A war no one can control
The problem with launching a war in an age of globalization is that its consequences are difficult to confine to the battlefield. They tend to radiate outward, to neighboring countries, to distant markets, to every sector of a world economy in which the targeted nation plays a role. That much is becoming painfully clear in the ongoing United States-Israeli war against Iran, a proud, oil-rich nation of 93 million people.
Worse, once unleashed, such a war proves nearly impossible to control. This is not simply because the world is interconnected, but because of the very structure of modern world society. It is a highly differentiated structure in which no single actor, however powerful, can direct outcomes across the many specialized domains that make up the global system.
Almost from the moment the first strikes landed, Iran responded as though a trip wire had been crossed. Its missiles rained down not only on Israel but on Gulf neighbors that host American military and civilian sites. Airports, hotels, ports, oil tankers, desalination plants, pipelines, and data centers were hit. Most critically, Iran moved to shut the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply flows. Tanker traffic dropped to nearly zero, with over 150 vessels stranded outside the strait. What had been one of the world’s most prosperous commercial crossroads went dark almost overnight, sending shockwaves through global energy and financial markets.
The Iranian strikes on Gulf states with which it was not formally at war came as a shock, and it should have stunned the US more than it apparently did.
The authors of this war had planned for something short and surgical. Trump himself called it a “brief disruption.” Striking over a thousand Iranian targets on the opening day alone, the US and Israel expected a weakened regime to capitulate once its leadership was eliminated. It was a serious miscalculation. Iran is not another Venezuela, where just 10 weeks earlier, US Delta Force commandos had seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas in the dead of night and flown them to a detention facility in New York, a bold operation that met with barely any resistance.
Two weeks into the war, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dead and several senior leaders killed in early strikes, US and Israeli forces have continued pounding Iran’s military infrastructure. Trump has demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Iran has ignored him. Its surviving leadership moved quickly to name Khamenei’s 56-year-old son Mojtaba, known as a hardliner, as the new supreme leader. His first statement, read aloud on state television with only a photo of him on screen, vowed to avenge Iran’s martyrs and resist what he called the aggression of “the arrogant front.” He also warned of “the opening of other fronts in which the enemy has little experience and is highly vulnerable,” a clear signal of unending escalation.
Such threats need not actually be carried out to produce real consequences. The uncertainty they generate is enough to set off cascading reactions across oil futures, insurance markets, and financial systems that no one in Trump’s inner circle can fully anticipate, let alone control. Brent crude crossed $100 a barrel this week for the first time since 2022, and emergency reserve releases have done little to calm the markets. The effects are deeply felt at the local gas pumps where ordinary people stare in panic at the wild swings in the price of kerosene and diesel.
This is the deeper lesson of the Iran war. In today’s global system, no country, however powerful its military, can calibrate its impact across the many specialized sectors of world society. Each sector operates autonomously by its own code. Markets price risk according to supply and demand, not presidential declarations. Military systems follow their own escalation dynamics, which do not always respond to political commands. We saw this even within Iran: while President Masoud Pezeshkian was apologizing to Gulf neighbors for the strikes on their territory, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continued launching those same strikes.
These are not just lapses in coordination. They are features of a highly differentiated world order that cannot be steered from any single command center, not even Washington.
This war is teaching us many lessons. Military supremacy is not a substitute for political wisdom. Nation-states are accountable to their own citizens first, but they are also answerable to the world their actions reshape. The world cannot wait for American foreign policy to be corrected from the outside. That political duty belongs to the American people themselves, who must decide whether the appetite for dominance, dressed up as security, is worth the cost being paid by the rest of humanity.
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