Abstract

This article advances a direct exposure of United States and Israeli strategy in the 2026 war against Iran, arguing that what was conceived as a demonstration of decisive military superiority has instead exposed a structural failure in Western strategic doctrine. It contends that the anticipated model of rapid dominance has collapsed under conditions for which it was never designed, revealing a fundamental misreading of the Islamic Republic as a state engineered for endurance rather than swift disintegration. The result is not an incomplete victory but a strategic deadlock that neither side can resolve through conventional force.

 

The analysis identifies a shift from battlefield failure to political and narrative manipulation, in which escalation is no longer achieved through military success but manufactured through attribution, media framing, and the construction of pretexts designed to widen the conflict. In this account, deception is not incidental but operational, functioning as a substitute for strategic coherence. Responsibility is assigned to specific actors, particularly the Trump administration and Israeli leadership, whose conduct is presented as a pattern of contradiction between declared objectives and observable actions.

 

The article further argues that the war has migrated from a military confrontation to a struggle over economic infrastructure, with the Strait of Hormuz emerging as the decisive arena. Here, Iranian strategy is characterised not by the pursuit of victory in conventional terms, but by the capacity to impose systemic costs on the global economy through the credible disruption of energy flows. This transformation reframes the conflict from a regional war into a structural challenge to the international economic order upon which Western power depends.

 

In its final analysis, the article rejects the premise that escalation can restore strategic control, asserting instead that further intensification risks triggering economic and geopolitical consequences that cannot be contained. The United States is thus confronted with a narrowing set of outcomes, each of which entails the admission of failure. The conclusion is unambiguous: the war has already invalidated the assumptions that produced it, and any attempt to sustain or expand it will deepen, rather than resolve, the systemic crisis it has unleashed.

 

 

Introduction

As of 21 March 2026, the opening phase of the United States–Israeli war against Iran in breach of the internal law, has not produced the rapid and decisive victory that had been confidently anticipated, but has instead settled into a war of attrition defined by operational stalemate and strategic failure. What was conceived as a demonstration of overwhelming force has, within twenty-two days, exposed a fundamental miscalculation: both the American and Israeli regimes have not only overestimated their military supremacy, but have also failed to comprehend the structural logic of the Islamic regime as a political system engineered for endurance rather than collapse (Suren-Pahlav, 2026a; 2026b). That endurance is not incidental. It derives from a state form organised not as a pyramid vulnerable to decapitation, but as a distributed network of clerical, military, and revolutionary institutions, each capable of sustaining function and executing pre-existing directives under conditions of disruption.

 

This endurance is not passive resilience but institutional design. Authority is diffused, succession is structured, and the capacity to absorb external shock is embedded across parallel systems of governance and coercion. The war, therefore, does not simply represent a failed campaign. It marks the breakdown of a strategic imagination that continues to project Iraq, Libya, and Syria onto Iran, as if the repetition of method could compensate for the absence of understanding. The assumption of rapid dominance, long embedded within Western military doctrine, collapses when confronted with a state whose survival depends upon absorbing pressure, redistributing violence, and prolonging conflict until the adversary’s political will erodes (Biddle, 2004; Freedman, 2013).

 

Within this context, the developments of the past twenty-two days are not incidental disruptions but structural indicators of failure. Iran, despite facing overwhelming aerial and technological superiority, has demonstrated capabilities neither anticipated nor incorporated into Western operational planning. The reported downing of an advanced F-35 fighter jet and the targeting of an Israeli F-16 are not merely tactical anomalies; they signal the erosion of the central myth upon which this war was justified, namely the assumption of uncontested Western military dominance. The scale of United States and Israeli losses, however, remains not only obscured but actively suppressed. This is not the fog of war but its management. Neither Trump nor Netanyahu can acknowledge the destruction of high-value assets or the loss of personnel without exposing the contradiction at the core of their war narrative: the claim to technological invincibility. That claim is sustained through omission, distortion, and deception, because its collapse would entail a corresponding crisis of domestic legitimacy.

 

This failure does not remain contained within the battlefield. It generates its own compensatory logic. Where decisive victory cannot be secured, escalation is reconstituted through political means. The analysis that follows examines this shift as a distinct strategic adaptation: the manufacture of escalation through false flag operations, the attempted entrapment of external actors, and the reconfiguration of the conflict’s political conditions in the absence of military success.

 

 

Manufacturing Escalation: Strategic Failure and the Politics of Entrapment

Most revealing, however, is not a single incident, but a pattern. Throughout the opening phase of the conflict, a series of alleged Iranian actions have emerged that, upon closer examination, bear the unmistakable characteristics of constructed escalation rather than credible military behaviour. These episodes are not designed to shift the balance on the battlefield. They are designed to reshape the political conditions of the war itself. This is not escalation in the conventional sense. It is the manufacture of escalation. The consistent objective is to generate the pretext required to widen the conflict, to draw additional actors into direct confrontation and, ultimately, to force the entry of the United Kingdom and the activation of NATO under the language of collective defence. The aim is not deterrence. It is entrapment.

 

The clearest indicators of this lie in the strategic irrationality embedded within the claims themselves. The Islamic regime is acutely aware of the thresholds that would trigger direct Western intervention. It has calibrated its actions accordingly, avoiding precisely those forms of escalation that would unify Western allies and legitimise expanded war. At this stage of the conflict, the narrative terrain has already shifted, with the United States and Israel widely perceived as the initiating aggressors. To undertake actions that would reverse that perception and provide legal and political justification for broader intervention would not constitute escalation. It would constitute strategic self-sabotage. Instead, what has emerged is a pattern of incidents whose function is political rather than military. The most exposed example was the missile strike on a British air base in Cyprus, initially attributed to Iran before indications pointed towards Israeli involvement. Parallel episodes, including missile launches directed towards the oil infrastructure and territories of Persian Gulf Arab states, appear calibrated not to achieve operational effect, but to provoke reaction and widen participation. These are not miscalculations. They are deliberate constructions.

 

The available evidence does not permit definitive attribution in each instance, but the operational pattern is sufficiently consistent to sustain a narrower and more precise claim. These incidents display a convergence of timing, target selection and narrative utility that aligns less with conventional military logic than with political signalling designed to alter the composition of the conflict. Whether executed directly or opportunistically exploited, their function remains the same: to generate conditions under which escalation appears both necessary and externally imposed. The distinction is not incidental. It is the mechanism through which strategic failure is reconstituted as political necessity.

 

This pattern is neither accidental nor exhausted. As long as the war remains unresolved and decisive victory remains unattainable, further such ‘false flag operations’ should be expected. The logic is clear: where military success is denied, escalation will be manufactured through deception in order to alter the composition of the conflict. The United Kingdom is the immediate target of this strategy, not as an endpoint, but as a gateway through which NATO can be drawn into direct confrontation. This is not an abstract alignment of interests, but a sequence of identifiable pressures: diplomatic signalling within NATO councils, the amplification of threat assessments through intelligence briefings, and the circulation of incident narratives across aligned media infrastructures. Each operates as a discrete mechanism through which political consent for escalation is manufactured. What emerges is a consistent method. When strategic objectives cannot be achieved through force, they are pursued through false flag operation. The creation of threat, the inflation of capability and the manipulation of attribution become instruments of war in their own right, even where acts of terrorism and bombing campaigns are conducted on British soil and attributed to Iran. This is not a deviation from strategy. It is its substitution.

 

Taken together, these developments do not simply undermine but dismantle the foundational premise of the war. The promise of rapid and decisive victory has collapsed into a grinding stalemate that exposes the structural limits of United States power. The Trump administration is not directing events but reacting to them, trapped within a shrinking set of contradictions: to escalate in a desperate attempt to recover a credibility it has already forfeited, or to de-escalate and concede, thereby confirming the failure of a war it cannot win.

 

Publicly, the language of restraint is deployed. Statements emphasise the need to stabilise volatile oil markets, particularly as prices approach one hundred dollars per barrel. Yet this rhetoric is immediately contradicted by practice. The intensity of attacks has increased, not decreased, and explicit threats have been issued against Iran’s energy infrastructure in clear violation of international law, confirming once again that for the United States, legality remains contingent upon utility rather than principle (Suren-Pahlav, 2026c).

 

Simultaneously, the United States has undertaken measures that reveal the depth of its strategic entrapment. The deployment of thousands of amphibious special forces to the Persian Gulf, the pressure exerted upon NATO allies to intervene militarily and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and the use of geopolitical leverage within the alliance system all indicate a power attempting to compensate for the collapse of its initial objectives. These are not the actions of a state in control of escalation; they are the symptoms of a strategy that has already failed but refuses to acknowledge its own limits.

 

Additionally, the discussion of deploying United States Marines and special operations forces is not escalation in any conventional sense. It is the point at which the war ceases to be reversible (Stewart et al., 2026; ). Reports indicating a potential operation against Kharg Island, through which approximately 90 per cent of Iran’s oil exports pass, point to an attempt to seize, not disrupt, the material basis of the Iranian state . That act crosses a threshold. It transforms the war from coercion into dispossession.

