Any attempt to understand a war involving Iran, Israel, and the United States that remains trapped in the old catechism of tanks, tonnage, and “shock and awe” is doomed to mislead. This is not 1991. The theatre is not Iraq. And the war now breaking out is not only about Tehran. It is also, increasingly, a rehearsal, a warning, and a structural test aimed at Beijing — and, more profoundly, at the possibility of any society wanting to live outside the strictures of US‑regulated industrial economism.
On the surface, the familiar storylines still dominate: terrorism, nuclear thresholds, Israel’s security, Gulf stability. But once we strip away the moral costumes and look instead at where energy flows, where currencies settle, and where sea lanes and railways converge, a different picture appears. Iran sits at the junction of three great nervous systems: the US security empire, the dollar–oil complex, and China’s embryonic Eurasian architecture. What happens there cannot be isolated to the region, any more than a clot in the carotid artery can be isolated from the body.
Iran has understood this for a long time. Unlike Western militaries, which still prepare themselves psychologically for short, decisive campaigns that demonstrate technological bravado, Iranian planners have crafted something more patient and more unsettling: a war designed to endure, to spread, and to erode. Not a spectacular duel of armadas, but a long, low grinding down of an overextended order that needs everything to move smoothly – tankers, data, capital, and consent.
Geography is not a backdrop in this conflict; it is the script.
Iran occupies the northern shore of the Persian Gulf and effectively holds the northern approach to the Strait of Hormuz – the narrow throat through which a sizeable share of the planet’s traded oil passes. Data from the International Energy Agency, the US Energy Information Administration, and major maritime insurers all converge on one bald fact: Hormuz is the single most sensitive chokepoint in the hydrocarbon supply system.
If flows there are disrupted for days, the tremors ripple through oil prices, shipping insurance, container schedules, airline fuel bills, fertiliser costs, and ultimately food prices in cities thousands of kilometres away. It’s not just Riyadh or Dubai that would feel the blowback, but Mumbai, Shanghai, Lagos, and São Paulo. The strait is a reminder that globalisation is not an abstraction; it’s an incredibly fragile choreography depending on a few narrow passages.
The United States can send carrier groups into those waters. It can deploy submarines, satellites, and cyber units. But it cannot move the strait, it cannot harden every vessel against a swarm of drones and anti‑ship missiles, and it cannot alter the topography of a coastline that allows a relatively poor country to threaten ships belonging to the richest societies on Earth.
That same geography – the Iranian plateau, ringed by the Zagros and other mountain ranges – makes Iran an atrocious candidate for occupation. Modern history has not been kind to those who try to pacify large, mountainous societies from the outside. The Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, earlier British misadventures across Asia: the pattern is painfully consistent. Air power, satellites, and high‑tech surveillance do not neutralise altitude, weather, narrow passes, dispersed communities, and the sheer exhaustion of policing hostile terrain year after year.
Iran’s armed forces have long accepted that they cannot win a conventional battle with the United States. Their response has been to make that kind of battle irrelevant.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has invested heavily in hardened underground bases dug into mountain sides; mobile missile and drone launchers that can be tucked into urban settings or folded back into civilian landscapes; and redundant, dispersed command‑and‑control networks designed to survive sustained bombardment. Western military assessments, commercial satellite imagery, and specialist analyses of Iranian missile and drone programmes all describe a dense, layered architecture geared for one overriding purpose: survivability. And I suspect that is all they have to do.
The United States, by contrast, has refined a mode of war in which it pulverises an enemy’s air defences and command centres in the opening days, then hunts down armour and bunkers at leisure. It did this in Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003. It did so over Serbia. It has tried, with more mixed outcomes, to repeat the pattern via proxies in Libya and elsewhere.
Iran has spent decades quietly undermining the assumptions behind that pattern. If launchers are mobile, if command is decentralised, if key assets are buried deep and scattered widely, then air supremacy – although still lethal – ceases to be decisive in the way Western doctrine expects. The first week of CNN‑friendly footage does not translate into strategic control in the third year.
