Theories of Victory in the War against Iran

A very foolish and ignorant man has made a decision. Unlike some people with a PhD, I won’t claim I can predict the future. If you want that, I recommend you find a haruspex and slaughter an ox. What he sees when the steaming liver gleams like a mirror may be true or plausible lies, but at least you will get a summer barbecue for your trouble. But I can describe the structure of the situation as I see it, just like I did in The Iron Horse in Ukraine.

The USA and some other countries can reduce Iran to radioactive rubble. Iran’s air force and air defense network are shattered and there is no defense against ICBMs. But they cannot occupy the country and impose their own regime. Iran has 88 million people in 1.6 million square kilometers, twice the population and four times the area of Iraq. If the USA and a coalition of the willing could not control Iraq, what chance do they have in a bigger country with worse terrain and a more diverse population? And trying to overthrow a government by launching a Pearl Harbour strike and hoping that the people rise up is not reliable. The lawless man who started this war has a habit of murdering Iranian generals, and one reason why most countries don’t do that is that its hard to negotiate with leaders who are worried you will poison the coffee at the negotiating table. Likewise, the USA broke the previous agreement with Iran to reduce sanctions in exchange for Iran accepting monitoring on its atomic program, and even if you don’t believe that Zeus punishes oathbreakers its hard to get people to follow a new treaty if you broke the last one. It is not clear to me that the USA and its allies can prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons just by bombing plants and murdering engineers. The current government of Iran has certainly made many mistakes and has many weaknesses, but the prospect of being lynched by revolutionaries or blown up in a drone strike does concentrate the mind.

The Iranian military has the capacity to close the mouth of the Persian Gulf to tankers (the Straits of Hormuz are less than 100 km wide). Supertankers are very expensive and no investor wants to see one of theirs on fire. Iran has an assortment of mines, land-based missiles, small boats, and drones. We have seen in the Black Sea how difficult it is for a navy to operate near a hostile coastline, and supertankers are much easier targets than warships. The USA probably has the capacity to break that blockade with time. But it took six months for the United States to stop the Houthis in Yemen from bombarding and hijacking passing ships, and the Houthis are a militia in a very poor country not the government of an industrialized country with atomic power plants and drone factories. The cost of breaking that blockade and shooting down the missiles was much greater than the cost of making it. Bullshit is not the only area of life governed by an asymmetry principle. And because oil prices are governed by an efficient global market, the blockade of the Persian Gulf fields would likely cause prices around the world to explode. A quarter of the world’s oil consumption passes through the straits, and the Persian Gulf is a gulf, so tankers trapped inside it can not simply sail out the other end.

Blocking the straits would not force the countries attacking Iran to negotiate. But it would probably feel satisfying after months of humiliation, and the 21st century is a time where states act more like ancient aristocrats than rational actors from political science textbooks.

I can not tell you whether the Iranian government will close the straits of Hormuz or launch a crash nuclear-weapons program. I do not have access to secret intelligence on the American strikes, and if I did I would not be blogging about it. I have been struggling not to express my personal opinions of the three regimes involved in this war. But I struggle to see how either of the countries at war with Iran can force Iran to give up the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, and Iran can probably block the Straits of Hormuz to tankers for weeks or months.

I don’t trust any of the states which have nuclear weapons, and if they have to exist I would like as few states as possible to have them. But I am not sure that either country attacking Iran has the capacity to make it a country which could never develop nuclear weapons, short of using their own. And most states not involved in this conflict do not agree that Iran had moved from expanding its nuclear program to actually building an atomic bomb.

(scheduled 22 June 2025)

PS. a reasonable-looking account of uncertainty about the impact of the US strike is Peter Beaumont, “Trump insists ‘monumental damage’ done by US strikes in Iran but others are more cautious,” The Guardian, 21 June 2025 (it does not address the assassination of scientists and engineers by other strikes and car bombings, although it certainly takes time to train a PhD in atomic physics or a BSc in nuclear engineering). It is absolutely possible that this campaign has put Iran farther from being able to develop a nuclear weapon than Canada is.

Gwynne Dyer writes handy summaries of treaty negotiations and violations between countries like Iran and the US power system.

I also think that telling a foreign government “we think you are planning to build nuclear weapons, and we will bomb you but not invade you to stop it, and we would be happy if you were overthrown by a revolution” is not a wise way to stop then from developing a nuclear weapon.

PPS. A lot of Iranians who are not named Pahlavi are not happy with the current regime. I am not sure where to find their thoughts because “Internet blackout in Iran” and “theocracy” but it might be helpful to refresh yourself on them.