The Iran War: A Game of Three Card Monte
The Foreign Affairs Smokescreen
This landed in my inbox today — a Foreign Affairs subscription pitch. The lead article screams “How America’s War on Iran Backfired.” Subtitle: “Tehran Will Now Set the Terms for Peace.” Next to it, another piece on the Hormuz “minefield” where Iran supposedly holds all the cards. They even threw in a third about Europe fracturing because the war is so messy.
The Playbook Was Already Written
In “Nation Building: You Can’t Build What They Don’t Want,” I said the foreign-policy priesthood has spent eighty years stapling reconstruction fantasies to the back of every war and then acting shocked when the locals don’t line up for democracy class. The lesson wasn’t that force fails. The lesson was that force paired with nation-building only worked once, in 1945, and the establishment has been chasing that result ever since.
In “Iran: The Bill Has Come Due,” I laid out the actual playbook: stop asking how to make Iran behave. Start asking how to make it impossible for Iran to afford the behavior. Pull the financial pin—Kharg Island first, then the shadow fleet, then the blockade if they keep playing games. One mechanism, four problems solved. No occupation. No reconstruction conferences. Just bankruptcy.
In the follow-up, “Will the US Seize Iranian Oil and Natural Gas Assets?,” I noticed the 2,500 Marines climbing aboard the USS Tripoli amphibious ready group and said out loud what everyone in uniform already knew: the plan might not be to destroy the oil. It might be to take it. Geography handed us a gift—Khuzestan province, the Ahvaz supergiant, Kharg Island, all sitting in a neat little triangle with the Zagros mountains blocking Iranian reinforcements from Tehran. The March 13 strikes proved it: they hammered every military target on Kharg but left the terminals, tanks, and pipelines untouched.
Burning the Deterrent
And here we are, March 20, with the Tripoli group closing in and the regime still dumping what’s left of its missile inventory on Dubai hotels, Riyadh refineries, Gulf civilian airports, and Israeli cities.
They are burning their own deterrent on secondary targets while the real prize sits undefended.
This is the part the news media refuses to see. Iran didn’t save its best missiles and fast boats for the Marine landing that’s coming. It fired them at shopping malls and runways in countries that were cautiously trading with it six weeks ago. The neighbors aren’t feeling “backfire” sympathy. They’re feeling rage. UAE officials talk about a “trust gap that could last decades.” Saudi princes call it blackmail. Even the Qataris—who used to play both sides—are done. Iran just torched whatever residual goodwill it had left in the Gulf.
Meanwhile the clerics are watching their navy sink, their launchers get bunker-busted, and their missile inventory go from 2,500 to functionally zero in two weeks. They are not setting the terms for peace. They are brawling and about to gas.
The clerics aren’t blind. They can see the Tripoli on the same charts we can. But revolutionary regimes don’t survive by being rational; they survive by performing defiance. So they fire. It’s the scorpion on the frog’s back — they know what the sting costs, and they do it anyway. It’s not strategy. It’s their nature.
The Real Move
The three-card monte is this: keep everyone staring at “regime change” or “forever war” or “escalation with China” while the real move happens offshore. The Marines are not going to Tehran or to make the Hormuz Straits safer. They are going to Kharg Island and the Khuzestan fields. They don’t need to occupy a country of 90 million people or the coastline. They only need to secure a 200-mile triangle that contains the third-largest oil reserves on Earth and the export terminal that moves 90 percent of it. And any column Iran sends across the Zagros to take it back becomes a target. Open terrain, no cover, US air dominance. They’d be destroyed before they reached the foothills.
Once those pumps are under new management, the regime’s ability to fund themselves, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and the nuclear program evaporates overnight. The oil doesn’t stop flowing—it just stops flowing to the clerics. China still gets its crude; it will simply buy it from whoever is running the terminal instead of from a sanctioned regime. Global markets stabilize. And the neighbors who just got rocketed get to watch Tehran finally learn that actions have consequences.
The Off-Ramp
The clerics still have an off-ramp. Reopen Hormuz. Verifiably cut the proxies. Walk away from the nuclear weapon path. Accept that the oil infrastructure will operate under international oversight with revenue sharing. They can keep their thrones in Tehran. They just can’t keep exporting violence.
But every day they wait, the missile and drone stockpiles shrink, the Tripoli gets closer, the sympathy gets thinner, and the terms get worse.
The Hormuz mining threat is another waste of resources. It won’t protect their income stream. It’s just defiance and theater.
This isn’t complicated. It’s not nation-building. It’s not regime-change theater. It’s exactly what I laid out two weeks ago: make aggression unaffordable. Whether by destroying the revenue stream or by taking the revenue stream, the result is the same. The bill has come due.
Regime change may come. It may not. Either way, it’s beside the point — a sideshow the media will obsess over while the real game plays out.
And the house—Kharg Island, Ahvaz, the whole southwestern prize—is about to change hands.
Fold or Lose
Fold or lose. The choice is still theirs.
For about seven more days.