The main reason why the US stays involved in the Persian Gulf has nothing to do with Israel; it is because Gulf Oil remains essential to the global economy. Without a reliable trade in Gulf Oil, food costs would rise worldwide, and many people in poorer countries would starve.
BY SIMON PEARCE FOR THE LIMINAL LENS ON SUBSTACK / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE LIMINAL LENS ON SUBSTACK
It’s bullshit, and it’s bad for you.
– George Carlin
Introduction: The Fog of War
The world is a complex yet strangely predictable place.
At the macro level, patterns repeat with remarkable regularity. Zoom in, however, and those patterns dissolve into irreducible complexity.
Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamic theory reveals long civilizational rhythms precisely because it refuses to claim more precision than the data allows.
It can show us the ebbs and flows of human civilization over hundreds of years, but it cannot tell you who will win the next election or when and where the next war will happen.
That restraint is not a weakness. It is respect for the model’s limits.
As Turchin’s work has shown us, causes of societal instability in complex civilizations are predictable in direction and build up very slowly over time. Predicting exactly when a crisis will hit, or its exact outcomes, is much harder.
Wars are a particularly unpredictable subspecies of crisis.
Wars are ruptures.
Ruptures break assumptions that previously appeared stable.
In war, our attempts to make the world legible again are often humbled by irreducible complexity.
This problem has repeated throughout history.
On the 24th of October 1415, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, the French knights were certain of victory. Unfortunately for them, their model of warfare was about to be defeated by a military innovation that they could not predict, and did not understand. The only way to find out was to fight the battle.
They were victims of their unknown unknowns. Their way of war had already been out-innovated, but they did not yet know it.
They ate heartily, slept soundly, woke up, mounted their horses, and got wiped out.
In a few short hours, the flower of the French Aristocracy had been cut down: a hard reset of the French ruling elite.
A relatively new weapon — the longbow — combined with new tactics, changed the course of battle and shattered the assumptions of the age.
This is just one aspect of the fog of war.
Wars make everything more complicated, confusing, and unpredictable.
Robert Duvall’s famous line as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now makes this point in stark terms. The only thing he, or anyone else fighting that war, could be sure about:
Someday, this war will end.
Wars are notoriously difficult to predict with precision.
The only way to see how this ends is to run the script.
What can we know about this war?
We may not be able to predict the outcome with certainty, but there’s still a great deal we do know, if we care to look.
It’s worth examining because it can help us understand what’s happening and why.
This war is neither a triumph of military planning nor a descent into barbarism; like all wars it contains elements of both. Stopping there misses the reasons for the war and promotes unhelpful, manipulative tropes. As I will explain in next week’s follow-up, many of these tropes are, in fact, part of the war itself.
Simplistic Explanations Will Not Suffice
The British voluntarily withdrew from Iran in 1946 after World War II ended, but the influential Anglo-American oil lobby believed Iran’s oil was too important to be outside Western control. In 1953, when Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh moved to nationalize Iranian oil and exclude Western oil companies, the CIA and their allies overthrew him in a coup. This triggered a series of repressions that ultimately led to the current Iranian theocratic regime in 1979, and from there, to our ongoing conflict.
This is our original sin in the region: the very existence of today’s theocratic regime in Iran is, in no small part, due to a miscalculation by the CIA and MI6 in 1953. This operation catalyzed existing Iranian political factions against Mossadegh and helped to bring him down. In the short term, they achieved their objectives; in the long term, it destabilized the country and sowed the seeds of revolution.
Since 1979, theocratic Iran’s radical Shiite stance has put it at odds with most of its Sunni Muslim neighbors and with the West. One of its founding acts was to take 66 US embassy staff in Tehran hostage and hold most of them prisoner for over a year.
Since then, Iran has pursued a dual policy of continuous aggression abroad and highly repressive actions at home. Domestically, the religious police have routinely beaten and tortured people to death for minor infractions, such as women not wearing the correct headgear as mandated by Islamic law. It’s hard for the Western mind to comprehend this, but this has happened consistently.
As recently as a few weeks ago, a 16-year-old Iranian girl was arrested for protesting and faces the death penalty. Even if she survives this ordeal, there’s a high possibility of sexual abuse at the hands of the regime, followed by a long incarceration under poor conditions. Outcomes like this are standard for this regime.
