The US and Israel appeared almost poised to declare “mission accomplished,” recasting a protracted and indeterminate conflict as victory, even as they sought an expedient offramp from a preemptive war that had already exceeded the temporal and strategic horizons of its hubristically conceived inception—much to their peril. Israel, however, stopped short, arguably vindicating its maximalist approach in a putative existential struggle it questionably felt compelled to pursue conclusively, even if that required a unilateral double-down.

The chemistry between this performative duo masked an incipient divergence: Washington’s growing inclination toward de-escalation—driven as much by systemic pressures in energy markets and financial volatility as by strategic recalibration—sat uneasily alongside Israel’s continued commitment to decisive degradation of Iranian capability. This parting of ways exposed fractures within what had been presented as a unified strategic front, further entrenching Iran’s strategy of endurance while simultaneously ramping up its deterrent leverage.

At this critical juncture, any negotiated offramp would differentially redistribute the optics and substance of defeat—if not render such an exit increasingly politically off limits—commensurate with the layers of disinformation and narrative management through which all sides have sought to obscure battlefield realities. For the US, it could be framed as pragmatic retrenchment within a broader global calculus, but for Israel, such an exit risked appearing as a more immediate and unambiguous setback, thereby amplifying the asymmetry of perceived defeat even within a shared de-escalatory outcome.

Yet the very desperation of finding themselves on the receiving end of a war that had outrun the logic of its own projection, much to their chagrin, has begun to generate an inverse dynamic. What initially appeared as strategic divergence is increasingly giving way to an inseparable convergence, as Washington and Tel Aviv, caught alike in the compulsions of escalation management, discover that the chemistry of collaboration—and the capacity to shape a prevailing narrative that masks the underlying reality—now binds them more tightly than the earlier choreography of victory ever envisioned.

The economics of exhaustion and the collateralization of deterrence

Iran’s leverage rests on a simple yet brutal economic equation: it costs Tehran pennies to launch a drone, but it costs the US and Israel millions to intercept one. As the war grinds on into its second month, Israel’s interceptor stockpiles are steadily thinning, compelling the US to shift from a mobile force of regional projection into a static guarantor of Israeli airspace. Beyond Israel’s losses, the US faces mounting financial, logistical, and reputational costs: forward-deployed forces experience heightened operational risk, expenditures on missile defense surge, and the strain on rapid deployment and force readiness reverberates across other theaters.

Meanwhile, the true measure of Iran’s leverage lies in the proximity of its surgical strikes to Tel Aviv, Dimona, and Arad, systematically degrading Israel’s radars and sensors. That Iranian missiles can reach the vicinity of Israel’s most sensitive nuclear facilities—despite their status as the highest-priority defensive targets—lays bare the unraveling of Israel’s vaunted air-defense doctrine. If the nuclear heart of the state can be placed under threat, no city can plausibly be considered secure, and the psychological collapse of Israel’s deterrent credibility becomes nearly total.

This desperation has inverted the regional order. The Gulf states, home to critical US bases, now find themselves reduced to hostages of escalation. They cannot refuse American requests without risking strategic abandonment, yet any cooperation in Israel’s defense exposes their oil infrastructure and urban centers to Iranian retaliation. Their prewar détente with Tehran has thus been rendered effectively meaningless.
Iran has, in effect, achieved strategic paralysis. By prosecuting a war of industrial attrition, it compels its adversaries to hemorrhage resources—Israel through direct missile defense expenditure and infrastructure degradation, and the US through operational overextension, deployment costs, and political exposure—while holding the entire US-allied architecture—from Israel’s nuclear core at Dimona to Gulf energy exports—as collateral against further escalation. In this configuration, Iran turns endurance and attrition into strategic instruments, converting both adversaries’ strengths and vulnerabilities into leverage.

