When the Strait of Hormuz closes, you don’t need to be a military analyst to understand what just happened. You only need to understand what the world runs on.

Oil. Gas. Shipping lanes. Insurance rates. Container schedules. Energy prices that decide whether factories hum or go dark, whether households heat or freeze, whether governments fall or survive.

This is why serious analysts have been saying for years that Hormuz is not a “threat” Iran invented for propaganda; it is a structural red line that the US and its allies kept treating like a bluff because they could not imagine a regional actor actually pulling the lever that exposes a vulnerability — dependence.

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And this is why what we are watching now is a massive US miscalculation that will be studied later the way the Iraq invasion is studied today, with the same disbelief that decision-makers could be so arrogant, so blind, and so certain that the other side would fold.

Because Washington didn’t only miscalculate Iran’s will. It miscalculated geography, logistics, and blowback. It miscalculated the fact that the US empire in the Middle East is not a fortress; it is a web of exposed arteries: bases scattered across Gulf monarchies, troops housed in predictable locations, air defenses that are expensive and finite, radars and communications nodes that can be degraded, and a regional order that can be shaken with one choke point.

You can see the arrogance in the assumptions. For years, Iran warned that if its survival is threatened — if the US and Israel push the conflict into an existential zone — Hormuz becomes part of the battlefield. Washington heard that and filed it under “Iranian theatrics,” because the American political class is addicted to the idea that their enemies always bluff, while they alone possess the right to act.

But Iran was not bluffing. Iran was describing the rules of an environment where deterrence is the only language that keeps you alive.

Hormuz was always the red line
The Strait of Hormuz is the world economy’s pressure point, and the fact that it remained open for years was not proof of Western strength. It was proof that Iran understood escalation control, because keeping Hormuz open — even while under sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, and constant threats — was Iran’s way of signaling restraint.

The West interpreted that restraint as weakness.

That’s the miscalculation.

Washington assumed Iran would keep absorbing blows, keep taking “limited strikes,” keep responding in contained ways, because Washington has lived for decades inside a fantasy where escalation is something the US controls.

But in a real war environment, you don’t get to decide the boundaries alone. The other side gets a vote. And Iran’s vote is written in the geography of the Gulf.

Iran’s ‘Samson option’
I used the phrase “Samson option” not to be dramatic, but to describe the logic of a state pushed into a corner: if the enemy wants you neutralised, disarmed, and humiliated, you don’t respond only with missiles; you respond with the full spectrum of leverage you possess — military, diplomatic, economic, and psychological.

Iran’s leverage is not limited to striking targets. It includes making the war economically unbearable for everyone who enabled it. It includes turning a regional conflict into a global cost spiral. It includes demonstrating that the “free flow of energy” is not a natural law; it is a contingent privilege that can evaporate when a state is pushed past its red lines.

This is what the West still struggles to internalise. It thinks deterrence is only about bombs and bases. Iran thinks deterrence is about making aggression unaffordable.

And Hormuz is how you make it unaffordable.

The three “solutions” don’t solve anything
Once Hormuz becomes the choke point, you immediately hear the same three proposals recycled through Western media.

First: “military escorts”: The idea that you can escort tankers through the most militarised, most surveilled, most missile-saturated corridor on earth as if this is a piracy problem. But escorts do not remove risk; they merely concentrate it.

They turn commercial shipping into military convoys, and that increases the probability of a clash that escalates further. You can escort 10 ships. Can you escort everything, every day, indefinitely, under constant threat? And at what cost in interceptors, drones, naval assets, and insurance panic?

Second: “ceasefire”: The idea that Washington can call a pause and re-freeze the conflict after crossing lines that Iran considers existential. But a ceasefire is not a magic reset button; it is a negotiation outcome.

And Iran is no longer interested in ceasefires that reproduce the same cycle: war, negotiations, pause, then war again. Iran has learned — painfully — that diplomacy has been weaponised against it.

Third: “capitulation”: The fantasy that Iran will disarm itself and accept a future where it is strategically naked. This is the most delusional solution of all, because it assumes Iranians are incapable of reading the regional record.

Iraq disarmed and was invaded. Libya dismantled its programme and was destroyed. Syria gave up its chemical file and was still ripped apart. In that record, capitulation is not peace. Capitulation is an invitation.

So no, none of the three “solutions” solves the crisis. They only reveal the empire’s problem: it assumed it could impose costs without paying them.

Even The New York Times admits miscalculation
One of the most interesting developments is how even mainstream reporting — carefully framed, carefully sourced — has begun to concede what was obvious from day one: the Trump administration and its advisers miscalculated Iran’s response.