The news archives are littered with stories like this, too many to count.
The Ayatollahs of Iran (there have been two of them since 1979) are the supreme leaders, combining religious and state leadership in a single person. The supreme leader is chosen by the Assembly of Experts, a body of senior clerics who themselves operate inside the same ideological structure. In practice, this keeps the selection pool extremely narrow. It’s as if an absolute monarch gets to be Pope and King at the same time, while controlling the army, appointing all the judges, and all of the police.
The Ayatollahs get to interpret the Quran and the Hadith as a basis for laying down a set of rules that govern all aspects of people’s lives. These rules are extremely harsh, particularly to women, who can be legally married off at age 9 (and worse).
This combination of religious and temporal roles has allowed the Ayatollahs to do something unique in the modern world: they have organized the resources of a large state towards the achievement of primarily religious goals.
I say “religious” here in the broadest sense. The Iranian Shiite conception of religious law does not match our Western conception of religion at all. In the West, religion is voluntary & personal; in Iran, religion is compulsory, communal, and enforced on pain of corporal or capital punishment. There is no daylight between religious authority and earthly authority: it’s the same thing, and to say otherwise is to be an apostate subject to sanction, up to and including the death penalty.
For historical reasons, minority religions (including the Iranian Jews) are tolerated in Iran. Still, the Muslim majority cannot leave Islam or stop following the strictures of the Mullahs, on pain of death.
There is, quite literally, a religious police to enforce all of this.
For quite some time, the religious police have been losing their emotional grip on the population, who are increasingly uninterested in Islam. Still there remains a hardcore, perhaps 20% of the population, that is extremely religious and political; this group retains control of all of the organs of the state. Even if enforcement of the rules has become patchy, when the rules are enforced to the maximum, it no doubt seems all the more unfair to the average person. A normal person can still be victimized by extreme punishment for breaking rules that people break all the time; this makes the regime seem even more cruel, especially to younger generations.
If this repression had stayed inside Iran’s borders, it might have been possible to deplore it, but also to say this is “none of our business.”
It did not.
Not Just a Problem for Iranians, a Problem for the World?
Iran’s oil wealth has enabled it to pursue its goals overseas while substantially neglecting its own people’s material conditions. Over the years, the US has attempted both carrots (Obama and Biden handed over billions of dollars in previously frozen assets in return for various nuclear non-proliferation agreements) and sticks (decades of US economic sanctions; Trump ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear weapons facilities in 2025). Despite all of this, the regime’s overall direction of travel never meaningfully alters course. At no point has Iran ever given up its sponsorship and arming of a wide range of terrorist groups and regional insurgencies.
The openly stated long-term goals of the Iranian theocracy include:
- The long-term expansion of Iran’s revolutionary Islamic governance model as an alternative to secular or Western-aligned political systems across the Middle East and globally.
- The elimination of the State of Israel, commonly described by Iranian leaders as the destruction of the “Zionist regime.”
- The expulsion of American political and military influence from the Middle East, consistent with the revolutionary ideology that has referred to the United States since 1979 as “the Great Satan.”
In other words, the Iranian regime is not just unfriendly, it’s a real problem for the Israelis, whom it seeks to destroy, and also for the West, which it seeks to expel.
Putting Their Money Where Their Mouth Is
This is not some abstract religious doctrine that we can safely ignore. Iran has repeatedly demonstrated the will to pursue these goals maximally and globally:
- Funded and armed Hizbollah in Lebanon, which has destabilized the country, waged repeated wars against Israel, and carried out numerous international terrorist attacks.
- Funded and armed Hamas, whose campaign against Israel culminated on October 7th, 2023, in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
- Armed and supported the Houthis in Yemen, who have attacked international shipping in the Red Sea using Iranian missiles and drones, disrupting one of the world’s most important trade routes.
- Backed Shi’a militias in Iraq and Syria, many of which have conducted years of attacks against U.S. forces and coalition partners.
- Directed or supported terrorist attacks abroad, including the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, one of the deadliest antisemitic attacks since World War II.
- Built a network of other militant proxies across the region, from Palestinian Islamic Jihad to militia groups in Syria and Iraq, allowing Iran to threaten adversaries while avoiding confrontation.
