This new state, forged in the crucible of conflict with two nuclear powers, pursues a militarized sovereignty that renders it simultaneously insular and strategically aggressive. Paradoxically, however, this emerging Iran presents President Trump with a workable chance to exit the Middle East to focus on rebalancing the US-China relationship, promoting domestic industrial renewal, and securing the Western Hemisphere — priorities laid out in Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy.

Khamenei’s most notable move is the elevation of Mohsen Rezaei as secretary of the country’s Supreme National Security Council, which coordinates decision-making across the state’s various security and military agencies. Rezaei is a close adviser to Khamenei, and is the longest- serving commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, having overseen Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s. The council was most recently headed by Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr after an Israeli air strike killed its high-profile secretary Ali Larijani in March. 

While Zolghadr has taken on a new role as Khamenei’s political adviser, his removal is a blow to the pragmatic-conservative bloc that has coalesced around the speaker of the Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, since Larijani’s assassination. Qalibaf, of course, has been Vice President JD Vance’s chief interlocutor in the stalled effort to bring the war to a negotiated settlement. Zolghadr’s replacement by the hard-line Rezaei is a telling indicator of the new supreme leader’s views on how the US-Iran talks were handled.

The previous arrangement — which empowered Qalibaf and Zolghadr — had effectively sidelined Khamenei from direct oversight over Iran’s deep state: his passive role repeatedly became a source of controversy in the negotiations. Khamenei’s hiding (due to fear of assassination) didn’t help the situation. In appointing Rezaei to lead the security council, Khamenei is now seeking to regain control and diminish what he likely sees as Qalibaf’s excessive influence in the system.

The Rezaei appointment is coupled with a run of high-level appointments in the Iranian military. These include Maj. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi as commander in chief of the IRGC and Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi as chief of staff of the armed forces. Both men are IRGC commanders who played leading roles in the Iran-Iraq War. 

Not all of the appointments are anti-Qalibaf. Having led Iran’s primary operational command in the current war, Abdollahi is a close ally of Qalibaf’s, having served as his deputy in multiple positions. Vahidi, meanwhile, is Rezaei’s protégé going back to the ’80s. Seen in tandem, the appointments represent a careful balancing act aimed at preempting potential internal power struggles and stamping the new supreme leader’s authority on the security state as a whole. 

At the same time, the appointments underscore Khamenei Jr.’s tightening grip on power and Tehran’s hardening — if audacious — strategic trajectory.

At first glance, the appointment of “security-first” veterans ensures that while the state’s military and logistics are run with efficiency, its overarching direction remains uncompromising. The Islamic Republic’s leadership views the conflict with Washington through an existential lens. This perspective turns the state’s red lines into rigid, non-negotiable realities for the nation as such. After all, when survival is at stake, any regime’s internal fractures yield to a unified front, as dictated by necessity and shared strategic priorities.

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Yet, this defensive consolidation and rallying around the flag in the face of war doesn’t mean that internal politics have gone away. Nor does it imply that long-term institutional and ideological rivalries have ceased. Rather, beneath the surface of wartime unity, Iran’s deep state remains locked in a fierce, quiet civil war between two competing factions — not over the Islamic Republic’s desired end state, but over how to get there. The resolution of this internal struggle, combined with Mojtaba Khamenei’s evolving leadership strategy, could also determine the fate of the Middle East.

The internal schism splits Iran’s security establishment between those who advocate for a technocratic Islamic Republic with normal ties with the rest of the world; and those who believe the only way to safeguard Iran’s sovereignty and national security is by turning the country into an autarkic fortress capable of fierce power projection in its near abroad.

The first faction is composed of technocratic-military elites and conservative clerics. Qalibaf is their most visible representative. But there are many others, including the cleric Ali Asghar Hejazi, the network’s main powerbroker, who served as an intelligence consigliere to Khamenei Sr., and who remains the deputy chief of staff at the Office of the Supreme Leader. This camp views the state through the lens of (Islamic) legitimacy and bureaucratic rationality. Having witnessed the devastating economic and physical toll of protracted conflict, its members advocate a “smart authoritarianism” — a model akin to Putinist Russia or post-Mao China. For them, Iran’s military and nuclear leverage aren’t holy relics, but strategic bargaining chips to be traded for sanctions relief, economic stabilization, and regime survival.

Opposing them is the regime’s old-guard intelligence and military network, spearheaded by Rezaei, Vahidi, and former IRGC chief Yahya Rahim-Safavi. The faction’s most critical internal enforcer is the ruthless shadow operator Hossein Taeb, Mojtaba Khamenei’s confidant and the former chief of the IRGC Intelligence Organization, now appointed to head the Basij paramilitia that operates as an auxiliary branch of the IRGC. This faction is unyielding about defending what it regards as the true principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and subscribes to a doctrine of permanent mobilization and attritional warfare. Members view any diplomatic overture or concession on the nuclear dossier not as statesmanship, but as an existential trap designed by Washington to trigger systemic collapse. To them, the Strait of Hormuz and the country’s uranium stockpiles are vital instruments of deterrence, never to be bargained away.