Across the Gulf, the picture is inverted. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait are wealthy, plugged into Western arms networks, and dotted with American bases. Yet their economic and ecological infrastructure rests on a narrow band of coastal facilities: export terminals, refineries, LNG plants, petrochemical complexes, and especially desalination stations that keep their cities from drying out. These sites are within range of Iranian missiles and drones.
We don’t have to rely on speculative war games to imagine the consequences of attacks on such assets. The 2019 strike on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq processing facility – widely attributed to Iranian‑made systems by US and Saudi officials – temporarily knocked out a significant chunk of global oil processing capacity and sent prices spiking. Energy agencies, insurers, and risk consultancies have since been broadly aligned on one conclusion: for all their wealth, the Gulf monarchies sit atop an exposed and brittle set of lifelines.
Overlay that physical vulnerability with social demography and the picture becomes more precarious. In cities like Dubai, Doha, and Kuwait City, expatriate labour forces form a large share – often the majority – of the population. They operate ports, build towers, clean hotels, and staff logistics. Yet they are often denied political rights and treated as temporary guests. In a protracted war involving repeated strikes, economic disruption, and water or power shortages, how many of these workers would stay? How many would want to?
By contrast, Iran may be politically contentious and economically constrained, but it’s not a city-state perched between desert and sea. It is home to over eighty million people, most of whom are not going anywhere. Its industries, agriculture, and communities are distributed across a large, daunting landscape. Demography does not guarantee cohesion. It does, however, provide a reservoir of manpower and a degree of social rootedness that expeditionary forces and rentier kingdoms cannot easily match.
Iran has also refused to keep the war within its own borders. Over the past decades, Tehran has nurtured a network of relationships with non‑state and quasi‑state actors across the region: Hezbollah in Lebanon, elements within Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Yemeni movement widely known as the Houthis, among others. These groups are not Iranian puppets; they have their own agendas, internal politics, and local grievances. But the channels of training, arms, funding, and ideological affinity are real and well documented.
In practice, this means that any sustained Israeli–US attack on Iran is likely to trigger a cascade of actions: rocket barrages into northern Israel, pressure on US and allied bases in Iraq and Syria, harassment of shipping in the Red Sea and Bab el‑Mandeb, and sporadic strikes on energy and water infrastructure from the Levant to the Arabian Sea. The “front line” dissolves into numerous overlapping theatres, each capable of generating local crises that feed back into global markets and domestic politics in distant capitals.
For planners in Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Abu Dhabi, this is deeply uncomfortable. It refuses the tidy geometry of a single “campaign” with clearly bounded objectives. Instead, they confront a kind of geopolitical fungal network: low‑visibility, spread out, embedded in multiple societies, and capable of producing disruptive events in different places at different times. Iran’s relative military weakness at the high‑tech, conventional end of the spectrum is thus offset by its reach through this more organic, less easily targetable web.
This brings us to the fulcrum of Iran’s strategy: using cost asymmetry as a form of warfare. A precision interceptor missile can cost millions of dollars. A drone designed to provoke that interceptor – or to slip past it – might cost tens of thousands. A ballistic missile aimed at an oil terminal can be built for a fraction of the annual insurance premium increase that even a single successful strike would trigger. A few mines, or even the credible threat of them, can oblige entire fleets to reroute or delay, raising shipping costs globally.
Empirical studies of recent conflicts back this up. Analyses of missile–interceptor economics in Israel’s engagements with Hamas and Hezbollah, assessments of Saudi Arabia’s attempts to defend against Houthi strikes, evaluations of Ukraine’s air defence challenges: all point to the same widening gap between the cost of offence and the cost of defence, particularly in the missile and drone domain.
Iran’s doctrine leans into that disparity. It is not trying to match Western militaries missile for missile, fighter for fighter. It’s trying to make each day of war more expensive for its adversaries than for itself – in money, in attention, in political credit with restless domestic audiences.
