Why Suez, Not Just Another Oil Shock

Look at the Suez Crisis of 1956 rather than the 1970s oil shocks. The mechanism in Hormuz right now is Suez’s mechanism, not theirs. The 1970s crises were about price—OPEC using oil deliberately to punish the West. Suez was narrower and closer to what is happening in the Gulf this week: a fight over who really controls passage through a chokepoint that carries a huge share of the world’s energy, fought as much with rhetoric and financial pressure as with open combat. When Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company in July 1956, two-thirds of Western Europe’s oil—about 1.4 million barrels a day—was moving through that canal. Britain and France, still thinking in imperial terms, invaded within months to take it back by force. Militarily the operation was a quick success. It made no difference. Nasser had ordered roughly forty ships scuttled at the Mediterranean entrance the moment fighting started, blocking the canal regardless of who held the banks. Saboteurs also shut down the Iraqi pipeline that supplied Western Europe. Britain and France learned that military victory and actual control of the passage were two different things, and that the second one had already left their hands.

The Gap Between the Claim and the Water

That same gap is visible in the Hormuz numbers this week. The United States can claim naval superiority in the Gulf the same way Britain and France could claim it around Port Said in 1956. Neither can claim, on the evidence of actual shipping movements, that the strait is functioning as a strait and carrying the roughly one-fifth of global oil demand it normally does. Iran’s Article 5 arrangement under the ceasefire-era memorandum of understanding, brokered by Pakistan in June, puts responsibility for reopening and managing the strait in Iran’s hands. That gives Tehran a legal basis for keeping restrictions in place even while Washington insists the strait is open and “controlled.” Trump’s declaration that America “owns” Hormuz looks, on the numbers, less like a statement of fact and more like Anthony Eden’s 1956 insistence that Nasser would not be allowed to keep his “thumb on our windpipe”—a claim made with total confidence at the exact moment the windpipe was already being pinched.

Where Suez Actually Broke

Be precise about how Suez ended, because the mechanism matters more than the memory of humiliation. Britain and France did not withdraw because Egypt beat them militarily. They withdrew because the United States, alarmed by a Cold War crisis it had not authorised, applied direct financial pressure: blocking IMF loans Britain needed to defend the pound, threatening to sell American holdings of British sterling bonds, and refusing to help offset the oil shortfall until British and French forces began to leave. Faced with a currency crisis on top of an oil shortage, Britain folded within weeks. The real lesson of Suez was never about naval power. It was that the actor with financial and economic leverage over a crisis, not the one with the most warships on the water, usually decides how it ends.

Who Holds That Leverage Now

This is where the current dispute gets uncomfortable for Washington. The roles look inverted from 1956. Then the United States played Eisenhower’s part—the outside power with the financial leverage to force a resolution neither side wanted. In the Hormuz dispute it is not clear anyone occupies that role, or that if someone did it would be Washington. The IEA has warned that global oil stockpiles are falling fast, which raises the cost of prolonged closure for everyone, the US economy included, given how directly Gulf oil flows feed into global prices and the petrodollar system. A senior IRGC adviser has said Iran is prepared to “prolong” the dispute until Trump leaves office—a timeline measured in years, not weeks. If that is a real strategic position rather than posturing, Tehran believes time, not naval strength, is the actual currency of this standoff, and that it can outlast Washington’s patience more easily than Washington can outlast Iran’s.

The Escalation Beneath the Rhetoric

None of this is confined to social-media statements. The US Navy fired on a vessel in the Gulf of Oman this week to enforce the blockade—a clear shift from interception and boarding to active weapons fire. Separately, Trump revealed that his own Secret Service detail and military escort wanted him off Air Force One while it was in Turkish airspace because of a specific Iranian threat. That tells you the threat assessment inside his own security apparatus has moved from concern about American assets in the region to concern about the president personally. Read together with the shipping data and the public argument over who controls the strait, this does not look like a dispute cooling toward resolution. It looks like one still escalating, dressed up in the language of victory on one side and defiance on the other.

Where I Think This Goes

I want to keep the line clear between what happened this week and what I think it means. This is a fast-moving story and precision matters more than drama.This week’s exchanges reinforce the forecast I have made elsewhere in the series: talks fail and the situation moves back toward something closer to full conflict rather than settling into a durable ceasefire. The gap between Trump’s declared control and the actual shipping data is the kind of gap that historically does not stay rhetorical for long. A great power that has publicly staked its credibility on controlling a strait it demonstrably does not control has strong incentives to close that gap by force rather than admit the claim was premature. The shift to active naval weapons fire, and the security establishment’s own alarm about threats to Trump personally, look like early evidence of exactly that dynamic. My view remains that this points toward American ground forces being deployed before the year is out, most plausibly aimed at securing the coastline and facilities such as Kharg Island directly, since air and naval power alone have not delivered the control being claimed.The counter-argument is real, and Suez supplies it as readily as the pessimistic reading. Financial and economic pressure, not military escalation, ended the 1956 crisis. The same dynamic could play out here: falling oil stockpiles and mounting economic costs on all sides, including the US, eventually force a negotiated reopening of the strait through the kind of pressure that made Eden fold within weeks, rather than through a ground invasion. Araghchi’s choice of words—accusing the US of “miscalculation” rather than issuing a straight threat—leaves the door open to a face-saving climbdown on both sides if either government wants one. I do not think that is the more likely path from here, but Suez proves it is not a fantasy either.

This piece is analysis and historical comparison based on rapidly developing reporting as of 13 August 2026. Figures such as vessel transit counts should be read as a snapshot, not a settled trend.

There’s a signal in markets that matters more than any headline number or central-bank statement: what the people with the best information do with their own money while they tell everyone else to stay calm. Warren Buffett spent his final years as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO selling far more stock than he bought, stopped buying back Berkshire shares for a year and a half, and stepped down at the end of 2025 sitting on more than $300 billion in cash—while his annual letter still claimed nothing fundamental had changed. Peter Thiel has been quietly selling stock, spent over a decade building New Zealand citizenship and land as a doomsday hedge, and has now moved to Buenos Aires, putting together a network of private jurisdictions across the hemisphere. Michael Burry, the guy who called 2008 early, has spent 2026 saying markets look like the final months of 1999–2000, with Shiller P/E ratios above 40—the highest since the dot-com peak. These three men agree on almost nothing. Their actions, if not always their words, say the same thing: this is not the time to be fully exposed. I think they’re right, and the closest historical parallel is 1929.

Why 1929, Not 2008

The usual comparison is 2008 because most people alive lived through it. I reach for 1929 instead because the mechanism is closer. 2008 was a specific crisis in mortgage debt that spread through hidden leverage. 1929 was broader: a market that had run for years on borrowed optimism and borrowed money, held up by the belief that growth would just keep going—until it didn’t. The Dow lost nearly 90 percent between 1929 and 1932, not in one crash but in a series of collapses and false recoveries that dragged on for three years. The debt and speculation underneath were too deep to unwind quickly. That’s the shape that worries me now: not a single dramatic Monday, but a slow, grinding unwind of a market and economy that have been propped up for far longer than they should have been.

The Debt We Never Paid Down

Start with the plain numbers. U.S. national debt hit $39.9 trillion in early August. Debt held by the public has crossed the size of the entire American economy for the first time since World War II. The Congressional Budget Office sees that ratio rising from about 101 percent of GDP today to 120 percent by 2036. The federal government now spends roughly $1.33 for every dollar it takes in. This isn’t a new problem; it’s an old one we keep choosing not to fix. After 2008 we did bailouts and quantitative easing instead of real deleveraging. Covid should have produced a genuine contraction; instead we injected trillions of newly created money that kept asset prices and spending afloat. Every time the choice has been the same: prop the system up now and let future taxpayers and future growth pay later. We’re running out of later.

