Given the amount of dis/misinformation being pushed about the nature of the conflict between the Israel-US alliance and Iran, it might be good to understand some basic concepts. I will leave aside for the moment that blatant illegality of the US/Israel preventative war of aggressive choice on Iran and instead concentrate on the nature of their respective approaches to the conflict when seen in broad context.
Counter-force strikes are lethal kinetic operations against “hard” targets like military installations, command and control bunkers, air, land and naval platforms, missile depots, launchers and launching sites, and anything that is involved in an enemy’s ability to mass and project force. This includes intelligence-gathering and military communications grids and even satellite surveillance and sensor stations. The key to the definition is that the targets are identifiably military or military-related in nature. The purpose of counter-force strikes is to degrade or eliminate the enemy’s military capabilities and ability to fight whether or not it has the will to continue to do so. Along with strikes on airfields and naval depots, Ukraine’s attacks on missile and drone production sites in Russia are examples of counter-force targeting,
Counter-value strikes are lethal kinetic operations undertaken against “soft” targets. The include all non-combatants and non-military infrastructure like civilian power grids, water treatment plants, hospitals, schools, churches, athletic and community facilities and anything that is not directly involved in a military effort. Counter-value strikes are generally prohibited under international law, including the Laws of War, but have continue to be used as a psychological weapon whose purpose is to undermine the collective morale of and willingness to continue support for the fight by the targeted population. This can be done to provoke a popular uprising, prompt socially disruptive internal refugee flows and to foment political unrest, or can simply be designed to psychologically break people and destroy the material and social cohesion of society.
The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo in WW2, as well as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were counter-value strikes. The Japanese military campaigns in East Asia, particularly in China and Korea, were mostly counter-value in nature. The Russian drone campaign against civilian targets in Ukraine is a recent example. So are most terrorist attacks regardless of who commits them. Assaults by military forces on civilian targets with the objective of eliminating popular support for insurgencies, be they in Gaza, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chechnya or Afghanistan, are another instance of counter-value targeting. All hark to a previous era where unlimited wars of annihilation were waged by societies, not just military forces representing them. As exercises in collective punishment, they are all contraventions of international law.
Long term readers will remember when I posted here at KP about the error of thinking that the nuclear doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) still applied to contemporary nuclear targeting strategies. Killing cities is a counter-value proposition, and in the days of dumb bombs and inaccurate guidance and surveillance technologies, was deemed the necessary means of bringing wars to their earliest conclusion (although the repercussive effects would remain for decades). Heavier throw-weights (warheads, as measured in mega or kilotons of nuclear explosive yields) compensated for inaccuracy (as measured by Circular Error Probables (CEPs), which is the circumference around a target point within which a warhead can be expected to fall). But as military technological advancements took hold by the 1970s, MAD was replaced with “flexible response,” where nuclear strikes were first directed at counter-force targets like ICBM missile silos, air and naval bases with nuclear weapons presence. CEPs were reduced to meters as distances and numbers of warheads increased per missile launched, which along with real-time manoeuvrable guidance systems allowed the use of lower throw-weights on more accurately designated counter-force targets.
Having killed the enemy’s response capabilities, surrender can be compelled or negotiated with the defenceless decision-makers on the other side. If that fails, their societies remain as easy counter-value targets. That logic now spans the spectrum of warfare capabilities from the battlefield to the strategic level.
In conventional wars, militarily superior actors–those with dominant military capabilities and resource bases–prefer counter-force targeting because it suits their strengths and degrades the opponent’s military capabilities without excessive “collateral” damage amongst civilians. As the old saying goes, after the strikes have achieved their strategic objectives there needs to be someone to negotiate with and a society that is capable of restoring some sense of functionality to its institutions and administrative and logistical capabilities. Removing a threatening military presence without removing or destroying its host society is seen as the most cost-effective means of achieving post-war peace and stability on the dominant actor’s terms.
