The trap for the United States after the strike

This article updates and reworks — post-strike — yesterday’s piece, February 27, 2026

Iran was already opaque: an internal crisis you can’t fully see, and precisely for that reason, it is easier to narrate and manipulate. In the night between February 27 and 28, 2026, the opacity didn’t disappear: it simply shifted. Before, it was the darkness of a compressed uprising, caught between repression and shutdown. Now it is the darkness of war, and darkness, as always, is not just the absence of information: it is a device of power.

In the early hours of Saturday, February 28, the United States and Israel launched a wide-ranging joint offensive against military and command targets in Iran. Washington named the operation Epic Fury; Israel described it as a campaign prepared long in advance, with a broad first wave and an estimated duration measured in days, not hours. But the political message was clearer than the technical details: Trump spoke of “major combat operations” and told Iranians, in substance, that war opens “their opportunity”: when the operation ends, “take over your government.” Netanyahu offered the same framing: the strike as the opening of conditions to “remove the yoke” and allow the Iranian people to “take their destiny into their own hands.” It is hard to imagine a more explicit definition of a war aimed at “regime change”.

The point, however, is not “why” we got here: the spiral was already underway. The point is how: by adding visible sovereignty to an obligation of coherence. When a power stages deterrence for too long — posture, assets, ultimatums, partial evacuations, declarations — it ends up having to “prove” it through an act.

From deterrence to war

The February 28 strike is also the product of a precedent: the twelve-day war in June 2025 broke the taboo on direct confrontation and normalized the idea that the conflict threshold is movable. Since then, the threat has become a stable instrument of pressure on Iran: intermittent nuclear talks, missile-related demands, and requests regarding conventional deterrence capacity. In this context, “credibility” is not strength; it is predictability: if you raise your voice and move assets, you invite expectations; if you then do not act, you not only lose prestige in the eyes of adversaries — who know how to distinguish rhetoric from practice — but, above all, you lose it in the eyes of allies and partners, who base their calculations on reliability.

Striking solves the problem in the short term: it saves face and realigns the command architecture, but it creates “duration.” Credibility is won in hours; duration is paid for in the weeks that follow. The bill comes due on three levels that a democracy struggles to sustain simultaneously: operational risk (retaliation, deaths), economic cost (energy, inflation), and political cost (the domestic coalition, institutions, and bureaucracies). Yesterday, the trap was a choice among losses; today it is an installment plan for loss, spread over time.

The real target: not “the nuclear program,” but command

Early reconstructions suggest the raids targeted not only military infrastructure but also nodes of power in Tehran and other cities, following a logic that resembles decapitation: paralyze the decision-making chain, hit the leadership, and disarticulate command-and-control. If the stated goal is to prevent a nuclear outcome and reduce missile leverage, the choice to hit command signals a qualitative shift: from coercion (“I force you to negotiate”) to rupture (“I prevent you from governing”).

Here, a distinction often missing from public discourse becomes clear: destroying sites is not the same as erasing capabilities. A program can disperse, build redundancy, and rebuild; knowledge cannot be bombed. Decapitation, by contrast, aims at something else: collapsing governance. Governance is not a building; it is a network of apparatuses, services, militias, bureaucracies, and loyalties. It is a machine that, when struck, tends to stiffen. Thus, the most likely outcome is not a vacuum but securitization: more darkness, more control, more repression, more opacity. War, in other words, can produce the opposite of the desired effect: not “opening,” but closure.

There is another element: regime-change rhetoric from the outside accelerates internal discipline. Even when part of society loathes the regime, the symbolic invasion — “overthrow your government” — makes it easier to convert dissent.

Blackout: visible sovereignty and a frozen uprising

At the heart of the strike, Iran plunged into an almost total blackout. NetBlocks estimated national connectivity at around 4%. It is a digital curfew: it doesn’t stop you from leaving your home, but it does stop you from knowing what is happening elsewhere, and from letting others know what is happening to you.

The blackout is not “just” censorship: it is internal war management. It disrupts coordination, testimony, and accountability; it makes chaos more governable by making it less verifiable; and it restores the state’s monopoly over the narrative.