An Economy Built to Keep Going Up

There’s a cultural side to this too. Corporate America has spent two decades optimizing almost exclusively for shareholder returns and share price, often at the expense of the unglamorous investment that actually builds lasting capacity. Share buybacks, not capital spending, have been the default use of cash for years. The current AI boom, which is carrying a huge share of stock-market gains, is already drawing internal comparisons to the dot-com bubble. Goldman Sachs’ CEO has said publicly that a large portion of the capital pouring into AI infrastructure will probably never earn a return. On top of that, the Trump administration has, since early 2026, started taking direct equity stakes in public companies through the Defense and Energy departments—about $27 billion so far in semiconductors, rare earths, and defense firms. Traders call it “the Trump portfolio.” The president has publicly celebrated the resulting stock gains. Whatever the national-security rationale, the practical effect is that the federal government is now a direct participant propping up equity prices in the exact sectors it owns, adding another artificial support to a market that already looks as stretched as it did in 2000 by measures like the Shiller ratio.

The Quiet Exits

No single insider’s moves prove anything by themselves. Burry in particular has a mixed record—he called crashes that never came, including a widely mocked 2020 prediction right at the bottom of the Covid crash that would have cost anyone who listened a big rally. He’s joked himself about becoming “the boy who cried wolf.” That caveat is real. Still, put it next to Buffett’s unusually defensive multi-year positioning at the end of a fifty-year career built on buying, not hoarding cash, and Thiel’s quiet sales plus an increasingly public doomsday relocation, and the pattern is at least suggestive. People with a lot of information and a lot to lose are, in aggregate, acting more cautiously than the headline numbers suggest they should.

Cheap Oil, Broken Twice in Two Years

There’s a second thread. The global economy has run for half a century on the assumption of reasonably cheap, reliable oil priced overwhelmingly in dollars—the arrangement that has done much of the work gold used to do in anchoring demand for the dollar since 1971. The Iran war has hit that assumption twice in under two years, on top of the disruption from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The International Energy Agency called the closure of the Strait of Hormuz the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. Brent crude has swung between roughly $77 and $120 a barrel within single weeks—volatility that by itself freezes the long-term investment decisions a stable economy needs. The last time the world got two major oil shocks in one decade was the 1970s (1973 embargo, then 1979 Iranian Revolution). That decade is remembered for stagflation: high inflation plus stagnant growth, a combination conventional policy struggles to fix because fighting one makes the other worse. We may be building the same conditions again, only this time on a much larger debt load relative to the economy.

What Happens When It Breaks

If a correction of this scale arrives, it’s not only a financial story. The 1929 crash produced unemployment above 20 percent at its worst, a collapse in global trade, and a decade of real desperation that reshaped politics across the developed world and fed extremism in more than one country. People who can’t feed their families or find work do not stay politically patient. A genuine economic crisis landing on top of the geopolitical instability already running—an unresolved Iran war, a fragile Middle East order, a NATO alliance under visible strain—is more dangerous than either problem alone. Economic crises and international conflict have a long record of feeding each other. There’s no strong reason to assume this time would be different.

Where I Think This Goes

I’ll be explicit: what follows is a forecast, not a description of something that has already happened. It’s the biggest claim I’ve made in this series.I believe there will be a serious economic crash before 2030. I don’t expect a single dramatic collapse so much as a 1929-style unwind—an initial sharp drop followed by a longer grinding period of false recoveries and renewed declines—as a debt load this large and entrenched proves too heavy to clear quickly. The tools that have kept the system running since 2008 (bailouts, quantitative easing, pandemic money printing, and now direct government equity stakes) each worked in the moment they were used, but each one also added to the total leverage and artificial support the system now depends on. At some point this decade, the ability to prop it up again either runs out or simply stops working the way it used to.The counter-argument deserves weight. Markets have survived an enormous number of confident crash predictions over the past twenty years, including several from Burry. Timing has often been wrong even when direction was eventually right. It’s possible that real productivity gains from AI, however overhyped some of the current spending is, grow the economy faster than the debt compounds—the outcome that has periodically rescued highly indebted countries before. Central banks and governments have also shown they are far more willing and able to intervene aggressively than they were in 1929, and that willingness, however reckless it looks on paper, might simply keep working longer than the historical parallel suggests. I don’t think that’s the more likely outcome. But I’ve been wrong before, and anyone making a claim this consequential owes readers that honesty.

This piece is analysis and historical comparison, not financial advice. Nothing in it is a recommendation about any specific investment. I am not a financial advisor. This is, by nature, the most speculative forecast I’ve made in the series.

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What Was Actually Signed

The Mecca agreement did not emerge from nowhere. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed their own bilateral Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement back in September 2025, in the aftermath of Israel’s strike on Doha, committing each to treat aggression against the other as aggression against both. The three countries then met in March 2026 to discuss widening that bilateral pact into a trilateral one, and Friday’s signing is the product of roughly a year of negotiation rather than a sudden reaction to any single event. What was actually put on paper is fairly minimal: a joint statement establishing the mutual-defence principle and committing the three to deeper cooperation on intelligence, training, and defence planning, but giving no specifics on what obligations each side has actually accepted, or what would trigger the clause in practice. That vagueness is not incidental. Mansoor Ahmed of the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre has noted that Pakistan and Turkey bring established defence industries to the arrangement while Saudi Arabia brings capital, but the pact reads, at this stage, more as a statement of political intent than a fully worked treaty, which leaves considerable room for what it ends up meaning in practice.

Not Officially Against Anyone

Officially, this pact is aimed at no one. A Turkish official told Reuters the agreement was “defensive” and “not against any specific actor,” while Saudi Deputy Minister for Public Diplomacy Rayed Krimly explicitly rejected the idea that it represents a sectarian bloc or a military axis, and denied any nuclear dimension to it. That denial is worth taking at face value on the nuclear point specifically: analysts have been quick to note that Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent is oriented towards India, not the Gulf, and extending it to cover Saudi Arabia would be a far larger step than anything in Friday’s statement. But officially non-aligned is not the same as practically non-aligned, and it’s worth being honest about who this pact is actually a response to. Saudi Arabia has been struck repeatedly since February by Iran and Iran-aligned forces, including Houthi fighters in Yemen, in a widening war it did not start and cannot fully insulate itself from. Turkey’s relationship with Israel, meanwhile, has deteriorated sharply over Gaza and Israel’s expanding military footprint across Syria and Lebanon. Nobody signed anything with Iran or Israel’s name on it. But Iran and Israel are, self-evidently, the two capitals watching this agreement most closely, and for good reason.

A Bloc Defined by What It Isn’t

One detail is worth stating plainly, because it says something about how this pact will be read across the region even if it’s never written into the text itself: all three signatories are Sunni Muslim-majority states. In a region where the Iran-led, largely Shia axis has spent two years absorbing and inflicting damage in a war against the United States and Israel, three major Sunni powers formally tying their security together reads, whatever the official language says, as at minimum a hedge against that axis, and at most the visible skeleton of a new sectarian security bloc. I don’t think that reading is unfair or paranoid. It’s the most obvious one available, and Iranian officials have already responded in kind: lawmaker Ebrahim Rezaei told Riyadh it would take more than a pact to secure the region, a fairly pointed way of saying Tehran doesn’t intend to be deterred by it.