- Conducted ongoing assassination and kidnapping plots abroad, targeting dissidents, journalists, and opposition figures in Europe and the United States.
- Attempted assassinations of foreign officials, including plots linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeting American and Israeli figures, including John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.
- Pursued nuclear weapons capability while expanding ballistic missile programs capable of delivering such weapons globally.
Why Not Just Leave Them to It?
It’s clear that the Iranian regime is extreme, but there’s a tempting argument to be made here that if we “get out” of the Middle East, all of this trouble between Iran and the West can just end. It’s their region, not ours, after all. Also, we bear some responsibility for the meddling that led to a theocratic Iran in the first place.
This argument has gained broad popularity in the West, particularly among young people on the left and within the MAGA movement: a rare coming together of left and right-wing groups. Before his first presidency, Donald Trump was also a proponent of this “leave them to it” argument.
So what might it take to actually disentangle from Iran?
1. End Support for Israel
Many people in the West have become convinced that the State of Israel is a foreign invader in the region. So much so that in the US, 40% of young people in a Harris Poll said that they supported Hamas (a terrorist organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction) over the State of Israel.
This view aligns perfectly with the Mullahs’ position in Iran.
The perception among many younger people now is that Israel has a malign hold over the US. While there’s clearly a lot of entanglement between the US and Israel, the notion that Zionists secretly direct US foreign policy is an old anti-semitic trope almost identical to the ones used by the Nazis in the 1940s.
Like the witch-dunking chair of old, there’s only one way to disprove this theory: abandon support for Israel definitively.
As Claire Berlinski recently noted, there’s evidence that the US interest in Israel was rather limited until it proved its military prowess during the Six-Day War. At that point, the US got interested in Israel as an instrument of US policy in the region.
While there’s no doubt that Israel does try to influence and even manipulate US foreign policy in its favor, the notion that it is steering US foreign policy from behind the scenes is not supported by the available evidence. The Epstein affair certainly shows that transnational manipulation is real, but the shady dealings here move in multiple directions: the traffic is not all one-way.
As Haviv points out in this video, Israel is mostly an instrument of US power, not the other way around.
2. Remove most, or all, US bases from the Region
Removing US bases from the Gulf region is another way to disengage from Iran. While this would certainly not change the regime’s behavior, it might at least remove the US from potential conflict with Iran.
This, of course, would entail the ultimate repudiation of the network of alliances the US has built in the region since 1945.
What might happen next if the US leaves? It’s hard to say for sure, but we might reasonably expect Iranian influence to spread deeper into Iraq and Syria and for Saudi Arabia and the UAE to look to other powerful nations for arms and protection from Iran.
The resulting power vacuum would almost certainly see increased Chinese activity in the region. This has been happening anyway, so a US departure would only accelerate this trend.
As I have argued elsewhere, a departure would also accelerate the collapse of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It is US global security guarantees that underpins the dollar by underwriting global trade in critical goods, with oil being the most critical of them all.
So yes, we can “get out” of the Middle East, but at the cost of a loss in living standards that the average American or European can hardly comprehend. In this case “living standards” includes the basics like food, medicine, transportation etc.
Why We Stay
The main reason why the US stays involved in the Persian Gulf has nothing to do with Israel; it is because Gulf Oil remains essential to the global economy. Without a reliable trade in Gulf Oil, food costs would rise worldwide, and many people in poorer countries would starve.
It’s not just the volume of Gulf Oil that makes it critical; it’s that the EROI (Energy Return on Investment) of Gulf Oil remains the highest in the world.
In the 1970s, Saudi oil wells produced at an EROI of 100:1, meaning that for every joule of energy invested, the world got 100 joules worth of oil out. Even today, many wells in the region produce at an EROI of 20:1 – 30:1.
In the Gulf of Mexico, the best offshore rigs have an EROI of 22:1, but a range of 4:1 to 16:1 is more typical as shallow-water wells run dry and the rigs move into deeper waters.
In the West Texas shale oil patch, EROI typically ranges between 5:1 and 3:1. This is barely economically viable, as large amounts of energy need to be continually put back into the field to eke out rather small returns.
On average, about 35% of the refined product from crude oil is a mixture of diesel and jet fuel. Diesel is essential for agriculture, and there is no viable battery-based replacement right now. As Vaclav Smil has demonstrated, you can’t easily run a combine harvester on anything except diesel, and this is also true for fishing trawlers and most other food production machinery.
