Italian
It is their particular rhythm that rewrites the nervous system. Not the explosion itself, which has now become an abstraction. It is the interval between the alarm and the impact, the eight to twelve minutes during which an entire country takes refuge underground and waits, in the white-blue glow of cell phone screens, for the shockwave or the silence, before resurfacing to check the sky, the news, and group chats, and finally returning to everyday life until the next alarm, which will come in two hours, four, or forty-five minutes, because the Islamic Republic of Iran, headless and degraded but not yet dead, continues to fire.
ISRAEL. In the shelters scattered across Israel, parents manage the nighttime choreography: the newborn in the crib in the sealed room, the older children awakened from a partial sleep, the dog locked away, the door sealed, the waiting. In Dubai, airport workers clear debris from a runway hit by a Shahed drone. In Erbil, Kurdish peshmerga bury six of their own, killed by a rocket from the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). In Tehran, a man is filmed saying “Thank you, Trump” outside a police station destroyed by American airstrikes in Chitgar. In the Bekaa Valley, a Captagon lab operates all night, its operators indifferent to the ideology of their former financiers, only concerned with the market price of fenethylline in Riyadh.
This is the war after more than a month. It is a war made up of multiple wars being fought simultaneously on various fronts, and almost none of them are discussed with the seriousness they deserve.
The kinetic campaign is proceeding with tactical brilliance. The Supreme Leader is dead. The high command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been annihilated; the Iranian missile infrastructure has been significantly weakened. These are top-tier results, the fruit of excellent intelligence, precise coordination between Washington and Jerusalem, and a strategically sound, morally justified, and long-awaited presidential decision. These successes have also, as noted by the International Energy Agency, caused the largest disruption of supplies in the history of global oil markets, a cost that underscores the urgency of transitioning from the kinetic phase to the institutional phase.
But a war is not won with its initial campaign, but with what is built in the space that the initial campaign creates. And that space, at the moment, is empty. No transitional architecture, no theory of succession, and no institutional framework that connects the destruction of the Islamic Republic to the construction of something lasting that serves American interests and Iranian aspirations for a generation.
Five weeks have passed since President Donald Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury, and during this time the world’s most formidable analytical apparatus has produced an extraordinary outpouring of commentary on the superficial phenomena of the conflict: the trajectory of every missile, the fluctuation of every barrel price, the diplomatic choreography of every statement from the Gulf foreign ministries. The Brookings Institution has provided thoughtful daily briefings, ACLED (ARMED CONFLICT LOCATION AND EVENT DATA) has created an invaluable crisis management center, the Atlantic Council has mapped Gulf reactions in remarkable detail, and Chatham House has assessed Gulf military options with professional rigor. These are serious institutions employing high-level scholars, and the quality of their analytical work is beyond question.
The curious aspect is not what the analytical establishment has said, but what it has not said. None of these institutions has developed a comprehensive theory on what will replace the order currently being dismantled, nor have they published the institutional architecture of the transition. None has offered the president a plan that connects the kinetic destruction of the Islamic Republic to the construction of something lasting in its place. The political recommendations that have emerged largely lean towards ceasefire frameworks, de-escalation mechanisms, and diplomatic exit routes. Scholars at the Brookings Institution have warned that the war could “extend into a regional conflict” and have urged caution. The Arab Center in Washington has called for a collective diplomatic response. Chatham House has advised Gulf States against joining the attacks, arguing that the risks are “considerable.” These are respectable positions, supported by serious people. However, in the current circumstances, they are profoundly insufficient. The debate between “continuing the war” and “negotiating an exit” obscures the more fundamental question, to which neither side has provided an adequate answer: what will the post-regime order look like and who is building it?
The pacifist chorus, predictably, filled the void with procedural objections and legal technicalities. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) submitted briefs, resolutions on war powers were introduced and rejected, and university protesters reused their Gaza signs. Their position, stripped of its constitutional guise, is that the Islamic Republic should have been left intact to continue enriching uranium, funding Hezbollah, and gunning down protesters in the streets of Tehran. This position deserves to be called what it is: a counsel for permanent controlled decline masquerading as caution.