Conflict no longer unfolds as a bounded event moving toward resolution but as a managed condition of fragmentation, simultaneity, and indeterminacy, subsuming many moving parts that befuddle all parties—both directly involved and indirectly affected,  simultaneity, and indeterminacy. De-escalatory gestures coexist with renewed deployments; mediation unfolds alongside targeted decapitation; and alliances oscillate between divergence and renewed collaboration through the very narrative management that masks underlying realities. The battlefield is no longer confined to the kinetic domain but dispersed across technological, financial, informational, and interpretive arenas

Iran derived strategic leverage from endurance, turning the protraction of conflict into a distinct form of victory—not through conquest, but through attrition, defiance, and the denial of any decisive pivot, such that apparent triumphs by adversaries risked collapsing into pyrrhic outcomes. The US implemented a selective pause of attacks on Iranian oil and energy installations, advancing negotiations under duress rather than from a position of strategic leverage, while submitting a fifteen-point peace and mediation proposal through intermediaries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Tehran publicly rejected the plan as one-sided and unacceptable, leaving the status of negotiations unclear and undercutting any claim of coordinated de-escalation.Adding to the strategic confusion, President Trump simultaneously signaled increasingly aggressive force options while touting the possibility of a diplomatic settlement with Iran. Thousands of soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division have arrived in the Middle East as part of a broader buildup that includes roughly 2,500 Marines and sailors from Marine Expeditionary Units, amphibious assault forces, and elements of Special Operations and support units, all positioned to expand US operational capacity across the Gulf. Trump publicly entertained the idea of seizing control of Iran’s oil-rich Kharg Island or “obliterating” key Iranian energy infrastructure if Tehran failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even as negotiations for a potential settlement appeared imminent.This juxtaposition—threatening massive destruction and potential ground operations while insisting that an offramp was within reach—reveals a marked cognitive dissonance in US policy: one foot engaged in escalating coercive military pressure, the other projecting imminent diplomatic resolution, a mixed signal that compounded strategic uncertainty and left adversaries unsure of which course of action would prevail.Amid ongoing escalatory maneuvers, the targeted decapitation of an IRGC navy commander continued unabated, underscoring the persistent kinetic dimension of the conflict. These strikes, alongside attacks on civilian infrastructure and Gulf shipping, inflicted casualties on US personnel—including up to 20 service members injured—and damaged allied assets, amplifying regional instability and global energy market shocks.Simultaneously, the life insurance for Iran’s Foreign Minister and the Speaker of its Islamic Consultative Assembly was reportedly brokered through Pakistani intermediaries with the Trump administration—a precaution should they need to represent Iran in future negotiations with the US, particularly after the targeted killings of an array of senior religious and political leaders, a move not without quiet dismay from Israel, still hellbent on regime change in Iran. The development underscored the intricate interplay of coercive action, diplomacy, third-party mediation, and international necropolitics—a constellation of forces defining an increasingly complex and multilayered theater of war.This dynamic resonates with a striking literary analogue in Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale transforms a commercial voyage into a singular, self-destructive quest, subordinating prudence and collective survival to the compulsive logic of pursuit. As Herman Melville renders it, obsession distorts judgment, narrowing the strategic horizon until the object of pursuit becomes indistinguishable from the conditions of ruin. A similar pattern can be discerned in Donald Trump’s fixation on Iran, where strategic calculation risks being subsumed by an overriding imperative to confront a singularly constructed adversary. The danger, as Melville’s narrative makes clear, is that such fixation does not produce resolution but entrapment—drawing not only the pursuer but the entire enterprise into a vortex where victory, even if claimed, collapses into something indistinguishable from defeat.Yet the conflict operates as Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum—an oscillating system set in motion by the initial forces of escalation and hubris. Once set swinging, the pendulum traces a trajectory dictated by initial momentum, yet its consequences reverberate across time and space in ways that are both inevitable and diffuse. In this war, the initial preemptive logic—Trump’s obsession with neutralizing Iran, the maximalist ambitions of Israel, and the systemic pressures driving US decision-making—has generated oscillations affecting the Middle East, energy markets, global financial systems, and regional alliances. The pendulum continues its arc independently of the desires of political actors, imparting effects far beyond the intentions of its initial movers.The search for an elusive, singular enemy—whether a white whale, a presumed interlocutor in Iran, or a “hidden threat” to US interests—produces a network of signs, actions, and reactions that can be read as meaningful but are only partially tethered to reality. In this sense, post-modern warfare becomes not merely a struggle of arms but a contest of narrative, perception, and interpretive construction, where every move is both sign and signal, and the stakes of misreading are amplified across geopolitical, financial, and technological domains.

In this transformed theater, victory is no longer a terminus but a provisional construct, and war itself has become a managed condition without finality, oscillating between perception and reality, action and consequence, across a web of interdependent domains. It is endurance, flexibility, and interpretive authorship that constitute leverage; it is narrative as much as ordinance that determines strategic effect; and it is the capacity to coexist with indeterminacy that now defines the art of modern warfare.