This is classic cost‑imposition strategy: strike where damage propagates through complex systems. In the Gulf that means energy exports, water security, major ports, and credibility. If desalination plants in one or two states are hit, the problem is not just a broken facility, but the onset of water rationing in cities that have no other source. If several tankers are attacked or even reputedly threatened in Hormuz and the Red Sea, the issue is not just a few damaged hulls, but the repricing of risk across the global shipping ecosystem.
The war Iran is preparing to fight, then, is not confined to the visible battlefield. It reaches straight into central bank models, stock indices, and pension funds. That is where the real vulnerability of the industrial paradigm lies: it cannot function in an environment of sustained uncertainty without provoking political crisis at home.
At this point the Chinese shadow becomes unavoidable. China’s ascent over the past four decades has been fuelled by imported energy. Public figures from the International Energy Agency, Chinese customs data, and major oil company reports all tell the same story: Beijing relies heavily on seaborne oil and gas, and a considerable share of that still comes from the Gulf. Some of it originates in Iran itself when sanctions are porous; more arrives from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and the UAE. Much of it passes through or near waters that Iranian missiles, drones, and small boats can reach.
For Beijing, then, Iran is not an abstract “issue”. Iran is part supplier, part transit corridor, and part strategic buffer along China’s energy artery. Through initiatives like the Belt and Road, China has sought overland alternatives – pipelines through Central Asia, rail links into Europe, potential routes through Pakistan – but even Chinese government documents concede that the maritime route through the Indian Ocean and the Gulf will remain vital for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, Iran has been drawn deeper into China’s institutional orbit: it has signed long‑term energy and infrastructure agreements with Chinese entities, joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and recently entered the expanded BRICS grouping. None of these steps overturn Western dominance overnight. Together, however, they form part of a Eurasian scaffolding within which China, Russia, Iran, and others can, in principle, trade more amongst themselves, explore non‑dollar settlements, and hedge against US sanctions.
Seen from Washington, this is the outline of an alternative operating system – one in which China can feed its industries, project influence, and settle accounts through channels it or its partners control, rather than through sea lanes patrolled by US carriers and payment systems regulated from New York.
In that light, Iran is not only a troublesome theocracy with a nuclear programme. It is a potential cornerstone in a Chinese‑centred order that would eventually be able to ignore, or at least circumvent, many of Washington’s favourite instruments of pressure.
The link between Hormuz and the dollar is not accidental. Since the 1970s, oil has been priced and cleared predominantly in US currency. This arrangement has bolstered global demand for dollars, supported deep US bond markets, and given the United States a unique capacity to weaponise the financial system. Blocking a state from dollar clearing or from the SWIFT messaging system is so devastating precisely because energy deals, trade finance, and reserves are still overwhelmingly dollar‑centric.
Iran has experienced the sharp end of that weapon since at least the early 2000s. In response, it has experimented – with mixed success – in selling oil in other currencies, bartering oil for goods, and using gold or local currencies with China, Russia, and some neighbours. Russia and Venezuela, having joined Iran in the sanctions club, are running similar experiments. China, for its part, has been deliberately widening the use of the renminbi in bilateral trade, building its Cross‑Border Interbank Payment System, and signing currency swap agreements across the Global South.
These efforts are still embryonic. Data from the IMF and SWIFT show that the dollar remains, by far, the dominant reserve and settlement currency. But to those invested in the current order, embryonic does not mean irrelevant. Each successful non‑dollar oil deal, each large‑scale renminbi settlement between sanctioned states, is a proof of concept that others can observe and emulate.
It’s in this context that Iran’s geography and alliances become truly alarming for defenders of the status quo. A relatively independent state, controlling access to the world’s main energy chokepoint, increasingly integrated into Chinese and Russian strategic frameworks, and experimenting with non‑dollar trade, undermines the idea that Washington, through its grip on sanctions and dollar clearing, can always decide who eats and who starves.
So when the United States applies “maximum pressure” on Tehran, it is not solely punishing past behaviour. It’s also plausibly sending a broader signal: no state on a vital artery will be allowed to build a sanctions‑resistant niche inside a rival’s ecosystem. When Washington threatens secondary sanctions on banks and firms dealing with Iran, it is not just disciplining Tehran; it’s warning Beijing, Delhi, Ankara, and others not to get too comfortable in alternative arrangements.
