One of the hallmarks of the mature adult is her ability to delay gratification. Among other things, it signifies self-control, emotional maturity, and a willingness and ability to think about, and plan for, the long-term future. Qualities that are essential to good strategic planning.
To the extent that we can attribute such traits to national governments, even the casual empiricism afforded by a Western mainstream media that bends over backwards to glorify one side’s behaviour cannot gloss over the wide gulf in strategic management capability between the principal combatants in the Iran war.
The character and course of the war provide compelling evidence of this chasm.
For the aggressors, their strategic fallibilities demonstrate how quickly old lessons can be forgotten or ignored; how the limitations of political economy and personality, the cravings of avarice, and racial prejudice can undermine and override human decency, common sense, and international law; and how the brittle foundations of the imperial powers that have sought to rule and exploit the world by brute force can begin to crumble.
Strategic Failure and its Consequences
By now, the missteps of the US and Israel in their conduct of the latest illegal war against Iran are so well known that they need not be repeated here in detail. Suffice to say that while Iran has incurred significant civilian and military casualties and extensive damage to its infrastructure, thus far it has emerged bloodied and battered but unbowed. Its possession of the strategic and moral high ground is untouched.
On the other hand, none of the main strategic goals of the US and Israel has been achieved. The decapitation strikes at the beginning of the war failed to produce what simple minds had hoped for. The resort to the carpet bombing of cities that followed confirmed the well-known lessons of history, which show that national unity and resilience are strengthened by it.
There has been no popular uprising against the national government. Iran has not disintegrated politically.
On the contrary, the technologically advanced and expensive defence systems of the Gulf Arab states and the US military bases they accommodated have fallen prey to the swarms of low-tech low-cost drones launched against them by Iran.
Despite US/Israeli control of the skies, Iran’s decentralised military and political command structure has remained largely intact and not broken step. Likewise, its geographically dispersed — and predominantly underground — missile launching and manufacturing capabilities, while depleted, have shown no signs of letting up.
And, most of all, without having to employ hardly any of its extensive maritime weaponry – its ‘mosquito fleet’ of mini (2-person)-submarines, underwater drones, and flotillas of small high speed attack boats – or its low-tech GPS jamming capability Iran has maintained complete control of the Strait of Hormuz (SOH).
But what might well prove to be the greatest strategic blunder of them all has been kept till last.
A few days after President Trump’s threat to ‘bomb Iran back to the stone age’ and the declaration on 7 April 2026 of a two-week truce (no doubt designed to allow the US/Israel to prepare for the next phase of the war), the US announced that it would establish a naval blockade of all vessels leaving and entering Iranian ports.
While no account has been given of how the blockade will be carried out, if the US begins to intercept and board vessels and turn them back or confiscate their cargos – which would constitute an act of piracy and an act of war — it would invite retaliation from the most injured parties. Iran and China would be principal among them.
China, which obtains about 13% of its oil needs from Iran at discounted prices, immediately referred to the blockade as ‘irresponsible and dangerous’.
Approximately 90% of Iranian oil is exported to China.
How might the aggrieved parties react? Responding in kind, at the very least, Iran might be expected to tighten the screws on the export of oil through the SOH by the Gulf Arab states and to renew strikes on their oil and gas infrastructure and their desalination plants.
Predicting China’s response is much more difficult. A minimalist approach that would be consistent with its long-game strategy would simply be to bear the short-term economic pain (for which it is well prepared) and the blatant military affront and to increase significantly its material support to the Iranian war effort thereby ensuring that Iran outlasts a US government, and a president, addicted to ‘big wins’ and ‘quick fixes’.
If implemented as suggested above, the naval blockade will seriously aggravate an already spooked global market, heighten the chances of global depression, increase the likelihood of prolonged and perhaps broader military conflict that will be even more likely to result in the defeat of the US and Israel.
Causes
The bumbling strategic failures that have led to this point are bound together by the confluence of several factors that are common to the US and Israel and the Western powers that support them.
First, is the overarching all-consuming capitalist catechism of instant gratification and short-term profit maximisation; social atomisation and the absence of community – everyone for themselves; and exploitative elite self-interest.
Second, as we have suggested elsewhere (Blunt et al., 2023), is a kind of collective stupefaction, induced by a blind faith in the omnipotence and civilisational and racial superiority of the US and its accomplices. ‘We are simply better than they are in every way, and more deserving’.
Third, it surely cannot just be coincidental that arrayed on one side are the ancient civilisations of Iran and China and Russia and on the other the vulgar ‘new money’ of the erstwhile doyens of the modern world.
Fourth is the institutional decay signified by the election of a government to head the most powerful nation in human history that effectively is owned by corporations and the Israel lobby and led by a man who is patently insane.
Conclusion
This is a war that yet again has revealed the limits of unbridled greed, mendacity and brute force and the power of community, national unity, and intelligent long term strategic planning.
For hopeful pessimists (Blunt, 2026), the optimal outcome of the war would be the realisation of China’s long term objectives – for the region and for the world. Objectives that promise to replace the drive to dominate and control and exploit with international cooperation for mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence and the sustainability of all forms of life on earth – along the lines, and for the reasons, suggested by Sachs (2026).
The trouble is that the causes of the strategic failure discussed above suggest that the US is constitutionally incapable of learning from its mistakes or changing its ways and therefore “seems unlikely to shrink from its mission to control and exploit the world…, to go ‘gently into the night’. More likely, as aging and weakened alpha predators tend to, it will fight to the bitter end, lashing out wildly at its real or contrived challengers and tormentors, ‘raging against the dying of the light’” (Blunt et al., 2023, ibid). A sentiment echoed by the likes of Hedges (2026).