The Alliance Trap

This is where 1914 earns its place in the argument, and it’s worth being precise about the mechanism rather than the mood. Europe before the First World War was not stumbling blindly towards catastrophe; it had spent decades deliberately building alliance structures, the Triple Alliance binding Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, the Triple Entente binding France, Russia and Britain, specifically to deter aggression by making the cost of attacking any one member the cost of fighting them all. On paper, that logic is sound: a rational aggressor should be deterred by the prospect of a wider war. In practice, it did something closer to the opposite. When Austria-Hungary moved against Serbia in July 1914 over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a genuinely local, containable dispute, the web of mutual obligations meant Russia mobilised to defend Serbia, Germany mobilised to honour its commitment to Austria-Hungary, and France and Britain were drawn in behind Russia, each government acting rationally within its own alliance commitments whilst the sum of those rational decisions produced a war none of them had actually chosen at the outset. The tragedy of 1914 was not irrationality. It was a set of deterrence mechanisms that worked exactly as designed, and in doing so removed the flexibility that might otherwise have kept a regional crisis regional.

It’s worth being fair to the differences here too, because they matter. The Mecca pact is nowhere near as consequential, yet, as the alliance web of 1914, and it bears even less resemblance to the other pact that sometimes gets reached for in moments like this, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which shocked the world precisely because it bound together two governments assumed to be implacable ideological enemies. There is no equivalent surprise here. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan are natural partners with decades of existing military cooperation between them; Riyadh already buys Turkish drones, and Pakistan has trained Saudi forces for years. What Mecca shares with 1914 is not the shock of realignment. It’s the specific structural risk of an automatic mutual-defence clause sitting on top of a region that already has multiple live conflicts running through it, any one of which could, in principle, trigger it.

Why This Region Always Ends Up on the Front Page

It’s worth stepping back and asking why a defence pact between three countries most Western readers would struggle to place on a map together commands this much attention, and the answer is that this part of the world has never been just regional in its consequences. Jerusalem, a few hundred miles from where this pact was signed, is a holy city to three of the world’s major religions simultaneously, which is precisely why disputes over it have proven so durable and so resistant to purely local resolution. The wider region sits at the literal hinge between Europe, Asia and Africa, a geography that has made it a contested crossing point for empires for millennia before oil was ever discovered beneath it. And a large share of the cheap oil that still underwrites the modern global economy flows from precisely this stretch of the map, which is why a Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani pact signed in response to a war over Iranian oil exports is never going to be read as a purely regional story, however local its stated scope.

Where I Think This Goes

I want to separate the facts of Friday’s signing from what I think it means for where this goes next.

My honest view is that this pact makes a wider regional conflict somewhat more likely, not less, over the medium term, precisely because of the 1914 mechanism described above. If Iran or an Iran-aligned group strikes Saudi Arabia again, which given the pattern of the last five months seems more likely than not, Turkey and Pakistan now have a formal commitment pulling them towards involvement in a conflict neither has chosen for itself. I don’t think that means automatic war the way 1914 eventually produced one; this pact is vaguer, less binding, and less operationally developed than the treaty web of a century ago, and all three governments have obvious reasons to want deterrence rather than entanglement. But the entire point of a mutual-defence pact is to raise the stakes of any future incident, and raised stakes cut both ways: they can deter an aggressor, or they can turn a containable strike into a wider war once the first shot has already been fired.

The counter-argument deserves proper weight. It’s entirely possible this pact does exactly what its signatories say it does: functions as a stabilising deterrent that makes Iran and its allies think twice before striking Gulf targets again, without ever being tested in practice. Deterrence, when it works, produces no headlines, only the absence of the crisis that didn’t happen. Saudi Arabia’s own logic here looks less like appetite for a wider war and more like a hedge against a US security guarantee that the last five months have shown to be less reliable than it once assumed. If that reading is right, Mecca may end up looking less like the alliance system of 1914 and more like NATO’s own founding logic, a defensive structure that succeeded precisely by never being invoked. I don’t think we’ll know which version of this pact we’re looking at until it’s tested for the first time, and I’d rather that test never comes.

This piece reflects analysis and historical comparison based on reporting available in the immediate aftermath of Friday’s signing, and the practical detail of what this pact actually commits its signatories to remains, as of this writing, largely unspecified.

The Erosion, Not the Dip

What makes this genuinely unusual, rather than simply another unpopular war, is the shape of the decline. Wars that lose public support typically do so gradually, over years, as casualties mount and the initial rationale frays; Vietnam is the textbook case, taking the better part of a decade to go from broad bipartisan backing to the subject of mass protest. This war skipped the backing altogether and has spent five months sliding further from there. By July, the Chicago Council found 68% of Americans believed the war’s costs outweighed its benefits, against just 31% who thought it worthwhile, alongside a striking secondary finding: Americans reported feeling no more threatened by Iran’s nuclear programme than they had in 2023, despite the war’s stated purpose being to eliminate exactly that threat. AP-NORC found only 33% thought the war worth fighting by late July, with even Republican approval of Trump’s handling sliding from 71% to 61% in a single month. Reuters/Ipsos, by 31 July, put support at just one in three, the lowest reading of the war so far, with 69% saying Trump had failed to clearly explain what he was trying to achieve. Nate Silver’s tracker has net support sitting around -21 to -24 through early August, ticking up slightly during lulls in the fighting and dropping again whenever it flares. This is not a war experiencing a rough patch. It is a war that has been shedding support consistently since the day it began.

The 1991 Comparison, Inverted

I’ve written before in this series about why 1991 is the wrong precedent to feel reassured by militarily, given how differently Iran is fighting this war compared to Iraq’s conventional collapse in the Gulf War. It’s worth adding here that 1991 is also the wrong precedent for reading American public opinion, and for a related reason. The coalition Bush assembled in 1991 worked, politically as well as militarily, because the American public could see a clean, limited objective, expelling an invader from a smaller state, and a war that ended in exactly the hundred hours it was expected to. Support for this war has none of that shape. Quinnipiac found 74% of voters opposed sending ground troops into Iran outright, including a majority of Republicans, 52% to 37%, which tells you something important: even Trump’s own base is not prepared to underwrite the kind of open-ended commitment this war increasingly looks like it might require.

Two Withdrawals, One Image

There is a reason war-weariness has set in this fast, and it isn’t only about Iran. It’s about what came immediately before Iran. American forces left Afghanistan in 2021 after twenty years, and the closing image of that war, desperate crowds at Kabul airport, Afghans clinging to departing US military aircraft, has become one of the defining pieces of American war imagery of the century, for the same reason the fall of Saigon and its own helicopter evacuations became the defining image of Vietnam a generation earlier. Both moments did the same rhetorical work in American political memory: they converted decades of stated purpose, containing communism in one case, building a stable Afghan state in the other, into a single, visually unmistakable admission of failure. The American public that watched that unfold in 2021 is the same public being asked, barely four years later, to underwrite another open-ended Middle Eastern commitment. It would be surprising if that public weren’t sceptical from the outset, and the polling above suggests it isn’t.

A Generation That Won’t Fight It

The generational split in this war’s polling is sharper than in almost any conflict on record, and it cuts in a direction that should worry the administration more than the topline numbers do. NPR/Marist found opposition highest among 18-to-29-year-olds at 64%, the single most opposed age cohort in the country. More striking still, the polling firm More in Common found Gen Z Trump voters essentially split down the middle, 38% opposed against 34% supportive, making them the only meaningful segment of Trump’s own coalition where opposition rivals support; by contrast, three in four Baby Boomer and Silent Generation Trump voters back the war. This is not simply the ordinary leftward skew of youth opinion. Young conservatives are turning against a war a Republican president is prosecuting, in numbers that suggest the “no new wars” promise Trump was elected on carries genuine weight with exactly the voters he most needs to keep. Analysts have offered a fairly unsentimental explanation for why: 18-to-29-year-olds are disproportionately the ones who would actually be asked to fight it.