Oil is also used in fertilizer production, and soil quality erosion means that more and more fertilizer is needed each year just to maintain food production yields for a global population that is still growing.
Even though the US is the world’s largest oil producer today, most of that oil is produced at very low EROI levels, and the only way to solve this problem while keeping food affordable is for US shale oil to be supplemented with high-EROI Gulf oil across the global economy.
Shale oil is economically viable in a world where it is not the only source of oil, because it helps fill the demand gap left by conventional oil.
Over time, what matters is the average EROI of the entire energy system. The more dependent you become on low-EROI shale oil, the more important it becomes to maintain a substantial share of high-EROI oil in that mix.
“Energy independence” is largely a political fiction. Even while producing more oil than any country on earth, the United States remains embedded in a global energy system it cannot control alone.
The US cannot afford to leave the Gulf, because any major conflict between Iran and the Sunni states could trigger a global economic and food crisis. If China stepped in to fill the resulting security vacuum, it would also gain the geopolitical leverage it needs to move on Taiwan and thereby seize control of another critical global resource: advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
It’s also worth noting that China is not really in a position to replace the US as a regional or global security guarantor, even if it wanted to. It lacks the Blue Water Navy and other military capabilities to effectively project power to the Persian Gulf.
We can leave, but the second order consequences of leaving might well cause significant hardship in nearly every country on earth.
This is why almost every US President arrives in office making some version of the statement “no more foreign entanglements” and then does the exact opposite. It varies from President to President but it usually takes a year or two for the national security advisors to explain all of this to them.
Some people reading this might still say it’s “not worth it,” but that’s a judgment each person has to make for themselves. At a minimum, we can say there are understandable reasons for this policy of maintaining a heavy U.S. military presence in the Middle East, whether we agree with it or not.
You simply cannot feed 8.3 billion people without a whole lot of diesel.
No Choice?
The idea that the US and other Western countries can and should avoid foreign entanglements is a popular one with a long history.
The United States only joined World War 2 after it was directly attacked by Japan in December of 1941. From 1939 to the end of 1941, America stayed out of it while the British Empire and Germany knocked lumps out of each other.
Today, the MAGA movement has this as one of its core precepts, which led to significant infighting when Trump launched the massive air assault on Tehran on February 28, 2026.
There’s a good chance that Trump’s political support in the MAGA heartlands is going to crater over this one.
Trump almost certainly knew this — and acted anyway.
He barely bothered to explain what he was doing, or why, he just went ahead and did it.
Raison d’État.
Was this just the latest sign of a deranged man whose love of power went to his head?
Partly, perhaps, but we’re talking about the full might of the US military being launched here. This plan clearly had many authors.
Staying Involved is One Thing, Launching a War is Another
What we have discussed so far explains why the US is still involved in the Middle East today, but it does not explain why we launched a war on Iran on February 28th, 2026.
- Democrats are hitting the airwaves calling it a “war of choice” that violates US law, which reserves war powers for Congress.
- Republicans are saying it was our “last chance to stop the Iranians getting nuclear weapons”, and this is should be our overriding concern because of the risks to global trade and to the US homeland. They also point out that Democratic Presidents have used military force without Congressional approval on many occasions.
In both narratives there are elements of truth and also elements of deception.
Let’s start with the Democrats.
Calling this a war of choice is true, but it also trivializes the stakes. It’s not a choice in the same sense that selecting a meal from a menu is a choice. It was a big strategic move on a very complex chess board.
Speculation of my part: this war was almost certainly not Trump’s idea, even if he thought it was, but an idea that was planted in his mind by his military and political advisers. This plan has existed in various forms for decades, since long before Trump came to office and it’s been updated many times over the years.
Trump has always been keen to be “seen to be in charge,” but large strategic moves like this typically emerge from long-standing military planning processes involving many actors.
It is not meaningful to ask whether this war is a war of necessity or a war of choice, as politicians love to argue over. All wars are wars of choice. You always have the option to surrender to your enemy and give up some piece of advantage or sovereignty, small or large, in the name of peace. The real question here is, was it worth the risk?
Now let’s look at the Republicans.