The New York Times, in the sections I cited, points to something the propaganda refuses to admit: Iran is not acting like a decapitated regime. Iran is adapting. It is learning. It is targeting vulnerabilities, not staging symbolic retaliation.

It is degrading key radar and air defence systems, hitting communications infrastructure, and shifting the battlefield away from the tidy “Israel–Iran” framing into a wider map that includes US assets and allies across the Gulf.

That matters because for years the West comforted itself with the idea that the Iranian response would be predictable and containable. The NYT reporting suggests the opposite: Iran is adjusting its tactics as the campaign evolves, hitting systems that matter to US coordination and defence, and doing so without the old “ample warning” pattern that allowed the US to frame everything as controlled.

In other words, Iran is making the environment less manageable for the US, which is exactly what deterrence looks like when you cannot match the empire symmetrically.

The miscalculation wasn’t only military
There is another layer that people avoid saying out loud, but it’s central: the US and Israel did not only miscalculate Iran’s missiles; they miscalculated Iran’s society.

Even Iranians who dislike the Islamic nature of their political system can still connect a basic dot: wherever America and Israel intervene, the country becomes worse.

People don’t need to love their government to recognise a foreign assault on their nation. This is why the fantasy of “decapitation + instant uprising” is so dangerous: it projects Western wishful thinking onto a society that is being attacked and then expects the society to celebrate its attacker.

That is not how national psychology works under bombardment.

‘They want Iran’s energy’ is the quiet part out loud
Now we come to the part that explains the deeper imperial logic behind all this: energy.

I referenced the mindset openly circulating among the empire-adjacent influencer class: the idea that “we need Iran’s energy for AI projects,” that the AI race with China will be decided by securing energy inputs, and that therefore this war is not only Israel’s war, but “our war”.

This is imperial logic in its purest form. It doesn’t even bother to hide behind democracy or human rights. It says: we need your resources for our future, and if you will not give them to us under cooperative terms, we will take them under coercive terms.

And here is the thing these people cannot understand, because their mindset is trapped in a 19th-century colonial reflex: cooperation is possible.

China shows that cooperation is possible. China buys resources, builds infrastructure, creates contracts, offers development pathways, and yes, does it for its own interests, but it does it through exchange, not through looting. The US model, by contrast, is too often: bully, sanction, destabilise, bomb, then pretend it’s about “order”.

So when I say this war has gone “too wrong” for Washington even to benefit from Iranian energy later, I mean something very simple: you do not kill people, destroy families, and then expect business as usual. You don’t kill children and then expect Iranian society to say, “Sure, let’s partner with you.”

This is where imperial arrogance collides with a proud, dignified Iranian society.

How Trump miscalculated                            Video: Syriana Analysis

Iran’s demands are not cosmetic
Now the crucial point: why Iran won’t stop now.

Iran is not continuing this because it “loves war”. It is continuing because the war created leverage, and Iran’s leadership understands that if you stop now, you waste the leverage you paid for in blood and risk.

This is why Iran’s demands are emerging with clarity.

First: deterrence restored. Not just for Iran, but for the wider deterrence ecosystem that includes Hezbollah. Iran wants to punish its enemy to a degree that makes future attacks psychologically and strategically unthinkable.

Second: US bases constrained or removed. Iran is not naïve; it knows it may not expel the US from the region overnight. But it can force a new reality where US installations become purely defensive or are reconfigured in ways that reduce their offensive utility against Iran.

In plain language: if Gulf monarchies host bases that are used to strike Iran, those bases become part of the battlefield, and Iran is signaling it wants to break that model permanently.

This is why the Iranian foreign minister’s tone matters, and why voices like professor Marandi’s matter: the message is no longer “we can negotiate and return to normal.” The message is “normal is what created this war, and we need a new security architecture.”

‘Deterrence or nothing’ framework
This is where Amal Saad’s analysis captures the logic cleanly: deterrence or nothing; total war or total ceasefire.

Her point is that the old conflict-resolution framework doesn’t apply, because Iran is not seeking a temporary suspension of hostilities; it is seeking to alter the bargaining space itself. Tehran rejects the framework in which negotiations are essentially arms control over Iran, and insists instead that the real issue is US-Israeli aggression and the regional order that enables it.

That is why Iran refuses a ceasefire that simply resets the cycle.

And that is why the US miscalculation is so profound: Washington thought it could strike under a cover of “diplomacy,” then return to negotiation as if diplomacy were a neutral channel. Iran now treats that as subterfuge, and it wants to make the weaponisation of diplomacy costly enough that it cannot be repeated.