 

Under such conditions, Iran’s strategic logic does not orient towards defence of assets. It shifts towards their denial. The regime would rather see its own infrastructure destroyed than allow it to fall under American control. What is at stake is not revenue, but sovereignty. Oil, in this context, is no longer an economic resource. It becomes a trigger mechanism, wired, in effect, for destruction upon foreign seizure. This is precisely why invasion does not produce leverage. It produces detonation. The moment American forces land, the preservation of infrastructure ceases to be rational. The rational act becomes its elimination. Not as desperation, but as doctrine: if the resource cannot be held, it will not be handed over. It will be removed from the system entirely. This underlying disposition is not hidden. It surfaces openly in the discourse of regime supporters, who state without ambiguity: ‘let them come, they will arrive as raw meat and return as barbecue in bags’. This is not performative excess. It is the vernacular expression of a strategic position already internalised. Invasion is not something to be avoided. It is something to be absorbed in order to justify total retaliation.

 

The implications extend immediately beyond Kharg Island. Once this threshold is crossed, oil and gas infrastructure across the Persian Gulf ceases to be insulated. It becomes targetable. The result is not disruption, but systemic economic shock. Iran does not need to win the war in conventional terms. It needs only to ensure that no one else can extract value from it.

 

The emphasis on Kharg Island may itself function as a form of operational misdirection. From a strategic perspective, a more consequential approach would privilege control over the entry nodes of the Strait of Hormuz rather than its internal arteries. This would entail the seizure or Iranian Islands of Qeshm, Hormuz, Hengam, Siri, Lark, Bumusu (Abu Musa) and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, or, the occupation of ports of Gargan, Sirik and Jask, thereby securing leverage over the maritime threshold through which transit is regulated. Such a configuration corresponds with Israeli strategic objectives insofar as it facilitates indirect control over the Strait of Hormuz as a critical chokepoint within the global energy system (Suren-Pahlav, 2020). Yet this distinction does not alter the outcome. Whether the point of contact is Kharg or the Strait itself, the response is structurally predetermined. Any American landing on Iranian-controlled territory will not be treated as a limited engagement. It will be treated as the trigger for a war in which destruction replaces preservation as the organising principle. Once initiated, this does not escalate. It detonates.

 

At the centre of this failure lies the search for a decisive ‘trump card’. For Washington, this includes the seizure of Iran’s enriched uranium and the restructuring of Iran’s political economy into a subordinate, resource-extractive model akin to Venezuela. For Israel, the objective is more radical: regime change not as transformation, but as destruction, with the ultimate aim of rendering Iran a fragmented and internally destabilised territory, subjected to prolonged civil conflict and eventual balkanisation in line with earlier strategic blueprints (Suren-Pahlav, 2018; 2024; 2025a; 2025b).

 

Yet these objectives remain detached from operational reality. The Islamic regime is not a pyramidal system that collapses with the removal of its upper layers, but a distributed network capable of sustaining function under conditions of disruption. Authority is not concentrated in a single point of failure. It is diffused across interconnected structures that retain the capacity to execute pre-existing directives even in the event of leadership decapitation. This is precisely where strategic miscalculation has occurred. The war was conceived on the assumption that the removal of the leadership would produce systemic collapse. Instead, it has activated a structure designed for endurance. Decapitation does not terminate the system. It fragments it into operational nodes that continue to act (Suren-Pahlav, 2026a).

 

Reality has therefore converged upon a different locus entirely: the Strait of Hormuz. It is here, not in the abstraction of regime collapse, that the balance of power is now determined. The regime has already made clear the consequences, and it is through this chokepoint that those consequences acquire material force.

 

 

Military Stalemate and the Myth of Rapid Dominance

The war has not stalled by accident. It has stalled because the doctrine that underwrote it was conceptually bankrupt from the outset. The belief in rapid dominance, codified in the language of ‘shock and awe’, rests upon a foundational assumption that the application of overwhelming force, delivered with speed and technological precision, can collapse the adversary’s capacity and will to resist within a compressed temporal frame (Ullman and Wade, 1996). That assumption has now been exposed, not as a miscalculation in execution, but as a categorical error in understanding the relationship between military force and political structure.

 

What the United States and Israel confronted in Iran was not a regime whose survival depends upon conventional military symmetry or territorial control alone, but a system whose durability is embedded in its capacity to absorb punishment, reconstitute authority and reframe external attack as internal consolidation. This is not incidental. It is the product of a political architecture forged through revolution, war and sustained isolation, in which coercion from outside is not destabilising per se, but constitutive of regime persistence. To assume that such a system would fragment under aerial bombardment is to mistake resilience for fragility and endurance for weakness (Suren-Pahlav, 2026b).

 

The result is a battlefield dynamic in which superiority fails to translate into decision. The United States and Israel retain overwhelming advantages in air power, surveillance and strike capability, yet these advantages have produced neither strategic breakthrough nor political collapse. Instead, they have generated a pattern of repetitive strikes without cumulative effect, a cycle of destruction that degrades infrastructure without dismantling the state that governs it. This is not victory deferred. It is victory rendered structurally unattainable under present conditions.

 

Classical strategic theory offers little comfort here. The expectation that technological superiority yields decisive outcomes presupposes a correspondence between battlefield success and political consequence. Yet, as Freedman observes, strategy is not the mere application of force but the alignment of means with political ends (Freedman, 2013). In this war, that alignment has disintegrated. Means have escalated. Ends remain undefined. The gap between the two has become the space in which stalemate consolidates.

 

The operational record of the first twenty-two days makes this disjunction explicit. Air campaigns have intensified, targets have multiplied and yet the core strategic objective – whether defined as deterrence, degradation or regime destabilisation – remains unfulfilled. Iran continues to operate, to respond and, crucially, to shape the tempo of conflict. This is the inversion of the expected hierarchy of power. The weaker actor, rather than collapsing, dictates duration. The stronger actor, rather than concluding the war, extends it.

 

This inversion is not unprecedented. It reflects a broader pattern identified in the study of asymmetric warfare, in which materially weaker actors exploit time, geography and political complexity to offset conventional inferiority (Biddle, 2004). However, what distinguishes the present case is that Iran is not a non-state insurgent force but a state actor with layered capabilities, regional networks and a governing structure that integrates military, ideological and economic functions. The application of force against such an entity does not produce linear degradation; it produces adaptive resistance.

 

At the centre of this resistance lies what may be termed a ‘coercive persistence dynamic’, in which the regime converts external pressure into a mechanism of internal reinforcement (Suren-Pahlav, 2026b). Air strikes that are intended to weaken the state instead legitimise its narrative of siege. Economic pressure that is designed to induce collapse instead redistributes scarcity in ways that consolidate elite control. The more intense the external assault, the narrower the internal space for dissent. In this configuration, the logic of coercion becomes self-defeating.

 

The United States, unlike Israel, remains constrained by a model of warfare that demands decisive engagement and rapid results, rendering it structurally ill-suited to prolonged confrontation. This model is not simply military; it is political. Western analysts attribute it to democracy. That is a convenient fiction. The constraint lies in the imperatives of the capitalist political economy that sustains it. War must produce return. It must stabilise markets, secure resources or generate outcomes convertible into economic and political value. War, within such a system, is not fought for abstract security or principle, but for return, for extraction, for profit. It must deliver stabilised markets, captured resources and outcomes that can be converted into economic and political gain. A war that produces only disruption without yield is not merely unsuccessful. It is intolerable. Not because of public dissent, which has no meaningful bearing on strategic decision-making, but because it begins to corrode the very system that finances, legitimises and depends upon it. The crisis, therefore, is not one of democratic patience, but of capitalist refusal to sustain a war that does not pay. This is why Iraq, Libya and Syria were not aberrations but precedents. They were dismantled, penetrated and reordered into zones of extraction, their sovereignty reduced to a mechanism through which external powers continue, to this day, to appropriate their national resources. That is the model. That is the expectation. Iran was meant to follow the same trajectory. Instead, it has broken it. Iran has not collapsed, has not yielded and has not been converted into a site of profitable domination. It has resisted, absorbed and redirected the conflict in ways that deny extraction while imposing cost. What was intended as another theatre of controlled plunder has become a strategic trap, in which the United States and its European partners now find themselves locked into a war that does not pay, cannot be made to pay and, in continuing, begins to strangle the very economic order that drove it into war in the first place.

 

This is the position in which Washington now finds itself. The longer the war continues without resolution, the greater the divergence between official narratives of control and the observable reality of stalemate. Each additional day without decisive outcome transforms the war from a demonstration of strength into an exhibition of limitation. The very technologies that were intended to guarantee dominance now serve to highlight the absence of strategic effect.

 

It is within this context that escalation becomes both inevitable and irrational. Faced with the failure of rapid dominance, policymakers seek alternative pathways to decision, often through the expansion of targets, the intensification of strikes or the widening of the conflict’s geographical scope. Yet such escalation does not resolve the underlying problem. It compounds it. More force applied to a structurally resistant system does not produce collapse; it produces further entrenchment.