Why the Public Has a Point

It’s worth taking seriously why this scepticism is rational rather than simply war-weary. The cost of living has risen sharply since Trump returned to office, and a candidate who won partly on a promise to end foreign wars, not start new ones, is now several months into a war with no clearly stated end state. Americans are being asked to bear the economic and human cost of a Middle Eastern war at precisely the moment a large share of the country says it cannot comfortably afford rent or groceries. There is no obvious mechanism by which prosecuting this war further improves that situation, and polling suggests the public has worked that out for itself faster than the administration has offered it a competing story.

The Kharg Island Problem

This is where the war’s logic and the public’s patience are most likely to collide directly. Kharg Island, the small coral island off Iran’s southern coast that handles around 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports and roughly seven million barrels a day of loading capacity, has so far had its military infrastructure struck without its oil terminals being destroyed outright, a distinction analysts read as deliberate leverage rather than restraint. Seizing or permanently disabling it, the step that would most directly cut off the revenue sustaining Iran’s war effort, would very likely require American ground forces, something 74% of the public already opposes before a single soldier has been asked to do it. Trump faces a genuine bind here: the economic logic of the war, and the wider importance of Gulf oil flows to the global economy and the petrodollar system I’ve written about elsewhere in this series, points towards exactly the kind of ground escalation the public will not tolerate, while stopping short of it risks a war that drags on indefinitely without ever producing a decisive result, the outcome the polling above suggests Americans are already the most tired of.

Where I Think This Goes

I want to separate what the polling shows from what I think happens next, because the two aren’t the same question.

I don’t believe negotiation resolves this quickly, however much the public might want it to. Iran has spent nearly five decades since the Islamic Revolution building a state and a military doctrine around precisely the assumption that it may one day have to fight the United States without matching it directly, and after the assassination of its Supreme Leader and sustained strikes on Gulf infrastructure, I don’t think Tehran has any incentive to accept a settlement that looks like it was dictated in Washington. For Iran’s leadership this is a fight for ideological and national survival in a way it manifestly is not for the American public, and that asymmetry of stakes is likely to outlast any amount of American war-weariness on its own.

My honest reading is that Israel is the war’s clearest beneficiary regardless of how it ends. Israel and the United States’ recent agreement to deepen military technology sharing sits alongside a broader Israeli strategic interest in a permanently weakened Iran, its primary regional rival, and the longer American forces remain committed to this fight, the more that strategic space opens up for Israel to assert influence across the wider region on its own terms. The United States, by contrast, has no comparably clear benefit on offer: the war strains the petrodollar system it’s nominally meant to protect, damages the global economy through higher oil prices, and is being fought without the domestic consent that has underwritten every previous American war of this scale. I don’t think a war can be sustained indefinitely on those terms, and I’d expect the pressure toward some form of negotiated off-ramp, however unsatisfying to either side, to grow rather than fade over the coming months. But I’ll admit that’s a forecast built on political sustainability rather than any sign yet that Tehran is ready to accept it.

This piece reflects analysis and polling data available as of early August 2026, and, as with the rest of this series, should be read as argument rather than settled prediction.

Right, here we go — this isn’t going to cause any controversy at all. Today’s subject is the conflict that never seems to leave the front page for long: Israel-Palestine. As of this week it has a fresh flashpoint. On Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu said publicly, for the first time, that Israel has not agreed to the Board of Peace’s roadmap for disarming Hamas, a plan Hamas itself had already accepted and one the Trump administration had been presenting as the mechanism that finally ends the war. Netanyahu says Israeli forces will not withdraw from their current lines in Gaza until Hamas disarms completely; the plan he’s rejecting requires exactly the opposite sequencing. It is a small, technical-sounding dispute over sequencing and lines on a map. It is also, I’d argue, a fairly precise illustration of why this conflict keeps outlasting every attempt to end it: both sides continue to believe, for reasons that are at least partly rational, that they cannot afford to accept the terms on offer. There is a useful precedent for reading a conflict through the lens of what each side believes it cannot afford to lose, and it is the war Israel fought in October 1973.

Why 1973, Not 1967

The instinct with Israel-Palestine is usually to reach for 1948 or 1967, the founding and the Six-Day War, since both explain how the map came to look the way it does. I want to reach instead for the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, because it explains something the founding wars don’t: what it looks like when Israel’s apparent strength meets a coalition of adversaries willing to accept catastrophic losses to erode it anyway. Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack on Judaism’s holiest day, catching an Israeli military that had, after 1967, come to believe its own deterrent reputation was close to unbreakable. Israel ultimately won the war militarily, pushing back across the Suez Canal and to within artillery range of Damascus. But it did so at a cost, roughly 2,600 Israeli dead in nineteen days, that shattered the assumption of easy, low-cost victory and reshaped Israeli politics for a generation. The lesson of 1973 was never that Israel could be defeated outright. It was that a multi-front coalition willing to absorb losses could impose a price high enough to change the political weather at home, regardless of who held the battlefield at the end.

The Israeli Advantage

Set against any adversary in the region, Israel’s military strength remains the single largest fact of this conflict. The IDF fields a modern, integrated force built around precision air power, layered missile defence, and battlefield technology that has no equivalent on the Palestinian side, where Hamas’s arsenal leans heavily on improvised rockets, tunnel warfare, and small-arms fighting. That gap is reinforced, not narrowed, by Washington. The US House passed its fiscal 2027 defence bill in July with a provision, Section 219, establishing a permanent US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, deepening the integration of American and Israeli military research and procurement in a way some of the bill’s own Republican critics called dangerously lopsided. That sits on top of the standing US financial aid relationship, and on top of Israel’s own increasingly stated ambition, voiced by Netanyahu himself, to eventually wean off direct financial aid whilst keeping the technological cooperation. Whatever else is true of Israel’s position in this war, it is not fighting from a position of material weakness.

Two Fronts Israel Cannot Fight Its Way Out Of

Israel’s difficulty is not military. It is, I’d argue, twofold, and neither problem responds to further firepower.

The first is what Israel’s own conduct of this war has done to its standing abroad. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel remains active at the International Court of Justice, with the court having already found, in provisional rulings, a plausible risk that Palestinians in Gaza face acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, even though no final ruling on the merits has been made and won’t be for some time yet. Gaza’s Health Ministry puts the death toll from Israel’s military campaign at over 73,000, a figure the UN and other international bodies consider broadly reliable despite it not distinguishing combatants from civilians. Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, the three mediating powers in the current ceasefire process, publicly condemned Israeli strikes on civilian and healthcare targets just this week as a “flagrant violation of international law.” None of that is a fringe reading of the war. It is now the position of governments that were, not long ago, quietly transactional partners of Israel. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that what has happened in Gaza has cost Israel a degree of international legitimacy that will outlast this specific war by years, regardless of how the current disarmament dispute resolves.

The second is domestic, and it is almost as serious. Netanyahu governs through a coalition that depends on Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right blocs to survive, a dependency that pulls policy rightward and alienates the international partners Israel needs while doing nothing to broaden the coalition’s actual support at home. Most current polling has that coalition falling short of the 61 Knesset seats required for a majority. Layer onto that a live constitutional crisis over ultra-Orthodox conscription exemptions, an ongoing judicial overhaul fight that triggered mass protests even before October 7, and Netanyahu’s own corruption trial running in parallel with all of it, and an election that may now be brought forward rather than waiting for its scheduled October date. This is not a government fighting a war from a position of unified national purpose. It is a government fighting a war whilst simultaneously fighting to survive its own coalition.

Hamas’s Advantages, and Their Limit

Hamas’s position looks, on paper, considerably weaker, and militarily it is. What it has instead are two things that have historically mattered more than raw material strength in exactly this kind of asymmetric conflict.

