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War On Iran – Regional Participation – U.S. Blames Israel
As the war on Iran continues it is getting even more difficult to assess the operational losses and the damage caused by either side. All parties, Iran, Israel, the U.S. and various Gulf countries, practice information warfare and censorship. They exaggerate their successes and do not admit their losses.
It makes little sense then to make any statements about the progress of the war as it unfolds on the ground. We will have to wait and look for irrefutable evidence before guessing the outcome.
A month ago the Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei had warned that any attack on Iran would develop into a regional war. He could have added that it would have global consequences.
Khamenei’s prediction has -to some extend- come true. Iran has attacked various U.S. bases in western Gulf countries. The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh was hit. Hizbullah in Lebanon has launched drones against a U.S./British base in Cyprus. Israel is invading Lebanon and the West Bank. Iraqi militia have launched attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Locals have attacked U.S. consulates in Pakistan.
But the Gulf countries themselves have not yet entered the war. They have spent their air defense after defending against missile and drone attacks on U.S. bases. They are now low on ammunition and the U.S. is in no position to back their needs.
Several small hits have been reported against oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Iran has denied to have attacked those sites. It is possible that Israel or the U.S. is launching these strikes to incite the Gulf states to more actively join their attack on Iran. I doubt that they are stupid enough to do so.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Qatar has stopped its production of Liquefied Petroleum Gas. Iraq is throttling its oil production as its storage capacity in Basra is full as no tankers arrive to load its products. All together some 20% of the daily global oil and gas production has been cut off or is endangered. Global oil and gas prices have already increased dramatically and are likely to rise further. Gas stocks in Europe are low as are oil reserves in India. A long war may well threaten the economic and social well being in those regions.
In its usual amateurish ways the Trump administration is trying to blame Israel (vid) for the start of the war:
Rubio: There was absolutely an imminent threat and it was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believe that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow
So the U.S. had to ‘pre-emptivly’ attack Iran because Israel was going to attack Iran?
The New York Times is trying to support that meme with the opening line of its tick-tock report about the start of the war placing the blame (archived) on the U.S. proxy:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel walked into the Oval Office on the morning of Feb. 11, determined to keep the American president on the path to war. …
But who ordered two aircraft carrier and some 250 U.S. attack planes to the Middle East? Who had urgently wished for Israel to attack Iran to have an excuse to join the fight?
Just a week ago Politico reported:
Senior advisers to President Donald Trump would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country, according to two people familiar with ongoing discussions.
These Trump administration officials are privately arguing that an Israeli attack would trigger Iran to retaliate, helping muster support from American voters for a U.S. strike.
The calculus is a political one — that more Americans would stomach a war with Iran if the United States or an ally were attacked first.
It is easy to blame Israel for this war but all the means to wage it, and the decision to launch it, were coming from the White House. The war was not started and is not fought for Israel but to advance the global position of the United States.
Rubio and Trump just want to cover their asses by misdirecting the anger of their MAGA follower over the war towards Israel. It is doubtful that any of them will swallow that nonsense.
It is the U.S. which wants to ‘regime change’ Iran. The chance to do that by air-power is zero. Their is also no proxy force, internally or externally, that would be willing to fight a ground war within Iran. Thus the U.S. campaign is destined become a failure.
A wider systems lens suggests that conflict with Iran is a major macro shock regardless of duration.
For two decades, markets have absorbed repeated blows: financial crises, prolonged wars, terrorism, supply-chain breakdowns, erratic geopolitics, and a pandemic. Energy volatility has structurally increased over that period. Not every shock is geopolitical, but energy disruptions sit near the center of most of them.
What makes this moment different is the degree of coupling. Energy, trade, food systems, climate stress, sanctions regimes, and financial markets are tightly interconnected and deeply financialized. Shocks now propagate faster and linger longer. Supply risk overlaps with demand destruction. Currency swings amplify credit stress. Tail risks are repriced more frequently and more aggressively.
The result is a higher-frequency, higher-amplitude uncontrollable regime. Margins move constantly. Commodities function both as industrial inputs and monetary hedges—physical necessities and stores of value against instability. Energy in particular carries a dual role: foundational input and geopolitical instrument. When confidence weakens, both roles assert themselves simultaneously.
What is unfolding around Iran is therefore not just a regional flare-up but a stress test of the broader order. Russia condemns rhetorically while avoiding direct intervention, signalling limits to its alignment with Tehran. China, dependent on Middle Eastern energy yet economically intertwined with the West, is cautious despite critical rhetoric. Strategic positioning collides with economic interdependence.
This is the paradox of the current system: fragmented politics layered over integrated trade and finance. Major powers remain deeply connected even as trust erodes. No actor is insulated. That is why Hormuz matters beyond oil tanker movements. The immediate signals are higher oil and gas prices, insurance repricing, and shipping adjustments. The deeper story is structural: politicized supply chains, conditional alliances, and economic flows increasingly shaped by strategic distrust.
The core issue is not whether this becomes episodic or structural. It is cumulative layering within a system that has become tightly complex and increasingly brittle. Shocks no longer clear before the next one arrives. They stack.
COVID fractured supply chains and normalized emergency state intervention. The Ukraine war weaponized energy, finance, and trade flows. The Iran crisis now pressures energy chokepoints, insurance markets, and great-power balances simultaneously. Each shock interacts with distortions left unresolved by the previous one. The strain is visible across tightly coupled global systems — energy, trade, food, finance, technology, defense, and transport.
These networked systems were optimized for efficiency and scale, not for persistent geopolitical stress. As complexity tightens, instability rises. Feedback loops accelerate. Trust erodes. Under pressure, systems simplify.
Simplification means reconfiguration — cutting off drag points, reducing exposure to unreliable counterparties, reshoring production, ring-fencing capital, duplicating supply chains, weaponizing trade policy. Efficiency gives way to resilience. Integration gives way to conditional alignment.
This is not theoretical. Even establishment financial figures now speak in transition language. In recent remarks at the World Economic Forum, former central banker Mark Carney PM of Canada framed the global economy as entering a period of structural adjustment and regime change rather than cyclical fluctuation. That shift in tone matters, one Carney is taking on a world tour.
It signals that recognition of systemic transition is no longer confined to critics of globalization but has entered mainstream institutional thinking. In other words, the awareness of systemic instability is no longer fringe — it is embedded at the highest levels of financial governance in the OECD. Even if the Iran crisis stabilizes quickly, it reinforces a world defined by higher risk premiums, defensive policy, and persistent mistrust. Decision-making increasingly occurs under information gaps and time pressure. Asymmetries widen. Misjudgments become more likely. When escalation occurs, fragmentation accelerates.
This is not just another headline cycle. It is another layer added to already stressed, deeply interconnected systems whose prior shocks have not been fully absorbed. The old order is visibly fraying, yet the replacement architecture remains unclear.
The direction is not subtle: greater volatility, thinner buffers, tighter coupling in some domains and abrupt decoupling in others; politicized supply chains; strategic use of energy and finance; and a global order struggling to reconfigure under compression. The instability is not accidental. It is the consequence of a system that grew highly integrated and financially complex — and is now being forced to adapt under sustained geopolitical pressure.
In short, the world is not simply experiencing repeated shocks. It is undergoing systemic compression. And compression forces change. Historically unexpected in form and timing.
Posted by: Systems Nerd | Mar 4 2026 5:00 utc | 689
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