Why Iran won’t stop now
So we return to the simple truth: Iran won’t stop now because stopping now would mean relinquishing the leverage it has finally acquired — militarily, economically, psychologically — at the very moment when the US and Europe are feeling pain they cannot hide.

Trump was elected on promises of prosperity. Now energy prices surge, markets shake, global supply lines tighten, and allies panic. From Tehran’s point of view, this is the rare moment when the empire is vulnerable enough that Iran can increase its demands instead of being forced to accept humiliating ones.

And when you understand that, you understand why this isn’t ending with a tidy “ceasefire” press release. Iran believes that if it accepts another temporary arrangement, it will simply be attacked again when the West finds a better moment.

So the choice Iran is presenting is brutal but clear: a settlement that restores deterrence and rewires the regional security order, or continued pressure through the one lever that forces the world to pay attention.

Hormuz.

Washington assumed it was a bluff.

Now the world is learning what happens when a red line is real.

Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis. This article was first published on his Substack Kevork’s Newsletter and shared via Collective Evolution.

The road from Beijing to Taiwan no longer seems impossible.

Nothing appears to prevent Moscow — should it decide — from abducting the Ukrainian president from the heart of Kyiv.

There is no longer any real immunity protecting political leadership anywhere, including Iranian leaders. The reason is not international chaos.

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The reason is Gaza.

Gaza: The moment of great exposure
Gaza is not a passing war, nor a limited regional conflict.

Gaza is the moment when the international system collapsed entirely.

In Gaza, the following fell:

• International law;
• The concept of sovereignty;
• The neutrality of international institutions; and
• The claim of Western values

A people were annihilated before the eyes of the world. Hospitals, schools, and United Nations facilities were destroyed. Children were killed. Starvation was used as a weapon.

And yet — no one was held accountable.

When the killer walks free in Gaza
Israel’s impunity in Gaza was not a detail; it was a dangerous precedent. A clear message reached every capital:

Do whatever you want, as long as you are protected by the United States. From that moment, red lines collapsed:

• Sovereignty was no longer protected;
• Leaders lost immunity;
• Agreements lost meaning; and
• International courts lost relevance

If the annihilation of a besieged city is possible, what prevents the kidnapping of a president, the assassination of a leader, or the toppling of an entire state?

America: From guardian of order to sponsor of crime
The United States is no longer a mediator or even a biased partner.

It has become the political guarantor of crime. It has:

• Provided cover;
• Supplied weapons;
• Used the veto;
• Obstructed accountability; and
• And legitimised extermination

Then it has continued speaking of “international order” and “human rights” as if Gaza had never happened.

The end of the illusion of immunity
After Gaza, one truth has become clear to every world leader:

• The United Nations does not protect;
• Conventions do not save;
• International law does not shield;
• The only immunity that remains today is power; and
• Those who do not possess it are potential targets.

This is why China is recalculating, Russia deals with law pragmatically, Iran understands that Western guarantees are an illusion, and many states are stepping out from under the American cloak.

Gaza was not the exception. It was the official declaration of the collapse of the global order.

In the age of American–Israeli thuggery:

• Sovereignty has fallen;
• Law has died;
• Power has become the only source of legitimacy; and
• Those without power are denied the right to live.

Sameer Barghouthi is an emeritus professor at Al-Quds University, Jerusalem, Palestine. This article was first published by Qatar Tribune.

ANALYSIS: By David Hearst

When push came to shove, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blinked first.

For months, Netanyahu had become the main obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire, to the considerable frustration of his own negotiators.

That much was made explicit more than two months ago by the departure of his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant. The chief architect of the 15-month war, Gallant said plainly that there was nothing left for the army to do in Gaza.

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Still Netanyahu persisted. Last May, he rejected a deal signed by Hamas in the presence of CIA director William Burns, in favour of an offensive on Rafah.

In October, Netanyahu turned for salvation to the Generals’ Plan, aiming to empty northern Gaza in preparation for resettlement by Israelis. The plan was to starve and bomb the population out of northern Gaza by declaring that anyone who did not leave voluntarily would be treated as a “terrorist”.

It was so extreme, and so contrary to the international rules of war, that it was condemned by former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon as a war crime and ethnic cleansing.

Key to this plan was a corridor forged by a military road and a string of outposts cutting through the centre of the Gaza Strip, from the Israeli border to the sea.