Their claim that this was our last chance to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons has some merit. It’s really hard to know for sure, but we can see that this regime has never really given up on its nuclear ambitions, and this slow-moving crisis has been going on for decades. Even if you accept that Iran only wanted the nukes as a deterrent, it still means that they have a deterrent that enables them to do awful things with impunity.
To underscore my point here, if the Russian military did not have nuclear weapons to deter NATO, there is no question in my mind that NATO would have gone into Ukraine and stomped the Russian Army years ago. The fear of nuclear armageddon is the only thing that has allowed Russia to keep doing what it is doing in the Ukraine. Full Stop. Period.
So what about the claim that this was our last chance to stop them?
That’s a bit murkier: but a good case can still be made for this.
China was allegedly on the brink of sending Iran supersonic anti-ship missiles when the US attacked.
Once that transfer happens, it would be possible for Iran to hold the entire Persian Gulf hostage and deny the entire area to US Carrier Battlegroups which are still the principal force-projection tool of the US military. This would not mean “war tomorrow” but it would mean increasing Iranian and Chinese power in the Gulf, which for reasons I’ve already explained, is very dangerous for the West.
The more interesting question should be: what was likely to happen if the US had not done this?
The answer to this seems to be the following:
- Continued efforts by Iran to secure a nuclear weapon, perhaps succeeding at some point in the next few years.
- Sales of increasingly sophisticated Chinese weapon systems to Iran making it harder and harder to stop them from eventually reaching their goal of developing a nuclear weapon.
- A strong Chinese regional ally in the Persian Gulf, able to hold the world to ransom if and when the Chinese decided to invade Taiwan.
- An increasingly dangerous Iran, ratcheting up their regional and global aggression from the safety of their newfound nuclear umbrella.
Why not before? Why now?
All of this raises the question, why have we not gone after them before now?
The answer here is complex, but it comes down to a few key points.
Why not before?
Nobody but the US has the capability to take Iran on. Iraq tried in the 1980s and was fought to a costly stalemate by Iran.
As long as the US military was tangled up in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was no way that the US could afford to take on Iran.
War is never popular in the US. It’s hard to explain to Americans why they need to fight on the other side of the world, so something usually has to happen to tip the balance towards war. Sometimes that something is manufactured, as in the notorious Gulf of Tonkin incident, but sometimes there are genuine shifts beneath the surface that change the calculus in favor of war.
As a matter of principle, neither Obama nor Biden believed in using US hard power at the scale required to neutralize the Iranian threat. Instead, they tried paying the Iranian regime off via a series of deals that never really worked; Iran kept funding terror groups and kept pursuing missile development and retained the option to “breakout” to nuclear weapons in just 12 months under the terms of that deal. Trump tore the deal up during his first term and returned us to a hard regime of sanctions on Iran.
Trump won his first term on a promise of “no foreign entanglements.” Politically, he knew a war like this would be unpopular with his base. Until recently that calculus kept the Iranian regime safe.
Iran has always had the theoretical ability to close the straits of Hormuz and choke off at least 20% of the world’s oil supply. Most US presidents don’t want to be responsible for causing serious economic harm today to prevent a vague, amorphous threat tomorrow. That’s always stopped us from acting in the past.
Despite decades of state-sponsored terrorism, the US took the view that the problem was manageable and that the cost of dealing decisively with Iran outweighed the benefits, especially given Iran’s apparent ability to close the Straits of Hormuz to global shipping at will.
Why Now?
A successful decapitation strike against Maduro in Venezuela convinced many, including Trump, that a decapitation strike was a viable option for Iran, also. This opened up new options that had previously been considered impossible. I think that the Venezuela operation was a critical piece in demonstrating to Trump that he could do this. Without the Venezuelan demonstration of US military capability, Trump might not have signed off on the Iran plan.
Over the past few years, Mossad agents had achieved deep penetration inside Iran. Israeli intelligence appeared to have a clearer picture than ever of the regime’s internal workings. Under those conditions, decapitation strike planning began to look increasingly viable.
At the same time, October 7th had convinced the Israelis that the Iranians really would kill all of them if they could. This strengthened the case for action in Tel Aviv, and indirectly, in Washington.
China has also deepened its strategic relationship with Iran in recent years. Reports suggested the possibility of transfers of more advanced air-defense systems and anti-ship missiles. If Iran were to acquire such capabilities, future military action against its nuclear program would become far more difficult.