When Mojtaba Khamenei assumed power following the death of his father, many anticipated an immediate purge of the establishment. Instead, Khamenei bided his time in the shadows and honored his father’s appointees, exercising a remarkable degree of strategic patience. Most notably, he chose to retain Ali Asghar Hejazi at the apex of the security apparatus, despite reports that Hejazi had actively sidelined Mojtaba in the final years of the elder Khamenei’s life and had lobbied against a hereditary succession.

This decision was not born out of affection, but systemic necessity. The new leader understood that in a period of intense external threat and internal transition, sacrificing his own personal agency and desire for vengeance was the price of preserving state stability. He needed Hejazi’s institutional memory and control over the vast web of state bureaucracy to prevent systemic paralysis during an existential war. 

The upshot is that, despite the monumental shift in leadership brought about by the US-Israeli assassination of Mojtaba Khamenei’s father, up until now, little has changed in Tehran since the war politically or structurally. The regime’s characteristic dual-track approach remains intact: Tehran brandishes its sword (Vahidi and the IRGC drone and missile attacks), even as it shows a diplomatic face to the world in the form of Qalibaf’s Cheshire Cat grin.

But the continuity wasn’t destined to last. As Mojtaba Khamenei consolidates his power, he is systematically building a parallel architecture to dictate his own distinct authority and vision — one that marks a sharp departure from his father’s era and its strategic ambiguity. The reshuffling of the SNSC to install Rezaei is a signal to the technocrats: the regime has entered a state of permanent warfare.

Put another way: the Western fantasy of a sudden internal collapse has failed. External aggression has instead hardened the state, expanding its domestic control and revitalizing its elite cohesion — a case study in the remarkable resilience of regimes that fully embrace the structures of the modern total state. Unlike the ideological rigidity of civilian hard-liners like Saeed Jalili, Mojtaba Khamenei’s rising faction is deeply pragmatic and militaristic about state survival. Yet, this is a pragmatism entirely divorced from Western integration or liberal norms, using autarky not as a temporary shield, but a structural choice (as long advocated by Rezaei himself).

Where Qalibaf’s technocrats seek survival through a win-win diplomatic deal or a grand bargain with Washington, Mojtaba Khamenei’s camp — bolstered by Rezaei’s uncompromising stance on Iran’s absolute sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz — seeks to translate raw military defiance and the ethos of resistance into permanent strategic gains. The latter group views Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities as critical levers to achieve the maximum deterrence needed to avoid the historical fates of disarmed states like Libya.

With the security-first crowd at the helm, the future of Iran is, in short, an autarkic, anti-American fortress that refuses to surrender its security assets or exchange its sovereignty for Western promises or economic incentives. 

The autarkists are convinced that Donald Trump is constitutionally erratic, aggressive, and untrustworthy; and that the only language his administration understands is that of strength. Consequently, they believe that the only way to free Iran from the looming shadow of war is if Washington comes to recognize and accept its defeat and is publicly humiliated — underscoring the futility of future military action. It’s a risky strategy, to be sure, but one they feel is the only solution to re-establish Iranian deterrence given Trump’s particular psychology.

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Paradoxically, this intensely inward-looking and sovereigntist Iran presents Trump with a realistic opening to fundamentally redraw the Middle Eastern landscape. A true realist foreign policy framework must reject the failed dogmas of regime change and endless “forever wars.” Instead, it must embrace a ruthless pragmatism centered on America’s core national interest alone: avoiding protracted entanglements in a region that is of secondary importance (at best). Realism doesn’t require trust; it requires predictable, self-interested state actors; and an insular, survival-focused Iran is far more predictable than a desperate, collapsing state driving a regional civil war.

By abandoning its penchant for primacy and military intervention in the Middle East, Washington can shrewdly leverage Iran’s consolidated, predictable power structure to enable the region’s (long-disrupted) natural balance of power to return. The emerging regional alignment — reinforced by the landmark Mecca defense pact that Egypt and Iran can eventually join — has already underscored the rise of the ME5 (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran) in a post-American Middle East. 

These five sovereign regional heavyweights are increasingly demonstrating a desire to manage their own neighborhood, explicitly rejecting being dragged into an unwanted regional war or serving as platforms for unilateral American military adventures, as seen in the Persian Gulf states’ recent resistance to assisting US naval blockades. In fact, a major motivating factor behind Riyadh’s and Tehran’s détente since 2023 remains their shared, pragmatic exhaustion with being used as proxies in strategic rivalries of external great powers. This is why the Saudi-Iranian reset has survived nearly six months of regional war — even military strikes on Saudi ports in the Red Sea by the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen.

But such a strategic reset can’t be brought about unless Trump alters his perception of Iran. He must give up the pipe dream of liberalizing the Islamic Republic, and end America’s decades-long pursuit of a “grand bargain” aimed at transforming Iran’s domestic society. Instead, Trump must heed his own vice president’s counsel, abandon containment strategies that prioritize the interests of foreign states like Israel and the United Arab Emirates over the American people, and swap Cold War-era Manichean mentalities for a transactional recognition of a bounded Iranian sphere of interest in a polycentric world. 

