The U.S. and Israel are aiming for the total destruction of the Islamic Republic. Iran is countering by globalizing the consequences of a war in its energy rich region. It calculates that the global economy will attrit sufficiently for the U.S. to change course before Iran’s internal cohesion breaks down.
When Trump announced his attack on Iran he named several seemingly random aims that the war was supposed to achieve. It turned out that none of them was achievable.
Trump and his mouthpieces seemed to assume that the war would be short. They had hoped for some kind of Venezuelan scenario where a U.S. friendly government would take over as soon as the Supreme Leader of Iran was killed. Such a view could only be held by people who were totally ignorant of the history and social structure of the society of Iran.
Ignorance is probably the most explanatory variable in the chaos we have seen. Neither the purpose, nor the length nor the consequences of the war had been gamed out.
The National Security Council, which has the task to plan out policies, had been cut down. The State Department was hardly involved in the planning. Warnings by the Pentagon have been ignored.
Trump went by his pants, got into a huge mess, and has yet to find a way to get out (archived):
When he came to office, Mr. Trump reduced the size of the N.S.C. staff by at least two thirds, casting out some of its members because of vague suspicions about their loyalty. Mr. Trump has made clear that his N.S.C. is not there to generate options, but to execute his decisions.
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“Trump seems to think he doesn’t need options or contingency plans,” said Thomas Wright, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who worked on long-term strategic planning in the National Security Council during the Biden years. “He just wants a small team to execute his instincts. But when events go wrong, as they often do, a president without prepared choices will be gambling with a pair of twos.”
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“Never has so much risk or such sweeping military action of so much consequence been undertaken with so little apparent planning or weighing of potential consequences, both intended and unintended,” [David Rothkopf] said.It is the military, he notes, that develops operational plans, which are then vetted at the N.S.C. “That process has atrophied to virtually nothing in this administration and what planning there has been is often ignored by a president who trusts his own instincts more than any advisers. That may work with actions that are narrow in scope, but it does not when waging war against a large, consequential country like Iran.”
The Armchair Warrior notes that the Trump administration has already failed with three of its plans and is currently trying a fourth one:
– Plan A: Kill Khamenei, new leaders surrender
– Plan B: Kill Khamenei, mass civil unrest, regime change
– Plan C: Ethnic insurgents mobilize, ???, profit
– Plan D: Actually get air dominance and bomb indefinitely until they surrender
Israel meanwhile is perusing Plan Z: the total destruction (archived) of everything that defines modern Iran:
Israel’s endgame was the “total destruction of this regime, of the pillars of this regime, of everything that holds it together: the IRGC, the Basij [grassroots militia], its strategic capabilities”, said Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert and senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies.
Removing Iran’s ability to threaten Israel — primarily via missiles and a nascent nuclear programme — was the “obvious” endgame, but even more important to Israel’s government, Citrinowicz added, was “undermining this regime [so] it has to deal with internal problems”.
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Summarising the Israeli government’s position, Citrinowicz said: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran.
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If a new leadership just as hardline rose up from the ashes of this war, “they will be dealt with as well”, said the former senior Israeli official.A person familiar with Israeli government thinking said: “Israel wants to destroy the Iranian regime’s capabilities to such an extent that it will not have to fight another round. They don’t want rounds two, three and four. They want to finish the job now.”
It seems that the Zionist plan is to do another “Gaza” on the nation of Iran. I probably would not mind to extend that plan to the whole Gulf region.
Parts of the Trump administration seem to endorse that plan:
[Sec. of Defense] Hegseth: Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.
The USraeli bombing campaign is hitting all over Iran:
Iran’s Emergency Medical Services Chief says that across 29 provinces and 172 cities targeted by US and Israeli strikes, …
The widespread attacks, which has hit at civilian targets like hospitals, schools, police stations just as much as at military targets, will have little effect on the will of Iranian people to fight back.
Iran is countering the U.S. campaign with its most dangerous weapon. Its geography allows it to hold all energy and transport in the Gulf region at risk.
This is causing many effects the Trump administration had not planned for. U.S. gas prices are rising:
President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is telling his advisers to bring ideas to the Oval Office to lower gasoline prices in the wake of the U.S. attack on Iran, according to two energy industry executives familiar with the conversations.