While the US and Israel continue to operate within the inherited logic of modern warfare—presuming linear escalation, coherent strategy, and the possibility of decisive outcomes—the broader historical and systemic context transforms the conflict into a distinctly post-modern condition, confounding precisely those expectations. On the ontic plane, this transformation is visible in the proliferation of drones, precision strikes, interceptor depletion, volatile energy markets, emergency mediation channels, and the oscillation between military escalation and diplomatic signaling.Yet beneath this ontic surface lies a deeper ontological mutation, a transformation not simply in how war is fought but in what war itself now is. Conflict no longer unfolds as a bounded event moving toward resolution but as a managed condition of fragmentation, simultaneity, and indeterminacy, subsuming many moving parts that befuddle all parties—both directly involved and indirectly affected, simultaneity, and indeterminacy. De-escalatory gestures coexist with renewed deployments; mediation unfolds alongside targeted decapitation; and alliances oscillate between divergence and renewed collaboration through the very narrative management that masks underlying realities.The battlefield is no longer confined to the kinetic domain but dispersed across technological, financial, informational, and interpretive arenas, where performative declarations of victory compete with unresolved facts on the ground. It is at this ontological level that the boundaries between victory and defeat themselves begin to blur. Triumph compounds into exhaustion, deterrence into paralysis, and survival into narrative authorship. What appears as tactical success on the ontic plane may simultaneously generate strategic entrapment on the ontological one, such that the categories of winning and losing lose their older fixity. Iran’s denial of any decisive pivot locks its adversaries into this altered being of conflict, where endurance and adaptability—not territorial dominance—become the decisive forms of leverage.The ramifications of this mutation are no longer merely regional. What begins as a theater of war in the Middle East compounds outward into global financial volatility, energy insecurity, alliance destabilization, maritime disruption, and even planetary consequences through supply-chain shocks, inflationary cascades, and technological militarization. War thus ceases to be an event among states and becomes a planetary condition of systemic interdependence, where every tactical move reverberates through layered regional, global, and civilizational architectures. It is precisely this displacement of war from decisive event to ontologically transformed managed condition that unsettles inherited zero-sum assumptions and prepares the ground for a broader rethinking of strategic payoff itself.This scenario exemplifies a critical paradigm shift. Traditional zero-sum assumptions—where one actor’s gain is necessarily another’s loss—are being upended. Boundaries between zero-sum and positive-sum dynamics blur. One can win by losing and lose by winning. Victory is no longer simply material; it is performative, contingent, narrative-driven, and often open to ontological relativity.Game theory provides a lens for understanding this evolving landscape. In a conventional zero-sum framework, preemptive action is designed to secure a decisive outcome: to compel capitulation or degrade a rival irreversibly. Yet systemic uncertainty disrupts these assumptions. Iran’s resilience has prolonged the conflict beyond its initially overwhelming phase, demonstrating that endurance—more than momentum—constitutes strategic leverage. The act of refusing to capitulate converts apparent weakness into legitimacy and a platform to influence negotiations, shape regional dynamics, and complicate adversaries’ calculations.Public signaling by the US and Israel—framing operations as successful and displaying military precision—aims to maintain domestic political support and international credibility. Yet these signals simultaneously create constraints: overt victory claims heighten expectations, risking backlash if conflict continues or unintended consequences emerge. The narrative of victory becomes both tool and liability, shaping the conditions under which an offramp can be credibly pursued.

Iran’s leverage rests on a simple yet brutal economic equation: it costs Tehran pennies to launch a drone, but it costs the US and Israel millions to intercept one. As the war grinds on into its second month, Israel’s interceptor stockpiles are steadily thinning, compelling the US to shift from a mobile force of regional projection into a static guarantor of Israeli airspace. Beyond Israel’s losses, the US faces mounting financial, logistical, and reputational costs: forward-deployed forces experience heightened operational risk, expenditures on missile defense surge, and the strain on rapid deployment and force readiness reverberates across other theaters.