 

The search for a decisive rupture, whether through the targeting of critical infrastructure, the elimination of leadership or the disruption of nuclear capabilities, reflects a refusal to accept the limits imposed by the initial miscalculation. Each proposed ‘solution’ operates within the same flawed framework: that sufficient force, applied at the correct point, will finally produce the desired outcome. This is not strategy. It is repetition under conditions of failure.

 

The consequence is a war that continues without direction. Tactical successes accumulate without strategic meaning. Destruction increases without producing decision. The battlefield becomes saturated with activity, yet devoid of resolution. In such conditions, the locus of conflict inevitably shifts away from direct military confrontation towards domains where asymmetry can be more effectively leveraged.

 

That shift is already underway. As the capacity to secure decisive victory on land or through air diminishes, the war is being reconstituted around control of economic lifelines, particularly those that extend beyond the immediate theatre of operations. The logic is straightforward. If the adversary cannot be defeated militarily within an acceptable timeframe, it can be pressured economically in ways that impose costs not only on the belligerents but on the global system that sustains them.

 

This is the point at which military stalemate is transformed into economic warfare. It is also the point at which the war ceases to be regionally contained. The mechanisms through which this transformation occurs are neither abstract nor distant. They are concentrated in a single, narrow corridor through which the circulation of global energy is forced to pass.

 

The Strait of Hormuz, long treated as a strategic vulnerability, now emerges as the decisive arena in which the failure of rapid dominance is converted into leverage of a different order. What could not be achieved through force is now pursued through control. What could not be resolved on the battlefield is displaced onto the structure of the global economy itself.

 

 

The Strait of Hormuz: Chokepoint Power and the Weaponisation of Global Trade

The war, having failed to produce decision through force, now discloses its true terrain. It is not fought where bombs fall, but where circulation can be stopped. The Strait of Hormuz is not a secondary theatre, nor a logistical concern to be managed after the fact. It is the structural fulcrum upon which the entire conflict now turns, the point at which military stalemate is translated into economic coercion and where the illusion of Western strategic control dissolves into systemic vulnerability.

 

Approximately one fifth of the world’s traded oil passes through this narrow maritime corridor. This is not a statistic. It is a condition of global dependency. The architecture of the international economy, particularly in its energy dimension, has been constructed upon the uninterrupted flow of resources through chokepoints that are presumed to be secure under the implicit guardianship of American naval power (Kaplan, 2010; Cordesman, 2020). That presumption has now been shattered. Control of the Strait is no longer theoretical. It is contested, and in practical terms, it has already shifted.

 

Contrary to prevailing claims that frame the situation in binary terms of ‘open’ or ‘closed’, the Strait of Hormuz is not, in formal or operational terms, closed. No comprehensive mining campaign has been executed, and maritime passage continues. Yet to state this as if it resolves the question is to evade the reality that matters. The Strait remains open only in the most superficial, legalistic sense. In practice, it operates under conditions of acute threat in which the calculus of risk has already begun to override the fiction of free navigation. Insurance markets do not respond to legal status, but to exposure, and where the probability of attack becomes credible, insurability collapses. Shipping does not cease because a waterway is declared closed; it contracts because actors refuse to bear unquantifiable risk. What is being constructed, therefore, is not a formal blockade, but a functional one, produced through fear, liability and the anticipation of violence rather than its constant execution. The persistence of the ‘open versus closed’ framing is not analytical error. It is a convenient simplification that obscures how economic coercion actually operates under conditions of strategic threat.

 

Iran does not require formal closure of the Strait to exercise control over it. It requires only the credible capacity to disrupt, delay or selectively threaten passage. This is the essence of chokepoint power. It operates not through absolute denial, but through the production of uncertainty. Insurance premiums rise. Shipping routes are reconsidered. Markets react not to actual closure, but to the anticipation of risk. In such a system, perception is not secondary to reality. It is the mechanism through which economic pressure is transmitted (Strange, 1996).

 

The first-order effects are already visible. Oil prices move sharply upwards, insurance premiums on maritime transit rise and shipping exposure is recalculated in real time. These are not speculative reactions, but measurable responses within energy and financial markets.

 

The second-order consequences extend beyond pricing. Energy-importing economies, particularly in Europe, begin to absorb inflationary pressure that transmits across supply chains, constraining industrial output and amplifying existing fiscal vulnerabilities.

 

Only at this point does the wider systemic implication emerge. What begins as a disruption in a regional chokepoint acquires the capacity to propagate through the global economy, not as a singular shock, but as a sustained condition of instability. This is how a geographically localised conflict is translated into structural economic pressure.

 

The United States, despite its rhetoric of energy independence, is not insulated from this dynamic. The global price of oil is not determined by domestic production alone, but by the integrated structure of international markets. When the Strait is destabilised, the effect is systemic. The claim that the United States can disengage while others bear the cost is not analysis; it is denial. In an interdependent system, disruption at the point of circulation propagates across all nodes. There is no external position from which the United States can observe without being affected (O’Sullivan, 2013). Yet Washington persists in advancing precisely this claim. Official statements suggest that the burden of reopening the Strait should fall upon other nations, particularly those more directly dependent upon its flows. This is not burden-sharing. It is abdication reframed as leadership. It reveals a deeper fracture within the Western alliance system, in which the costs of American strategic failure are to be redistributed across partners whose own economic stability is now placed at risk.

 

Iran, by contrast, does not approach the Strait of Hormuz as a vulnerability to be defended, but as a defensive weapon to be deployed. The objective is not disruption alone, but coercive reordering. Control over the Strait enables the transformation of a passageway into a point of extraction, where transit is no longer governed by the fiction of free navigation enforced by Western naval dominance, but by terms dictated by Iran to those who depend upon it. This is not leverage at the margins. It is structural power exercised at the centre of the global energy system. For Iran, this is not optional strategy. It is the condition of survival. The significance of the Strait is not merely strategic, but historical and civilisational. The New Persian name ‘Hormoz’, derived from the Middle Persian pronunciation of the name ‘Hormuz’, rooted in Ahura Mazda, the God and creator of the world in the Zoroastrian religion, is not an incidental label but a marker of long-standing Persian sovereignty over this space. What is now unfolding is therefore not simply a contest over maritime control, but a direct challenge to the external domination that has defined the Strait in the modern era. Iran is not defending the waterway. It is reclaiming it, and in doing so, converting geography into coercive power.

 

This is where the conflict transcends its immediate military context and becomes a structural challenge to the existing international order. The dominance of the dollar in global trade, particularly in energy transactions, has long functioned as a pillar of American power (Eichengreen, 2011). If Iran, in coordination with external partners such as China, were to denominate transactions through the Strait in alternative currencies, particularly the yuan, the implications would extend far beyond the Persian Gulf. The war would cease to be about territory or regime and would instead become a contest over the monetary architecture of the global economy.

 

Such a shift would not occur through formal declaration. It would emerge incrementally, through bilateral arrangements, preferential access agreements and the gradual erosion of dollar-denominated transactions. The Strait, in this scenario, becomes a lever through which economic realignment is enforced. States seeking secure passage would be compelled to adapt to new conditions, thereby normalising what would otherwise be resisted. This is not speculation. It is the logical extension of chokepoint control in an era of contested hegemony.

 

The United States is structurally incapable of accepting such an outcome. To do so would be to concede not merely a regional setback, but a systemic loss of authority within the international order it has spent decades constructing. Yet the options available to prevent this outcome are constrained by the very conditions the war has produced. A direct military effort to seize or permanently secure the Strait would require a level of escalation that risks full-scale regional war, drawing in multiple state and non-state actors and potentially closing the Strait altogether. The cure, in this case, would replicate the disease. This is the strategic trap. If the United States escalates, it risks triggering the very economic collapse it seeks to avoid. If it withdraws, it leaves Iran in a position to consolidate control and translate military endurance into economic power. There is no pathway that preserves both strategic credibility and economic stability. The contradiction is irreducible (Suren-Pahlav, 2026a).

 

For Europe, the situation is even more acute. Unlike the United States, European economies lack both the energy independence and the strategic autonomy required to navigate such disruption. Their wealth is structurally tied to the stability of global trade flows. A sustained crisis in the Strait would not simply inconvenience European markets; it would destabilise them at a foundational level. Inflation, energy shortages and industrial contraction would converge, producing a crisis that no European government is presently equipped to manage. In this sense, the war exposes not only the limits of American power, but the dependency of its allies upon a system that can no longer guarantee their security.

 

What emerges, therefore, is a redefinition of victory itself. It is no longer measured in territorial gains or battlefield outcomes, but in control over the mechanisms through which global economic life is organised. The side that determines the conditions of passage through the Strait determines the distribution of costs across the international system. In such a framework, the distinction between military and economic power collapses. They become different expressions of the same underlying capacity to impose structure upon others.