Military inferior actors–say, guerrilla groups or less powerful states (as measured in military capabilities, resource bases and social support for political decision-making processes and institutions)–prefer to engage in counter-value strikes. They cannot afford to fight toe-to-toe against a more powerful foe or engage in a counter-force wars of attrition. That only plays to the stronger opponent’s strengths and hastens inevitable defeat. Think of Saddam Hussein’s strategy in the first Gulf War (Desert Storm), where he tried to use old Soviet era tactics to confront the US military and its allies in Kuwait and Iraq as if they were peer competitors. Instead, “Shock and Awe” did not go well for Saddam’s forces. The war lasted six and a half months and although Saddam was allowed to remain in power because no better options were deemed to be available, it was believed that he had learned a lesson and returned to his “box.” As it turned out, it just set the stage for the second Gulf War and his overthrow a decade later.
Most militarily inferior leaders are not as foolish as Saddam was and do not “stand up” to fight countries like the US and Israel on symmetrical terms. Instead, their best bet is to resort to unconventional, irregular warfare tactics that place a premium on counter-value targeting and flexibility of maneuver as part of widening and prolonging the conflict into non-military spheres. They seek to involve the enemy populations and neutral actors in the fight, making it an ongoing engagement with economic and social repercussions that extend far beyond the conflict zone. That raises the direct and indirect political and material costs of the militarily-superior opponent.
That is what Iran is doing in response to the US/Israeli attacks. While it does some counter-force operations against Israeli and forward-positioned US forces, its strategy is also based on counter-value targeting of civilian infrastructure in neighboring Arab countries as well as Israel. That includes key shipping lanes and transportation/logistical hubs. The counter-value targeting is illegal, to be sure. But from the Iranian perspective it is a necessary part of its defensive strategy against the military superiority deployed against it. It cannot win the war on military terms, although it might be able to force a stalemate if the will of the US (and perhaps Israeli) public turns against continuing the war, something particularly significant given that the US holds midterm elections in November.
Raising the economic, social and political costs of the war, including but not limited to oil prices, is one way that the Iranians can compensate for their militarily inferior position. Threatening civilian targets in the Arab oligarchies, along with the threats to shipping through the Straits of Hormuz, has an adverse ripple effect on tourism, air and sea passenger travel, merchant cargo and air freight prices and supply chain schedules, insurance premiums, and much more. It also sows fear in the populations of states that Iranians target because of their alignment with the US and Israel, even if they do so in a passive way (say, by allowing military overflights and/or forward US basing). That in turn can pose domestic problems for Gulf oligarchies because even if they aren’t democracies and are as closed when it comes to governance as is the revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran, most have significant Shiite minorities living and working in them. Killing the Shiites’ spiritual leader as well as the head of the Islamic State of Iran, Ayatolla Khamenei, does not sit well with his millions of co-religionists, so Iranian attempts to stoke tensions along sectarian lines via kinetic operations on civilian targets inside Sunni Arab territories can be expected as part of its counter-value campaign. In other words, it brings the war home to the Arab oligarchs.
For their part, the US and Israel have engaged in a hybrid or mixed conflict model: they use both counter-force and counter-value strikes as part of their military campaigns. They both emphasise to the public the successes of the former, including the Israeli strike on the compound that killed Khamenei (along with his wife, daughter-in-law and grandson and his son-turned-successor badly wounded). The MAGA administration boasts of destroying dozens of Iranian warships (including a lightly armed frigate that was over 2000 nautical miles from Iranian waters when it was torpedoed off of the coast of Sri Lanka after participating in an Indian-led naval exercise) and aircraft as well as hundreds of land-based military targets (e.g., missile launchers and weapons storage facilities).They are less keen to acknowledge their counter-value strikes, such as the bombing of a girls school that resulted in over 170 deaths (the US says it had dated targeting coordinates for the double Tomahawk missile strikes on the site), a desalination plant and an oil refinery in Tehran, to say nothing of numerous civilian buildings throughout the country. (Incidentally it is against international law to target water supplies and bomb facilities that result in great environmental damage, such as the refinery Tehran).
