This draws on a running series covering the Iran war on this Substack. Not every relevant piece is referenced, just the ones doing the most work here. They are listed in an addendum at the end of the article.
Turn on the news, watch a roundtable show or open a newspaper, and you’ll hear that the war with Iran is a stalemate, or that the Strait of Hormuz is. Those are the same claim. Hormuz is where this war gets decided. Lebanon, Gaza and the Houthis are side games.
To be clear, this piece does not claim that Iran is not dangerous, that the Strait is back to normal, or that the war is over. Iran can still hit tankers. The Houthis can still hit Riyadh. Brent crude closed at $104 on Thursday. So what is a stalemate, anyway?
What a stalemate means
In chess, each side makes alternating moves. If at some point the side to move has no legal move and is not in check, the situation is a stalemate and the game is a draw. Nobody wins.
The other side can still have an overwhelming material advantage. It doesn’t matter. One side has to move, there are no legal moves, and the rules call it a draw.
By the late 1800s the word had left the chessboard. It came to mean any contest or dispute where neither side can win, and that is the sense the dictionaries carry today.
Oxford’s general definition is a situation in which “neither side is able to win or make any progress.” That is not a looser meaning. It is the same idea with the chessboard removed: a position that cannot produce a winner.
One could argue the press means a drawn position, not a stalemate. Oxford’s general definition already covers both: neither side can win. Stalemate isn’t the only way a chess game ends with no winner. Neither side may have sufficient advantage to deliver checkmate against the other. And if the same position comes up three times, a draw can be claimed.
Neither fits Iran. Iran can’t stop the blockade. And nothing is repeating. Every week, the position gets worse for Tehran.
A won game is not a stalemate
Anyone who plays chess knows the difference between a stalemate and a won game that isn’t over yet. A player can reach a position where victory is certain and still need 10, 20 or 30 more moves to finish it.
The winner tightens the screws. The loser shuffles pieces and looks for a trick. Sooner or later the loser resigns or gets mated. Nobody at the board calls it a stalemate because mate isn’t three moves away.
Iran is just not folding so easily. A losing side can drag out a lost game for a long time. That doesn’t change the result, and it doesn’t make it a stalemate.
The losing side’s only real hope is that the winner gets careless and blunders into an actual stalemate. Chess players have a word for that: a swindle.
What a real stalemate looks like
Korea was a stalemate. After China entered in late 1950, the front froze near the 38th parallel by mid-1951. Neither side could push the other off the peninsula. The 1953 armistice ended the shooting without a peace treaty. The two Koreas are still technically at war.
North Korea’s nuclear weapons made that stalemate permanent. Nobody tries regime change on a nuclear power. It also has two patrons on its border. China is one. Russia, linked by rail across the Tumen River and by a 2024 mutual defense pact, is the other.
Vietnam was a stalemate. America could not invade the North without risking a war with China, which sent several hundred thousand support troops to make the point. It could not bomb Hanoi into surrender while Chinese and Soviet supplies kept flowing. Both roads to victory were closed, and the side with patrons behind it could wait.
Iran has none of that. It has no bomb. No great power will send armies to defend Tehran. An American invasion would be enormously costly. Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq, with about 90 million people. Nobody in Washington wants one.
But nobody is stopping it either. An option you don’t want to use is not an option you can’t use.
Two blockades
There are two blockades in the Persian Gulf, and the press mostly talks about one of them.
Iran is harassing Gulf shipping. It is only partly working. Saudi Arabia and its neighbors are rerouting through bypass pipelines, U.S.-escorted tankers and ship-to-ship transfers outside the strait. Their oil costs more to move. It still moves.
The United States is blockading Iran’s ports. That one is working. Iran has survived sanctions for decades, but sanctions leak. Iran kept selling oil under them, mostly to China, through shadow-fleet tankers and middlemen. A regime can work around paperwork. It cannot work around a destroyer.
Since July, not a single Iranian crude cargo has gotten out. I laid out the rest of the numbers in my satire, The Media Was Right: Trump Is Lost and Desperate for an Off-Ramp.
Iran has land borders, and trucks and smugglers will keep a black market going. They will not replace oil revenue for a state of 90 million people. The sea is where the money comes from.
The results are on the currency board. The rial has fallen to roughly 2.7 million to the dollar. Consumer prices in September were up nearly 90% from a year earlier. The central bank is injecting up to $2 billion to hold the line.
One side’s oil is rerouted. The other side’s oil is cut off. That is not a deadlock.