 

The United States entered this war seeking to impose its will through force. It now confronts a reality in which force has failed, and where the locus of power has shifted to a domain in which its superiority is neither absolute nor uncontested. Iran, by enduring rather than defeating, has repositioned the conflict onto terrain where asymmetry becomes advantage and where the global system itself becomes the medium of struggle.

 

This is not a temporary disruption. It is the exposure of a deeper transformation. The Strait of Hormuz is no longer merely a chokepoint. It is the site at which the post-Cold War order confronts its own limits and begins to fracture under the weight of its internal contradictions.

 

 

Strategic Endgames: Withdrawal, Escalation and the Architecture of Systemic Defeat

The war has now entered the phase in which outcomes are no longer determined by intent, but by constraint. The range of available options has narrowed to a set of mutually destructive choices, each of which carries consequences that extend beyond the immediate theatre of conflict. What remains is not strategy in any meaningful sense, but the management of failure under conditions in which every available pathway imposes costs that cannot be contained.

 

The first and only viable option is withdrawal. Not as a choice, but as compulsion. If the United States intends to halt the accelerating damage to its own economy, prevent the spillover into already fragile European systems and avoid a wider financial rupture, it must disengage immediately. There is no alternative that does not deepen the crisis. What will be presented as de-escalation is, in substance, defeat. Withdrawal under conditions in which the Strait of Hormuz remains under credible Iranian threat does not simply mark the failure of military objectives. It transfers power. The United States would leave the battlefield having failed to break Iran while preserving the very chokepoint through which Iran can now exert sustained economic coercion. This will not be interpreted as restraint. It will be understood, without ambiguity, as capitulation under pressure.

 

And withdrawal alone is not sufficient. It forces negotiation, and not on American terms. To restore the flow of energy and stabilise the global system it has destabilised, the United States will have to negotiate directly with the Islamic regime and concede. Not rhetorically, but materially. Sanctions relief, the release of frozen assets and, ultimately, financial compensation for the damage inflicted. Washington will not exit with leverage. It will pay to leave. Yet even in retreat, the fiction must be enforced. Trump cannot concede defeat; his political identity is contingent upon the denial of it. He will declare victory regardless of outcome and will attempt to impose that narrative on the settlement itself. The Islamic regime, acting with cold pragmatism, is unlikely to object. Provided it secures sanctions relief, financial concessions and strategic recognition, it has no incentive to expose the fabrication. What takes shape, therefore, is not diplomacy but collusion in narrative management: a defeated power proclaiming triumph, and a victorious adversary permitting the lie in exchange for material gain.

 

The implications are immediate and irreversible. Iran consolidates control over the Strait and converts it into a permanent instrument of regulation and extraction. Transit ceases to be governed by the fiction of neutral passage enforced by American naval dominance and becomes conditional upon Iranian terms. The message is unmistakable: power now resides not with the actor that initiated the war, but with the one that absorbed it and endured.

 

However, even this pathway is not immediately accessible. Before withdrawal can be operationalised, a ceasefire must be established, and that in itself is a separate obstacle. The barrier is not technical. It is credibility, or more precisely, the absence of it.

 

Over the course of these twenty-two days, Trump has lied repeatedly, shifting position as it suits immediate political need while contradicting his own statements through action. This is not a matter of inconsistency. It is a pattern. Prior to both the June 2025 and February 2026 attacks, he projected the appearance of negotiation and restraint, only to initiate military action in the midst of those very processes. Negotiation, in this context, is not diplomacy. It is a device (Suren-Pahlav, 2025c). Under these conditions, the Islamic regime has no reason to trust any ceasefire proposal issued by Washington. There is no ambiguity in this assessment. Any such proposal will be understood for what it is: a tactical manoeuvre designed to relieve pressure on energy markets, drive down oil prices and create the operational space required to replenish military capacity ahead of renewed escalation. A ceasefire is not interpreted as a step towards peace. It is read as preparation for the next phase of aggression, state terrorism and war (Suren-Pahlav, 2026c). This collapse of credibility is not incidental. It is decisive. Negotiation becomes structurally impossible when one party is known to use it as cover for attack. The result is a strategic deadlock in which the actor that must end the war cannot secure agreement to do so because its word carries no weight.

 

Under such conditions, there is only one remaining option. If the United States intends to end the war, it cannot rely on negotiation, assurances or staged diplomacy. It must act unilaterally. It must stop the war itself. Anything else will be read, correctly, as another attempt at deception.

 

The second, and profoundly reckless, option is escalation. This would entail a direct and sustained attempt not only to break Iranian control over the Strait through large-scale naval operations, but also expanded air campaigns and the systematic targeting of critical infrastructure across Iranian territory. This would mark the transition from a failing limited war into an uncontrollable systemic confrontation.

 

The risks are not hypothetical, but neither are they mechanically predetermined. They are embedded within a sequence of escalation thresholds that, once crossed, become progressively more difficult to contain. A sustained attempt to forcibly reopen the Strait would likely trigger retaliatory measures, mining operations, missile strikes on shipping and the targeting of critical infrastructure, that would significantly disrupt energy flows. The immediate consequence would be severe market volatility, with price shocks and supply uncertainty reverberating across global systems. Beyond this, the danger lies in feedback effects: disruption generates further escalation, which in turn deepens disruption. Under such conditions, the capacity of financial and energy markets to stabilise becomes increasingly strained. What emerges is not instantaneous collapse, but a trajectory in which systemic stress accumulates to the point where containment itself becomes uncertain. This is only the first layer. The real escalation begins where regime survival is threatened. If the Islamic regime is pushed to the edge, it will not collapse. It will retaliate without limit.

 

Trump’s threat on 21 March, posted on Truth Social, that the United States would ‘hit and obliterate Iran’s various power plants’ if the Strait is not reopened within forty-eight hours (CNBC, 2026), is not coercion. It is a trigger. Destroying power infrastructure is not a tactical strike. It is a move towards total system collapse. Apart from the human catastrophe and the destruction of Iran as a functioning state, a context in which no one in the world would shed tears for Iranian lives, especially the West, which operates not on morality but on profit, extraction and strategic advantage, this also signals to the regime that survival is over. Under those conditions, restraint becomes irrational. Survival overrides all limits.

 

The response is unlikely to remain proportionate within conventional limits. Under conditions in which regime survival is perceived to be at stake, the range of retaliatory options expands beyond standard deterrence frameworks. Oil fields, export terminals, reserves and critical infrastructure across the region will be hit. Water systems, energy grids, everything within reach. Israeli nuclear facilities will not be exempt. Nothing is off the table. This is not escalation for gain. It is destruction to deny. The regime will not leave a functioning system behind. It will burn the resources its enemies depend on. It will take the system down with it. The consequence is immediate global economic meltdown. A significant share of global energy supply disappears. No state can contain it. Not the United States. Not Europe. European economies go first. The United States follows. The shock they triggered turns inward. And the responsibility is not confined to Washington and Tel Aviv. Western powers, through direct military cooperation, logistical support and political alignment, have already embedded themselves in this war in clear breach of international law. They are not external observers. They are participants. The collapse that follows will not be an unintended consequence. It will be the outcome of deliberate complicity.

 

Yet another layer is being suppressed. Not because it is unclear, but because it is inconvenient. Economic collapse is not the endpoint. It is the trigger for retaliation.

 

The Islamic regime is shaped by a political theology in which sacrifice and martyrdom are not symbolic, but operational. Under conditions of existential threat, this logic translates into action. The battlefield does not remain confined to the region. It expands into irregular and transnational domains, where attribution is obscured and retaliation becomes diffuse. The exposure is not limited to the United States. European states that have aligned themselves militarily and politically with Washington and Israel become direct targets. Distance offers no protection. Alignment carries consequence. Retaliation, in such a framework, does not follow conventional rules of engagement. It bypasses them.

 

The regime has already developed the capacity to project influence and organise networks beyond its borders (Suren-Pahlav, 2017; 2015). Under conditions of escalation, these networks would not remain dormant. They would be activated to carry out sustained campaigns of disruption and violence aimed at destabilising political systems and imposing cost on civilian populations. This is not escalation in the conventional sense. It is the breakdown of boundaries, where conflict ceases to be containable. Consequences cannot be localised, managed or reversed. At that point, the question is no longer how to resolve the conflict, but how to prevent what cannot be contained.

 

Therefore, what begins as an attempt to dominate would end in the destruction of the very system it seeks to preserve.

 

The geopolitical outcome would also be equally decisive. In collapsing the existing order, escalation would accelerate the shift of power towards actors positioned outside the Western economic system. Russia and China, less exposed to the immediate shock and better positioned to exploit the resulting vacuum, would emerge not as participants in the crisis, but as its principal beneficiaries. What is framed as a demonstration of American strength would, in effect, hasten the erosion of its global position. Escalation, therefore, is not a strategy. It is an act of systemic self-destruction, in which the pursuit of control produces the collapse of the very order that made such control possible. It is, in effect, an option that nullifies itself, since to pursue it is to trigger outcomes so catastrophic that they render the original objective irrelevant.