From that perspective, any major war involving Iran is inevitably also about China, because it is about who has permission to breathe along the pipelines and sea lanes on which China’s development still depends.
If war now breaks out on a truly large scale, China will face a series of compressed decisions it has so far deferred. Can Beijing maintain significant oil imports from Iran, or provide financial lifelines to Tehran, without exposing its own major banks and corporations to crippling US sanctions? Past episodes suggest that when Washington tightens the screws, Chinese institutions quietly scale back their exposure. A war would make such hedging harder to hide and more costly to execute.
Can the current patchwork of non‑dollar mechanisms — bilateral currency swaps, CIPS, local‑currency oil deals — cope with the volume and urgency of trade displaced by a serious disruption in Gulf energy flows? Or will frightened firms, in China and across Asia, default back to the relative safety of dollar channels and US insurance as soon as the shooting starts? The renminbi’s share of global reserves and settlements remains modest; that reality cannot be wished away by rhetoric.
Can China offer Iran sufficient diplomatic protection – in the UN Security Council, across the Global South, through mediation efforts – to prevent complete strategic isolation, without triggering a larger confrontation with the United States and its allies? The Chinese‑brokered détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia was a significant diplomatic achievement. A war involving direct US and Israeli strikes on Iranian territory would make any similar balancing act immeasurably more complex.
In other words, this US–Israeli war with Iran is also a live‑fire examination of China’s claim to represent, or at least convene, an alternative civilisational pole. If Beijing cannot materially shield a key partner under attack, then the limits of its current power will be visible to every government contemplating a “pivot” away from the West. If it can, then the reach of Western sanctions and military threats will, for the first time in decades, encounter a substantive counter‑structure.
And yet, if we make this entirely about an American effort to contain China, we vanish the lived realities, memories, and aspirations of the people who happen to live between the Zagros and the Gulf.
Iran’s antagonism with the United States and its complicated dance with Israel long predate China’s emergence as a global challenger. The Anglo‑American coup of 1953, the Shah’s dictatorship, the 1979 revolution, the hostage crisis, the chemical warfare of the Iran–Iraq conflict, the “axis of evil” label, and decades of sanctions and covert attacks – these are part of Iran’s own story, not China’s. Iranian leaders are not sitting in Tehran asking how they might best assist Beijing. They are asking how they can survive and retain dignity in a world that has repeatedly treated their society as a disposable chess piece.
Their answer has been to build asymmetric capacities, cultivate regional allies, and seek partnerships with powers – Russia, China, sometimes India – that can dilute US dominance. But that does not make Iran a mere instrument of Beijing. It makes Iran a stubborn, sometimes ruthless, always self‑referential node in a wider pattern of revolt against a global order that many in the Global South experience as hypocritical and extractive.
Treating Iran only as the “China front” of a new Cold War would be to repeat the same imperial error from another direction: refusing to acknowledge that people living in the supposed periphery have agency, memory, and their own tightly held convictions about justice and humiliation.
If we stand back, the underlying pattern looks eerily familiar. Empires often fall not because they are defeated in a single, glorious battle, but because they allow themselves to be drained in distant, stubborn, expensive conflicts fought for reasons that become less credible over time. Classical historians wrote of Athens’ Sicilian misadventure. We could list Napoleon in Russia, the British in Mesopotamia, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the United States in Vietnam, then again in Afghanistan and Iraq. The uniforms change. The script does not.
Iran’s entire war doctrine is an attempt to harness that pattern, deliberately and systematically. Force the distant empire to fight on your terrain, on your timeline, against a distributed network of hazards. Let it stretch its supply lines, its attention span, its domestic patience. Encourage it, subtly, to translate every prestige investment – the carrier group, the missile defence shield, the global base network – into a liability by compelling it to spend relentlessly just to keep up appearances.