Unlike Nixon’s opening to China, shifting Iran policy wouldn’t hinge on a formal deal or bilateral treaty between Washington and Tehran. By merely accepting Iran as an enduring regional power that will neither relinquish its sovereignty nor tolerate foreign meddling, Trump has a unique Nixonian opportunity to withdraw from the Middle East and offload regional security onto the ME5 themselves. 

This nascent regional equilibrium, sustained by a balance of indigenous powers, rather than an expensive and deeply resented American military umbrella, would finally provide Washington with the strategic off-ramp it has sought for a generation — freeing the United States to retrench, preserve its great-power status, and focus on its most vital priorities at home and abroad.

An inconclusive failure, then.

Yet instead of asking why America’s war in Iran has been a failure, the better question is: why would anyone expect any major American war, anywhere in the world, to be a success? Far from being an isolated instance that can be blamed on Trump’s incompetence, this war is only the latest in a series of American expeditions that drag on for years, only to backfire and empower US enemies. From Korea to Iran, the story of American military policy since World War II has been one blunder after another, in which tactical achievements are followed by strategic defeat.

It is popular to blame the American president’s bad decisions or personal traits for such fiascos, but the history of major American strategic failures since 1945 can’t be explained solely or even primarily based on the performance of leaders from Truman to Trump. The underlying cause of America’s strategic tragedy — its chain of short-term tactical successes followed by strategic failures — is what experts describe as the American Way of War — a failing style that future American leaders must seek to reform. 

Like President Barack Obama before him, Trump was elected in part because he was viewed as an alternative to the hawks who brought about the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq. And just as Obama proceeded to launch new American military campaigns in Libya and Syria, so Trump in his second term has brought about the war in Iran, with immediate consequences for the global economy, caused by rising prices for oil, that are far more consequential than were the global consequences of the Korean, Vietnam, and Afghan wars in the eras in which they were fought.

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But the pattern isn’t all that different from those earlier adventures. The Korean War, which caught the United States by surprise, began with Communist North Korea’s invasion of the Western-aligned South on June 25, 1950, influenced by an American blunder: Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s exclusion of South Korea from America’s defense perimeter in Asia, in an unwise speech on Jan. 12, 1950. 

Stalin was quick to take advantage of the invasion, urging Mao’s Communist regime, which had seized power in China a year earlier, to enter the war. The result was a bloody stalemate that Stalin, the sponsor and supplier of North Korea and China, kept going in order to drain American resources. At the same time, Stalin orchestrated the parallel war of Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists against American-backed France in Indochina. Only after Stalin died, on March 3, 1953, did his successors in Moscow negotiate the partition of Korea and Vietnam with the United States and its allies in 1954. At the cost of more than 36,000 American fatalities and more than a million Korean lives, Washington was only able to restore the former division between the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.  

The tense, armed truce in Korea has persisted to this day. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Communist regime and its South Vietnamese insurgent allies, backed by the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, fought to establish a united Vietnam and succeeded in 1975, after a failed Americanization of the conflict that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans dead, as well as those of some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese, plus more in Cambodia and Laos. The great-power victor of the Vietnam War was the Soviet Union, which for the remainder of the Cold War turned Vietnam into its largest military base outside of Eastern Europe. 

The all-out invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States, following the earlier, limited Gulf War of 1991, similarly resulted in an “own goal” for Washington. Undertaken along with the war in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of 9/11, the US invasion caused Iraq to disintegrate along ethnic and sectarian lines into anarchy, in which al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other Islamist organizations flourished. Instead of bringing to power a pro-American democracy that would permit permanent bases on Iraqi soil, the war replaced Saddam’s secular Baathist regime with a satrapy of Shiite Iran. Last January, Iraq declared that the withdrawal of US forces from its territory was complete.

Obama, elected in part on the basis of his opposition to George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War, then led America into new military quagmires in Libya and Syria. In 2011, NATO, led by the United States, deposed Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi. The result has been continuing fragmentation and anarchy in Libya. In Syria, beginning in 2014, Washington perversely waged a low-level war simultaneously against both sides in a civil war — Islamist militants, on the one hand, and the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad, on the other. Once again, the American strategy backfired. At the end of 2024, Assad and his family fled to Russia. Syria’s president today is Ahmed al-Sharaa, an al-Qaeda warlord whom the US until 2025 had named on its Specially Designated Global Terrorist List.  

This brings us to the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021), the longest war in American history. The purpose of the war was to topple the Taliban, the Islamist faction that had provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and his allies before the 9/11 attacks. The result? Following years of warfare under the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the Biden administration beat a chaotic retreat in August 2021. The victor is the Taliban, which came to power and has imposed a repressive Islamist regime, stripping women, ethnic minorities, and dissidents of rights and carrying out public floggings and executions for crimes including  “illicit relationships.” 

What is striking is the frequency with which major American wars have ended by bringing US enemies to power or allowing them to remain in power. Today, following the deaths of more than 80,000 American soldiers, and millions of Koreans and Indochinese, North Korean Communists aligned with Beijing and Moscow rule North Korea, while Vietnamese Communists rule united Vietnam. Syria and Afghanistan are governed by former anti-American jihadists.

In the case of Korea, it can be argued that the 72-year truce was a partial success that has allowed South Korea to develop and flourish. Even so, North Korea has nuclear weapons with which it threatens America and its East Asian allies, has deployed thousands of troops to fight in Putin’s war in Ukraine, and continues to tie down American military forces in Asia. 