 

These two pathways – withdrawal and escalation – do not represent distinct strategies. They are different expressions of the same underlying failure. Each reveals, in its own way, the inability of the United States to align its military capabilities with its political objectives under the conditions it has created. The war cannot be won as conceived. It can only be prolonged, expanded or abandoned, each at escalating cost.

 

The first option, however, collapses the moment Israel is treated as subordinate rather than autonomous. It is not. Even if the United States accepts defeat under the cover of manufactured victory, there is no guarantee that Israel will allow the war to end.

 

For Netanyahu, termination is not policy failure. It is political annihilation. He has invested his premiership, his legitimacy and his personal survival in the destruction of Iran. At the same time, Israel itself has absorbed significant damage from Iranian retaliation, exposing vulnerabilities that his entire political narrative was built to deny. To end the war under these conditions is not retreat. It is the public exposure of failure for which he alone will be held responsible. Politically, it is suicide. This creates a structural rupture. The United States, constrained by economic reality, is pushed towards exit. Israel, driven by internal political survival, is pulled towards continuation. These trajectories are not compatible.

 

If Washington withdraws unilaterally, Israel is left with two options, both extreme. The first is acceptance: the end of the war, the admission of failure and the collapse of Netanyahu’s political career. This outcome is highly unlikely. For Israel, prolonging the war is not a loss. It is a strategy. It has little to lose and much to gain by continuing. This is not conjecture. It reflects an established strategic disposition. As retired Major General Jonathan Shaw stated in an interview with LBC, citing a former MI6 chief, Israelis ‘love long wars’, adding that ‘mowing the lawn for Israel is the way of doing business – just go there and kill more people’ (Shaw, 2025). The objective is not to end the war, but to prolong it.

 

The human cost does not function as a constraint. Even large-scale civilian losses do not alter the underlying calculation. They are absorbed within a framework that assumes continuity. Demographic asymmetry reinforces this logic. Israel’s fertility rate, at approximately 2.7–3.0 children per woman, remains above replacement level, whereas Iran’s, at around 1.7, falls below it (United Nations, 2024; World Bank, 2024; OECD, 2024). The implication is not incidental: losses are not perceived as existential.

 

The same logic applies economically. The cost of war, even the destruction of Israeli cities, does not impose a decisive limit. It is externalised. Israel operates on the expectation that the United States will pay — for the war, for the damage and for the reconstruction. This is not conjecture. It is how the system operates. American political life has been structured to guarantee support for Israel irrespective of cost or consequence. Organisations such as AIPAC have institutionalised this alignment through sustained lobbying, political financing and the systematic shaping of policy boundaries. What appears as choice is, in practice, preconditioned compliance.

 

Alongside this formal architecture, the shadow cast by scandals such as the Jeffrey Epstein network has reinforced a wider perception of vulnerability within political elites — a perception that power operates not only through persuasion, but through exposure. Whether acknowledged or not, this climate narrows the space for dissent and disciplines those who might otherwise resist.

 

The result is a system without restraint. The costs are displaced, the risks are externalised and the incentives to continue remain intact. Israel can prolong the war because it does not bear its full price. The burden is transferred outward, and it is paid, ultimately, by others.

 

In this configuration, prolonging the war is not irrational. It is structurally enabled, politically incentivised and economically underwritten.

 

However, if it is forced to stop, escalation will move beyond the limits of rational calculation. Faced with strategic defeat and personal ruin, the incentive shifts not towards restraint, but towards expansion. Under such conditions, escalation ceases to function as strategy, and it is at this point that the risk crosses its final threshold. Israel retains nuclear capabilities which, if deployed under conditions of desperation, would transform the war into an event of irreversible magnitude. The destruction of Iran would not remain contained. It would constitute a regional and systemic rupture, the consequences of which would extend far beyond the battlefield.

 

European responses, as before, would not alter this trajectory. Public condemnation would be issued, the language of international law would be invoked and moral outrage would be performed. Yet these gestures would remain hollow. The historical pattern is already established: condemnation without consequence, outrage without rupture. Support would continue, materially and politically, even in the face of mass destruction. What emerges, therefore, is not a contained conflict, but a system without restraint. A war that the United States cannot sustain, cannot escalate and cannot control, yet one that Israel, driven by internal political imperatives, may refuse to end. In such a configuration, rational strategy gives way to political desperation, and the threshold between limited war and systemic catastrophe becomes dangerously thin.

 

What is now unfolding is not confined to the battlefield. It is a direct assault on the foundations of the global economic order. The war can no longer be resolved at the level at which it was initiated. Its consequences are already migrating into a different order entirely.

 

 

The Third Path: Forcing the Endgame Through Systemic Threat

There is an unspoken and unthinkable path, one that leads directly to global economic collapse. It produces no victors, only systemic loss. It erases the distinction between sides, drawing the United States, Iran, the Persian Gulf Arab states, NATO and every economy structurally dependent on Middle Eastern oil and gas into a single outcome: collective destabilisation.

 

If the United States chooses to mirror Iran’s logic, the sequence becomes clear. Trump declares victory, announces that a peace process is underway and projects de-escalation in order to calm markets and restore confidence. Beneath this performance, however, the war does not end. It is repackaged. A controlled war of attrition or managed de-escalation is pursued, allowing the United States to reset its military posture, stabilise economic pressures and gradually exhaust Iran’s ballistic missile capacity.

 

This approach rests on a critical assumption: that Iran will accept the structure imposed upon it. That it will either endure a prolonged war designed to deplete its capabilities while the United States regains strategic balance, or accept a negotiated pause that preserves the conditions for renewed pressure at a later stage. This assumption is fundamentally flawed.

 

Iran will recognise the structure for what it is. It will see that both continuation and suspension operate against its long-term position, and that compliance leads only to delayed defeat. Faced with such a configuration, the rational response is not adaptation, but rupture. Not participation in the game, but the destruction of its underlying logic. At that point, the conflict shifts. Iran does not respond within the existing framework. It breaks it. One plausible course is the imposition of a deadline, not in hours, but in days. A fixed period within which the war must cease, accompanied by a clear and credible threat: if hostilities continue, Iran will systematically target and destroy oil and gas infrastructure across the region.

 

This is not escalation for advantage. It is escalation for systemic denial. Without relinquishing its leverage, Iran would place the global economy under direct threat. The immediate effect would be panic. European economies, structurally exposed and heavily dependent on energy flows, would face acute pressure. Markets would react before any strike is carried out. The threat alone would begin to produce the crisis. Under such conditions, pressure would not fall on Tehran, but on Washington. European states, confronted with the prospect of economic collapse, would be compelled to force the United States towards termination of the conflict. The locus of pressure shifts. The alliance fractures under strain.

 

If the deadline passes and Washington does not concede, the logic does not end. It intensifies. Iran extends the deadline, replicating the same temporal pressure that Trump himself deploys as a tool of coercion. The structure is reversed. What began as American strategic management becomes Iranian strategic control. This is the point at which the war ceases to be governed by military capability alone and becomes a contest of endurance, timing and systemic leverage. Yet even this framework presumes a degree of rational continuity that can no longer be assumed. At this stage, the decisive variable is not structural alone, but personal. The conduct of the war is inseparable from the condition of the individual directing it.

 

Trump must be treated, in strategic terms, as mentally unstable. His decision-making is erratic, impulsive and unbound by consistent logic, legal constraint or moral limitation. This is not a peripheral concern. It is the central risk factor. When such instability is situated at the helm of a superpower, the entire structure of deterrence becomes fragile.

 

The implications are immediate. Outcomes can no longer be confined to calculated pathways. De-escalation remains possible. So does continued managed confrontation. But so too does abrupt and extreme escalation, driven not by strategy, but by impulse and the preservation of personal authority. The deployment of ground forces, the acceptance of rising casualties and the potential resort to the most destructive weapons available cannot be excluded.

 

This is what transforms the crisis from a regional conflict into a potential systemic rupture. When strategic authority rests with a decision-maker who is not reliably bound by law, restraint or rational calculation, the risk is no longer miscalculation alone, but uncontrolled escalation. In such conditions, the pathway from limited war to a wider, potentially global conflict is no longer theoretical. It becomes a real and immediate danger.

 

This is not conjecture. It follows from a pattern in which legal and normative constraints have already been openly dismissed when they conflict with immediate objectives (Suren-Pahlav, 2026c). Under these conditions, the question is not whether escalation is justified, but whether it can be contained. And when instability governs decision-making, containment itself becomes uncertain.

 

 

From Oil to Currency: The War Beneath the War

At its core, this war is not about oil, but about the survival of the dollar as the organising principle of the global economic order. The control of the Strait of Hormuz is not simply about the movement of oil. It is about the terms under which that movement is conducted. For decades, the dominance of the dollar in energy transactions has functioned as a central mechanism of American power, enabling the United States to externalise costs, enforce sanctions and maintain structural advantages within the international system (Eichengreen, 2011).

