grand strategic vision. It is a regime finding a way to monetize the one asset it still controls, its geography, in order to fund the war that is destroying everything else. Iran is simultaneously attacking ships that transit without permission and charging ships that ask for it. It has effectively turned a waterway governed by international law into a toll road. And the dilemma this creates is one that no capital has solved. Sanctioning the operators who pay the IRGC toll means shutting down the only active oil supply channel through the strait. The extortion is also the lifeline.
The War That Forgot Itself
So let me return to where I started. What is this war for? The administration asked Congress for two hundred billion dollars to fund a war that Congress never authorized. It lifted sanctions on Russian oil to stabilize a market destabilized by its own campaign. It lifted sanctions on Iranian oil in the middle of a war on Iran. That is not a strategy adjusting to circumstances. That is a war that has lost the thread of its own narrative.
And as this piece goes to publication, the contradictions have compounded again. On Saturday, the president gave Iran a 48-hour ultimatum to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its power plants. On Monday, he announced a five-day pause on those same strikes. Ultimatum to pause in forty-eight hours. This is the rhythm of a war that cannot find its own tempo.
And the fracture is not just in the numbers. Two days before the president posted about winding down, Joe Kent resigned. Kent was Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a former Special Forces officer, former CIA paramilitary, as MAGA as it gets. He sat down with Tucker Carlson and said that Iran posed no imminent threat, that Israel drove the decision to strike, and that senior officials were not allowed to raise their concerns with the president. The White House called it insulting and laughable. The FBI is now investigating him.
For those willing to buy this narrative, this is the WMD moment of the Iran war. And I understand the appeal of that framing, but it is more complicated than Kent makes it sound. Iran may not have posed an imminent nuclear threat in the narrow sense that the intelligence community measures these things, but the longer arc tells a different story. A regime that controls proxy networks across four countries, that has demonstrated it can shut down a fifth of global oil trade overnight, that was testing ballistic missiles against Gulf states years before this war started, that has leverage over Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea through its most capable proxy, that regime is not harmless just because it was not building a warhead that week. The problem is that the American system evaluates threats on short timelines and authoritarians plan on long ones, and that mismatch is how you end up surprised by things that were visible for a decade.
But regardless of where you land on the threat question, what Kent’s resignation makes undeniable is that there is not enough buy-in. Not in the intelligence community, not in the media ecosystem that elected this president, and not among the allies who were supposed to share the burden. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans still support the strikes, but the people who built Trump’s media infrastructure, Carlson, Rogan, Megyn Kelly, are breaking with him. The base voted for no new wars and got the largest American military operation in the Middle East since Iraq. The Gulf states are watching, and they can read a calendar.
The means have overtaken the ends. The war is no longer being driven by its objectives. It is being driven by its consequences, and the consequences are generating their own logic, a logic that nobody in Washington is articulating and nobody in the Gulf can afford to ignore.
Iran’s theory of victory was never military. It was always political. Tehran cannot defeat the United States Air Force. It can make the war expensive enough, long enough, that American domestic politics does the work. Every day the strait stays closed, gas prices climb. Every day gas prices climb, the political coalition behind the war erodes. Every day the coalition erodes, the probability that Washington will seek an exit increases. And every day that passes without an exit, the IRGC’s toll regime on Hormuz becomes more entrenched, more normalized, and harder to reverse.
The question is not who has more firepower. It is whose political tolerance for pain runs out first. This is a contest of endurance disguised as a military conflict, and the outcome will be shaped less by what happens over Iranian airspace than by what happens in American living rooms, European energy markets, and Gulf foreign ministries.
As this piece goes to publication, the United States has requested a meeting with Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf. Trump says the talks have been “very good and productive” and that they are close to a deal. Qalibaf denies any negotiations are taking place and calls the reports “fake news” designed to “manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped.” Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan are passing messages between the two sides. Israel says it was surprised by the pace. Eighty-eight million Iranians are waiting for someone to decide their future, and nobody can confirm whether the conversation about it is even happening.
The trajectory of this war has a pattern: decapitation continues without stated strategy. When Ali Larijani was killed on March 17, the man who had been effectively running Iran since late December and who was responsible for the brutal killing of protesters in January, the system replaced him with Hossein Dehghan within 48 hours. We do not yet know how much authority or respect Dehghan commands, because Larijani was embedded deep in the network, a hardliner with nuclear negotiation credentials and the Khamenei family’s trust. His replacement is probably another hardliner, but not necessarily one with the same reach. I have seen this before. When Israel killed the Houthis’ prime minister and a dozen cabinet members last year, the movement kept functioning because the power was never in the titles. None of this means nothing is happening. The psychological damage accumulating inside Iran is enormous, and it would be wrong to dismiss it. But the people absorbing that damage are also the people who still control the guns, the institutions, and the economic networks that make the IRGC indispensable to millions of Iranians. They have everything to lose, and that makes them more dangerous, not less. The Iranian public has not been able to rise at this moment, and until they can, the IRGC will be left standing, weaker and more paranoid but standing. Each strike makes the adversary weaker and the off-ramp narrower. That is the paradox of successful decapitation in the absence of strategy, and we are not learning from it.
We have seen what happens when wars of this magnitude end without a political framework to receive them. Iraq after 2003. Libya after 2011. The word for what fills the space between the old order and the one that never arrives is always the same. It is a void.
The minimum condition for avoiding another void was always the same: you need a theory of the day after before you start the night before. That theory was never written, and this war was launched without it. But the absence of a theory is not an argument for continuing without one. A war conducted one day at a time, one ultimatum at a time, one five-day pause at a time, is not strategy. It is drift with a body count. The markets can feel it, the Gulf can feel it, people in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon who have suffered from the IRGC-backed proxies can feel it, the Iranians on every side of every line inside that country can feel it. The entire region needs something more serious than improvisation because the absence of a strategy has itself become the most destabilizing force in the theater. A void. Another void. In a region that has had enough of them.