As I write, the US president is threatening to kill Iranian civilisation, ‘never to be brought back again.’ The craziest thing is not the business of threatening genocide on impulse. It’s the fact that we won’t even remember this in a week. There will be some other flashpoint, some other deadline. I’m laying my cards on the table: Trump is bluffing again, just like two weeks ago when he extended a 48-hour deadline to 5 days and then appeared to forget about it altogether.

Sooner or later, the bluffs will spill over into escalating horrors, because the terrifying logic of this situation means there is an ‘up’ button but no ‘down’ button. And yes, this might be the time it spills over. So if I’m wrong and Trump abides by his deadline in some more-than-token way, it will do more than add a few more pages to the catalogue of sordid and pointless war crimes. It will provoke an escalation that will make the blowback so far seem mild. So I don’t make this prediction lightly. But I am sick of how Trump keeps saying nonsense that he doesn’t follow up on, and we still hang on his every grotesque word.

To get some sense of order out of all this chaos, and as we wait for Trump either to fulfil his threat or forget about it, let’s run through the various facets of this war in turn: what I’ll capitalise as the (1) Machine War, (2) the Oil War, (3) the Regional War and (4) the potential for a Ground War. The latter two I will hold back for a separate post to go up in a few days.

The Machine War

Fatalities on the US/Israel side have stayed strikingly low through 39 days of war (from what we can gather through the screen of wartime censorship) while, by contrast, the death and destruction in Iran and Lebanon have been appalling. But don’t be fooled by that. The basic idea I laid out back on March 3rd was: the US has walked into a situation which only their adversary, Iran, actually has the power to end. The war is not over while Iran is still hitting US assets with drones and missiles, still saying who passes through the straits. In my post from Day 12 of the war I placed importance on the idea of a ‘missile-interceptor gap;’ weeks later, I’m not sure if this was right: Iran is still bombing away due to its bottleneck of launching capacity while on the other side it’s not clear if their woes are due to “running out of interceptors” as such.

A lot of the questions I posed were answered on March 21st when Iranian strikes hit Arad and Dimona in Israel. Footage showed massive destruction, and 180 injuries were reported in a single evening. We are still seeing near-daily reports of successful strikes on Israel in particular but also on facilities across the Gulf. Is this the missile-interceptor gap, the effect of cluster munitions, or the sooner-or-later outcome of a numbers game where if there are enough missiles no so-called “iron dome” can catch em all?

On March 21st, Israel’s health ministry stated that over 4,292 people in Israel had been injured since the start of the war, a number that has surged since then. As of today, officially 39 people including soldiers have been killed. The disproportion between injuries and fatalities generally strikes me as odd. The idea that no-one lost their lives in Arad or Dimona seems strange to me as the pictures showed buildings really flattened.

Another straw in the wind is a report on US personnel in the Gulf being forced to ‘work remotely.’ This puts an image in my head of Napoleon explaining that his army has to ‘work remotely’ from Moscow. This places the “fatalities are so low” argument in a different light. They are low because the US facilities have been abandoned (and the naval vessels are anchored thousands of miles away). The low fatalities on the US side (taking them at face value) are not in this case a measure of success. There’s nothing new about running away as a means of reducing fatalities.

Hegseth brags about ‘lethality’ as if killing people were an end in itself. (Maybe it is, for him and for his church. And he calls Iran a death cult!) But the really crazy thing about this war is that the US bombardment is many times greater than the Iranian bombardment in ‘lethality’ – but so much less effective. In the future it will be difficult for history teachers to explain this. But the strategic reality is what it is. Speaking very broadly, the Iranians are fighting for survival and are ready to endure suffering. The Americans are ‘like the poor cat i’ the adage’ who want to catch fish without wetting their paws.

Oil War

The conflict over the oil fields is a warning. On March 18 Israel bombed the South Pars oil field, which is shared by Qatar and Iran. The US government were angry at Israel for escalating the war, so angry that they threatened to punish… Iran. Iran escalated in response with more attacks on oil facilities, then the US threatened an astronomical escalation, then extended the deadline, then extended it again, and again… What interested me about this episode was that it pushed the world to the brink of a far greater escalation. And a few weeks later we are again on the brink. It’s a measure of how wild the situation is: the US government has blown up tens of thousands of targets in Iran, and the Iranian government has closed the Strait of Hormuz. You’d think that was extreme, but there’s a lot of room left to escalate. Things can still get a lot worse and it’s easy to see how.

On the other hand it’s very difficult to see how things could get better, how the oil could flow again: even if Trump changes his meds and declares victory, Netanyahu could kick things off again with some unilateral action that would spoil a deal. The US have now essentially established a set of rules where negotiating is just a cover for the next act of aggression, which means that even if Trump and Netanyahu are both visited by seasonal ghosts who scare them into changing their ways, the Iranians will not come to the table for fear that the table will be blown up.

The Oil War is really having an effect. At the start of this war the countries of Western Europe came out very much on the US/Israel side. This was surprising given they had been mad at Trump over Greenland only weeks before. The way the war is dragging on, and the way things have gone with Hormuz especially, has pushed the US-Europe relationship back to where it was over Greenland. The anger from world leaders toward Trump for choosing to create this situation is very obvious. The Gulf countries are in a far more desperate situation. There are hints that Saudi Arabia and the UAE would support a broadened US war. I doubt Qatar and Oman are pushing the same agenda.

The US cannot replace the Iranian government. The US cannot collapse Iran as a state. The US cannot spirit away a huge quantity of highly enriched Uranium. The US cannot disarm Iran. The US cannot make the Strait of Hormuz safe on US terms (see my post from Day 20). You can’t make predictions so early in a conflict that could last years. But right now the US has no way to achieve any of its stated goals.

A pattern we see in many wars – arguably in Ukraine – is that the weaker side, intoxicated by early wins, overplays its hand and misses an opportunity to cut a deal before the tide turns. Trump is threatening to carry out massive-scale war crimes against Iran. But from the Iranian point of view, I would imagine there is little the US and Israel can do that would make the situation significantly more serious than it is, short of a nuclear attack or a ground invasion. I think that right now the Iranian leaders would only be ‘crazy bastards’ if they reopened the ‘fuckin’ straits’ and sat down with the Americans for another game of negotiate/assassinate. Trump’s speeches and posts read like a man who is trying, with mounting desperation, to scare people who are already beyond fear. The threats fail to hide a deep fear of further escalation.

Often over these last ten years it has felt like the entire human race was being forced to live inside the brain of Donald Trump. But reality is asserting itself and it now feels like we are on an interface between Trump’s grey matter and a real world that has ceased to cooperate with him solipsism. The mullahs are more formidable opponents than Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. It is even clearer now than it was a month ago: the US-Israel alliance can cause a lot of pain and suffering, but they can’t win this war.

Stay tuned. In a few days I will post a follow-up looking at the various frontlines of this war across the region, and assessing the potential for a ground invasion of Iran.