President Trump was right to act. The theocratic regime in Tehran has spent four decades killing Americans, arming militias from Beirut to Baghdad, pursuing a nuclear program while constantly defying the international community, and, in January 2026, massacring tens of thousands of its own citizens. The idea that this regime did not represent “an imminent threat” is not a serious analytical position. It is the same form of willful naivety that allowed North Korea to cross the nuclear threshold, enabled Assad’s regime to use gas against Syrian children without consequences, and produced the catastrophic 2015 nuclear deal, which simply secured Iran’s moderation at the cost of $150 billion in unlocked assets. The question now is not whether the war should have been started. It is whether the United States will see it through with the discipline that a decisive victory requires, or if they will repeat the pattern that has marred American military intervention for a generation: a brilliant initial campaign followed by institutional amnesia about what comes next.
Trump has the tools, the leverage, and a window of opportunity that will not remain open indefinitely. What he needs is a plan.
Clausewitz defined it Nebel des Krieges, the fog of war: the unbridgeable gap between what commanders believe is happening and what is actually happening on the field. In the first month of the campaign against Iran, that fog was thick and its distortions produced a typical wartime pathology: the premature declaration of victory.
The White House spokesperson stated that the military operation would conclude in four to six weeks, although an internal Pentagon memorandum suggested months. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that Iran was “losing badly” on the tenth day. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 19: “We are winning and Iran has been decapitated.”
Seventy-two hours later, two Iranian ballistic missiles struck cities in southern Israel, one of which near Dimona.
Temporal discrepancies are just background noise, while premature statements are pure vanity. Neither should overshadow the underlying strategic reality, which is this: the initial campaign of the war has been a tactical triumph. Khamenei is dead, the high command of the Revolutionary Guards has been annihilated, and much of the Iranian missile infrastructure has been neutralized. These are concrete and significant results. But the history of American military intervention in the Middle East is a graveyard of initial victories that turned into strategic defeats. Baghdad fell in three weeks; the insurgency lasted eight years. The failure was not military in nature, but structural. No one had designed the state that was supposed to succeed the one that was destroyed. Iranians must have a say when the war ends. But the conclusion to draw is not that the war was a mistake, but rather that it requires the same constant commitment to its conclusion that was expended at its outset. President Trump demonstrated this principle when, in January, he authorized the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and immediately appointed Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as interim head of the country. Beyond its imperfections, the operation embodied a theory of succession. Iran requires the same discipline, but on a vastly larger scale and with much higher stakes.
The doctrine that conflicts end with a decisive victory, not with a managed equilibrium, is correct. But victory does not simply consist of destroying the enemy’s fighting capability: it consists of establishing an order that serves American interests for a generation. This requires a different kind of planning than merely identifying objectives.
Every successful political transition in the modern era has revolved around a single, seemingly elementary question: who is in charge?
In occupied Germany, the response was formulated even before the last bombs fell: the Allied authorities administered a carefully selected German public administration, within an institutional framework designed in Washington and London. The result was the most successful post-war reconstruction in the history of politics. In post-Saddam Iraq, the response was no one, and the result was the Islamic State.
President Trump has the opportunity to ensure that Iran follows the first trajectory. But to do so, it is necessary to address a legitimacy crisis that is already spreading like wildfire behind the fog of war, and to abandon the brutal tool of military occupation. The United States will not occupy Iran. No serious strategist proposes this. The country is too vast, the population too numerous, the territory too complex, and the political will for another decades-long commitment on the ground in the Middle East is nonexistent. What is needed is not occupation, but orchestration: the creation of conditions under which Iranians govern themselves, supported by American diplomatic, financial, and intelligence tools, channeled through legitimate transitional institutions created by Iranians for Iranians. This is a more challenging task than occupation, not easier, because it requires that the architecture be designed before the moment of collapse, not improvised afterward.
The opposition in Iran is real, substantial, and fragmented along fault lines that Western capitals have been reluctant to honestly examine.