To these humiliating American strategic failures, the Ukraine war might soon be added. In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden declared, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Today, Putin is still in power and Biden is out of power. The Ukraine War, which has been prolonged as a result of Western military and economic support for Kiev, is likely to end at some point in Russian control of both Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine — yet another embarrassing and costly strategic defeat for the Uncle Sam.

“But other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” Compared to the strategic defeats of US foreign policy in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, US strategic victories in the last seven decades have been few and far between. The most significant strategic victory came with the success of the US strategy, shared with post-Maoist China, in arming insurgents to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989 — a policy that did not require the commitment of any American troops. The United States and its NATO allies, with minimal coalition losses, and together with Russia, also helped to bring an end to the wars of the Yugoslav Secession by 1995. Otherwise, the few US strategic victories in recent decades have involved small-scale interventions, both peaceful and violent, in America’s western hemisphere sphere of influence — Panama (1989), Haiti (1994), Venezuela (2026).

All of this can be attributed to the American Way of War, which is shaped by the goal of achieving maximum military objectives with minimum American fatalities, due to the US public’s aversion to significant losses, not only of draftees but also of professional American soldiers in combat. To minimize American losses, the United States has long relied on technology, hoping that air power and conventional big-unit warfare will break the will of enemy regimes.

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During the Korean War, the United States dropped more bombs on the Korean peninsula than were dropped in America’s entire Pacific campaign during World War II. In Vietnam, instead of engaging in a classic, low-level counterinsurgency campaign, Uncle Sam relied on bombing and air-support by helicopters against insurgents and North Vietnamese infiltrators in South Vietnam, and deployed defoliants and herbicides like Agent Orange to destroy South Vietnamese forests and crops. In Afghanistan, the United States sought to minimize the loss of pilots by using expensive drones. In all of these cases, America’s advantages in high-tech industrialized warfare failed to prevent strategic stalemate (Korea) or total defeat (Vietnam, Afghanistan). Given these historic precedents, it comes as no surprise that America’s initial tactical successes in the war against Iran, including the massacre of Iran’s top leaders and the degrading of much of its military capacity, have failed to dislodge the repressive Islamist regime or end the conflict.

The unsuccessful American Way of War is not merely technological, but also political — a category that includes both domestic US politics and geopolitics.

In domestic politics, when a president launches what is hoped to be a brief, successful war, there is often a “rally-around-the-flag” effect (though this has been missing in the case of the US-Israel war against Iran). If there are American casualties, however, over time the rising number of body bags and the perception that no end to the conflict is in sight lead the American public to turn against the war, to the point that most Americans come to prefer abandoning the effort and “bugging out” to further losses in blood and treasure.

But even after the public has turned against a war, domestic political factors can result in its prolongation for years — or, in the case of Afghanistan, for decades — through multiple presidencies. On the one hand, wartime presidents are mindful of rising public opposition to a doomed war. At the same time, they fear that they or their party will be accused of weakness and defeatism by hawks in both parties and will suffer electoral setbacks. So in order to avoid blame, presidents from Johnson to Bush, including Trump in his first term, have flinched from withdrawing from a quagmire and passed the disaster to a successor in the White House who can serve as the scapegoat for American military defeat.

American domestic politics, then, makes it politically easy to start wars and hard to end them.

At the geopolitical level, American leaders’ lack of commitment provides an advantage for US enemies. What is a vital interest for the enemy — the survival of the North Korean regime, the conquest of all of Vietnam by Communists, the survival and if possible the triumph of the Taliban — is only a lesser interest for Washington. In the case of enemy dictatorships, the existential threat is personal. A lost war may mean execution, imprisonment, or exile for dictators and their allies and families.

To be sure, America’s war leaders pretend that the United States, like its enemies, has vital interests in the foreign war, often invoking memories of the Nazis and World War II or warning of “domino effects” throughout a region or nuclear mushroom clouds rising above American cities. But this has proved insincere: Washington has refused to mobilize the country for all-out war, eschewing means such as regimentation of the economy and a wartime draft, suggesting that the threats haven’t been existential, after all. 

The underlying problem, then, is the American Way of War itself, with respect to both military means and strategic ends. Since World War II, there has been a mismatch between America’s reliance on high-tech, air-power-intensive, big-unit warfare and the actual requirements for success in many low-intensity conflicts, as well as a mismatch between American public opinion and the trigger-happiness of much of America’s bipartisan political elite.  

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The American people and American politicians alike prefer a war like World War II, which for the United States lasted only four years and ended with total victory and regime change in the enemy countries. At the same time, the US Army would prefer to fight Field Marshall Rommel in North Africa, with few collateral civilian casualties, and the US Navy would prefer naval battles far from centers of population. What Americans want is a limited war in which a complete victory against demonized or genuinely demonic enemies is possible. When that cannot be achieved, war is unpopular with American civilians and soldiers alike. There is no appetite for brutal, protracted, low-level counterinsurgency campaigns in foreign mountains or jungles, where enemy soldiers and civilians are intermingled. 