The Netzarim Corridor would have effectively reduced the territory’s land mass by almost one third and become its new northern border. No Palestinian pushed out of northern Gaza would have been allowed to return.

Red lines erased
No-one from the Biden administration forced Netanyahu to rethink this plan. Not US President Joe Biden himself, an instinctive Zionist who, for all his speeches, kept on supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide in Gaza; nor Antony Blinken, his Secretary of State, who earned the dubious distinction of being the least-trusted diplomat in the region.

Even as the final touches were being put on the ceasefire agreement, Blinken gave a departing news conference in which he blamed Hamas for rejecting previous offers. As is par for the course, the opposite is the truth.

Every Israeli journalist who covered the negotiations has reported that Netanyahu rejected all previous deals and was responsible for the delay in coming to this one.

It fell to one short meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to call time on Netanyahu’s 15-month war.

In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will

After one meeting, the red lines that Netanyahu had so vigorously painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.

As Israeli pundit Erel Segal said: “We’re the first to pay a price for Trump’s election. [The deal] is being forced upon us . . . We thought we’d take control of northern Gaza, that they’d let us impede humanitarian aid.”

This is emerging as a consensus. The mood in Israel is sceptical of claims of victory.

“There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality: the emerging ceasefire and hostage release deal is bad for Israel, but it has no choice but to accept it,” columnist Yossi Yehoshua wrote in Ynet.

The circulating draft of the ceasefire agreement is clear in stating that Israel will pull back from both the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor by the end of the process, stipulations Netanyahu had previously rejected.

Even without this, the draft agreement clearly notes that Palestinians can return to their homes, including in northern Gaza. The attempt to clear it of its inhabitants has failed.

This is the biggest single failure of Israel’s ground invasion.

Fighting back
There is a long list of others. But before we list them, the Witkoff debacle underscores how dependent Israel has been on Washington for every day of the horrendous slaughter in Gaza.

A senior Israeli Air Force official has admitted that planes would have run out of bombs within a few months had they not been resupplied by the US.

It is sinking into Israeli public opinion that the war is ending without any of Israel’s major aims being achieved.

Netanyahu and the Israeli army set out to “collapse” Hamas after the humiliation and shock of its surprise attack on southern Israel in October 2023. They demonstrably haven’t achieved this goal.

Take Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza as a microcosm of the battle Hamas waged against invading forces. Fifteen months ago, it was the first city in Gaza to be occupied by Israeli forces, who judged it to have the weakest Hamas battalion.

But after wave upon wave of military operations, each of which was supposed to have “cleansed” the city of Hamas fighters, Beit Hanoun turned out to have inflicted one of the heaviest concentrations of Israeli military casualties.

Hamas kept on emerging from the rubble to fight back, turning Beit Hanoun into a minefield for Israeli soldiers. Since the launch of the most recent military operation in northern Gaza, 55 Israeli officers and soldiers have perished in this sector, 15 of them in Beit Hanoun in the past week alone.

If any army is bleeding and exhausted today, it is Israel’s. The plain military fact of life in Gaza is that, 15 months on, Hamas can recruit and regenerate faster than Israel can kill its leaders or its fighters.

“We are in a situation where the pace at which Hamas is rebuilding itself is higher than the pace that the [Israeli army] is eradicating them,” Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, told the Wall Street Journal. He added that Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, “is managing everything”.

If anything demonstrates the futility of measuring military success solely by the number of leaders killed, or missiles destroyed, it is this.

Against the odds
In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will. It is not the battle that matters, but the ability to keep on fighting.

In Algeria and Vietnam, the French and US armies had overwhelming military advantage.

Both forces withdrew in ignominy and failure many years later. In Vietnam, it was more than six years after the Tet Offensive, which like the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 was perceived at the time to be a military failure. But the symbol of a fightback after so many years of siege proved decisive in the war.

In France, the scars of Algeria last to this day. In each war of liberation, the determination of the weak to resist has proved more decisive than the firepower of the strong.

In Gaza, it was the determination of the Palestinian people to stay on their land — even as it was being reduced to rubble — that proved to be the decisive factor in this war. And this is an astonishing feat, considering that the 360 sq km territory was entirely cut off from the world, with no allies to break the siege and no natural terrain for cover.

Hezbollah fought in the north, but little of this was any succour to Palestinians in Gaza on the ground, subjected to nightly bombing raids and drone attacks shredding their tents.

Neither enforced starvation, nor hypothermia, nor disease, nor brutalisation and mass rape at the hands of their invaders, could break their will to stay on their land.