The leaking dam
Iran has not folded yet. That is true. A dam with a leak in it hasn’t collapsed yet either.
A reporter takes a photograph, sees the dam still standing and calls it a standoff. An engineer looks at the leak and the water pressure and knows where it ends. Unless somebody plugs the leak, the dam goes.
Iran cannot plug this one. It cannot break the blockade. It cannot run a country with no oil money. In a stalemate, waiting changes nothing. Here, every week of waiting makes Iran weaker.
Back in April I laid out The Three Clocks Running Against Iran: economic, geological and relevance. All three are still running.
The word is the story
The press knows all this. The facts are in the papers. The economics desks document a country being bled out. The war desks call it a stalemate.
The narrative is leaking too. The facts have become too obvious to leave out, so they appear in the body and the occasional analysis piece. That way, when Iran folds, nobody ends up with egg on their face. The headline still says stalemate.
Take the oil moving through Hormuz. For months, the press threw cold water on the administration’s claims that tankers were getting through. Now the independent tanker trackers put Gulf flows at roughly three-quarters of prewar levels, and that number is creeping into the coverage. It strains credulity that newsrooms didn’t know. It’s one more leak.
Accurate words were available. “Iran escalates as blockade tightens.” “Tehran lashes out.” The press picked the one word that tells readers nobody can win.
That word does work the coverage never has to do out loud. Kissinger wrote in 1969 that in Vietnam, the guerrilla wins if he does not lose, and the conventional army loses if it does not win. Call the Iran war a stalemate and the reader finishes the thought: America isn’t winning, so America is losing.
There is an old saying in advertising: repeat your message until the public is singing it in their sleep. The word stalemate is now ubiquitous. Wire services, newspapers, cable news, roundtable shows and think tanks all use it.
It’s the news business, after all, and the business right now is the midterms. Once every two years the public gets a lever to pull nationwide, a chance to hand out grades and punishment. Who holds the gavel in January matters to everyone, so every story gets run through one question: does this help or hurt before November? It’s no secret that the mainstream press detests Trump, and he detests them. A war Iran is slowly losing doesn’t reflect badly on Trump. A war stuck in stalemate does. That’s why you hear it on every network. Repeat it often enough and it becomes the only word anyone uses.
The midterms won’t rescue Tehran anyway, as I argued in What Does Iran Think Will Happen If Democrats Win the Midterms?
Nor are they on Trump’s calendar. See Iran: The Midterms Are Not on Trump’s Calendar.
The stalemate story doesn’t need to be true to dominate. It just needs to be more compelling, as I wrote in Is Trump Cornered, or Is He Managing a War He’s Already Winning?
The Oxford dictionary defines gaslighting as making somebody believe untrue things in order to control them, especially that they have imagined or been wrong about what really happened. IMO, the control here is the vote. Convince the public the war is stuck, and a Democratic Congress starts to look like the check Trump needs. Put a currency in freefall next to the word stalemate, repeated story after story, and decide for yourself what to call it.
And Tehran reads the coverage. I wrote about what that has already cost Iran in The Hall of Mirrors: What the Coverage Cannot Stop.
Honest caveats
Regimes can absorb a great deal of pain if they are willing to make their people eat it. Nobody knows how long Iran’s will hold.
Iran’s attacks cost real money. Oil at $104 is a real problem for an administration facing midterms, and Trump has said publicly he won’t strike Iran before the election.
The Houthis are less cautious than their patron. One serious incident could widen the war in ways nobody plans.
A won game can still be thrown away. Stalemate is what happens when the winner gets careless.
So what is a stalemate, anyway?
In chess, stalemate is what saves the losing side. In the news, it’s what Iran’s collapse is being called.
It is the losing king’s last hope. Iran is playing for one. The press is already printing it.
This is not a stalemate. This is a country losing a war.
You’ve seen the evidence. So you tell me: why does everyone keep using the word?
Addendum: earlier pieces in this series
The Hall of Mirrors: What the Coverage Cannot Stop (Apr. 14, 2026)
The Three Clocks Running Against Iran (Apr. 25, 2026)
Iran: The Midterms Are Not on Trump’s Calendar (June 8, 2026)
Is Trump Cornered, or Is He Managing a War He’s Already Winning? (Aug. 16, 2026)
What Does Iran Think Will Happen If Democrats Win the Midterms? (Sept. 9, 2026)
The Media Was Right: Trump Is Lost and Desperate for an Off-Ramp (Sept. 30, 2026)