From the various US statements about why it chose to make war on Iran–first to destroy its nuclear program (supposedly destroyed last year), then eliminate it as the “greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world” (although the 9/11 attackers, al-Qaeda, Taliban and ISIS are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim and unrelated to Iran and recent mass attacks in the West have been carried out mostly by rightwing extremists), and then to pursue regime change, to now a bit of “all of the above”– it is clear that the hybrid warfare strategy is basically a catch-all assault blanket designed to destroy Iranian society as much as its military and political regime. In other words, it is an attack on the Iranian nation-State, not just those at the top of the bureaucratic ladder (and now subjected to “decapitation” strikes).
Perhaps the US believes that a popular uprising will emerge from the rubble and that someone like the son of the ousted dictator Shah Reza Pahlavi will restore the Peacock Throne. If so and inspire of what Iranian exiles in the West claim about the strength of organised opposition to the Islamic Republic inside and outside of Iran, they are deluded and will be disappointed because the revolutionary regime is resilient, determined, well-prepared for a protracted struggle and very much infiltrated into every aspect of Iranian life. Plus, Persian ethno-nationalism is a very strong ideological bind in Iranian society, so even if the US and Israel attempt to “Balkanise” Iran via the arming and funding of irredentist ethnic groups like the Kurds, it is unlikely that Iranian society will atomise along ethnic lines over the long-term. But if it does, that will only lead to more instability and conflict as primordial divisions spill into modern conflict modalities.
Israel has a different strategic agenda. Convincing the US to join it in its attack on Iran citing “existential” grounds is just part of the larger plan to redraw the map of the Middle East in an image more favorable to Israel. With an accommodation having been reached with its Sunni Arab neighbors on regional security issues (including intelligence-sharing and non-support for an independent Palestinian state), October 7 was the catalyst-precipitant for the move, which has been decades in the making amongst Zionist strategists and intellectuals. Once Hamas gave Netanyahu the excuse–and saved him from his ongoing legal troubles in the process–with its indiscriminate as well as ill-fated assault on Israeli civilians as well as military personnel, the gears were set in motion for a multi-fronted/multi-pronged hybrid war involving conventional and unconventional means (and perhaps nuclear weapons if the desired geopolitical outcomes of the war look increasingly unachievable by conventional means).
US and Israeli war-mongering is also a double “wag the dog” scenario. Netanyahu needed to divert attention from his court case and the costs of occupying Gaza and the West Bank, whereas Trump needed to divert attention from the Epstein files and his unpopular domestic policy agenda. For Israel, destruction of Iran as a nation-state is seen as a way to remove a longer-term existential threat to not only Israel but Jews is general (because Iranian proxies have targeted Jews around the world). This is why the possibility of an Israeli first strike use of nuclear weapons on Iran cannot be discounted. Should the US quit the fight and/or the war bog down and become a Ukrainian-style quagmire, then the resort to nuclear strikes may be put on the table. Given Israel’s record when it comes to international conventions and the Laws of War, that is a worrisome prospect. Given the global community’s record when it comes to stopping aggression and thwarting nuclear weapons first use (even the US refuses to renounce first use strikes and Israel certainly does not), who is going to stop them?
When militarily-superior actors become frustrated by their lack of success in forcing opponent’s capitulation via counter-force targeting, they are tempted to resort to counter-value targeting in order to intimidate and force the opponent’s population into submission. That denies the opponent its support base and cannon fodder in a protracted war scenario. But it also is a type of state terrorism in wartime and as such a war crime. And it often has the opposite effect, as besieged populations abandon short-term internecine enmities in favour of uniting against the common aggressor. Think of it this way: whether the parent’s of the murdered schoolgirls opposed the ayatollahs or not, they all know very well who killed their daughters. It was not Khamenei and they will not forget.
Given that the US has been the most consistently at-war country in the world over the past 60 years and Israel has consistently used counter-value targeting as a social control instrument in occupied Gaza and the West Bank over the same period, both have dark records of moving from counter-force to counter-value operations depending on tactical circumstances, This is more the case for the US, where failures in strategic framing and overly-optimistic reliance on weapons technologies and belief in “effects-based” results have left gaps in short-and medium-term goal-setting and contingency planning. Be it in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran, the US has consequently veered into counter-value operations well beyond the counter-force objectives of its initial rules of engagement. In a sense, the move to counter-value targeting is a sign of the desperation on the part of political and military leaders when their counter-force superiority does not produce the results that they anticipated in the (short) time frames that they hoped for (remember that the US likes its wars short and snappy, much like the video games many of its soldiers played before they joined the kinetic real world).