Between the end of December 2025 and mid-January 2026, the Islamic Republic killed between 7,000 and 32,000 of its citizens. The lower figure comes from the Human Rights News Agency, which has documented every single case. The higher figure comes from Iranian health officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Whatever the actual number, the massacre has produced a moral toll that will shape transition policies for a generation.
The people who buried the dead, who ran underground clinics in basements while the Revolutionary Guards patrolled the streets above, and who kept the networks of rooftop chants alive night after night while the security forces shot upwards at the darkened windows, hold a form of political authority that no degree, diaspora resume, or Georgetown diploma can replicate. They possess a legacy of blood: the legitimacy that belongs exclusively to those who risked everything when the outcome was uncertain.
Western capitals, by institutional reflex, will tend to involve prominent figures from the opposition in the diaspora. These individuals possess strong diplomatic expertise, access to the media, and the ability to navigate international legal frameworks for the unlocking of sovereign assets – qualifications that are far from negligible. The diaspora represents a vast reservoir of engineers, doctors, lawyers, economists, and administrators who will prove invaluable for reconstruction. However, the gap between the diaspora and the internal resistance is not purely geographical, but rather experiential and, increasingly, political.
The administration has the opportunity to develop a better solution, based on a pre-negotiated framework that divides responsibilities according to functions: diaspora figures would handle strategic sectors such as stabilizing the central bank, relations with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and recovering sovereign assets. Internal security, transitional justice, and municipal management are constitutionally entrusted to carefully selected local resistance commanders. The division is not ideological, but operational, and aims to align capabilities with needs.
The president should order the National Security Council to immediately initiate this mapping. And the mapping must go beyond individual personalities. The detailed work of identifying the structures of civil society, the networks of merchants in the bazaars, the unions, the tribal authorities, and the professional corporations present in each of the 31 Iranian provinces has not been done in any publicly accessible form. Without this field information, transition planning is an abstraction drawn on a blackboard by people who have never set foot in Tabriz.
Be aware of the “ghost of Baghdad.” Indeed, at that time, about 30,000 members of the Ba’ath Party were removed from their public positions. A week later, the Iraqi army was dissolved, leaving 400,000 armed men unemployed overnight.
The lights went out, the water stopped flowing, and the hospitals closed. In the void, an uprising was born that would later define itself as the Islamic State.
President Trump, who has publicly and rightly criticized the conduct of that war, has the opportunity to demonstrate that the United States has learned the most costly lesson of its recent military history.
The Iranian state apparatus employs about 2.5 million public employees. The Artesh, the conventional Iranian army distinct from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has about 420,000 personnel, including engineers, logistics specialists, and technicians who keep alive a nation of 88 million inhabitants. Tavanir, a subsidiary of the Ministry of Energy, manages the national electricity grid. Municipal water systems, telecommunications networks, hospitals, transportation networks: everything depends on mid-level technicians whose only connection to the regime might be a mandatory membership card in the Basij, obtained for university admission, somewhat like an ambitious young American might join the Rotary Club.
A radical ideological purge would produce exactly what it did in Iraq: institutional collapse, mass unemployment, and a population without electricity, drinking water, or functioning hospitals: a ready-made recruitment pool for insurgents, composed of technically skilled, resentful, and recently unemployed men who know where the infrastructure is and how to destroy it.
The alternative is what should be defined as Conditional Functional Immunity: local operational courts that evaluate mid-level managers solely based on their functional competencies. The hydraulic engineer who held a Basij card keeps his job. The logistics officer of Artesh who has never fired on protesters receives amnesty, but the intelligence officer of the Revolutionary Guards who directed the January massacre does not.
The stability of the electrical grid takes precedence over ideological purity, not because ideology is irrelevant, but because a dead population cannot build a democracy.
This requires pre-established criteria, developed now, before the fall of the regime, not hasty decisions made in the chaos of collapse by anyone holding the local monopoly on violence. And then we arrive at what is perhaps the most significant analytical error of the entire strategic discourse: the persistent consideration of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a military organization.
It is not. It is a corporate conglomerate that possesses an army, a navy, a missile force, and a nuclear program.