 

The disruption of the Strait introduces the possibility of a rupture within this system. If Iran, leveraging its position, were to condition passage on transactions denominated in alternative currencies, particularly the Chinese yuan, the implications would be transformative. States dependent upon energy flows through the Strait would face a choice: comply with new conditions or risk exclusion. Over time, such compliance would normalise non-dollar transactions, eroding the centrality of the dollar not through direct confrontation, but through gradual displacement.

 

This process would not be uniform. It would be uneven, contested and subject to resistance. Yet it would not require universal adoption to be effective. Even partial shifts in currency usage within critical sectors can produce disproportionate effects within the global financial system. The strength of the dollar lies not only in its use, but in the assumption of its indispensability. Once that assumption is weakened, the system it underpins becomes vulnerable to reconfiguration (Strange, 1996).

 

China’s role within this emerging dynamic is neither incidental nor secondary. As the world’s largest energy importer and a state actively pursuing the internationalisation of its currency, China possesses both the incentive and the capacity to engage with alternative transactional frameworks. The alignment between Iranian chokepoint control and Chinese monetary ambition does not require formal alliance. It emerges from converging interests within a system under strain.

 

For the United States, this represents a challenge of a different order. Military superiority offers no direct mechanism through which to prevent the gradual erosion of monetary dominance. Sanctions, long used as an instrument of coercion, become less effective as alternative channels of transaction develop. The very tools that once reinforced American power begin to lose their efficacy, not through defeat in confrontation, but through obsolescence within a changing system.

 

This is the deeper layer of the current conflict. Beneath the visible exchanges of force lies a struggle over the structure of the international order itself. The war in the Persian Gulf is not an isolated event. It is a node within a broader process of transition, in which established hierarchies are contested and new configurations of power begin to emerge.

 

The tragedy, from the perspective of American strategy, is that this transition is being accelerated by the very actions intended to prevent it. By initiating a war it cannot decisively win, and by allowing that war to shift onto terrain where its advantages are diminished, the United States has created the conditions under which its own systemic position is placed at risk.

 

There is no resolution within the existing framework. Withdrawal concedes. Escalation destroys. Drift corrodes. The confrontation over currency, once peripheral, now moves to the centre, where it intersects with the control of energy flows and the stability of the global economy.

 

The war, in other words, has already exceeded its initial objectives. It is no longer about Iran alone. It is about whether the structures that have defined international power for decades can survive the pressures now being applied to them.

 

 

Regional Security Illusions: The Montreux Analogy and the Impossibility of Stabilisation

At the point where military options narrow and economic confrontation intensifies, the discourse of ‘solution’ inevitably re-emerges in the form of institutional design. It is here that the language of collective security, regional frameworks and stabilising treaties is reintroduced, not as an extension of strategic success, but as a compensatory gesture in the aftermath of failure. The proposal to restructure security in the Persian Gulf through a framework analogous to the Montreux Convention of 1936 belongs precisely to this category. It presents itself as pragmatic, historical and grounded in precedent. In reality, it is structurally inapplicable and politically untenable.

 

The Montreux Convention granted Turkey sovereign control over the Turkish Straits under a defined legal regime that balanced national authority with international guarantees (Howard, 2014). It is frequently invoked as an example of how contested waterways can be stabilised through treaty-based arrangements. Yet the conditions that made Montreux viable are absent in the Persian Gulf. To transpose it uncritically onto the Strait of Hormuz is not analysis. It is analogy elevated above reality.

 

Montreux functioned within a specific geopolitical context. It emerged from a European state system in which the principal actors, despite rivalry, recognised a shared interest in preventing escalation within a confined maritime space. The convention was not imposed upon a region characterised by asymmetrical dependencies and external military presence on the scale observed in the Persian Gulf. Nor did it attempt to reconcile fundamentally incompatible strategic objectives between actors whose security is defined in zero-sum terms.

 

The Persian Gulf presents the opposite configuration. It is not a region in which local actors possess autonomous security agency. It is a space saturated by external power projection, where the presence of United States military bases, the alignment of Arab regimes with Western strategic priorities and the ongoing confrontation with Iran produce a structure in which ‘regional security’ is less a reality than a rhetorical device. To propose a collective security arrangement under these conditions is to ignore the fact that the region is already embedded within a hierarchy of external control (Buzan and Wæver, 2003).

 

The proposal itself rests upon three core components: the establishment of a collective security framework among the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, the withdrawal of all non-regional military forces and the inclusion of regional powers as supervisory actors to guarantee compliance. Each component collapses under scrutiny.

 

The notion of a collective security arrangement presupposes a minimal level of trust and shared interest among participating states. No such foundation exists. The Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf are not neutral actors seeking equilibrium; they are structurally integrated into the security architecture of the United States and, by extension, aligned with Israeli strategic objectives. Their regimes depend upon external guarantees for survival. To expect them to enter into a security arrangement that dilutes this dependency is to misread the basis of their political existence.

 

The withdrawal of non-regional forces, while rhetorically appealing, is equally implausible. The United States does not maintain its military presence in the Persian Gulf as a matter of optional policy. It does so because that presence underwrites its capacity to project power, secure energy flows and maintain alliance structures that extend beyond the region itself. To withdraw would not simply alter the balance of power in the Persian Gulf; it would signal a contraction of American influence with global implications. Such a decision cannot be contained within a regional framework. It would reverberate across the entire architecture of American grand strategy (Posen, 2014).

 

The inclusion of regional supervisory powers introduces a further contradiction. Iran, as the dominant littoral state with demonstrated capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz, would be expected to accept a framework that constrains its leverage in favour of a nominally balanced arrangement. There is no strategic incentive for Tehran to do so. Having endured sustained military pressure and emerged with enhanced coercive capacity, Iran is positioned to convert that capacity into durable advantage. To relinquish it voluntarily in exchange for a treaty that offers no enforceable guarantees would be irrational.

 

What is presented, therefore, as a pathway to stabilisation is in fact a projection of order onto a structure defined by conflict. The language of collective security obscures the underlying reality that the Persian Gulf is not a system seeking equilibrium, but a theatre in which power is contested without resolution. Treaties in such contexts do not eliminate conflict. They suspend it temporarily, often in ways that preserve the conditions for its return.

 

Historical precedent supports this conclusion. The interwar period between the First and Second World Wars was characterised by a proliferation of agreements intended to prevent renewed conflict. These agreements did not fail because they were poorly designed, but because they were imposed upon a distribution of power that remained fundamentally unstable. They functioned as pauses, not solutions. The same logic applies here. Any arrangement that emerges from the current conflict would operate within a structure that continues to generate confrontation.

 

This is not a failure of diplomacy as such. It is a reflection of its limits. Diplomacy can formalise relations, codify expectations and provide mechanisms for communication. It cannot substitute for the underlying distribution of power. Where that distribution remains contested, diplomacy becomes an instrument through which temporary accommodations are reached, rather than a means of securing lasting peace.

 

The Persian Gulf, under present conditions, is characterised by a continuous state of latent war punctuated by episodic escalation. The conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran is not an anomaly within this system. It is its most explicit expression. To propose a stable security architecture in such an environment is to disregard the structural forces that reproduce instability.

 

The likely outcome is therefore not the establishment of a durable framework, but the emergence of cyclical conflict. Short wars, limited engagements and periodic escalations will recur at irregular intervals, each time reactivating the same dynamics without resolving them. Ceasefires will be interpreted as victories by all parties, yet none will alter the underlying balance. The region will oscillate between confrontation and temporary calm, without transitioning to a stable equilibrium.

 

For Iran, the strategic objective is neither abstract nor expansive. It is to repel external attack, terminate the cycle of imposed war, and, in the process, displace the United States from the security architecture of the Persian Gulf. This objective is not mirrored by its adversaries. In Washington, the calculus remains shaped by the search for rapid, demonstrable victory, framed in the mould of prior interventions that promised decisiveness yet yielded only partial and reversible outcomes. Such expectations are structurally misaligned with the realities of confrontation with Iran. The likely trajectory is not resolution, but eventual disengagement, whether reframed as strategic success or imposed by the cumulative costs of protracted conflict.

 

The greater strategic coherence lies not in Washington, but in Tel Aviv. The Israeli position cannot be reduced to the language of regime change, particularly where the hypothetical emergence of a democratic Iranian state would introduce the possibility of strategic recalibration. The problem, from this perspective, is not the regime in isolation, but Iran as a geopolitical entity capable of constraining Israeli regional projection. The operative objective is therefore the fragmentation of Iran as a state form: the induction of internal conflict, the erosion of territorial cohesion, and the production of a condition of durable weakness. Within such a framework, the persistence of the existing regime is not an obstacle, but an instrument.

