“Oil War” – seize the oil fields before they’re blown up.
I can’t recall precisely, but I have a feeling I typically didn’t “win” playing the US/Europe…
On a completely separate note, RUSI comments on proposals to seize Kharg Island:
Suggestions that Trump may want to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s most important oil export terminal facility, sound sensible theoretically, but the logic dissolves under scrutiny. Taking or destroying this facility would severely dent Iran’s export capabilities, but Iran has plenty of other (albeit smaller) export terminals it could use. And Iran is a state where the collective memory is of extraordinary economic suffering during a bitter eight-year long war with Iraq in the 1980s that killed around half-a-million Iranians. Otherwise, Kharg is at the north end of the Gulf around 800 km past the Strait of Hormuz and 1000 km away from the comparatively safe open waters of the Arabian Sea. Operationally, any move against Kharg would be extraordinarily risky, placing US forces well within the Iranian ambit. If the US wants to impede Iran’s oil exports, a far simpler way would be to blockade Iranian exports in the Arabian Sea under an ‘Open For All or Closed To All’ plan, as Richard Haass outlined.
Speaking of winning, what might Iran’s goals be in this war? They didn’t start it, but they will have a say in how it ends. To understand how they may behave with regard to end the war, we need to know what they want.
I’ve said in earlier comments that one Iranian goal is likely to be lowering the odds of future attacks against Iran. There are lots of ways to do that, either diplomatically or militarily, but those mostly have little relevance as to when Iran might want to end the war. I suspect that Iran will want to impose high costs on Iran’s opponents as a way to dissuade potential future opponents from attacking. Bombing the heck out of Israel is an example of imposing costs on an attacker.
Bow does Iran impose costs on the U.S.? Because of our geography and natural endowments, the U.S. has suffered less economic harm than much of the rest of the world in this war. Iran can’t change that relative effect. It can, howevee, change the absolute effect by shortening or lengthening the closure of the Strait of Hormuz; it’s obvious Iran’s leaders are thinking about that.
So how long is long enough? If Iran wants political elites in the U.S. to think attacking Iran is a bad idea, but can’t do much physical harm, then imposing a high political cost is a reasonable goal. Removing the felon-in-chief from office is unlikely. Taking the Senate majority away from the felon’s Party, on the other hand, seems doable. Here’s the latest odds on Senate control from Kalshi:
https://kalshi.com/markets/controls/senate-winner/controls-2026
Big shift since the war started, from likely Republican control to nearly even odds. The longer high gasoline prices last, the closer to voting we come without relief, the better the odds that Republicans will lose. That loss would become part of the entrenched memory of U.S. political elites.
I doubt Iran will want to keep soaking up damage all the way to November. For now, though, I suspect that Iran’s leaders see their own long-term survival as being served by dragging things out. A couple of bad jobs reports, some cracks in the financial plumbing, and in particular, a serious further deterioration in Republican election prospects, seem reasonable goals for Iran in deciding how long to keep Hormuz bottled up.
The population in a brutal dictatorship has much bigger “tolerance” for suffering than the population in a democracy. The population in a country that suffer under an illegal attack from powerful foreign enemies are much more tolerant of hardship than the population that is given a dozen confused rationale for that suffering.