The first is a regional support network, however uneven and reduced by two years of Israeli and American strikes, running through Iran and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which forces Israel to plan for and resource a multi-front threat environment rather than a single contained one. The second is the structural advantage of guerrilla and asymmetric warfare against a conventionally superior opponent, a pattern that recurs across the twentieth century wherever a materially weaker side has been able to absorb losses for longer than its opponent’s political will could sustain paying the cost of the fight, from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

But there is a limit to that historical pattern, and it’s worth being honest about where it breaks down here rather than assuming it simply repeats. In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the occupying power, for all its firepower, was not willing to raze entire population centres and inflict casualties on the scale Gaza has now seen in order to secure a decisive result. Whether that reluctance was moral, legal, or simply political, it created a ceiling on how far the stronger side would go, and it was against that ceiling that guerrilla resistance found room to outlast its opponent. I don’t think that ceiling has held in this war in anything like the same way. That is precisely why I’d argue this is the harder version of the guerrilla-war pattern for Hamas to actually win, not the easier one: the historical logic depends on the stronger power eventually finding the cost of continuing too high to bear, and a government willing to accept the level of civilian destruction already seen in Gaza has, whatever else it has sacrificed, not yet reached that threshold.

The Vietnam Parallel, Updated

There is a second historical parallel worth drawing here, separate from 1973, and it concerns not the war itself but the reaction to it. The scale and breadth of global protest against Israel’s conduct in Gaza, spanning capital cities, university campuses, and a wide swathe of public figures willing to speak out, echoes the anti-war movement that eventually helped end American involvement in Vietnam. The difference is one of geography and scale. The Vietnam-era movement was substantially American, a domestic political phenomenon that mattered because it eroded Washington’s own will to keep fighting. What’s happening now looks considerably more global: a 2026 Pew survey found 60 percent of Americans hold a negative view of Israel, up from 53 percent the year before, and that shift sits alongside genuinely mass protest movements across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond, rather than being concentrated in the country actually prosecuting the war. Whether that broader, more diffuse global pressure can produce the kind of political effect the Vietnam-era movement eventually did in Washington, given that it isn’t aimed at a single domestic electorate the way the Vietnam movement was, is one of the genuinely open questions of this conflict.

Where I Think This Goes

I want to be clear about the line between what’s happened and what I think happens next, not least because this is a conflict where it’s unusually easy to let the two blur together.

My honest view is that the situation gets worse before it gets better, particularly for Palestinian civilians. Neither side’s underlying calculation has shifted enough to produce a durable settlement: Israel’s governing coalition depends on factions that reject Palestinian statehood outright, while Hamas has shown no willingness to disarm without exactly the kind of political guarantee Netanyahu refuses to give. I don’t think Israel’s upcoming election changes this fundamentally, even if it produces a different governing coalition, because the structural drivers, the multi-front regional threat, the international legal exposure, the domestic political fragmentation, will still be there regardless of who’s sitting in the Knesset afterward. I’ll admit to being genuinely sceptical that a change of government alone resolves any of this.

I’ll say plainly where I land on this myself, since I don’t think a piece like this should hide behind studied neutrality on every point: I think what has happened in Gaza should be classed as a genocide. A peer-reviewed household mortality survey published in The Lancet Global Health in early 2026 put total violent deaths at over 75,000, more than a third higher than the Gaza Health Ministry’s own contemporaneous count, and found that women, children and the elderly made up 56.2 percent of the dead, a demographic skew the researchers described as remarkably consistent across every independent count of this war, including Israel’s own internal figures. A war that kills civilians as an unavoidable by-product of fighting an embedded enemy is one thing. A war in which more than half of those killed are women, children and the elderly, sustained at this scale for two years, is, in my view, no longer adequately described by that framing. I recognise the ICJ hasn’t reached a final ruling, and that Israel disputes both the figures and the characterisation entirely, but I don’t think withholding judgment until a court process that may take years to conclude is where I want to sit on this one.

The counter-argument deserves to be stated properly, though. The Board of Peace framework does represent the most sustained multilateral pressure on both sides to actually conclude this war that has existed since October 2023, and Washington’s evident frustration with Netanyahu’s rejection of the disarmament roadmap this week suggests the Trump administration may be willing to apply real pressure of its own rather than simply continuing to underwrite the status quo. It’s entirely possible that pressure, combined with war exhaustion on both sides and the sheer diplomatic weight of Egypt, Qatar and Turkey all now publicly critical of Israeli conduct, forces a resolution faster than the underlying political dynamics would otherwise suggest. I don’t think that’s the more likely outcome, but I don’t think it’s a fringe one either.

This piece reflects analysis and historical comparison rather than a claim to settled legal or military fact, particularly given that the ICJ case discussed above remains unresolved and the conflict itself is still actively unfolding.

For most of the summer of 2026, Crimea has been going dark. In late June, Ukrainian drones collapsed a railway bridge over the North Crimean Canal near Rozdolne, struck an oil depot at the Kerch thermal power plant, and hit an electrical substation and an LNG distribution point in Simferopol, the peninsula’s second city. In early July, a single night of strikes knocked the entire occupied peninsula off the power grid. Russian authorities have since suspended petrol sales to civilians, hotels in Yalta and Alushta are running rolling blackouts through the height of the tourist season, and the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces, Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, has said plainly what the campaign is for: to make it impossible for the Russian military machine to remain and continue to operate there. It is not, in other words, a campaign aimed at retaking Crimea by force. It is a campaign aimed at making Crimea impossible to hold. There is a precedent for exactly that idea, and it is rather older than most of the coverage of this campaign has acknowledged: the Allied siege of Sevastopol, 1854 to 1855.

Why Crimea, Then and Now

The reason Crimea keeps recurring as a strategic prize, across a century and a half of otherwise unrelated wars, is not really about the peninsula itself. It is about what the peninsula controls. Crimea sits across the mouth of the Sea of Azov, through which much of Russia’s supply traffic for its southern front has moved, and it projects Russian naval power across the wider Black Sea, the route by which grain, oil, and military hardware move between Russia, Ukraine, and the Mediterranean beyond. A power that holds Crimea holds a base from which to dominate that traffic; a power that loses it loses a warm-water foothold it has coveted since the eighteenth century. This was precisely the logic that drew Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire into the Crimean War in 1853, and it is substantially the same logic, updated for drones and electrical substations rather than ships of the line, that is playing out today.

Sevastopol, Then

When the Allies landed on the peninsula’s north-west coast in September 1854, their objective was not the conquest of Russia. It was the destruction of a single asset: the Russian Black Sea Fleet, based at Sevastopol, which Britain and France regarded as a standing threat to the Mediterranean and to Ottoman territory. What followed was not a rapid campaign. The siege of Sevastopol ran for eleven months, from October 1854 to September 1855, and became, by most estimates, one of the costlier operations of the nineteenth century, with more than 100,000 dead on both sides, the overwhelming majority from disease and the brutal Crimean winter rather than combat. The Russian engineer Eduard Totleben spent that time reinforcing the city’s defences so effectively that repeated Allied bombardments failed to break them outright; what eventually decided the siege, in September 1855, was not a single dramatic assault but the sustained attrition of a fortress cut off from adequate resupply, culminating in the French capture of the Malakoff Redoubt and the Russian decision to scuttle their own fleet and abandon the city rather than lose it intact.

The detail worth dwelling on, given what is happening in Crimea now, is what a besieging army actually spent most of that year doing. It was not, principally, storming defences. It was strangling supply. Russian forces made repeated efforts throughout the siege to disrupt the vulnerable lines connecting the besiegers to their own ports at Balaklava and Kamiesch, understanding correctly that an army fed and supplied would eventually break a fortress that could not be. The eventual construction of the Grand Crimean Central Railway by the Allies, finished in March 1855 specifically to solve their own supply problem through that brutal winter, was as decisive to the siege’s outcome as any single battle fought during it. Sevastopol did not fall to superior numbers alone. It fell once the logistics keeping it alive gave out.