For Israel, the resort to counter-value targeting pursues both tactical and strategic objectives. At the broadest level, this is what distinguishes Israeli from US military objectives in Iran. It can be argued that there is some legitimacy of the Israeli position in that some of the extreme anti-Semitic statements of Iranian leaders over the last 4 decades have involved threats to eliminate the “Zionist Entity” in its entirety. Clearly that is a poor choice of words when it comes to menacing a nuclear-armed regional rival backed by a declining superpower, but in any event it has given Israel a (largely contrived) justification for its actions along “kill or be killed” lines.
The summary outlook for this war is for it to slow down, widen and become more of a counter-value than a counter-force affair that costs millions in treasure and litres of blood, and eventuate with a status quo that is different at the margins but essentially the same at its core–but all at a far higher price in terms of international stability and global order.
The situation distilled: This war has plenty of background but the immediate reason is that two powerful and malevolent guys and their respective support retinues needed and therefore staged a diversion from their respective personal and political foibles by picking a fight with some other distasteful foreign fellows just because they could.
Others are and will suffer the consequences long after they are gone.
The last value judgement I fisagree eith. Despite the odds I would love to have Iranian islamist regime overturned. Sunni or Shi’a is irrelevant…Islam is the problem.
Hi Juliana,
Is that because you feel Islam is incompatible with democracy or human rights? Do you not see variations in how Islam is practiced in different cultural contexts? Are not most authoritarian regimes prone to justifying themselves on ideological lines, be they secular or religious? If so, how is Islam any different than any other ideological prop for authoritarian social control?
I am more of an “all authoritarians suck” type of person, including in that characterisation elected demagogic populists as well as murderous clerics.
The whole thing is a terrible mess. Heaven only knows where it might end.
Thanks for the analysis, Pablo. Extremely worrying times.
Pablo, I respect how well written/presented that article is to the reader. Please bear with me while I address a few of your points. I enjoy the discussions and debates your articles generate. (I can dish it out and take other people’s responses in equal measure).
Strategic circumstances override existing international law and existing norms. Consider how the United States Navy conducted unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan. After Pearl Harbour, the United States was on the back foot in the Pacific. (Unfortunately, how the United States Navy’s aircraft carriers survived the Pearl Harbor disaster is beyond the scope of this topic).
The notion that the U.S. would let any international legal frameworks get in the way of the war against Japan is nonsensical, and undermines “It is against international law” arguments.
Incidentally, the allies defeating Japan required a cumulative effort, with the United States Navy’s submarine campaign having a greater impact than the B-29 bombing raids.
Things are different outside of the worst-case world wars. Consider the Falklands War: The exclusion zone around those islands imposed by the United Kingdom was a “nicety”. The United Kingdom’s victory in the Falklands War was achieved with military force. (U.S. logistical and intel support for their UK ally during that war falls beyond the scope of this topic, but is also worth noting.)
However, military necessity doesn’t ensure sound strategy. The Bomber Harris school of thought that aerial bombing populations into submission is debunked. Ultimately, allied ground forces, not stand- alone air raids, brought about Germany’s defeat.
However, I would argue against the U.S. putting “boots on the ground” in Iran. Much like General Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign later influenced aerial bombing, I am omitting further details to remain topical.
Another viewpoint is that technological advancements consign existing norms and international laws to a dustbin. The arrival of drones on battlefields extends the air power umbrella and builds upon the trends I mentioned above.
I am not suggesting that international law be thrown out with the bathwater. However, I am making arguments in the context of this topic, and not other matters, such as the Geneva Convention/how prisoners of war are treated.
I agree that the current Iranian regime is far more entrenched than some international observers’ wishful thinking would suggest. It is odd how many commentators miss that point.
Concerning the U.S. using nuclear weapons against Iran. Putting aside how that is a terrible idea, there is no guarantee that it would end the war on terms favourable to the U.S.