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The attack and Iran’s subsequent targeting of the Persian Gulf’s energy sector has sent crude oil up more than $10 a barrel, lifting gasoline prices to their highest levels since Trump took office last year.
Closing the Strait of Hormuz and rising the price of energy was one of the most obvious countermoves available to the Iranian side. But the Trump administration had not planned for it:
[Energy Secretary Chris] Wright […] has so far not publicly broached the subject of energy prices since the attack.
That’s on purpose, said a third energy industry executive who talked to White House officials right after the U.S. attack began Saturday. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other hawkish members of the administration were leading the administration’s planning, but other administration officials who would normally argue to keep oil prices low had initially been told to take a back seat while the fighting in Iran continues, this person said.
“The faction of the White House that would care about $80-90 oil [was] being silenced,” said this person, who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations with the administration. ”There [were] louder voices winning at the moment.”
The concern for rising oil and natural gas prices brought by the war is a relatively new thing, said industry executives. The Trump administration did not start hitting the phones to discuss ways to calm oil and gas markets until several days after the attacks started and oil prices started rising.
Iran has announced that it would attack ships which were passing through the Strait of Hormuz. The insurance companies used this threat to up their prices. The high risk and lack of insurance has led ship owners to stop their vessels.
Some 20% of the world oil, gas and fertilizer has to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The closure of the Strait has many cascading global effects:
Oil and LNG fail as inputs into electricity, fertilizer, shipping, chemicals, mining, manufacturing, and state finance.
As an example, The global polyester chain begins in petrochemicals. A severe disruption to hydrocarbon and petrochemical feedstocks cascades into PTA, MEG, polyester resin, filament, and fabric production, causing acute shortages, price spikes, and factory stoppages across synthetic-heavy apparel segments. The industry does not vanish overnight, but the low-cost, high-volume apparel model starts to break down.
From this follows a chain whose logic is cumulative: fuel inflation becomes fertilizer inflation; fertilizer inflation becomes food inflation; food inflation becomes urban instability, sovereign subsidy exhaustion, and ultimately hunger. In this sequence, food shortages are not a secondary humanitarian issue. They are one of the central political outcomes of the crisis, because modern populations do not experience systemic breakdown first through grand strategy, but through unaffordable bread, intermittent power, empty pharmacies, and possibly the collapse of public order. A globalised Arab Spring.
In this framework, hyperinflation emerges as the social expression of real physical bottlenecks. When energy-importing states are forced to acquire dollarized fuel at any price, when currencies weaken, when fertilizer and transport costs reprice an entire harvest cycle, inflation ceases to be cyclical and becomes coercive.
It enters every household budget and every state ledger at once. The result is the destruction of planning itself: firms cannot quote, governments cannot subsidize, and populations can no longer calculate the future. Under such conditions, credit markets seize up, foreign-exchange reserves drain, sovereign spreads widen, and the boundary between economic crisis and political crisis disappears.
Yesterday stocks in South Korea, which to 97% depends on fossil energy imports, were down by 18%. Retail investors were panicking. Taiwan, which produces 80% of the high end chips in this world, has a gas reserve for only 11 days. Its electricity network, and the chip production depending on it, will soon be in trouble. It is planting season in many parts of the globe and the price for urea have gone up to unreasonable levels. The prices for bread will follow.
The short campaign the Trump administration had hoped for in Iran is turning into a long war of attrition. The U.S. and Israel will do their best to bomb Iran – all of it – to smithereens. Iran will to its best to enforce a near blockade on the Strait of Hormuz and the whole Gulf region.
U.S. allies in the Gulf will suffer. Global container carriers have stopped to accept traffic to Gulf port. Food security in the Gulf states is at risk.
The global economy will suffer an energy shock with all the financial and social consequences that entails.
The U.S. is to some extend autarkic and can sustain a sharp rise in energy prices. But many of its allies, who did not speak up when the U.S. attacked Iran, will soon be in very deep trouble.
Iran will suffer huge damage. But it is likely that the U.S. will be the first to blink.