Isolation Without Invasion

What makes the current Ukrainian campaign a genuinely interesting variation on that precedent, rather than a simple repeat of it, is that Ukraine is not besieging Crimea in any conventional sense. There is no Ukrainian army encircling the peninsula the way Allied forces encircled Sevastopol. What there is instead is a sustained drone campaign aimed at exactly the target Russian forces spent 1854 trying to protect: the supply lines that keep a besieged position viable at all.

The targets tell their own story. Strikes have focused on the M14 highway linking Rostov-on-Don to Melitopol, a critical land corridor for resupplying occupied southern Ukraine; on the rail line to Rozdolne; on the Chonhar road bridge connecting Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland; and, most strikingly, on the power stations that keep the peninsula’s civilian and military infrastructure running at all, including a thermal power station that alone had supplied up to 60 percent of Crimea’s electricity before it was destroyed. Brovdi’s forces claim to have struck more than 100 energy facilities and 196 Russian ships in a single month, figures that, like most wartime statistics from either side of this conflict, cannot be independently verified but are broadly consistent with the pattern of blackouts and fuel shortages now being reported from the ground. Some three million people on the peninsula depend, in one way or another, on the supply chains this campaign is targeting.

There is one deliberate exception worth noting, because it complicates any simple reading of this as pure strangulation. Brovdi has said Ukraine is intentionally sparing the Kerch Bridge itself, the direct road and rail link to the Russian mainland, on the stated grounds that it should remain open as an escape route for civilians who want to leave. Whether that restraint holds, and for how long, is arguably as important a variable in how this plays out as the strikes themselves.

The Difference Precision Makes

It would be a mistake, however, to treat 1854 and 2026 as the same story told with better technology. The Allied siege of Sevastopol required tens of thousands of soldiers to physically occupy ground on the peninsula for the better part of a year, exposed to disease, artillery, and a Russian winter that killed as effectively as any battle did. The current campaign requires none of that. It is being conducted at range, without Ukrainian soldiers setting foot on the peninsula at all, using drone technology that allows Kyiv to strike specific power substations, rail junctions, and fuel depots individually rather than reducing a fortress city to rubble wholesale. Where the Allies eventually had to build their own railway simply to survive the logistics of besieging Sevastopol, Ukraine’s drone arsenal is the logistics: it is both the weapon and the supply-chain solution in one, requiring no equivalent occupying force to sustain the campaign against Russian resupply at all.

That difference matters for how this is likely to resolve. A nineteenth-century siege ends, eventually, in an assault, a surrender, or a withdrawal of the besieging force once its own supply position becomes untenable. Whether an unmanned isolation campaign of this kind produces an equivalent endpoint, given that neither side needs to sustain an army physically on the peninsula to keep the pressure applied, is a genuinely open question, and one without a clean historical precedent to answer it.

Where I Think This Goes

I want to be explicit about where description ends and forecast begins, because the temptation with an ongoing campaign like this one is to read the current trajectory as a straight line toward Crimea’s collapse, and I don’t think that reading is safe yet.

I believe Ukraine’s isolation campaign will continue to intensify rather than plateau, for the straightforward reason that it has proven both cheaper and more sustainable for Kyiv than any conventional attempt to retake the peninsula would be, and because Russia’s ability to defend dispersed civilian energy and rail infrastructure against drone strikes has so far lagged well behind its ability to defend military positions directly. I would expect further strikes on the M14 corridor and on Crimea’s remaining power generation capacity in particular, since both have already shown themselves to be high-value, comparatively soft targets.

The counter-argument deserves to be stated fairly. Sevastopol in 1855 fell because a besieging army eventually broke through defences that supply shortages had already weakened; Crimea in 2026 has no equivalent breach on the horizon, since Ukraine’s stated objective, by Brovdi’s own account, is not to seize the peninsula outright but to make it unusable as a Russian military asset. It is entirely possible this campaign settles into a long, grinding equilibrium, much as the wider war has along the Donetsk front, in which Crimea remains nominally under Russian control indefinitely while functioning less and less as the naval and logistical base it was annexed to become. That outcome would not look like 1855’s decisive fall of Sevastopol at all; it would look like a slow hollowing-out with no clean resolution.

I do not think that equilibrium is where this ends, however, because 1854 suggests a fortress under sustained pressure to its supply lines has historically proven harder to hold indefinitely than defenders initially believe, even when no single assault forces the issue. Whether that historical pattern reasserts itself against a form of siege that requires no occupying army at all, and whether Moscow’s political tolerance for an increasingly unlivable Crimea outlasts Kyiv’s capacity to keep striking it, are the two questions I’ll be watching most closely in the months ahead.

This piece reflects analysis and historical comparison rather than a claim to verified operational data on either side, which remains, as with most reporting from this war, difficult to establish with full confidence.

There is something grimly familiar about the images coming out of the Donetsk front in 2026: soldiers dug into positions that barely shift for months at a time, artillery and drone strikes traded over the same few kilometres of ruined ground, and offensives that gain, at extraordinary cost, distances better measured in hundreds of metres than in miles. It is, in other words, beginning to look rather like 1916.

The comparison is not a loose one. During the Battle of the Somme, fought between July and November of that year, the Entente and German armies between them suffered somewhere in the region of a million casualties in exchange for an advance, at its absolute deepest point, of around six miles. It became, and remains, one of history’s starkest illustrations of what happens when defensive firepower comprehensively outpaces an attacking army’s ability to break through it. A little over a hundred years later, the arithmetic on the eastern front in Ukraine is starting to look uncomfortably similar. In the first five months of 2026, Russian forces achieved a net territorial gain of just seventeen square miles around the Donetsk front, at a cost, by some estimates, of over 9,600 casualties for every square mile taken. Whilst the technology has changed almost beyond recognition, the underlying arithmetic of attrition warfare has not.

Understanding why this war has settled into something resembling trench warfare, and why neither side appears willing or able to stop, requires looking at three things in turn: the way the war is actually being fought, the reasons both sides believe they cannot afford to lose it, and a regional history of enduring catastrophic loss that makes this kind of grinding conflict more politically survivable than it might be almost anywhere else.

The Drone Revolution

The most significant change to the character of this war, and arguably to modern warfare generally, has been the sheer prevalence of drone technology on both sides. What began as a relatively marginal battlefield tool has, over the course of the war, become close to the dominant one: according to CSIS estimates, over 90 percent of Russian casualties are now the result of drone strikes rather than direct combat between troops. The practical effect has been to create what analysts describe as a “kill zone” stretching twenty to forty kilometres along much of the front line, within which movement of any kind, whether by infantry, vehicles, or supply convoys, is extremely hazardous.

This has, in effect, replicated one of the defining features of the First World War by entirely different means. Machine guns and artillery made crossing open ground between trench lines close to suicidal in 1916; cheap, mass-produced first-person-view drones are doing much the same job in 2026, only across a considerably wider belt of territory, and with the added complication that both sides are locked in a continuous technological arms race to out-innovate the other’s drones, jamming systems, and countermeasures. Whichever side gains a temporary edge, whether through better electronic warfare, cheaper mass production, or improved targeting software, tends to see a corresponding shift in the front line’s stability, at least until the other side adapts. This is warfare being reshaped in real time by an industrial and technological competition rather than by any single decisive innovation, and it is difficult to see this particular dynamic disappearing regardless of how or when this war ends.