It’s unlikely  that Americans will ever support the transformation of the US military into a permanent colonial-style constabulary specialized in assisting proxies and fighting or assisting insurgencies in broken countries around the world. In light of this, the only way to avoid repeated strategic failures is for there to be much higher domestic political obstacles to American presidents’ tendency to resort to war. 

But Congress lost control of the process for launching war to the executive branch in the Truman years; there has not been a formal declaration of war by the United States since 1942, when Congress declared war against Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, having earlier declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. The launching of new and failed wars like those in Libya, Syria, and Iran by presidents like Obama and Trump after they campaigned as relative doves proves that it is still too easy for American presidents to drag America into war and still too hard for presidents to get out.  

Breaking this sad pattern of repeated, large-scale American strategic and military failure will require Washington to align its foreign policy with the values of most Americans, not simply replacing one dove-turned-hawk with another in the White House.

Ali Larijani, whom the Israelis assassinated on Tuesday, was a ruthless propagandist who broadcast the “confessions” of dissidents broken by torture, and an apparatchik whose National Security Council oversaw the slaughter of thousands of unarmed protesters in January. Yet his long membership of Iran’s ruling clique at least gave him insight into the country’s external enemies. At a pro-regime rally shortly before his death, he observed that “Trump’s problem is that he doesn’t understand that… the more pressure he applies, the stronger the [Iranian] people become.”

For nations driven by patriotism, religion or both — Iran, the Palestinians, Ukraine, Russia, Israel — capitulation becomes more unthinkable the longer the casualty list. In this, the Iranian regime has form. Drawing on its experience of fighting Iraq in the Eighties, when the Islamic Republic was a production line of commanders going fearlessly to their deaths — recall one-armed Hossein Kharrazi, who was killed while diverting a subordinate away from enemy fire, and is remembered by his men for his valor and self-sacrifice — the state replaces fallen generals and politicians quickly and without fuss.

So far, at least 1,500 Iranians have been killed, including hundreds of civilians; much infrastructure has been destroyed. Now Trump is openly contemplating an invasion of the island of Kharg, off Iran’s southern coast, from where the country’s oil is dispatched to China and other more clandestine markets, while the CIA has been encouraging a rebellion among the Kurds in the country’s western provinces.

All the while, Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s new supreme leader, who lost his wife, son and perhaps a leg in the attack that also killed his father and predecessor, Ali, promises a life without security for the regime’s enemies, both “domestic and foreign.” His Islamic Republic, a pariah state, tells the world’s most powerful military: bring it on.

That Iran derives strength from adversity and prefers heroic defeat to ungentlemanly victory derives in part from the foundation epic of Shia Islam. In 680, the Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, along with a tiny band of followers, was put to the sword by the powerful caliph, Yazid of Damascus, in what is now southern Iraq. Iran’s sectarian identity works in tandem with cultural exceptionalism. The Persian language emerged from the Arab invasions of the 630s energized and expanded, becoming a tool fit for the works of beauty that Persian poets went on to compose.

Similarly, Islamic beliefs and Persian forms merged to create a new aesthetic, visible in cities like Isfahan and Tabriz, and which spread as far as Central Asia and India. No one, then, has ever accused Iran of suffering from an inferiority complex. Or, for that matter, of excessive deference towards the parvenu Arabs of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs, in the words of an old bit of doggerel, grubbing around for lizards while the Persians sip chilled water.

Since the war began, Iran’s drones and missiles have exacted a death toll of fewer than 50 on the far side of the Gulf, but put the regimes in question, to say nothing of world oil markets, into a tailspin all the same. As for the people of Beirut, bombarded by Israel while calmly receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees from Benjamin Netanyahu’s furious assault on south Lebanon (itself prompted by Hezbollah’s feeble strikes on Israel following the elder Khamenei’s assassination), they poke fun at their neighbors in the Gulf for gathering up their dishdashas and running for the basement at the first sound of tinkling glass.

Many ordinary Muslims thrill to the spectacle of plucky Iran refusing to bow to the oppressors of the Palestinians. Pro-Iran demonstrations were held in Iraq and Pakistan following Khamenei’s assassination, the latter costing at least 22 lives, while, on 11 March, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a majority-Sunni country, pledged solidarity with Shia Iran. “We have but one religion,” he declared in parliament, “and that is Islam.”

Between US and Israeli attacks on military installations, gas fields, and the odd school, Iranian life goes on. Notwithstanding the danger and inconvenience, families convened yesterday to celebrate the Persian New Year, pride of place in homes being given to seven auspicious items (garlic; apple; a brown pudding with a base of wheat sprouts; sumac; the powdery fruit of the jujube-tree; vinegar; and coins), even if the traditional feast of herb rice and Caspian carp (beware: the tiny bones have a habit of lodging in the windpipe) has long been abandoned in favor of more affordable fare.

Yesterday I got through to Ali Dehbashi. An editor and literary doyen living in Tehran, I’d called to wish him Happy New Year. Dehbashi told me that his son Shahab had had a narrow escape that morning, when a house three doors down was obliterated in an Israeli airstrike. The target was Ali Muhammad Naini, the Revolutionary Guards spokesman: not that Shahab had any idea they were neighbors. His father is a pigeon fancier, but when I asked after the birds, Dehbashi told me that two pigeons and a canary had dropped dead from shock at the racket produced by Israel’s war machine. Having the misfortune to live on Palestine Square — which boasts a clock counting down the days to Israel’s longed-for destruction — he went on with typical understatement, “I suppose one is in the firing line.”