An article from the Wall Street Journal on March 29 noted that loyalty to the IRGC is “sustained by a system of economic incentives that makes the collapse of the regime a direct threat to the livelihood of its followers.” As summarized by the World Tribune: “The bond that unites the Iranian regime of the IRGC is privilege, not fanaticism.”
If the unifying factor is economic rather than ideological, then the accelerated collapse mechanism of the regime is economic rather than kinetic. A general controlling a $500 million construction portfolio operates under a fundamentally different logic than an ideologue Basij who has nothing to lose. One can be corrupted; the other can only be neutralized. The United States should map these incentives at the level of the individual commander and devise calibrated offers: protection of assets in exchange for institutional surrender, with amnesty for cooperation and targeted financial strangulation for resistance. This costs a fraction of what continuous bombing does and directly strikes at the structural ligament that holds the regime together.
When that bond breaks, when the authority of the Supreme Leader completely fades away, the legal and religious protection of the bonyad empires evaporates with it.
It will be a race against time. Surviving commanders, criminal organizations, and opportunistic militias are rushing to seize factories and liquidate corporate treasures by transferring them to offshore cryptocurrency wallets, destroying property deeds, and dismantling the copper wires of state enterprises: all of this is happening simultaneously in 31 provinces of a country as large as Alaska. The disaster of the Russian privatizations of the 1990s, in which uncontrolled transfers of state assets to influential individuals created an oligarchic class that permanently took control of the political economy, serves as a cautionary precedent.
An armed task force for economic stabilization, ready to physically occupy the headquarters of the security forces and freeze assets the moment the central authority collapses, is what makes the difference between an Iranian economy capable of financing its own reconstruction and a carcass picked apart by vultures.
And now we examine a phenomenon so elegant in its destructive simplicity that it could have been devised by a malicious actuary rather than a military adversary.
Military planners seem to believe that the physical neutralization of the naval resources and coastal batteries of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) will lead to the immediate resumption of energy trade through the Strait of Hormuz. This belief reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of how global trade actually operates. The ultimate arbiter of maritime trade is not the U.S. Fifth Fleet, but rather the London-based insurance syndicates that underwrite war risk premiums for every merchant vessel transiting a conflict zone. Even if allied navies declared the waterway safe, risk models would set premiums at levels that would mathematically negate the profit margins of cargo transport. The Joint War Committee has already classified the surrounding waters as high risk.
The Strait can be militarily open and commercially closed. It will be mathematics, not ammunition, that keeps it that way.
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) oil market report from March 2026 described it as “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimated that a quarter-long shutdown would push the price of West Texas Intermediate to $98 a barrel and reduce global GDP growth by 2.9 percentage points. Bloomberg Economics predicted that at $170 a barrel, the stagflation shock “could upend everything from the future path of central banks to the outcome of the midterm elections in the United States.” Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah, CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, called it “an attack that holds the global economy hostage.” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth warned of “very real physical manifestations of the shutdown spreading across the globe.” Paul Sankey of Sankey Research described it as “the worst I’ve ever seen… perhaps since 1973,” and the Congressional Research Service produced its assessment of the critical point. Kpler’s analysis of ship tracking confirmed that “the withdrawal of commercial operators, major oil companies, and insurance companies has effectively created a shutdown for most global shipping.”
President Trump has the opportunity to break this deadlock. The tool is an Allied Sovereign Underwriting Framework in which governments take on financial responsibility for hull and cargo losses, acting as insurers of last resort until organic market confidence is restored. The War Shipping Administration performed exactly this function during World War II. The mechanism exists in institutional memory; it only requires a presidential indication to be activated.
The cascading effects extend far beyond oil. Up to 40% of global nitrogen fertilizer exports pass through the Strait. Urea exports have increased by 50%. Brazil imports 85% of its fertilizers. Qatar produces a third of the world’s helium. The director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, warned that “no country will be immune to the effects of this crisis if it continues in this direction.” Lutz Kilian, director of the Center for Energy and the Economy at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, added that the poorest countries will be the most affected “because they will be outbid for the remaining reserves of oil and natural gas.”
The reopening of the Strait is not a matter of energy policy: it is a prerequisite for maintaining the international coalition that supports the war effort itself.