The Fog Around Kostyantynivka

Nowhere illustrates the war’s current character better than the fight for Kostyantynivka, one of a handful of fortified towns anchoring Ukraine’s defensive line in Donetsk, alongside places like Pokrovsk and Sloviansk. Control of this cluster of settlements is, in a very real sense, essential to the war’s overall trajectory: their fall would open considerably more direct routes into the remaining Ukrainian-held territory of Donetsk oblast, which is precisely why the fighting here has been so sustained and so costly.

What is striking, however, is quite how contested even the basic facts of this fighting have become. Putin claimed in early July that Russian forces had seized the city outright. Ukrainian troops, and even pro-Russian military bloggers, disputed this almost immediately, maintaining that fighting continued and that Russian units attempting to infiltrate the city were taking heavy losses to Ukrainian drone defences. Ukrainian military sources reported, as of late June, more Ukrainian soldiers physically present in the city than Russian ones. It is a reminder that this war, like most wars, is not only being fought on the ground but also in the framing of what is happening on the ground, and that claims of decisive advance ought to be treated with some scepticism until independently verified, a lesson historians of the Tet Offensive’s media coverage would find entirely familiar.

Why Both Sides Keep Fighting

The question of how this war is being fought is, in some respects, easier to answer than the question of why it continues at all, given the scale of loss already incurred on both sides. The honest answer is that both Ukraine and Russia have, for quite different reasons, concluded that they cannot afford to stop.

For Ukraine, this is fairly explicitly a war for national survival, and for control over territory that Russia has formally, though not always practically, annexed. A negotiated settlement that cedes Donetsk and Luhansk outright would not simply mean the loss of territory; it would mean the loss of the industrial and demographic heart of eastern Ukraine, along with a precedent that Ukrainian sovereignty is negotiable under sufficient military pressure. For Russia, the framing is entirely different, though no less deeply held within the Kremlin: this is presented as a war against what Moscow regards as a NATO-aligned state on Russia’s own border, and Putin’s political position, having invested so heavily and for so long in this war, would be difficult to survive if it ended in anything that could be plausibly described domestically as a defeat.

The Weight of History

There is, I would argue, a further reason these two societies in particular have proven able to sustain casualties at a scale that would likely break the political will of most other nations rather more quickly, and it has to do with the sheer historical weight of loss this part of the world has already absorbed.

The scale of what the Soviet Union endured during the Great Patriotic War, as it is still remembered across much of the former Soviet space, is genuinely difficult to convey in terms that feel real rather than merely large. Estimates converge on a total of around 27 million Soviet deaths between 1941 and 1945, split roughly between 8.7 million military dead and an almost incomprehensible 19 million civilian deaths, the product of siege, starvation, forced labour, and Nazi occupation policy that treated much of the Soviet civilian population, Ukrainians and Russians in particular, as expendable. As with so many casualty figures from this period, the precise national breakdown remains genuinely contested; the historian Orest Subtelny put Ukraine’s toll at roughly one in six of its entire population, or around 5.3 million people, while other estimates, including those from the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, run several million higher still. Russia’s own losses, concentrated disproportionately among ethnic Russian soldiers of the Red Army, are generally put at somewhere north of six million military dead alone. Layer onto this the seven to twelve million or so who died during the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed it, and the three to five million Ukrainians who perished in the Holodomor famine of 1932–33, and a pattern becomes difficult to avoid: this is a part of the world in which the state’s capacity to absorb, and outlast, catastrophic human loss has been tested, repeatedly, at a scale most nations have never had to reckon with.

It would be too simple to say this history explains Russian or Ukrainian tolerance for casualties on its own. But it is difficult to look at a region with this particular relationship to mass loss and conclude that either government is likely to be moved towards a settlement purely by casualty figures that, in almost any other national context, would already be considered catastrophic and politically unsustainable.

A War of Manpower

Which brings the argument to what I think is now the single most important axis on which this war will actually be decided: not territory, but manpower.

Russia retains, on paper, a considerable population advantage over Ukraine, and has historically leaned on that advantage to sustain losses that would cripple most militaries. That advantage, however, looks considerably less durable than it once did. According to Ukrainian General Staff estimates, Russia has, for four consecutive months running since December 2025, been losing troops faster than it has been able to mobilise replacements: against a Kremlin recruitment target of around 1,100 to 1,150 personnel a day, actual intake has fallen closer to 940, whilst losses since the start of 2026 alone are estimated at over 160,000 killed or seriously wounded, including a single-month record of 35,000 Russian casualties in March.

It is worth stressing, and worth building into any honest reading of this war, that Russia has not published comprehensive military loss figures since the invasion began in 2022, which means virtually all of the numbers now in circulation, including the ones above, come from Western intelligence estimates, organisations such as CSIS, and Ukrainian government trackers, rather than from anything independently verifiable. The true figures could, in principle, be somewhat lower or higher than these estimates suggest. What is harder to dispute, given how many independently derived estimates now converge on broadly similar orders of magnitude, is the underlying direction of travel: the cost of this war to Russia in manpower terms is rising, not falling, and rising considerably faster than its ability to replace what it is losing.

Where I Think This Goes

As with the previous piece in this series, I want to be explicit about where description ends and forecast begins.

I believe this war will continue as a grinding battle of attrition for the foreseeable future, punctuated by renewed Russian offensives of the kind I expect around Kostyantynivka and the wider Donetsk line in the coming months, most likely before winter weather further complicates offensive operations, rather than being resolved by any single decisive battlefield event. Neither side’s underlying reasons for fighting show much sign of softening, and the region’s history, discussed above, suggests both states are capable of absorbing losses that would be politically unthinkable elsewhere. Barring an unforeseen technological breakthrough in the drone race that meaningfully restores the possibility of manoeuvre warfare, or a Russian domestic manpower crisis severe enough to force Putin’s hand regardless of his own political preferences, I would expect this pattern to persist largely unchanged for some years yet.

This piece reflects analysis and historical comparison rather than a claim to precise, independently verified casualty data, which for the reasons discussed above remains genuinely difficult to establish with confidence for either side.

When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a joint US-Israeli strike on his Tehran office on 28 February 2026, a narrative emerged almost immediately across Western media: that with the head of the regime removed, the war itself would not be far behind it. This is a view best summarised by the assumption that a state built so heavily around the religious and political authority of one man could not long survive his death. Five months on, that reading does not hold up particularly well. The ceasefires that were reached have since collapsed, reformed, and collapsed again; strikes have continued on both sides; and the Gulf states have found themselves absorbing Iranian drone attacks they did not sign up for. Iran’s Foreign Ministry has stated, in fairly unambiguous terms, that Tehran will never allow the United States to determine the timing of war and peace.

This is, I would argue, the trap of writing history whilst it is still being made: the temptation to declare a turning point the moment something dramatic occurs. It is a trap historians have fallen into many times before, and there is a useful precedent close at hand for why decapitating a regime and defeating it are not always the same thing.

Why Hormuz Matters More Than Most Wars Get Credit For

To understand why this conflict is unlikely to be resolved quickly, it is worth looking back to 1971 rather than to 2026.

When Richard Nixon closed the gold window and brought dollar convertibility to an end, the United States required something else to anchor global demand for its currency. What emerged over the following years, informally rather than through any formal treaty, was an arrangement whereby oil-exporting states priced their exports in dollars and recycled much of the proceeds back into US financial markets. This is often referred to as the “petrodollar system,” though it is worth being precise about what that term actually describes: it is not that the dollar is formally backed by oil in the way it was once backed by gold, but rather that a global default to dollar-denominated oil trade, sustained since the mid-1970s, has done much of the work that gold used to do in anchoring demand for a currency that would otherwise float free.