There is, however, another veto player in this story – one whose deliberations rarely reach the evening news: high finance. Studies of the long‑term cost of America’s recent wars, such as those produced by the Costs of War project at Brown University, peg the total bill – once we include veterans’ care and interest on borrowed money – in the trillions of dollars. A major new conflict involving intensive air and naval operations in the Gulf is not going to be cheap. Plausible estimates run to something on the order of a billion dollars a day in direct military costs during a high‑tempo phase. Add to that the macroeconomic consequences of a serious disruption in Hormuz: spiking oil prices, inflationary pressure, contagion in emerging markets, sovereign debt crises in fuel‑importing countries.
At what point do the custodians of industrial economism – asset managers, central bankers, oligarchs, senior bureaucrats in treasuries and finance ministries – signal that enough is enough, not for ethical reasons, but because the war threatens their portfolios, their political arrangements, and their long‑term bets? Does a red line exist beyond which the 0.1 per cent no longer find such conflicts tolerable?
We don’t have tapes of those conversations. We do have a pattern of wars that end not when “victory” is secured, but when the costs, political and financial, become too obvious to disguise. It is at least plausible that in the current US–Israeli–Iranian confrontation, the decisive constraint will not be Iranian missiles or American aircraft, but the patience of a global elite that wants order, not chaos, markets, not mayhem. If so, the war’s duration may be measured less in sorties than in basis points.
Beneath the surface clash between nations lies something more unsettling: the stubborn resilience of a worldview. Industrial economism – the belief that salvation lies in perpetual growth, competition, extraction, and the monetisation of everything – has become our planetary operating myth. It organises how we teach economics, how we design cities, how we structure corporations, how we measure success. It is relatively indifferent to flags. It will happily wear American colours, Chinese colours, European colours, or a charming shade of technocratic green.
What this system cannot abide are autonomous nodes along its crucial arteries – places and polities that refuse to be fully domesticated by its logic but sit astride routes, resources, or platforms the system needs. Iran is one such node, by choice and by geography. China dreams of becoming something more dangerous still: a manager of its own network of arteries, less beholden to existing overseers.
From that vantage point, the pressure on Iran and the unease about China share a family resemblance. Both challenge the axiom that the flows that sustain industrial civilisation – oil, gas, data, capital – must be supervised by a single hierarchy of institutions, norms, and enforcement tools. Both embody, in very different ways, the possibility that life could be organised around principles other than permanent competitive accumulation.
If there is a deeper “target” in this situation, it may not be Beijing or Tehran as such, but the idea that anything vital to the current world‑system can ever again lie beyond the reach of its preferred forms of control.
So is this war, in the long run, “aimed at China”? In a narrow or even a subliminal sense, yes. The constraints imposed on Iran strongly appear intended – and certainly function – to hem in the emergence of a sanctions‑resistant, Eurasian architecture in which China would be central and Iran a strategic hinge. To downplay that dimension is to ignore how strategy is actually practised.
But if we stop there, we remain trapped in the theatre of great‑power rivalry and miss the wider, more important performance. A conflict around Iran is not just a story about Washington, Tehran, Jerusalem and Beijing. It’s an x‑ray of a civilisation that has built its prosperity on intricate, fragile interdependencies and then handed the keys to those interdependencies to a narrow, self‑interested elite.
The closure – or even the credible threat of closure – of one narrow strait should not be able to throw billions of lives into turmoil. Yet under the current design, it can. That ought to trouble a farmer in India, a nurse in Brazil, a shopkeeper in Kenya, as much as it troubles a hedge‑fund manager in London or a party official in Beijing.
The real strategic question, then, is not whether Iran can “win” against the United States, nor whether the United States can “contain” China. It’s why we have allowed ourselves to inhabit a world‑system in which the security of our daily bread, our water, and our children’s future depends on the uninterrupted functioning of a few exposed arteries policed by competing empires.
Until that question is faced, wars like the one now unfolding around Iran will keep recurring, each time dressed in new rhetoric, each time supposedly “different”, each time rehearsing the same deeper ritual: an industrial civilisation defending its claimed right to control the flow of life itself, and lashing out at any society that dares suggest those flows might belong, instead, to the communities who live along their banks.