 

This strategy operates across temporal registers. In the short to medium term, it is oriented towards securing full control over critical maritime and energy infrastructures, most notably the Strait of Hormuz, through which a substantial proportion of global energy flows transit. In a scenario defined by the erosion of Iran’s territorial cohesion, such a strategy would extend to the reconfiguration of control over key insular nodes in the Persian Gulf. This includes not only the three islands contested by the United Arab Emirates, but also strategically significant positions such as Qeshm and its surrounding islands, including Hengam, Hormuz, Larak and Siri, whose geographic proximity to the Strait confers disproportionate operational value (Suren-Pahlav, 2021). The feasibility of such an expansion would rest not solely on military capability, but on the convergence of regional financial capital and external strategic sponsorship. Within this strategic horizon, initiatives such as the proposed ‘Cyrus Accord’, framed as a continuation of the Abraham Accords, should be read less as diplomatic innovation than as anticipatory architecture for a post-cohesive Iran, in which integration is conditioned upon strategic subordination rather than mutual recognition (Suren-Pahlav, 2021).

 

In the longer term, it aligns with a broader ambition to consolidate control over interconnected trade corridors linking the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, thereby reconfiguring the material basis of regional and, potentially, global trade. Control over such nodes extends beyond hydrocarbons to encompass strategic resources integral to advanced industrial and technological systems. The cumulative effect would be a transformation of Israel from a regionally constrained power into an autonomous strategic actor with reduced dependence on external patronage, at a moment when the durability of American primacy is increasingly subject to question (Suren-Pahlav, 2020). The current obstacle in relation to the consolidation of control over the Red Sea corridor, remains Saudi Arabia, whose intervention has thus far constrained further expansion. This constraint, however, should be understood as a setback rather than a structural limit. Concurrently, the projection of Turkey as the prospective locus of future confrontation functions less as a definitive strategic orientation than as a form of discursive diversion, displacing attention from the more immediate significance of Saudi Arabia within this configuration. In a scenario in which Iran is neutralised or fragmented, the strategic logic would not terminate, but reorient. Saudi Arabia, by virtue of its geographic position, resource base and role within regional energy and trade networks, would assume heightened centrality. The production of instability within its territorial framework would replicate, under altered conditions, the strategic advantages sought in the Iranian case, namely the weakening of a coherent state actor capable of obstructing the consolidation of regional corridors.

 

Under these conditions, where adversarial objectives extend beyond containment to the fragmentation and strategic neutralisation of the Iran as a unified state, deterrence ceases to be an abstract principle of security and becomes the only viable mechanism of preservation, with all that this entails at the highest levels of strategic capability.

 

Therefore, within this cycle, the role of power becomes decisive. Stability, to the extent that it exists, is not produced by agreement, but by deterrence. It is maintained not through mutual trust, but through the credible threat of unacceptable cost. This is the logic that underpins the most durable instances of strategic restraint in the modern international system (Jervis, 1989). The implication is stark. If the objective is not merely to pause conflict, but to prevent its recurrence, then the capacity to impose deterrence at a level that dissuades adversaries from initiating hostilities becomes central. In the absence of such capacity, all institutional arrangements remain provisional, contingent and ultimately reversible. The Montreux analogy, when stripped of its rhetorical appeal, thus reveals itself as a conceptual diversion. It offers the appearance of solution without addressing the conditions that produce the problem. It substitutes historical reference for strategic analysis, and in doing so, obscures the reality that the Persian Gulf cannot be stabilised through institutional design alone. What remains, once these illusions are removed, is a system in which power, rather than agreement, determines outcome. The question is no longer how to construct a framework that prevents conflict, but how to create a configuration of power that renders conflict prohibitively costly.

 

The implications for Iran are unambiguous. Without the capacity to impose costs at a level that deters external intervention, it remains exposed to a cycle of repeated assault, each iteration justified through shifting narratives and manufactured pretexts. With such capacity, the terms of engagement are altered. Not eliminated, but constrained. Deterrence does not produce peace. It imposes limits.

 

Within this framework, the acquisition of nuclear deterrence emerges not as an ideological aspiration, but as a strategic necessity (Suren-Pahlav, 2025d). It is the only mechanism through which Iran can secure itself against systemic assault, preserve its territorial integrity and enforce control over critical assets, including the Strait of Hormuz. Without it, control remains contingent. With it, control becomes credible.

 

This does not resolve the internal contradictions of the Islamic regime. It does not correct the structural deficiencies of governance, the suppression of political reform or the economic distortions that continue to shape Iranian society. These remain real, and they remain unresolved. Yet they exist within a hierarchy of threats that cannot be ignored. External aggression, directed not merely at the regime but at the state itself, collapses the distinction upon which internal transformation depends. It subordinates reform to survival and, in doing so, entrenches the very system it claims to confront.

 

 

Conclusion

The war that began with the premise of decisive force does not move towards resolution. It moves towards termination under compulsion. The United States cannot sustain it any longer. The economic pressures already generated, the instability in energy markets and the exposure of systemic vulnerabilities have reduced its options to a single outcome: exit, and soon. Not in months, but in weeks. Any extension, any attempt at escalation, risks crossing thresholds beyond which the damage to the global economy becomes irreversible. What will follow will not be declared as defeat. It will be staged as de-escalation, framed as strategic recalibration and presented as responsible leadership in the face of global risk. This language will obscure the reality. The war will end because continuation is no longer structurally possible. The costs have exceeded the capacity to absorb them. The system that enabled the war now demands its termination.

 

This is not a negotiated success. It is a compelled retreat. Both the United States and Israel identified an opportunity in Iran’s internal political upheaval, hijacked and diverted to serve their interests, and used it to instigate a war designed to impose a predetermined outcome upon Iran (Suren-Pahlav, 2026d). For Washington, the objective was unmistakably neo-colonial: to subordinate the state, secure control over its strategic resources and reassert the right to extract and dictate at will. For Israel, the aim was more destructive still: to break Iran as a coherent state, to drive it towards fragmentation, internal collapse and eventual balkanisation. They now exit having failed in both. What has been exposed is not a miscalculation, but a limit. The belief that overwhelming military superiority could be converted into political submission has collapsed. Iran did not conform to the model upon which the war was designed. It did not disintegrate under pressure. It absorbed, endured and retaliated. The doctrine of rapid dominance has not simply failed in execution. It has been stripped of credibility.

 

The Strait of Hormuz stands as the decisive point in this transformation. It has converted an unwinnable military campaign into an economic confrontation that cannot be contained. Control over this chokepoint has revealed the true centre of gravity: not territory, but flow; not occupation, but the capacity to regulate circulation at scale. In this shift, the structure of power itself is exposed as vulnerable.

 

The consequences are immediate. Energy markets destabilise. European economies, already fragile, absorb pressure they are not equipped to withstand. The United States, despite its insulation, cannot isolate itself from the shock it has helped generate. The continuation of the war under these conditions is not strategy. It is systemic risk.

 

Escalation remains formally available, but in material terms it is already impossible. To pursue it is to trigger a chain of events that would collapse the very economic order the United States depends upon. Withdrawal, therefore, is not one option among others. It is the only remaining path that does not produce immediate systemic rupture. That is why the war will end, and why it will end quickly. Yet termination does not restore coherence. It exposes its absence. The conflict has demonstrated that the integration of military, economic and monetary power, long assumed to guarantee control, no longer functions under conditions of resistance, interdependence and structural strain. What has been revealed is not a temporary imbalance, but a shift in the conditions under which power operates.

 

What has not yet been fully accounted for, however, is the possibility that this termination is not reached through American decision alone, but imposed through external coercion. The analysis thus far has treated withdrawal as compulsion generated by systemic pressure. Yet that pressure need not remain passive. It can be activated.

 

Iran is under no obligation to accept a managed end to the war that preserves the conditions of its own attrition. If confronted with a staged de-escalation designed to stabilise markets while enabling future escalation, It retains the capacity to rupture that logic. Not through immediate destruction, but through the calibrated threat of it.

 

The introduction of a deadline, explicitly tied to the cessation of hostilities and backed by credible escalation across critical economic infrastructure, would transform the strategic environment. The risk would no longer be contained within the theatre of war. It would be transferred directly into the global system. Energy flows, regional production facilities and the wider architecture of economic interdependence would become conditional, not assumed. Under such conditions, the calculus collapses. Termination is no longer a matter of strategic choice. It becomes a forced outcome. The United States would not be managing the end of the war. It would be compelled to accept it under the threat of systemic disruption that it cannot absorb and cannot rapidly counter. This does not introduce stability. It removes the possibility of controlled continuation. It forces closure.

 

This is where the deeper consequence becomes unavoidable. The war has accelerated processes already underway: the questioning of dollar centrality, the search for alternative transactional systems and the gradual erosion of mechanisms through which the United States has historically exercised coercion without direct confrontation. These shifts are not the product of a single conflict, but this conflict has intensified them.

 

For Iran, the implications remain as previously established. Without decisive deterrent capability, it remains exposed to repetition. With it, the terms of engagement change. This is not a resolution. It is a reconfiguration of risk.