This, I would argue, is precisely why the Gulf states matter so greatly to Washington, and why they have mattered for the best part of half a century. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE are not merely trading partners; they are, in effect, load-bearing walls within the architecture that has underwritten dollar primacy since the collapse of Bretton Woods. The Strait of Hormuz, meanwhile, is the chokepoint through which a fifth of the world’s oil must physically pass in order to reach the market that architecture depends upon.

We have seen this calculus play out before. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States assembled the largest coalition since the Second World War, and whilst Kuwaiti sovereignty was certainly part of the stated justification, it is difficult to separate that response from the fact that a hostile power controlling a greatly enlarged share of Gulf oil production was rightly treated as a structural threat to the postwar economic order. The 1991 Gulf War remains the clearest case study available of what the United States is willing to do when Gulf oil security is placed in genuine jeopardy.

It is worth being careful, however, about what that precedent actually tells us, since the differences between 1991 and the present war matter rather more than the similarities.

Why 1991 Is the Wrong Comparison to Feel Reassured By

In 1991, the United States was expelling an invader. Iraq had crossed a border in a conventional armoured assault, and the coalition’s task was to reverse a fact on the ground using conventional force against a conventional army one which, for all its size, collapsed within a hundred hours of the ground campaign beginning.

Two factors made that collapse possible, and both are worth naming precisely rather than gesturing towards. The first is that the coalition secured air superiority over Iraq within days of the campaign opening, with Iraqi air defences and its air force suppressed early enough that the ground war which followed took place under skies the coalition controlled entirely. The second is that the technological gap between the two sides was not a marginal one. Even the Republican Guard, the regime’s best-equipped and most politically loyal formation, was fighting with Soviet-vintage T-72 tanks and largely unguided munitions against M1 Abrams tanks, precision-guided weapons, and real-time targeting for which Iraq had no equivalent whatsoever. The Gulf War, in other words, was not won simply by fielding a larger coalition; it was won by one side holding a categorical technological advantage across nearly every domain of the fight, against an opponent who had no choice but to contest that advantage directly in order to survive.

Iran in 2026 is not contesting that fight at all, and this, I would argue, is precisely what makes it the harder problem of the two rather than the easier one. This is a state that has spent decades deliberately building a military doctrine around not fighting the United States in the way Iraq did. It has, in effect, ceded any contest for air superiority over its own skies from the outset, and has instead shifted the entire war onto a different axis entirely: low-cost, asymmetric strikes against targets that require no ability to match a single American sortie. Iran is relying instead on the tools available to a weaker but well-prepared power the geography of the Strait of Hormuz, the mountainous terrain that has swallowed occupying armies long before this war began, the doctrinal loyalty of the IRGC, a regional network of aligned militias, and a sustained missile-and-drone campaign against precisely the infrastructure Gulf economies cannot function without. Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery, the kingdom’s largest, was struck by drones within days of the war’s opening. Kuwait’s Shuaiba complex, which produces both electricity and desalinated drinking water, has since been struck repeatedly.

This last category of target is worth dwelling on, since the irony contained within it is precisely the kind of detail history tends to reward noticing. The Atlantic Council has noted that Gulf states draw the overwhelming majority of their drinking water from desalination plants which run on the very petroleum-fired power infrastructure this war is already disrupting, whilst analysis from CSIS has similarly pointed out that a relatively small cluster of these facilities, many within a few hundred kilometres of Iran, supplies the majority of potable water along the coastline. Iran, by contrast, is comparatively insulated from the same tactic being turned against it, given that its own water supply depends far more on dams and wells than on coastal desalination. This is, in effect, a rare instance of the weaker power in a war holding a target set that its opponent’s allies simply have no equivalent means of striking back at.

That is a considerably harder problem for air power to solve than a column of tanks crossing open desert. Shock-and-awe campaigns are built to shatter the will and cohesion of conventional militaries quickly; they are not well suited to a state which has already priced in the likelihood of exactly this kind of bombing campaign, has ceded the one fight it could not win, and has structured its defence around absorbing the rest.

There is also a coalition asymmetry worth noting here, and it cuts in rather the opposite direction to what one might assume. In 1991, the coalition was broad precisely because the target in question for a conventional invasion was one that international law and Gulf-state self-interest could unite behind fairly cleanly. Today, whilst the United States retains significant allied backing, with the UK, France and the Gulf states all entangled in some form, the nature of the war itself is considerably murkier, and that entanglement often looks involuntary rather than chosen. The clearest illustration of this came in March, when a drone believed to be Iranian-made and launched from Lebanon struck the British RAF base at Akrotiri on Cyprus, drawing an EU member state into the war’s blast radius despite having no direct stake in the conflict whatsoever. Broad participation in the 1991 coalition reflected a genuine consensus about the problem at hand. Broad entanglement in 2026, by contrast, reflects rather more the sheer difficulty of staying out of a war once Hormuz, Gulf infrastructure and now Mediterranean bases are all within its range.

The Martyr Problem

There is one further reason why the “decapitation ends it” reading looks weaker with the passage of time, and it concerns the particular kind of leader Khamenei was.

Killing a president or a general removes a decision-maker from the board. Killing Khamenei removed something closer to what killing a Pope and a head of state simultaneously would mean in a different tradition entirely, since he held religious authority alongside political power, and Iran’s constitutional structure explicitly fuses both roles into the office of the Supreme Leader. The tens of thousands who travelled to mourn him at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla were not simply observing a change of government. Iran’s own state broadcasters marked a forty-day mourning period in the language of martyrdom, rather than mere succession.

It is worth noting that regimes built around charismatic religious authority do not always collapse when that authority is removed by an external strike; on occasion, the opposite occurs, and the death itself becomes a unifying grievance that outlasts the individual it happened to. This is a historical pattern worth watching for rather than a certainty, but it represents a serious complication to any theory which assumes that removing Khamenei would remove Iranian resolve along with him.

Where I Think This Goes

This is the point at which I will step out of description and into forecast, and I want to flag that shift clearly: what follows is an argument, not a settled fact.

It is my contention that the United States will need to commit ground forces if it wishes to win this war outright, rather than simply degrade Iranian capability without resolving the conflict on terms favourable to Washington and its allies. Air campaigns are, historically, very good at destroying infrastructure and military assets from a distance. They have not historically been very good at compelling a state to fully capitulate when that state has organised its entire defence around surviving exactly this kind of campaign, and when the death of its leadership has, if anything, hardened domestic resolve rather than fractured it.

The counter-argument deserves to be stated fairly, since it is not a weak one. The United States could instead continue the present pattern indefinitely: rolling waves of strikes, economic strangulation via the naval blockade already in place, and reliance on Iran’s internal fractures — the succession crisis, economic collapse, and war exhaustion — to force capitulation without a single American soldier crossing into Iranian territory. This is, after all, roughly the pattern of the last five months, and it is entirely possible that this pattern simply continues, punctuated by further collapsed ceasefires, until one side’s capacity to sustain it gives out before the other’s does.

I do not believe, however, that this pattern is stable indefinitely, and here the 1991 comparison earns its keep once more. Iraq’s army collapsed within a hundred hours of ground forces moving precisely because a conventional force, once subjected to conventional pressure, tends to break quickly. Iran is not a conventional force in this sense, which means it is unlikely to break the way Iraq did — but this also means that air power alone is unlikely to produce the kind of decisive outcome that would end the war on American terms. If Washington genuinely wants resolution rather than indefinite attrition, I would argue that this eventually means committing forces to the ground, in terrain that has not historically been kind to occupying armies.

Whether the political appetite exists in Washington for that kind of commitment, after Iraq and Afghanistan, is a separate question entirely and perhaps the more important one.

This piece reflects analysis and historical comparison rather than any claim to inside knowledge of military planning. I will be following how this develops in future pieces.