Iran’s conduct illustrates the complementary dynamic. Rather than seeking decisive engagement on conventional terms, Iranian strategy leverages asymmetry—often perceived by adversaries as weakness—to its advantage: delaying tactics, irregular operations, cyber and proxy actions, and selective engagement designed to preserve capability while imposing maximal costs. Prolonged conflict becomes a strategic asset. Iran also implicitly adopts a mosaic defense approach. Targeted strikes designed to disrupt command structures—misrecognized as a veritable house of cards—produce only localized disruption within a resilient, distributed architecture. Authority is diffused, redundancy is built in, and operational continuity is preserved through overlapping layers of command. The system absorbs shocks, reorganizes, and fortifies long-term resilience.What appears as tactical success for the US and Israel may paradoxically reinforce Iran’s strategic position: a decapitation strategy intended to weaken or overthrow the regime instead strengthens the leadership structure from the bottom up, as decentralized command and resilient institutions persist amid external pressure and help unify supporters against a common adversary.Decisions about an exit or “offramp” defy linear logic. Declaring victory is simultaneously symbolic and pragmatic: it signals a withdrawal while maintaining political and strategic credibility. Circular causality—resonating with the pendular dynamics described earlier—governs this process: actions and narratives co-construct outcomes, emergent patterns materialize and dissipate, and the initial preemptive logic continues to reverberate across the strategic system.Victory is neither absolute nor singular; it is contingent, performative, and interpreted through multiple registers. Success manifests politically, psychologically, and symbolically, often diverging from tactical or battlefield outcomes. Hybrid dynamics dominate: endurance, defiance, asymmetric adaptation, and narrative management all constitute forms of success alongside conventional military achievements, underscoring the profound transformation of warfare from a linear pursuit of resolution to a sustained, post-modern condition of managed complexity.What returns us to the opening tensions—the US-Israeli divergence, the asymmetry of perceived defeat, the life insurance brokered through Pakistani intermediaries—is precisely this condition. The US, entangled in systemic pressures and seeking a managed exit, finds itself increasingly at odds with an Israeli partner still committed to a logic of decisive degradation. Iran, for its part, has transformed endurance into a strategic asset, ensuring that even an offramp negotiated under duress will carry the texture of defeat for some and survival as victory for others.The life insurance arrangement—a precaution against further decapitation strikes—is not merely a grim detail but a synecdoche of the broader predicament: negotiations now proceed under the shadow of targeted killing, and diplomacy itself has become another domain of coercive signaling. In this theater, we witness the emergence of post-national necropolitics—the sovereign right to kill no longer tethered to territorial defense or conventional statecraft but exercised transnationally, through targeted strikes and proxy networks, against political figures whose very capacity to negotiate becomes contingent on survival.

This desperation has inverted the regional order. The Gulf states, home to critical US bases, now find themselves reduced to hostages of escalation. They cannot refuse American requests without risking strategic abandonment, yet any cooperation in Israel’s defense exposes their oil infrastructure and urban centers to Iranian retaliation. Their prewar détente with Tehran has thus been rendered effectively meaningless. Iran has, in effect, achieved strategic paralysis by holding the entire US-allied architecture as collateral against further escalation.

The Iran conflict underscores the inadequacy of conventional strategic frameworks, revealing the indeterminacy, oscillation, and systemic interdependence that define contemporary warfare. Zero-sum and positive-sum logics coexist in uneasy tension: actors may win by enduring, lose by ostensibly triumphing, or find both outcomes intertwined. Encumbered by maximalist ambitions, hubristic preconceptions, and a spiral of escalation, the United States faces a war of choice animated by anachronistic objectives—relics of a unipolar strategic imagination—misaligned with an emergent, multipolar reality, and conceptually undone from the outset.In the absence of any exit strategy, the war of choice has ceded the endgame to the pendulum, not the clockwork. The clockwork logic of linear strategy—where victory is a fixed endpoint—has yielded to the pendular dynamics of post-modern conflict, where some consequences are foreseeable, while others are not, and every action resonates beyond immediate intent. Power now resides less in domination than in endurance, adaptation, and the capacity to navigate complexity, uncertainty, and narrative.In this transformed theater, victory is no longer a terminus but a provisional construct, and war itself has become a managed condition without finality, oscillating between perception and reality, action and consequence, across a web of interdependent domains. It is endurance, flexibility, and interpretive authorship that constitute leverage; it is narrative as much as ordinance that determines strategic effect; and it is the capacity to coexist with indeterminacy that now defines the art of modern warfare.

Dr. Faridul Alam is a former academic, writes from New York City.

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