At the outset of the fighting, Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government” as soon as the dust had settled, for “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Since then, in one of those cognitive exercises he lets us observe, like a child showing off his ability to join one bit of playdough to another, he has changed his mind. The President now deems a popular uprising unlikely because the security forces “have people in the streets… machine-gunning people down if they want to protest.” A few inquiries beforehand would have saved him from any misapprehension on this score and the world a lot of pain.

The irony of Trump and Netanyahu’s war of liberation is that it has silenced those opponents of the Islamic Republic who continued to agitate for freedom even after January’s massacre. Many had urged Trump to bomb the country to oblivion, placing their hopes in a restoration of the monarchy under Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah. Now, three weeks into this conflict of unexpected intensity, the true sentiments of the majority are hidden behind an intermittent internet blackout. Treat with caution the prognostications of Iran specialists in the US who haven’t seen the country in decades.

That said, the longer the pounding goes on, the more schools are hit and the more damage is done to buildings of national importance — it’s the meticulously cut mirror pieces adhering to the muqarnas, or stalactite squinch, that fall like dandruff when a bomb slams into the barracks a block away — the greater the likelihood that feelings towards the aggressors will cool.

The authorities are taking no chances. The national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, has warned that should “scum, spies and hirelings”, his catch-all for pro-democracy protesters, return to the streets on the advice of Trump, Netanyahu or Pahlavi, they “will be treated as the enemy… our boys have their fingers on the trigger, defending their revolution, protecting their people and their country.” On Wednesday, three young men were executed for killing policemen in the January unrest.

For all his disagreeable qualities, Larijani’s removal has robbed Iran of an experienced negotiator who might have helped bring the war to an end before the country turns entirely to ashes — one of the reasons, it has been suggested, why Netanyahu targeted him. At present, peace suits neither the Israeli Prime Minister, who on Thursday said that the war would continue “as long as is necessary”, nor those Revolutionary Guardsmen for whom the current hostilities are an opportunity to militarize the Islamic Republic.

In all this, the hardliners may have an ally in Mojtaba Khamenei. His meager credentials as a Shia theologian are far from commensurate with the almost pontifical office, the guardianship of the jurist, which he lately inherited. The new supreme leader owes his elevation to the Guard. Assuming he stays alive — the attack that killed the father is thought to have left the son with life-threatening injuries — the clerical character of the Islamic Republic will fade and it will more closely resemble a uniformed dictatorship with a nationalist character.

Not a day passes without an official warning of threats to the country’s territorial integrity: code for foreign-funded agitations among the country’s Kurdish, Baluch and Arab minorities. But Iran isn’t in danger of falling apart. It isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq, modern confections of mutually antagonistic groups. Rather, it has a natural coherence based on the supremacy of the Persian language; its geographically logical homeland on the Persian plateau, ringed by seas and mountains; and the Shia Islam to which most Iranians adhere.

For centuries, indeed, these strengths have enabled Iran to survive invasions, violent changes of dynasty, famines, tribal uprisings, regicides and years of meddling by imperial Britain and Russia — not to mention the 1979 revolution itself. They will offset the centrifugal forces that Trump seems intent on stimulating. For the true danger to Iran is not disintegration, but implosion.

When Trump and Netanyahu decide that they have had enough, Khamenei and his friends in the Guard will have to deal with the same rotten institutions and ruined economy, the same seething anger and desire for change, that brought the people onto the streets in January — with the difference now that any chance of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s isolation has been foreclosed while Israel will continue to bomb the country and sabotage its institutions on a rolling basis. In the meantime, the “scum, spies and hirelings” haven’t gone away, and they have even less to lose. The police chief shouldn’t book any holidays.

Iran is experiencing the most evil days in its modern history. To mark an earlier catastrophe, the Anglo-American coup d’etat that ejected the country’s legitimate prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, in 1953, ushering in a quarter of a century of monarchical despotism, the poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales composed the following lines which an Iranian friend of mine recently found himself reaching for.

“My house has caught fire, a soul-burning fire,
This fire burns in all directions,
Burning the curtains, the rugs, warp with weft,
I run aimlessly, crying, in the flames of the smoke-laden fire,
And amid my bitter laughter,
And the lamentation of my mirthless tears,
From a burning core,
I scream…”

Raleigh lived in a different era, of course — one that most of us imagine as a time of swashbuckling sailors and risk-taking pirates, when control of the High Seas was a competition between the European states building empires in both the New and Old Worlds.

This was also an age when geography mattered every bit as much as resources. Many of the first European footholds overseas were chosen less for what lay in the ground than for where they sat along the great sea routes that were beginning to bind the world together. The Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511 was not about spices growing nearby but about controlling the narrow maritime gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea through which much of Asia’s trade passed.