This kind of calculation has historical precedent. During the Falklands War, Argentina used French-made Exocet anti-ship missiles to sink several British warships. Had Argentina possessed a larger stockpile, the outcome of that campaign might have been very different.
Given China’s increased aggressiveness in the first island chain and the South China Sea, Pentagon planners are almost certainly to consider that China’s investment in Iran is not just to secure oil supplies for China (which China already has), but also to potentially disrupt Gulf oil supplies to the US and US allies in the event of a conflict in the Pacific. This could elevate Iran from a regional threat to a global threat in a future China-US-Taiwan war.
Summary
Over the long course of history, this war was always a highly probable event, a long time in the making. There’s no point in asking “who is to blame for the hostility”; it’s not a meaningful question. Maybe Leonidas started it at Thermopylae when he resisted the armies of Xerxes, King of Persia. Maybe the Caliph Umar started it when he invaded Jerusalem in 636AD, and received the surrender of Patriarch Sophronius of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. Maybe it started with the CIA coup in 1953, or with the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
This war did not originate with Trump; it has existed as a serious plan for decades. Trump approved it, but it was almost certainly not his idea. In fact, he probably approved it against many of his natural instincts. His first term was isolationist. He’s a businessman who hates the cost and waste of warfare.
He’s also an improviser, par excellence, so it’s not hard to imagine him being swayed by new conditions, and new options.
In my opinion this war is systemic and bigger than any one man.
The conflict in the Persian Gulf sits at the intersection of three forces: energy, ideology, and great-power competition. Oil gives the region strategic weight. The Iranian revolution gives it ideological volatility. The rise of China gives it global stakes. When all three forces align, the probability of war rises dramatically.
This war did not begin with a single strike, nor even with a single generation of leaders. It emerged from decades of accumulating pressure: ideological hostility, proxy wars, nuclear brinkmanship, and the slow narrowing of diplomatic space between two states that came to define each other as existential adversaries. Once systems reach that point, the precise trigger often matters less than the forces that made a collision increasingly likely.
None of that makes the future inevitable. Wars remain contingent, shaped by human decisions and chance. But the path that brought the United States and Iran to this moment has been forming for a long time.
And like so many patterns in history, it is easiest to see only after the fog begins to clear.
Now that the war has begun, no one can say for sure where it will lead.
- The invocation of “black magic” is actually rather telling. The global security architecture underpinning modern trade, including crude oil trade, has been in place for so long that most people are barely aware of its existence, how it functions, or who pays for it.
- Few people appreciate the global complexity of the food production system we all rely on, or that it depends on freedom of navigation across the oceans to remain viable.
- They are also largely unaware of the critical role the seaborne oil trade plays in powering the agricultural machinery that feeds the world. Far from being immune to this, poorer countries are even more vulnerable to oil shocks that curtail supplies of agricultural diesel and fertilizer. If serious disruption were to persist for a year or more, excess global mortality could plausibly reach into the hundreds of millions.
- For those interested in the mechanics of this system, Vaclav Smil has quantified the diesel and petroleum inputs required to produce many food staples in his book How the World Really Works.
- The direct answer to how the world maintains this system is simple: the United States and a small number of allies largely provide the security architecture that keeps global trade functioning. Since 1945, the U.S. Navy has largely guaranteed that the world’s sea lanes remain open. The safe movement of food, fuel, fertilizer, and manufactured goods across the oceans is not automatic; it depends on a maritime security system that must be actively maintained.
- Every country on earth benefits from that system, including the ability to feed much of the world’s population, while the United States and a small number of allies bear most of the burden of maintaining it.
- Even now, we can see the asymmetry of the situation: Iranian tankers continue to sail to China not only unmolested, but through the straits of Malacca where US and allied sea power keeps their passage safe; meanwhile Iranian-backed forces attempt to sink civilian merchant ships belonging to countries that have no direct role in this conflict, in “retaliation” for U.S. strikes on Iran.
- The situation with Iran is particularly difficult because the United States is now pushing short-term destabilization in the hope of longer-term stabilization. Whether that calculation proves correct remains to be seen. It may indeed prove to be disastrous, but no sane person should be cheered by this, as many innocents will suffer as a result.
