By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers
NEW YORK: It began, as these things often do, with the language of certainty. Targeted strikes. Decisive blows. A crippled nuclear program and a supreme leader dead. Washington and Tel Aviv declared the opening salvos of their campaign against Iran a strategic masterstroke — a swift, surgical intervention that would fracture a regime, end a nuclear threat, and reshape the Middle East in a single, overwhelming moment of force.
Eight weeks later, none of that has happened. What has happened is this: oil is trading at levels not seen since the worst convulsions of the 1970s energy crisis. Gulf state oil infrastructure lies in smoldering ruin — Saudi and Emirati facilities hit by Iranian-backed Houthi missiles, damage so extensive that engineers estimate years of repair work lie ahead.
American and Israeli military budgets are hemorrhaging at a pace that unnerves even hawkish defense economists. Iran, battered and isolated, has lost much of its oil export revenue — but has not lost its will, its geography, or its arsenal of asymmetric tools. And across the developing world, from Cairo to Colombo to Nairobi, populations are absorbing a cost-of-living shock they did nothing to deserve.
The question that haunts chancelleries from Berlin to Beijing, and ought to haunt Washington: is this a war that can be ended? Or has it already become something else — a slow-motion catastrophe, metastasizing across the global system the way Ukraine did, only faster and with far less of the world’s critical infrastructure safely out of reach?
To understand how we arrived here requires understanding the foundational error of the campaign’s opening logic. Iran is not Gaza. It is not even Iraq. It is a nation of nearly 90 million people, a civilization of extraordinary antiquity, spread across a territory larger than Western Europe, defined by mountain ranges that have confounded every would-be conqueror from Alexander to Tamerlane.
Its military doctrine is not built for conventional battlefield victory — it never was. It is built for endurance, diffusion, and the weaponization of pain.
Iranian strategic culture has a name for this: moqavemat — resistance. It is not a slogan. It is a deep civilizational posture, forged across centuries of invasion and reinforced by four decades of sanctions, proxy warfare, and international isolation. When the regime absorbs a blow — even a devastating one — it reaches for a playbook refined across decades: absorb, disperse, survive, retaliate laterally.
The killing of the supreme leader shook the regime. It did not break it. Iran’s new ruling council has done something tactically shrewd: it has publicly signaled openness to diplomacy while simultaneously accelerating asymmetric operations. This dual-track approach — the olive branch and the proxy missile launched simultaneously — is not a contradiction. It is doctrine.
Perhaps the most underreported dimension of this war is the devastation being visited upon the Gulf states — ostensibly allies or neutrals, but increasingly victims.
Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq facility, the single most critical node in the global oil supply chain, has been struck twice. The damage is assessed as severe. Kuwait’s offshore platforms have been targeted. The UAE has watched its carefully constructed image as a haven of stability dissolve in smoke and rising insurance premiums. These countries did not choose this war. They are paying for it nonetheless — in infrastructure that took decades to build, in foreign investment that has begun quietly departing, and in the existential anxiety of small, wealthy states trapped between great powers.
The strategic logic of these strikes is clear. Iran cannot defeat the United States and Israel in a conventional exchange. But it can make the regional cost so catastrophic — to oil infrastructure, to shipping lanes, to the very architecture of Gulf prosperity — that the pressure for a negotiated settlement becomes irresistible. It is coercive deterrence by immolation.
Crude oil prices have surged more than 50 percent since the conflict began. That number, clinical in its abstraction, carries within it a world of suffering.
Higher oil prices are not merely an inconvenience for Western motorists. They are a civilizational lever. They raise the cost of fertilizer, which raises the price of food. They raise freight costs, which ripple through every supply chain. Aviation fuel shortages are beginning to disrupt long-haul logistics. Central banks in emerging economies face an impossible trinity: raise rates to fight inflation and choke growth; hold rates and watch currencies slide against a surging dollar; or burn through reserves that were never ample to begin with.
The IMF has begun quietly revising its global growth projections downward. Stagflation — that grim, hybrid malaise of stagnant growth and rising prices — is no longer a theoretical risk. It is arriving.
For the United States and Israel, the financial cost of the war is significant but, for now, manageable. American defense expenditure is running dramatically above projections; the Israeli military is burning through materiel and reserve capacity at rates that are straining its domestic economy. But these are wealthy states with deep capital markets, strong currencies, and the geopolitical leverage to pass some costs onto allies.
For Mali, for Bangladesh, for Sri Lanka — countries that still have not fully recovered from the economic shocks of the 2020s — there is no cushion. The Iran war is, for them, not a foreign policy crisis. It is a hunger crisis.
The comparison to Ukraine is irresistible and imperfect in equal measure. Ukraine is a territorial conflict with defined fronts and a comprehensible military grammar. The Iran war is something stranger: diffuse, multi-domain, waged across land, sea, cyberspace, and the nervous system of global energy markets. But the parallel that matters is not military. It is political.
Ukraine taught the world that modern great power-adjacent conflicts do not resolve on schedule. They metastasize. They create facts on the ground that make compromise politically toxic for all parties. They outlast the assumptions that launched them.
Eight weeks into the Iran war, the same dynamic is visible. Every new strike raises the domestic political cost of de-escalation. Iranian leaders who negotiate under fire risk being seen as weak — a fatal charge in their political culture. American leaders who step back without visible gains risk the accusation of strategic retreat. Israeli leaders, navigating a domestic politics of existential anxiety, have little space for ambiguity.
Pakistan has stepped forward as a potential intermediary. Backchannel communications are, reportedly, ongoing. But backchannel conversations require political will to traverse the distance from secret to settlement. That will, on all sides, is conspicuously absent. India has dubed the Pak intervention as a dalal – trader – approach that risks political fallouts, uncertain ends , consequences and results. Iran does not trust Pakistan, as it’s seen as a puppet. .
What Victory Looks Like — and Doesn’t; The most troubling absence in the public discourse surrounding this war is a coherent account of what success would look like. Regime change in Tehran?
The Islamic Republic, for all its fractures, shows no signs of collapse — and history offers no example of an outside power bombing a nation of 90 million into liberal democracy. Seizure of Iranian oil infrastructure?
Even setting aside the legal and moral dimensions, such an operation would require a sustained ground presence in one of the world’s most difficult operational environments — and would almost certainly trigger a global oil shock dwarfing anything seen so far.
The uncomfortable truth, which military analysts speak quietly and politicians avoid entirely, is that there may be no version of this war that ends cleanly. There is only escalation and negotiation — and the longer escalation continues, the more negotiation costs everyone.
Eight weeks in, the window for an exit remains technically open. It is also closing, one strike at a time.
The world built over the past eight decades — its trade routes, its energy systems, its fragile web of economic interdependence — was not designed to absorb a conflict of this shape. It was designed on the assumption that wars of this kind would be deterred, contained, or ended quickly.
That assumption is being tested, in real time, at enormous cost. The question is no longer whether the Iran war can be fought. It can, and it is. The question is whether anyone, anywhere, has a plan for how it ends. (IPA Service)
