This weekend, Donald Trump has begun to say the quiet part out loud -- that he wants to take control of Iran's oil, a formulation more in line with his robber-baron style of international relations.
Prem Panicker continues his must read daily blog on the Gulf War.
There comes a moment in any war when diplomacy, though invoked by rote, ceases to matter. This feels like one of those moments.
The fourth week of the war had begun with loud optimism about the prospects of mediation.
The news cycle spoke of Pakistan as both venue and facilitator; names of possible interlocutors, at least on the American side, were floated and as quickly rejected, Trump injected optimism into the markets (with little success, though)...
A week later mediation, such as it is, appears to have been given the go-by, though it is still occasionally referenced.
The United States talks of backchannels; Iran dismisses them; and on the ground, the war proceeds with an accelerated brutality that makes both positions feel beside the point.
Israel and Iran are no longer probing each other's defences. They are hitting sensitive targets regularly, with the kind of force that suggests as far as they are concerned, the war has settled into a phase of attrition. [Guardian (external link)]
Washington, for its part, seems to be preparing for a much longer conflict than was originally envisaged (Vice President J D Vance said over the weekend that the US does not want to be in Iran 'for more than one or two years' -- years, note, not weeks).
Each day brings news of fresh troops being committed to 'limited' ground operations. [Guardian (external link)]
US Prepares Long Iran War
Key Points
- Iran-Israel conflict has shifted into sustained attrition, with intensified strikes and diminishing prospects for meaningful diplomacy.
- US signals preparation for prolonged engagement, with troop movements and logistics suggesting potential expansion into extended ground operations.
- Global oil and LNG markets face tightening supply as disruptions in Hormuz and Red Sea threaten critical trade routes.
- Multiple conflict zones, including Ukraine strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, are compounding global energy instability.
- Asia, especially India and developing economies, faces immediate energy stress as LNG shortages and rising prices ripple across markets.
More importantly, the stated objectives of the war are shifting in plain sight.
The 'emancipation of Iranian women' has fallen out of sight; 'regime change' merely succeeded in replacing relatively moderate leaders with hardline successors.
Opening the Strait of Hormuz was in any case risible -- the Strait was open before the war began, so all that means is a return to status quo ante. [Al Jazeera (external link)]
Houthis Expand Red Sea Conflict
This weekend, Donald Trump has begun to say the quiet part out loud -- that he wants to take control of Iran's oil, a formulation more in line with his robber-baron style of international relations.
Beyond the battlefield, the consequences are no longer abstract. Oil markets are tightening as traffic through the Strait remains sporadic.
Prices are climbing, even as key links in the supply chain are breaking.
As far as the world at large is concerned, the war is no longer a contained conflict -- it is taking on the contours of a spreading systemic shock. [Axios (external link)]
As if all this were not enough, another front is opening up.
The Houthis have stepped up on the side of Iran, extending the theatre of conflict into the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb, another narrow artery through which global trade is forced to pass. [Reuters (external link); Guardian (external link)]
Hormuz Disruption Hits Global Oil
Layer onto this a second front in everything but name.
In Ukraine, strikes on Russian oil infrastructure are now biting deep into production capacity, adding further strain to an already unstable energy landscape.
The effect is cumulative: Multiple conflicts across different geographies, all converging on an increasingly fragile system. [CNN (external link); Al Jazeera (external link)]
It is hard to see recent developments as the outcome of some coherent strategy.
A war prosecuted with no clearly defined outcome now appears to be making its own decisions, with each move narrowing the available options for the next one.
For Iran, the problem is how to hang on and continue inflicting damage till the US and Israel decide they have had enough.
And for the two aggressor nations, the question is no longer how to win, but how to stop and exit with a semblance of face.
What the war looks like from Tehran's streets: Al Jazeera's Maziar Motamedi reports from a city that is trying to hold its shape in the midst of severe bombardment.
Armed checkpoints, Basij patrols, loudspeakers summoning residents to mosque gatherings, children as young as 12 being recruited into security patrols.
The Internet has been blacked out for a month. Nearly 2,000 killed, the government says.
And still, people walk to the gym, visit neighbours, try to find a routine inside the fear.
Such reporting lives on its details, and the one that stayed with me is this: A woman in the affluent north of Tehran who has left her home three times in a month, worried that an official in an adjacent alley might make her family collateral. [Al Jazeera (external link)]
The morning after that nobody planned for: Eric Alter, dean of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, asks the question Washington appears to have avoided: what happens the day after?
He walks through Iraq and Libya as case studies in what fills the vacuum when military success outruns political planning.
Iran, he argues, is even harder: a civilization with two thousand years of self-governance, a technocratic class that has accommodated successive regimes, and a regional militia architecture (Hezbollah, the Houthis, the PMF in Iraq) that has grown its own roots and will not simply switch off when Tehran changes hands.
Then there is the uranium: current whereabouts uncertain.
'The question of what happens to the enriched uranium during a governance transition is not a technical detail that can be addressed later.' [The National Interest (external link)].
The escalation nobody wanted to name: Simon Tisdall in The Guardian does not pull punches.
