After a Month, Will the Storm of War Swallow Its Own Parties Before It Subsides?
- sara john
- Mar 29
- 5 min read
Samir al-Taqi
The images of this war are not confined to a crater in a runway or a cloud of smoke above a facility. Many other images must be added to them: paralyzed tankers, insurance policies, emergency plans at Asian refineries, and the grim silence hanging over central banks.
A believer does not fall into the same pit twice. Yet Trump fell, out of fondness for Netanyahu’s deception, twice: first, in the twelve-day war over Iran’s alleged proximity to producing the bomb; and second, over the imminent collapse of the Iranian regime.
But after a month of this war, one central fact becomes clear: Iran is not a banana republic. Its vital extremities have been struck at considerable depth, but it has not been paralyzed, and that gives the conflict additional life.
For a state that loses without being defeated remains locked in agony with its exhausting wounds, like a bleeding wolf, and remains capable of denying its adversaries a decisive victory. How many incomplete wars there have been in this Middle East.
And the lesson is this: whoever triumphs, triumphs through politics; and whoever is defeated, is defeated through politics. For politics does not emerge from missile launch pads, but from authority over rule on the ground. And Tehran is not governed from the sky, but from the ground.
For its part, Israel is not proposing peace with Iran. Rather, it sees any Iranian commitment not accompanied by Iran’s final and structural defeat as a hollow and fragile obligation. For its part as well, and as the twelve-day war demonstrated, Iran sees in a ceasefire nothing more than a tactical respite and preparation to restore deterrence in a coming round.
In this zero-sum game of arm-twisting, unless the political context of the conflict changes, each side will wager that its adversary will tire before it does. Both will rekindle “the fire from the smallest spark.”
From the American perspective, Netanyahu is betting on Trump’s need for a manifest victory, while Iran is betting on raising the cost of decisive resolution and transforming the war from a short campaign into a long bargaining process. Indeed, it is working to convince Trump that he has already won, while raising the cost to America of bringing the battle to a conclusion, whether in Hormuz or if it descends onto the ground.
As roughly 20 percent of humanity’s energy needs pass through Hormuz, the two parties to the conflict are gripping the throat of the strait so that Asia may choke on it, European banks may feel it, and opinion polls in America may decline.
Iran does not need to close the strait completely. It needs only uncertainty, fear, and rising insurance premiums. Nor do alternative routes alter the context of the crisis. When the door narrows, the windows do not compensate for it. Thus economic inflation—4 percent in the G20 economies during 2026—returns to the heart of the global stage. The barrel no longer remains a commodity in the market; it quickly moves into the consumer’s pocket and the ballot box.
Iran brandishes a present card like a deferred check: it is smaller in size, yet denser and more dangerous. It is the 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, of which Rafael Grossi confirms that the nuclear authority has not been able to track more than half.
Theoretically, this stockpile, if processed appropriately from a technical standpoint, would be sufficient to produce fissile material for more than ten bombs. Thus these bombs remain merely a project, but they render every truce temporary unless their file is closed.
Yes, the nature of the regime in Iran has changed—but not exactly as Netanyahu desires. The longer the conflict endures, the more the fraying of the Iranian regime takes shape, such that it becomes more heavily militarized, more inclined to seek shelter in the language of siege and survival, and its discourse becomes militarized, nationalist, saturated with wounds and ferocity.
History is not ornamentation; it is a mirror of possibilities. In the Tanker War during the 1980s, the United States began escorting tankers reflagged under the American flag in Operation Earnest Will, then responded in Operation Praying Mantis in 1988 after the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine. The lesson was not that convoys are useless, but that Gulf geography grants coastal power a permanent ability to harass, even in the face of a navy greater than itself. Narrow waterways do not require massive armies to become dangerous; they require only the collapse of international law and a few mines and boats.
In 1973 and 1974, oil was not cut off forever, but the shock was enough for the price first to double and then to rise to nearly four times its level, plunging the global economy into the tunnel of inflation and recession together. The U.S. Department of State and the Federal Reserve documented how that shock deepened existing imbalances and pushed governments to rethink strategic reserves, fuel efficiency, and the limits of dependence on external sources.
Like a spark in a field, energy wars do not need to last long in order to ignite a fire at the international level.
Iran is, in practical terms, seeking to turn the Arab Gulf into an open center of international conflict: deterrence without trust, bargaining without agreements or peace, sea lanes under the domination of guns, and anxious markets. Indeed, Iran persists in denying its Arab neighborhood and in its brazen aggressions against it.
For their part, the Arab Gulf states understand that some wars do not emerge from missile platforms alone, but through strangling energy sources and their tankers, and through entrenching the threats of “centrifuges.” They are therefore trying to push international diplomatic action so that the Strait of Hormuz may become a focal point of regional consensus guaranteed by the international community.
As for Washington, another front is opening there, one that appears less noisy.
For the disagreement within the administration over the continuation of the war is not, in essence, between advocates of war and advocates of peace.
There are those who want to perpetuate the strangling of Iran—militarily and financially—until it surrenders all its cards. And there are those who fear that pressure, if prolonged, will turn into a swamp applauded by Israel and one in which America sinks.
Trump told his aides that he wants negotiation and to avoid an “eternal war.” Vance embodies this hesitation in a telling way: the man known for his inward-looking tendency, to the point that Trump himself described him as “less enthusiastic” about striking Iran. As for Rubio, he has become the voice of this organized anxiety; he keeps repeating that the operation should be measured in weeks, not months, and that its objectives can be achieved without ground forces.
And in the Pentagon, there is strenuous work to narrow the objectives of the war. Its hesitation is not confined to the political side, but extends to cold professional calculation: the depletion of precision munitions, the widening scope of deployment, and the fear that any step on the ground may lead to a new version—repellent and familiar alike—recalling the smell of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And in politics, as at sea, the storm is not measured by the height of the waves, but by the force of the current that may push the ship where it does not wish to go. So will the storm of war swallow all its parties before it subsides?
If you want, I can now make it even more polished and literary in true Chicago-style English while still keeping every single meaning intact.
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