Never before have Palestinian fighters and civilians shown this level of resistance in the history of the conflict — and it could prove to be transformative.

Because what Israel has lost in its campaign to crush Gaza is incalculable. It has squandered decades of sustained economic, military and diplomatic efforts to establish the country as a liberal democratic Western nation in the eyes of global opinion.

Generational memory
Israel has not only lost the Global South, in which it invested such efforts in Africa and South America. It has also lost the support of a generation in the West, whose memories do not go back as far as Biden’s.

The point is not mine. It is well made by Jack Lew, the man Biden nominated as his ambassador to Israel a month before the Hamas attack.

In his departing interview, Lew, an Orthodox Jew, told the Times of Israel that public opinion in the US was still largely pro-Israel, but that was changing.

With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict

“What I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state, or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the intifada even.

“It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers — not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years.”

Biden, Lew said, was the last president of his generation whose memories and knowledge go back to Israel’s “founding story”.

Lew’s parting shot at Netanyahu is amply documented in recent polls. More than one-third of American Jewish teenagers sympathise with Hamas, 42 percent believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and 66 percent sympathise with the Palestinian people as a whole.

This is not a new phenomenon. Polling two years before the war showed that a quarter of American Jews agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”, and a plurality of respondents did not find that statement to be antisemitic.

Deep damage
The war in Gaza has become the prism through which a new generation of future world leaders sees the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is a major strategic loss for a country that on 6 October 2023 thought that it had closed down the issue of Palestine, and that world opinion was in its pocket.

But the damage goes further and deeper than this.

The antiwar protests, condemned by Western governments first as antisemitism and then legislated against as terrorism, have created a global front for the liberation of Palestine. The movement to boycott Israel is stronger than ever before.

Israel is in the dock of international justice as never before. Not only are there arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant on war crimes, and a continuing genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but a myriad of other cases are about to flood the courts in every major western democracy.

A court action has been launched in the UK against BP for supplying crude oil to Israel, which is then allegedly used by the Israeli army, from its pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkiye.

In addition, the Israeli army recently decided to conceal the identities of all troops who have participated in the campaign in Gaza, for fear that they could be pursued when travelling abroad.

This major move was sparked by a tiny activist group named after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old killed by Israeli troops in Gaza in January 2024. The Belgium-based group has filed evidence of war crimes with the UCJ against 1000 Israelis, including video, audio, forensic reports and other documents.

A ceasefire in Gaza is thus not the end of Palestine’s nightmare, but the start of Israel’s. These legal moves will only gather momentum as the truth of what happened in Gaza is uncovered and documented after the war has ended.

Internal divisions
At home, Netanyahu will return from war to a country more divided internally than ever before. There is a battle between the army and the Haredim who refuse to serve.

There is a battle between secular and national religious Zionists. With Netanyahu’s retreat on Gaza, the settler far right are sensing that the opportunity to establish Greater Israel has been snatched from the jaws of military victory.

All the while, there has been an unprecedented exodus of Jews from Israel.

Regionally, Israel is left with troops still in Lebanon and Syria. It would be foolish to think of these ongoing operations as restoring the deterrence Israel lost when Hamas struck on 7 October 2023.

Iran’s axis of resistance might have received some sustained blows after the leadership of Hezbollah was wiped out, and after finding itself vastly overextended in Syria. But like Hamas, Hezbollah has not been knocked out as a fighting force.

And the Sunni Arab world has been riled by the Gaza genoicide and the ongoing crackdown in the occupied West Bank as rarely before.

Israel’s undisguised bid to divide Syria into cantons is as provocative to Syrians of all denominations and ethnicities, as its plans to annex Areas B and C of the West Bank are an existential threat to Jordan.

Annexation would be treated in Amman as an act of war.

Deconfliction will be the patient work of decades of reconstruction, and Trump is not a patient man.

Hamas and Gaza will now take a backseat. With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict.

Gaza has shown all Palestinians — and the world — that it can withstand total war, and not budge from the ground upon which it stands. It tells the world, with justifiable pride, that the occupiers threw everything they had at it, and there was not another Nakba.

Gaza tells Israel that Palestinians exist, and that they will not be pacified until and unless Israelis talk to them on equal terms about equal rights.

It may take many more years for that realisation to sink in, but for some it already has: “Even if we conquer the entire Middle East, and even if everyone surrenders to us, we won’t win this war,” columnist Yair Assulin wrote in Haaretz.

But what everyone in Gaza who stayed put has achieved is of historic significance.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. This article has been republished from the Middle East Eye under Creative Commons.