Trump is caught between maximalist demands he cannot deliver and a ground war he cannot afford, either politically or militarily.
Iran's surviving leadership, dominated now by hardliners, believes it is winning by surviving.
Trump's 15-point peace plan amounts to a demand for total surrender; Iran's counter-demands include reparations and guaranteed sovereignty over Hormuz. Neither side is close to the other.
Tisdall's summary of the trap is blunt: 'Cave or escalate'. The piece is opinionated in the way Guardian commentary tends to be, but the structural analysis is sound. [The Guardian (external link)]
The man who saw it coming -- and was shown the door: Nate Swanson spent nearly two decades in the US government, most recently on Trump's Iran negotiating team.
Days before the February 28 strikes, he published a piece in Foreign Affairs predicting exactly what Iran would do.
He was pushed out after a tweet from Laura Loomer flagged him as an Obama holdover.
In this Politico interview, he is careful but clear: both sides are "irrationally confident," there is no off-ramp in sight, and the most likely forcing function for de-escalation is not diplomacy but markets, the one indicator Trump actually watches.
His read on what Iran wants is worth noting: a permanent toll on Hormuz, and a guarantee this doesn't happen again in six months.
Neither is something Washington can easily give. [Politico (external link)]
Ground War Signals Emerging
The logistics tell the story: Robert Pape, writing in his Substack Escalation Trap, offers the most structurally rigorous analysis of where this is heading.
His argument: The signal of ground war is logistics.
In Vietnam, the shift from air war to ground war was visible weeks before Johnson's July 1965 announcement, in the expansion of port capacity, fuel stockpiles, and airlift cycles. The same indicators are now appearing around the Gulf.
Around 5,000 Marines are in theatre; elements of the 82nd Airborne have deployed; the Pentagon is drawing up contingency plans for sustained ground operations.
'The ground war did not begin when troops landed. It began when the system to sustain them was built.'
Watch the C-17 cycles, not the press conferences. [Escalation Trap (external link)]
A note on what Iran just demonstrated: Worth pausing on a data point that has not received the attention it deserves.
Iranian forces appear to have damaged or destroyed multiple USAF KC-135 aerial refueling tankers parked in the open at Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia.
KC-135s are what keeps US strike aircraft aloft over Iran. Losing them degrades sortie capacity directly.
The broader point, made sharply by analyst Ron Filipkowski: Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb destroyed a significant portion of Russia's strategic aviation by targeting planes parked in the open.
Did the Pentagon look at that, and conclude it didn't apply to them?
Iran's precision missile capabilities are, by most assessments, orders of magnitude beyond Ukraine's. The question answers itself. [Twitter/X (external link)]
Track the weapons, track the war: For those who want to follow the military dimensions day by day, the Iran War Weapons & Attacks Tracker, built and maintained by Anushka Saxena and drawing on CENTCOM, ISW, and official defence ministry statements, is the most comprehensive open-source resource currently available.
It covers the battlefield timeline, weapons systems deployed by every party, maritime attacks, and the broader ecosystem of actors. [Iran War Tracker (external link)]
Asia Faces LNG Supply Crunch
When the gas runs out: The New York Times today carries the piece that puts the energy consequences in their starkest form.
The buffer of LNG cargoes that left the Persian Gulf before Hormuz closed is running out. The last of those ships arrive this week.
Asia, which buys roughly 90 percent of Middle Eastern LNG, is about to feel the physical impact of non-delivery.
India is ordering coal plants to run at full capacity for three months. Pakistan has closed schools to conserve fuel.
In Vietnam, factories are slowing. Taiwan, which has retired much of its coal capacity and phased out nuclear, has few options.
The richer economies such as Japan, South Korea and China, can bid on spot markets, but as one analyst notes, that comes at the direct expense of poorer countries who cannot.
The longer-term damage may be structural: 'The entire concept of LNG being a reliable fuel is undermined.'
For India, caught between two stressed chokepoints simultaneously -- Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb -- this is a catastrophe knocking on the door. [New York Times (external link)]
In passing...
The war is a month old, and it has already outgrown every framework used to explain it: Limited strike, regime change, negotiated exit.
What remains is a conflict that is generating its own momentum and sending its costs outward in every direction.
The bill, as usual, will be paid by people who had no vote in any of it.
- EARLIER BLOGS: The New Fog of War
- Has US Repeated Its Iraq Mistake?
- Hormuz Crisis Threatens Global Economy
- Iran War Exposes Washington's Strategic Chaos
- Iran Plays Hardball With India's Hormuz Requests
- Trump Is Caught Between Two Bad Options
- Iran Rewrites Rules of War
- Why Did Israel Kill Ali Larijani?
- Trump's War Has Crossed Energy Rubicon. And There's No Turning Back
- War Exposes Cracks in US-Israel Alliance
- Gulf War: Hormuz Is Becoming The Central Battlefield
- Will Trump's 5 Day Pause End The War On Friday?
- Trump's Pause Gives Iran NOTHING!
- Will Trump Send Troops To Iran By The Weekend?
- Gulf War: US, Israel Didn't Expect This To Happen
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff
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