The same strategic logic shaped the expansion of the British empire. Outposts were established above all because of their position along the world’s shipping arteries. The British occupation of Gibraltar in 1704 secured control over the entrance to the Mediterranean and the vital route between the Atlantic and Europe’s inland sea. In the Caribbean, islands such as Jamaica — seized from the Spanish in 1655 — were major naval and commercial hubs sitting astride the shipping lanes linking the Americas and Europe. Likewise, further south, control of Cape of Good Hope allowed Britain to dominate the maritime passage between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

The empire that Raleigh’s generation started building was not only created through conquest and extraction: it was built through the control of the sea lanes and strategic points that allowed commerce, information and manpower to move across the oceans. The same ports that handled cargo could shelter naval squadrons, repair ships and project force across vast distances. Britain’s empire was fueled by sugar, silver, slaves and more; but it was built on being able to move these at will across the oceans, and on the islands, harbors and strongpoints that underpinned maritime, economic and imperial power.

More from this author

The water wars are coming

By Peter Frankopan

These days, we have become used to future-gazers insisting that the future belongs to those who control data and algorithms, or satellites and space rockets, or rare earths and critical minerals. Ships, shipping, and transport networks do not sound quite so exciting, so fresh or so unknown. To a historian, though, in a world that is hyper-connected, logistics are king.

In its heyday, Britain’s reach rested heavily getting the basics right. At Gibraltar, ships entering or leaving the Mediterranean could refuel and undergo repairs, while Malta secured British control of Mediterranean shipping routes. Further east, Aden functioned as a crucial coaling station at the mouth of the Red Sea once steam navigation transformed long-distance travel; or there was Singapore, which, from the early 19th century, grew into a key naval base guarding the approaches between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Each of these places mattered less for what they produced than for the services they provided: coal, water, repairs, provisions, intelligence and protection. Ships could not roam the oceans indefinitely; they required an interconnected chain of harbors capable of maintaining hulls, repairing sails or (later) overhauling, to provision with fresh food and water. Maritime power was not just about ships, captains and crews — but about a dense mesh of locations that were spread out around the world and reinforced each other.

Over time, however, it became easy to forget just how central these routes and nodes were. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, the world entered a period of globalization underpinned by overwhelming American economic, political and military power — and by the mantra of free trade being the engine of prosperity and the bedrock of the international world order. Attention shifted elsewhere, and strategists and commentators forgot about shipping lanes. Yet as geopolitical competition intensifies and the world moves into a more multipolar era, the importance of the arteries of global commerce has once again become startlingly clear.

Maritime transport moves over 80% of goods traded worldwide. Around 11 billion tons of goods are transported by sea each year — roughly one and a half tons per person. Ships carry around two thirds of global oil production, as well as around a fifth of natural gas, moving energy to places where they are most needed. Without global shipping networks, computers can’t be switched on, assembly lines can’t work, and houses can’t be heated.

While the crisis in Iran and the Gulf have focused attention on oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and petroleum products, global shipping is fundamental in almost every aspect of daily life. Seaborne trade moves almost two billion tons of iron ore per year, with major exporters in countries like Australia, Brazil and South Africa being matched with demand in China, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. Hundreds of millions of tons of bauxite and alumina are sent by sea from mines and processing plants in Guinea, Indonesia and Australia, as are tens of millions of tons of copper ores from Chile, Peru and south East Asia.

Global shipping is not just the backbone of international trade; it is crucial in keeping the world fed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN body, international trade plays a crucial role in supporting global food security by linking food surplus with deficit areas and enabling access to basic food products. 80% of agricultural commodities are transported by sea, with shipping again playing a crucial role in matching “breadbasket regions” with those that suffer from food production deficits.

As Sir Walter Raleigh would have recognized, globalization makes control of the seas more, not less important; as peoples, regions, goods and resources get moved from one part of the planet to another, dependencies rise — and so, therefore, do vulnerabilities. Things that we take for granted are always ones that we should pay special attention to, not least since it never seems to cross people’s mind that small shocks can have major implications.

*****

In the summer of 2011, Thailand experienced catastrophic flooding as a result of unusually high levels of rainfall, which had an enormous impact on global car production. At the time, Thailand was one of the world’s leading producers of hard-disk drives and wiring harnesses for cars, as well as electronics modules. As factories closed because of flooding, the effects spilled over into the global economy. Hard drive prices doubled in a matter of weeks; shortages of parts crippled automotive production not only in Thailand, but across Asia, North America and even Europe. The associated costs ran to tens of billions of dollars.

If that gives one example of the risks that come from the assumption that supply chains are dependable, then another comes from Covid-19. Lockdowns and collapsing industrial demand caused an immediate decline in maritime activity. Global maritime trade volumes fell sharply, with estimates suggesting a reduction of as much as 10% in the first eight months of 2020, representing cargo worth at least $225 billion in trade value — if not considerably more, precipitating an unprecedented logistics crunch.

In the past few days we have seen another classic case of the risks posed by pressure on supply chains. Energy markets have been spooked by the implications of attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf following US and Israeli strikes on Iran, with oil prices almost doubling in a matter of days. But it is shipping prices that have truly gone through the roof. Spot charter rates for LNG carriers are six times larger than they were before 28 February — a rise some industry experts refer to as “unthinkable”. Some charterers are paying as much as 10 times the rate they paid before the attacks on Iran began to secure prompt tonnage because of the scale of the shock.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s key chokepoints, a narrow stretch that connects the Gulf with the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, a crossroads where geology and geography dovetail to create perfect opportunities for disruption.