Curiously, in the event of a U.S.-China conflict, a nuclear exchange might not bring that conflict to an end.
I covered the sinking of the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena on my Substack. Suffice to say, it was another case where the media class were asleep at the wheel.
Starting with the events made famous by the Black Hawk Down book and film, targeting individuals has come at the expense of sound military principles. Targeting an enemy’s logistical systems has been overlooked in favour of strategic and operational absence.
The U.S. and Israel’s strategic purpose or feasible goals will doom their war against Iran.
US Navy veteran & commentator Malcolm Nance takes a realpolitik view of Trump’s Iran war:
https://xcancel.com/MalcolmNance/status/2030572269898998102?s=20
“Look folks, reality can sometimes be hard to accept.
We all want freedom for Iran. The regime was a horrible, nasty pack of religious zealots for whom terrorism & murder was always the first option. Their revolution started by killing 400 people in a theater with arson & chained exit doors. They sent thousand of kids to their deaths with toy keys around their necks promising entry to heaven if they just walk in to Iraqi minefields.
I’ve tracked IRGC terrorism across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria & Yemen and even fought them in the PG, They almost killed me in 1988. The Islamic regime needed/still needs to be destroyed … that said:
People are getting upset with why I assess this war will likely fail to topple the regime.
Because it is a fantasy based in Trump’s head using lethal tools we prepared for 47 years for the right moment. That moment likely has passed.
Trump has no idea what he’s doing. Because he has contempt for the people who know what they’re doing & the history of what came before him.
If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires then Iran is the funeral home of empires. It dresses you up and lays you into the coffin neatly. Then closes the lid.
Trump cannot understand why Iran hasn’t surrendered … “Lookit all them bombs,” he shouts “They should all love Trump!”
That’s it. That’s the Iran-War strategy. He does not care about the people of Iran. It a score settling grudge match egged on by Netanyahu’s 40 years of promises that war will change the regime if we just drop enough bombs & assassinate its leaders.
So If you want to live in a fantasy world where we are suddenly being greeted as liberators by the 93 million Iranians … feel free.
You are now set up for earth shattering disappointment.
You have to account for the fact that Trump could have attacked in support of the protesters in January. He didn’t & he let them be killed. He was completely indifferent. The 30k dead were a one-day talking point.
Right now, none of these attacks will liberate Iran without a populist uprising or invading ground forces. Worse case is a sectarian Civil war. If that happens the only outcome is that it will kill a lot of people, splinter the country & take down the global economy. Trump will sleep soundly & demand he be made Ayatollah.
This is literally his mental illness masked as foreign policy
This war may give some Iranians hope but it’s a false one. Gird for a horrible chain of dramatic events but rest assured Trump doesn’t care about the people of Iran.
He only want its oil. He said so.
I’m sorry folks, but my job is to deliver reality based assessments, not promise you sunshine in a swirling hurricane of flying bullets, bombs, excrement & razor wire.
That is all.”
Pablo, what is your assessment of how much counter value attacking and unequal warfare will Iran need to do before either one or both of them decide to use nucs???
William,
I do not think that the US will resort to nukes and instead read that there is talk of instituting a draft (even if that will spell the end of the MAGA administration because even MAGA morons do not want to serve in this war). Apparently the talk has progressed to the GOP House leadership drafting a bill to that effect. Of course, Pete the steroid-popping alcoholic “Alpha” male cosplayer may advocate for nuclear strikes and the Air Force brass may be amenable to such a proposition, non-freak leaders in the Navy and Army will demure from exercising that option.
Israel is a different kettle of fish. Since they want to redraw the map of the ME and remove what they perceive as (or at least claim to be) an existential threat, a counter-force nuclear first strike on an Iranian hard target close to a population centre but not decisive to its civilian governance structure could be the Pareto optimal solution for them (because it is a second choice option located on a targeting scale somewhere in between counter-force and counter-value options). For example, something like a major IRGC facility or underground nuclear storage site close to Tehran but not in the centre of it. Since the detonation will be a low level air burst or ground/underground penetration blast, the radioactive debris field will be relatively “small” and drift eastwards to and over Afghanistan and perhaps beyond. They would not need to use a large yield warhead given their targeting and guidance sophistication, so even a bunker-busting nuke would be relatively small when compared to ICBMs and SLBMs.