 

For the international system, the conclusion is more severe. There is no return to the previous equilibrium. The conditions that allowed for controlled intervention and predictable outcomes have eroded. What replaces them is less stable, more contested and less susceptible to unilateral control.

 

The war will end. It will end because it must. But its conclusion will not mark closure. It will mark transition. What has been exposed at the Strait of Hormuz is not simply the failure of a campaign, but the limits of a system. The belief that power can be projected without consequence, that escalation can be controlled and that economic structures remain insulated from military decisions has been dismantled. The question is no longer whether this war can be brought to an end. It is whether the order that produced it can survive what it has revealed. Even within this broader systemic crisis, one outcome is already determined. There will be a loser, and it will not be confined to states.

 

The Iranian nation will bear the cost. Not as an abstract victim of geopolitics, but as the direct consequence of external aggression compounded by diasporic betrayal (Suren-Pahlav, 2025e). Sections of the Iranian diaspora, driven in part by political naivety and susceptibility to manipulation, and in part operating as instruments of foreign interests, have actively contributed to the conditions under which this war was made possible under the cover of ‘liberation’. The organic uprising of December 2025 – January 2026 was not merely suppressed. It was hijacked, redirected into confrontation and transformed into bloodshed through the injection of external agendas that displaced its internal logic (Suren-Pahlav, 2026d). What might have remained a domestic struggle for political change was recast into a theatre of escalation. Within this configuration, the circle surrounding Reza Pahlavi has played a particularly consequential role (Suren-Pahlav, 2025e; 2025f). By legitimising confrontation and promoting the illusion that ‘external intervention’ could produce national liberation, it has functioned not as a force of emancipation, but as a vector through which the conditions for war were normalised (Suren-Pahlav, 2016; 2025g; 2025h; 2025i).

 

The result will not be liberation. It will be consolidation. The Islamic regime, having survived external assault, will not emerge weakened in its internal posture, but hardened. More radical, more suspicious and more repressive. War will not open space for reform. It will close it. What was already a system of constraint will intensify into one of control. The logic is familiar: under conditions of perceived existential threat, the state does not liberalise. It securitises. It expands its mechanisms of surveillance, repression and internal discipline, recasting dissent as collaboration and opposition as betrayal.

 

In this sense, the deepest tragedy of the war is not strategic, but societal. A country that contained the possibility, however limited, of internal transformation will be driven further into closure. The cost will not be borne by those who advocated intervention from a distance. It will be imposed, entirely and without recourse, within Iran itself.

 

 

References

• Biddle, S. (2004) Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• Buzan, B. and Wæver, O. (2003) Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Cordesman, A.H. (2020) ‘The Military Balance in the [Persian] Gulf’, Center for Strategic and International Studies.

• Eichengreen, B. (2011) Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Freedman, L. (2013) Strategy: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Howard, H. (2014) ‘The Montreux Convention and the Turkish Straits’, Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce, 45(2), pp. 199–220.

• Jervis, R. (1989) The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

• Kaplan, R.D. (2010) Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. New York: Random House.

• Mearsheimer, J.J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W.W. Norton.

• OECD (2024) Society at a Glance 2024. Paris: OECD Publishing.

• O’Sullivan, M.L. (2013) Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power. New York: Simon & Schuster.

• Posen, B.R. (2014) Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

• Shaw, J. (2025) ‘Major General Jonathan Shaw interview with LBC’, LBC, video clip, available at: Watch clip  [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Stewart, P., Ali, I., Banco, E. and Slattery, G. (2026). Exclusive: US weighs military reinforcements as Iran war enters possible new phase. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-weighs-military-reinforcements-iran-war-enters-possible-new-phase-2026-03-18/ [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Strange, S. (1996) The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2015) ‘The Imperative Lessons Britain Must Draw from the Charlie Hebdo Tragedy’, suren-pahlav.com (10 January). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-imperative-lessons-britain-must-draw-from-the-charlie-hebdo-tragedy.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2016) ‘The ‘External Liberation’ Narrative As Information Strategy: The Normalisation Of War And The Hollowing Of Sovereignty’, suren-pahlav.com (26 December). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/external-liberation-narrative-as-information-strategy-the-normalisation-of-war.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2017) ‘Islamic Centre of England: The Spectrum of Propagation and Terrorism by the Islamic Regime in the UK’, suren-pahlav.com (5 June). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/islamic-centre-of-england-the-spectrum-of-propagation---terrorism-by-the-islamic-regime-in-the-uk.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2018) ‘Bernard Lewis Dies At 101, But His Cartographies Endure: Zionism, Eurocentrism, And The Engineered Balkanisation Of Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (2 May). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/bernard-lewis-dies-at-101.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2020) ‘Israel’s Strategic Doctrine and the Somalisation of Iran: Erosion of National Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity', suren-pahlav.com (5 September). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/somalisation-plan-for-iran-the-erosion-of-iran-s-national-sovereignty-and-territorial-integrity.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2021) ‘The Cyrus Accord as Myth and Strategy: Fabricated Antiquity, Foreign Power, and Iran’s Sovereignty’, suren-pahlav.com (02 February). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-cyrus-accord-as-myth-and-strategy-fabricated-antiquity-foreign-power-and-iran-s-sovereignty.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2024) ‘Know Thyself, Know Thy Enemy: “Misinformation,” My Ally & the Enemy of My Enemy’, suren-pahlav.com (26 March). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/know-thyself-know-thy-enemy-misinformation-my-ally-and-the-enemy-of-my-enemy.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025a) ‘The Garrison State Gambit: Why Betting on Israel Imperils Iran’s Liberation’, suren-pahlav.com (18 July). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-garrison-state-gambit-why-betting-on-israel-imperils-iran-s-liberation.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025b) ‘Once Again, “Deception as Diplomacy”: The “Total Victory” Path to Iran’s Annihilation’, suren-pahlav.com (7 July). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/once-again-deception-as-diplomacy-the-total-victory-path-to-iran-s-annihilation.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025c) 'Deception As Diplomacy': Don’t Be Fooled–War With Iran Is Imminent’, suren-pahlav.com (12 June). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/deception-as-diplomacy-do-not-be-fooled-war-with-iran-is-imminent.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025d) ‘The Final Countdown: Why Iran Must Obtain a Nuclear Deterrent’, suren-pahlav.com (21 November). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/final-countdown-why-iran-must-obtain-a-nuclear-deterrent.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025e) ‘Constructed Traitors: NUFDI and the Crisis of Trust,’ suren-pahlav.com (30 September). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/constructed-traitors-nufdi-and-the-crisis-of-trust.html [Accessed ].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025f) ‘From The Belly Of Hezbollah To The Mouth Of Yahwollah: Nufdi, Israel, and the Political Instrumentalisation of Iran's Water Crisis’, suren-pahlav.com (14 November). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/from-the-belly-of-hezbollah-to-the-mouth-of-yahwollah.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025g) ‘Simulated Consensus: Digital Policing and the Crisis of Dissent in Iran’s Exilic Opposition,’ suren-pahlav.com (18 September). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/simulated-consensus-digital-policing-and-the-crisis.html [Accessed ].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025h) ‘The Illusion of Change: Exposing A ‘Charter Of Deception’ By The Islamic Regime–Aligned Reformist Faction’, suren-pahlav.com (4 August). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/nufdi-rehearses-the-islamic-regime-s-second-republic.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2025i) ‘Weaponised Optimism and the Strategy of Perception Management: How the Claim of ‘50,000 Defectors’ Undermines Uprisings and Serves Foreign Destabilisation Agendas in Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (31 July). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/iranian-opposition-weaponised-optimism-and-the-strategy-of-perception-management.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2026a) ‘The “Beautiful Armada”: Perso-Sino Trap and the End of U.S. Hegemony, or the Somalisation of Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (28 January). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/beautiful-armada-and-the-perso-sino-trap-the-strategic-unravelling-of-american-hegemony.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2026b) ‘The “Coercive Persistence Dynamic”: Why the War on Iran Defies Western Strategic Assumptions’, suren-pahlav.com (5 March). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-coercive-persistence-dynamic-why-the-war-on-iran-defies-western-strategic-assumptions.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2026c) ‘When the Mask is Off: The United States, War, Terrorism and Genocide Without Its Alibi’, suren-pahlav.com (19 March). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/when-the-mask-is-off-the-united-states-war-terrorism-and-genocide-without-its-alibi.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2026d) ‘Hijacked Revolution, Stolen Hopes: Proxy Dissents, Israel’s Blood Trails on Iran’s Streets, and the R2P Trap’, suren-pahlav.com (22 January). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/hijacked-revolution-stolen-hopes-proxy-dissents-israel-mek-r2p-trap.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].

• Ullman, H.K. and Wade, J.P. (1996) Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. Washington, DC: National Defense University.

• United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2024) World Population Prospects 2024. New York: United Nations.

• World Bank (2024) Fertility rate, total (births per woman) – Iran. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=IR/ Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/external-liberation-narrative-as-information-strategy-the-normalisation-of-war.html [Accessed: 21 March 2026].