And the narrative monopoly creates a strategic paradox for the U.S.–Israel “tag team”: the emphasis on external interference turns protest into a “sovereignty war.” No longer “regime versus people,” but “state versus aggression.” The more Iran appears besieged, the more repression can be sold as defense; the more repression is framed as defense, the more the uprising risks being absorbed by coercive patriotism: a “we” imposed from above, useful for freezing the internal fracture precisely when, until yesterday, that fracture was the most promising geopolitical lever for those betting on regime erosion.

The military view: the campaign carries a high risk of strategic failure

The military option is not only costly; it is inherently risky and highly likely to yield an ambiguous outcome, a big operational spectacle, and a small strategic effect. The Western temptation is to measure effectiveness by the number of targets destroyed; strategic effectiveness, by contrast, is measured by the political outcome. The political outcome must produce a governable “after,” not merely an impressive “during.”

The first reason for the high risk of failure is geography. Iran is not a concentrated target: it is characterized by depth, dispersion, mountains, redundancies, and underground infrastructure. Fordow, to stick with the symbol, is a hard target carved into rock: a technical problem that often becomes a political one because it requires complex operational packages and, often, a campaign, not an isolated strike.

The second reason concerns the nature of the target. If the target is “nuclear,” you do not just hit buildings: you hit a system (supply chains, stockpiles, concealment capacity). Even with severe damage, residual capacity remains, along with the incentive to accelerate: if you are hit while negotiating, the internal argument for moving faster becomes almost unassailable. In that sense, the operation risks transforming the nuclear program from a bargaining chip into a national imperative.

The third reason is retaliation and regional spillover. The strike is expected to trigger Iranian retaliation against Israel and U.S. bases and assets in the region, with awareness that the “after” will be immediate, dangerous, and difficult to control.

The fourth reason is defense, which in war becomes inventory economy. The twelve-day war of 2025 already revealed a structural constraint: intercepting missiles is expensive and limited; saturating the skies with missiles is relatively cheaper and, above all, psychologically destabilizing. The Wall Street Journal reported the scale of U.S. interceptor consumption (THAAD and naval missiles) during that short war to underscore the difference between defending for days and for weeks.

Finally, the fifth reason is politics. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, warned the White House of the concrete possibility of failure and U.S. casualties, meaning that once you enter, you no longer control the overall scale of the conflict’s cost.

Retaliation: bases, the Gulf, and the American “frontier”

Regional vulnerability materialized immediately. In the hours after the raids, Iran launched missiles and drones at Israel and U.S. infrastructure in the Gulf, striking or attempting to strike bases and assets across multiple countries: Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE. Reuters reconstructed launch and impact data in Gulf states, while The Guardian described the spread of sirens, interceptions, and airspace closures in areas that, until yesterday, were perceived as a “safe rear.”

This is the core of the trap the United States has set for itself: it does not fight in a vacuum. It fights from bases, logistics hubs, radar sites, depots, and runways, with exposed personnel. Every “decisive” blow against Iran opens a new front to protect American infrastructure. Protecting infrastructure requires time, systems, munitions, and attention, exactly what is in short supply today.

Reuters also published images and reconstructions of attacks in Manama, Bahrain, and in areas linked to the U.S. infrastructure. It is a stark reminder that, for Washington, war is everywhere there is a U.S. base.

Hormuz: Iran doesn’t need to close the Strait only to make the risk credible

Energy leverage is the simplest way for Iran to turn war into an American political cost. The Strait of Hormuz does not need to be closed to generate consequences; it is enough to make instability credible, which raises the geopolitical premium on insurance, routes, logistics, and the price per barrel. In a phase in which affordability is the decisive domestic electoral variable, the geopolitical premium on oil does not remain a macro indicator: it becomes the price at the pump — thus inflation — and therefore a loss of consent.

That is how geopolitics enters Americans’ homes: through the gas station. The trap, which in yesterday’s piece was still a dilemma (“if you strike you pay in consent, if you don’t strike you pay in credibility”), now changes shape: credibility has been bought with the strike, but the cost in consent is paid in installments through “duration.” And a conflict that drags on produces not only an economic cost: it produces fatigue, then resentment, then internal fracture.

External war becomes domestic war by proxy

American politics is not a bloc; it is a constellation. There are those who fear inflation and disorder; those who fear the “swamp”; those who see intervention as an anti-system betrayal; those who see it as a security necessity; and those who reject it as waste. War does not unite: it selects and splits. The split is not only ideological; it is material. When the cost appears on the utility bill, at the grocery store, and at the pump, war ceases to be an external event and becomes a daily referendum.