The demonstration effect as well as the damage itself will have an impact on the Iranian collective psyche, which is the ultimate counter-value objective. Since no one is going to retaliate in kind on Iran’s behalf and because their own retaliatory capability will be eliminated or degraded to the point of uselessness, the Islamic Republic leadership may have to capitulate just in order to survive in skeletal fashion. That is why it suits them better to have the Yanks get suckered into a grind war that even if limited, makes tangible to all Iranians who is killing them in large numbers. It is not the regime’s morality police.
I hate to say it but even though I am getting a bit long in the tooth I fear that I will witness the use of nuclear weapons in my lifetime. That it may be a “western democratic” country that does so first is even more depressing to contemplate.
I cannot see how this conflict ends soon or well.
Almost all the incentives are for Iran to stretch out the war and make it as painful as possible for the US, while lack of strategic clarity on the part of the US (combined with narcissism) means the only off-ramp is Iranian capitulation. Meanwhile, Israel and Russia both see benefits in continued hostilities.
The only way this ends sooner rather than later, is some kind of big push from China, but even that would need to provide Trump with someone kind of perceived Big Win, right?
So, I think it is quite likely the US tries to send in special forces to secure nuclear materiel and it ends in disaster, prompting Israel to use tactical nukes to destroy the target(s).
Whatever happens, there us no way the US comes out of this in a better position in any respect than prior to the bombing started, surely?
PGM:
Two things I learned during my time in government service where a) put yourself in the other guy’s shoes; and b) will we be better for having taken this course of action? One can determine the answer to the other. Neither appear to be at play in US calculations and planning.
I think that your scenario is quite plausible. I also think that the US may simply quit and run, declaring victory etc., after the US body count starts to mount as the war drags out. That will be especially true if Marines and SPECOPS troops are sent in. The necessities of the campaign season serve as a hard stop to prolonging the war from the US perspective. Israel may have other ideas and the Iranians just need patience and perseverance to weather the current storm. But I do not see the US lingering into the Northern summer (which will be an environmental factor that plays into operations).
Lots of talk that Russia & Putin are being advantaged????
It sounds like there is a very real chance that Israel and the US will seek to occupy Kharg Island and to capture and remove Iran’s Highly Enriched Uranium. That cannot end well.
Netanyahu is much smarter than Trump, but both have about the same level of rat cunning and the desire for self preservation. Looks like Israel is pulling the strings, who knows how or when it will end.
Pablo, this is what I think is the US (stupid) theory of victory – thoughts?
First, that sustained military pressure combined with strikes on repression infrastructure will tip internal protests into regime collapse or at least a meaningful regime change dynamic.
Second, that the nuclear programme can be sufficiently degraded to set Iran back years and prevent reconstitution.
Third, that Hormuz can be managed through naval escorts and reserve releases without requiring a ceasefire.
Fourth, that the Gulf states will ultimately align with the US security architecture because their interests are served by Iranian defeat.
Fifth, that early exit would be strategically catastrophic, leaving Iran with leverage it will exploit indefinitely.
PGM,
You scenarios seem plausible. But they require some degree of strategic rationality and assume uniformity of strategic intent on the part of Israel and the US. That is not the case on either front.
First, it is clear that the US assumed an initial decapitation shock and awe strike on Iran would make the regime collapse. It did not, and in fact even though more leadership cadres have been killed the regime has hardened rather than softened (see the latest Foreign Policy with an Iranian scholar on this). rather than a strategic vision put into practice, this was wishful thinking based on false assumptions, ignorance of Iranian domestic politics (not necessarily by US intelligence but by the MAGA morons who run the administration), and perhaps a fair share of alcohol on the part of some of the MAGA leadership. They do not know of what they speak.
