People hate it when I do this, but sometimes I just have to nerd out on geo-strategy and my geostrategic Spidey senses are tingling up a storm, telling me that no matter how many times Trump insists he’s obliterated the Iranians, or cut a perfect deal with the Iranians, the end result of this will be a ‘yuuuge win’ for the Iranians Mullahs, an even bigger win for Beijing, and a world historical amount of suckage for everyone else.

Is this getting too wonky yet?

Allow me to explain.

There will be no unconditional surrender from Tehran, nor any meaningful reform of the regime. The ceiling on ambition now is a negotiated settlement that lands us somewhere close to the old status quo, albeit altered in ways that now favour the murderous theocratic regime this gigantic clusterfuck was meant to change. And yes, that’s Iran, just in case you’re struggling to keep track of which of these three murderous theocracies is currently having the best week. Iran is so far doing the bestest with the mostest of their strategic objectives, with Israel a close second, and the Trump regime disqualified from even competing because it turns out Washington has no strategic objectives, just a mad king with accelerating dementia and no impulse control.

How can Israel and Iran both be winning?

Because their strategic aims compete without quite cancelling one another out. Israel’s military seeks to degrade Iran’s nuclear and conventional capabilities, and the Israeli leadership is focused on keeping Bibi Netanyahu out of prison, which is easier done in a state of permanent crisis. Iran, for its part, pursues the asymmetric punishment of its adversaries via the use of military force against hugely vulnerable economic targets, while its political strategy is to outlast the will of its principal attacker, the US.

And fam, it’s smashing out its KPIs on both.

The incoherence of US aims is probably best captured in this piece by a British observer on the Stack, which is both hilarious and not the least bit funny:

This week, the US Treasury lifted all oil sanctions on Iran. For 30 days. 140 million barrels of Iranian crude, sitting on ships at sea, may now be sold freely on the global market. Including to the United States itself.

In yuan.

The United States is purchasing, with Chinese currency, oil from the country it is currently bombing?! The same oil that funds the missiles that just shot down an F-35 for the first time.[4] The same missiles that are redecorating allied oil infrastructure. . . .

The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that.

Yes, everything is proceeding splendidly, and the good times are being widely shared. Say what you will about the psychopath in the Oval Office, he does have a talent for bringing people together around the shared experience of everything falling apart. The Thai fishing fleet is stranded in port with no fuel for its trawlers. Koreans are being urged by their government to take shorter showers because every tiny spark of electricity saved pushes back the moment when their cities go dark. Millions of Vietnamese scooter riders are burning through their last reserves of petrol, zipping from one gas station to the next, looking in vain for a fill-up. And here in Vegemiteland, the government has embraced the opportunity to polish up its world-class skills in reality denial.

The Iranian leadership, meanwhile, contemplates a new reality. They don’t even need to build that bomb. After all, why get all sweaty and grimy digging all of that enriched uranium out of the rubble at Isfahan, when you’ve demonstrated you can punch holes in the global economy with a couple of cheap Shahed drones? Sure, they’re not much good at turning Tel Aviv into a glowing sheet of radioactive glass, but a couple of dozen drones slamming into Israel’s five main desalination plants will still kill plenty of your least favourite infidels.

As much as the Mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard are currently winning, by their own definition of victory, Trump and the US are far from done losing. Iran throws cheap drones and missiles across the Persian Gulf, and the go-to response is high-end interceptors that cost a fortune and quickly deplete hard-to-replace war stocks. The math is not subtle: bargain-bin attacks, luxury-priced defences, and two fairly obvious problems.

First, there’s the money. Every interception looks like a win in isolation, but stack enough of them together, and you’ve got the missile economy version of Hemingway’s famous quip.

How did you go broke? Slowly at first, then all at once.

Because, second, you run out of inventory.

It takes two years to build a Patriot interceptor.

In that time, you can probably knock up a couple of hundred thousand Shaheds.

In this equation, Iran’s regional power grows, while America’s declines not just regionally but globally. Because watching the Operation Epic Failure closely from afar is the Chinese military, which will be noting every interceptor launch, every incident of strategic incoherence or self-contradiction, every fraying thread of the US alliance system. And having watched Trump lose so badly in the Strait of Hormuz, the temptation for Xi to strike out across the Taiwan Strait grows more urgent every day.

Eventually, the math will get him there. And the knowledge that history rarely gives you fools like this for enemies.

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