The Wrong Game

The objective was straightforward: reduce Iran’s ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz. The result has been something quite different. The threat has not been removed. It has been transformed from centralized and deterrable into distributed and persistent. In doing so, the United States has not stabilized the system. It has degraded it.

This was not a failed move. It was a successful move inside the wrong game.

Make no mistake, at the tactical level the United States remains at the top of the food chain. It can designate and destroy with extraordinary precision and lethality. In Iran, targets were chosen, targets were hit. Infrastructure was degraded. Visible, centralized capacity was reduced. Within a conventional military framework, this is success. The logic is familiar. Identify the adversary’s means, apply force, diminish those means. Capability goes down. Progress is declared.

But that logic describes a closed, tactical contest between two players. This is not that kind of game.

The campaign was planned as if the objective were measurable, the metrics clear, and the time horizon short. In that framework, the task is simple: remove enough capability and the threat disappears. Yet the environment surrounding Hormuz does not behave like a controllable battlefield. It is not a hierarchy but a network. It is not a decisive engagement but a cost-imposing system. It is not a single move but a sequence of repeated plays.

Recent intelligence reporting underscores this reality. Even after sustained strikes, Iran retains roughly 60 percent of its missile launch capacity and about 40 percent of its drone arsenal—more than enough to continue threatening shipping through Hormuz.   What remains is not a broken force waiting to be finished off, but a distributed one: mobile launchers, hardened underground systems, and low-cost platforms designed explicitly to survive precisely this kind of campaign.

The U.S. response has been to push outward, attempting to intercept and interdict Iranian activity before it reaches the chokepoint itself—effectively blockading the blockade at the edge of the Sea of Oman. On its face, this is a rational extension of naval superiority. Control the approaches, seize cargo, disrupt logistics, and you relieve pressure on the strait. But in practice, it expands the battlespace without simplifying it. Instead of a single chokepoint, the contest now stretches across a wider maritime zone, multiplying points of contact and opportunities for escalation. Each interception, each seizure, introduces a new decision node for both sides. The system does not become more stable. It becomes more complex.

What, then, was actually accomplished? Fixed launch sites were destroyed. Known infrastructure was targeted. Centralized nodes were degraded. But these were not the true sources of Iranian leverage. That leverage rests on dispersion, survivability, low-cost disruption, and the unforgiving geography of a narrow maritime chokepoint.

In such an environment, disruption does not require dominance. It requires only the ability to impose intermittent risk at tolerable cost. A handful of successful or even threatened attacks can alter shipping patterns, raise insurance costs, and inject volatility into global energy markets. The asymmetry is stark. The cost of attack remains low. The cost of defense remains high. Under these conditions, even a degraded arsenal is sufficient to sustain a credible threat.

The result is a shift in the nature of the game itself. What was once a deterrence equilibrium, uneasy but legible, is giving way to something more fragmented. Iran no longer needs to control the strait in any conventional sense. It need only render it unreliable.

This is no longer a deterrence game. It is a harassment equilibrium.

In a deterrence framework, escalation is governed by identifiable actors and relatively clear thresholds. In a harassment equilibrium, risk becomes diffuse, episodic, and harder to attribute. The system moves away from binary outcomes—open or closed—toward probabilistic ones. The strait remains nominally open but functionally degraded. Reliability declines. Volatility increases. Control becomes elusive.

From a game-theoretic perspective, the shift is unmistakable. A low-player, high-predictability system has been replaced by one characterized by fragmentation and asymmetric incentives. More actors, more pathways for escalation, and less clarity about who is responsible for what. Deterrence becomes harder to calibrate as the line between state action and deniable activity blurs.

There are, broadly speaking, two archetypes of conflict. The first is a control game, defined by a centralized adversary and clear lines of engagement. In such a setting, deterrence can work, and the degradation of capability tends to produce stability. The second is a persistence game, in which the adversary is distributed, adaptive, and oriented toward endurance rather than decisive victory. In that environment, deterrence frays and degradation spurs further adaptation.

The United States continues to act as though it is playing a control game. Iran has spent decades preparing for a persistence contest.

This is the strategic misalignment at the heart of the current moment. The United States has succeeded in degrading what can be targeted. But what can be targeted is not the true source of the threat. By weakening centralized capabilities, it has accelerated the shift toward distributed, survivable systems that are harder to deter and easier to employ. The threat has not been eliminated. It has been made more durable.

Global hegemony is not simply a function of power projection. It is the ability to impose order on complex systems. When actions taken in the name of stability instead increase fragmentation and unpredictability, that capacity erodes. The result is not immediate collapse, but a gradual loss of control.Global influence, much less hegemony, grows out of the ability to introduce order into chaos. The US, most probably unintentionally (but the book is still out on this), has done the exact opposite, and is bearing the very real cost.