Second, as the US intelligence bosses testified before Congress, Iran has no real nuclear delivery platforms that can threaten the US. It has enriched (235U >20%) uranium stockpiles that are believed to be weapons grade (anything over 20% is weapons grade but most weapons are >90% enriched), but without warhead and trigger technologies in its delivery systems, including dumb bombs delivered by aircraft or artillery, they are not usable as intended. 235U>20% is also not good as a dirty bomb, which can be produced without going through the “high” enrichment process or using nuclear waste and byproducts like Plutonium. That means that the Iranian capability is already pretty degraded but still “usable” in non-high tech ways. It could be degraded even further if the 235U>20% stockpiles are removed (something that the US is contemplating by using specialised ground forces locating and seizing the material wherever they are cached). But that involves land troops working towards heavily fortified defences that even after aerial “softening” campaigns using bunker-buster bombing runs will likely retain a significant ability to make such operations very costly for the US (because the stockpiles will not all be in one location). Getting Israel involved will just aggravate the situation and compound the problem.
The idea that naval escorts and releasing oil reserves can compensate for the de facto blockade of the strait ignores the fact that few countries have the capability or the will to get involved on behalf of the US and Israel and cannot fully suppress anti-shipping attacks launched from inland sites adjacent to the Gulf and wider region. Releasing reserves is a temporary solution so has a “use by” date that is likely to be before any ceasefire date the Iranians would be forced to accept. Then what?
It is feasible that Gulf States will stay within the US security architecture (as they are now) but its weakness is now evident to all. They must start looking to alternative arrangements and networks, and there are several non-US powers who could step into the breach. Because wether the US exit is early (more likely) or late, it will be a catastrophic blow to US reputation and credibility and likely spell the end of the MAGA kleptocracy as a domestic political force.
On a positive note, the latter would be a very good thing, so there is hope yet for a silver lining in all of this.
I’ve been reading about comparisons between the Iran War and the 1956 Suez Crisis. In any case, analysts say the most likely outcomes from Trump’s war on Iran are:
– a Vietnam-grade quagmire
– a Somali-grade quick retreat
– a Korean War-grade stalemate
– or a collapse of the Ayatollah regime leading to sectarian chaos.
The ideal outcome of democratisation remains the most unlikely.
KR:
Again, as I have written before and based on my academic background studying regime transitions, short of defeat in wars of annihilation like post-war Germany and Japan where occupiers stayed to oversee postwar material and political reconstitution, there has never been a modern instance of democracy produced by war, with the exception being when dictatorships stage a foreign armed adventure in order to divert attention from their domestic problems that winds up with their military defeat (think Greek colonels regime in 1974 and Argentine junta in 1982). Foreign imposition of democracy after military victory is a non-starter, particularly in places like Afghanistan or Iraq that have no histories with that political construct and were not annihilated by their temporary occupiers. They may have the trappings of post-conflict democracy in some cases, but as the vulgar saying goes, “it is not in their nature to be democratic.”
There is zero chance that what comes from this illegal preventative war of aggression will produce a democracy. In spite of their shallow rhetoric, neither the US or Israel (especially the latter) care one iota about Iranian democracy and even if they did the track record for post- conflict democracy-building is abysmal. The best that can be said is that this war is about breaking Iran as a State that can project power outside of its borders. Ethno-religious factionalisation suits that purpose, especially since the idea that the Shah’s son can aggregate support from various sectarian factions is absurd.
So what is likely is some sort of stalemate as you outline plus sectarian strife and, I would add, foreign meddling of various sorts as interested parties seek to exploit the situation and take advantage of what Iran has to offer in its broken condition (think critical minerals as well as the obvious). But as I wrote in the post, that 7,000 year old tradition of Persian nationalism may have something to say about the eventual outcome on every level.
I’ve also read of comparisons to the Suez Crisis, only this time it’s Trump in the position of Anthony Eden.
https://www.newsweek.com/iran-war-trump-nato-suez-crisis-11739964
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-iran-strait-hormuz-suez-moment-oil-ukraine-b2940408.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/03/10/donald-trump-risks-his-very-own-suez-crisis/
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/american-credibility-is-on-the-line-in-iran-84c13e6a
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-iran-war-imperial-decline
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/iran-war-suez-crisis-imperialism/