Bordered by Iran to the north and Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the south, the Strait is one of the world’s most strategically significant waterways. At its narrowest navigable point, the shipping lanes are only a few kilometers wide in each direction, meaning that at a time of conflict — such as today — the ability to restrict shipping is considerable. Considerable volumes of goods pass through the Strait — something that is clear from the fact that Jebel Ali in Dubai is the ninth-busiest port in the world. But Hormuz is more crucial to global energy markets, with around 15 million barrels of oil passing through each day, equivalent to about one-fifth of global petroleum consumption. Other chokepoints are significant; but Hormuz is the most important oil chokepoint in the world.

At the moment, almost no shipping is transiting the Strait, with an estimated 1000 vessels waiting for the conflict with Iran to pass. A small handful of ships have sailed through, with several others reported to be trying their luck by either claiming to be Chinese or by turning off transponders that reveal both their location and their true identities. More than a dozen ships have been damaged so far, with Iran saying that British ships are “legitimate targets”.

Political leaders have tried to project confidence. Donald Trump said that merchant crews and shipowners simply needed to show “some guts” if they wanted trade to keep moving through the Strait. Yet the reality suggests that courage alone is rarely enough to keep maritime commerce flowing during wartime. Guts are one thing; a US Navy ship being damaged by Iranian mines, missiles or attacks from land is another. For now, then, such are the risks to crews, cargo and hulls that shipping in the Gulf is at a standstill.

Just how high the strategic stakes have become is clear from the military deployments now underway. That message has not been lost on Greece, Italy or France — all of which have dispatched warships towards the Gulf to secure maritime traffic and monitor the Strait, although it remains unclear whether or how they will solve the problem of getting traffic moving again. In Britain, there has been fierce criticism of the Royal Navy’s absence from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, but the absence is not imminently solvable. It is the result of the British government’s catastrophic lack of foresight, decades of not investing in the sort of naval forces one needs in this century.

Trump has insisted that the shutdown in the Gulf is temporary and that oil, gas and more besides will soon start to flow again. It is typical fighting talk from a president who chose to start a confrontation with Iran because he was not able to understand why the regime in Tehran had refused to “capitulate” to American demands regarding nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile programs and more.

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Starmer's perfect storm

By Helen Thompson

Trump came to office promising never to drag the US into “forever wars”, sneering at the “so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits” from who had inflicted disaster on the Middle East. Now, while Trump and his team work out how to stop Iran from inflicting damage on its neighbors, others must pay the price. India imports the overwhelming majority of its oil and gas by sea, partly because it has access to a limited network of pipelines. So the collapse of shipments from the Gulf is producing an existential crisis: although the US has granted a “temporary waiver” to allow Delhi to buy Russian oil, the facts that the rupee has weakened sharply, and that authorities are reportedly speeding up customs procedures to allow faster unloading, are signs that compression of logistics at sea is already having ripple effects. Moscow emerges as an unexpected beneficiary of the crisis, as the spike in oil and gas prices will provide much-needed relief to a beleaguered economy. Russia’s geopolitical role could be additionally bolstered by the country’s purported long-standing “security concept for the Persian Gulf” as an off-ramp for the US intervention in Iran.

The consequences of the current crisis, however, extend well beyond the coming days or even the coming weeks. What we are witnessing is not simply a temporary disruption in the Gulf, but a reminder of a deeper truth about how power works in the modern world. Maritime routes remain the arteries through which prosperity, security and resilience flow. Data, algorithms, satellites and artificial intelligence may dominate the language of the 21st-century economy, but they still depend on the movement of physical goods across oceans. Microchips require minerals, energy and specialized manufacturing equipment that must be transported. Data centers require copper, aluminum, rare earths and vast amounts of energy infrastructure. Without ships and secure sea lanes, even the most advanced digital economy quickly runs into very practical limits. Power is and always has been about logistics.

For Britain in particular, this requires a series of profound shifts. The protection of shipping routes is already a central strategic task. The Gulf is one theater where the risks are currently obvious, but it is far from the only one. The North Atlantic and the High North are rapidly emerging as arenas of growing geopolitical competition as melting Arctic ice opens new routes and as submarine cables, energy infrastructure and shipping lanes become ever more exposed to interference and disruption.

These are not challenges that can be addressed through strategy documents or policy papers; they require investment in ships, in platforms, in training and in the infrastructure that allows maritime forces to operate effectively across long distances. They also require the rebuilding of the kind of interconnected networks of ports, facilities and partnerships that once underpinned Britain’s global reach. In an increasingly multipolar world — one in which predation, risk-taking and opportunism are often rewarded — maritime resilience will become a defining measure of national strength.

In that sense, the current crisis offers a glimpse of the future. Control and protection of shipping routes is key to stability, to reduction of risk and to long-term national resilience. The resources on which new economies depend may have changed, technologies may have evolved and ships may look different. But the underlying reality remains exactly the same as when Raleigh wrote four hundred years ago: whoever commands the sea commands far more than the sea itself.