Moreover, the institutional dimension matters: various outlets reported lawmakers’ criticism of launching large-scale operations without adequate prior consultation. It is another face of visible sovereignty: war as an act of concentrated command. But it is also a fragility factor: without a broad political coalition, duration becomes more costly and more vulnerable to shocks (U.S. casualties, escalation, incidents, mistakes).

A short coalition in a long theater: the Gulf brakes, Europe follows

The operation confirms a geometry that was already clear. The explicit ally is Israel. Gulf Arab partners, even as they fear Iran, fear even more that destabilization will turn them into targets and expose their rear: the bridge countries of the U.S. posture become an immediate frontier. Before the war, this caution had already been formalized: Reuters reported in late January that Saudi Arabia rejected the use of its airspace and territory for military action against Tehran. War now forces recalculation: some Gulf governments condemn Iranian counterstrikes and offer defensive cooperation, but they do so precisely because they are hit and vulnerable, not because they want a long conflict.

Europe, for now, responds with appeals to international law, civilian protection, and the urgency of de-escalation; diplomacy follows the military dynamic rather than guiding it. The UN Security Council convened an emergency session, while the IAEA and other technical actors try to contain the most uncontrollable component, the radiological one. Reuters reported that the UN nuclear agency did not observe a “radiological impact” from the strikes in the first hours. It is a technical detail that carries political weight: it suggests the campaign can continue without the “brake” of a nuclear disaster, but it also refocuses attention on a single fact: the war is underway while people were arguing about how to avoid it.

Meanwhile, the crisis immediately sparks a battle over civilian casualties and legitimacy. The Financial Times reported on a massacre at an elementary school in Minab amid widespread raids: it is the kind of event that, even if unintentional, becomes politically decisive because it shifts the operation from the terrain of “precision” to that of “blame.”

China’s strategic gift: saturation and simultaneity

Every long war in the Middle East is a strategic tax on the Pacific. If Washington is pinned down in a costly and politically toxic theater, it reduces attention, munitions, and priorities elsewhere. Beijing doesn’t need to do much: it is enough for America to burn itself out in a protracted conflict, because holding out is hard. Moreover, simultaneity across theaters is an effective weapon against U.S. power: you don’t need to defeat it; you only need to saturate it. And the war with Iran, as it has begun — a short coalition, a large theater, regional retaliation, energy risk — is a perfect saturator.

The theory of the end: exit is never an event

The most dangerous knot is not entering the war; it is the lack of a credible theory of the objective, and thus of the end of this war. If the stated goal becomes “remove the yoke” and “favor regime change,” the bar rises automatically: it is not enough to have struck; you must produce an outcome. But a regime change induced “from the air” is unprecedented, and a dictatorship — especially an imperial one, as the Persian — has a higher pain tolerance than a democracy. The risk, then, is twofold: not only do you fail to achieve regime collapse, but you also end up with a harder, more paranoid, and more willing-to-sacrifice-the-economy-and-welfare-for-deterrence regime.

In this scenario, every possible “exit” is imperfect. A quick ceasefire would save the region but leave the strategic issue unresolved and, above all, look like a half-defeat, given that the operation was presented as a historic turning point. Negotiating under fire, by contrast, requires something war tends to consume: minimal trust and stable channels. A long war, finally, is the worst exit: it burns the scarcest resource of hegemony in an interregnum — the capacity to endure — and turns the Middle East theater into an attrition machine for America’s global posture.

The constant: Iran only needs to make the “after” expensive

From the elements analyzed — command, blackout, regional retaliation, energy premium, short coalition, America’s internal political fracture — a thesis emerges: Iran does not need to win in the classic sense. It must make crossing the threshold prohibitive and managing the “after” costly. In that sense, the Iranian crisis is a device for wearing down the American “form”: not America-as-power, but America-as-the-capacity to endure without fraying.

The February 28 decision preserved credibility “here and now.” But it converted that credibility into debt: a debt to be repaid with domestic patience, allied cohesion, economic resilience, stockpile sustainability, and the capacity to prevent the Middle East theater from becoming an attrition trap.

The real question, therefore, is whether the United States and Israel have a theory of the end — a theory of exit — that does not align with the vain hope that, in the dark, the regime will collapse on its own.