By Ioannis Tirkides
The US-led war against Iran marks the definitive collapse of the international order established after the Second World War, exposing the structural limits of Western unipolar power and of military coercion through advanced technology.
Trapped in a spiral of escalation, a large-scale kinetic campaign, characterised by the strategic bombing of nuclear infrastructure and targeted strikes against senior leadership figures, failed to force Iran into political capitulation. Instead, it strengthened domestic cohesion and triggered an asymmetric counter-escalation. As a result, the battlefield has evolved into a systemic geoeconomic war.
By imposing a dual choke-point blockade across the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, Iran and its allies have disrupted one-fifth of global energy consumption and more than one-quarter of total seaborne oil trade, triggering a severe supply shock. This contraction is accelerating pre-existing challenges associated with excessive public debt in the West, trapping the European Union in a period of severe stagflation. At the same time, the BRICS bloc is exploiting American overstretch to challenge petrodollar dominance through commodity- and gold-backed settlement architectures. From a geopolitical perspective, the conflict has also undermined global nuclear non-proliferation norms, creating dangerous regional vacuums that allow revisionist middle powers to impose local hegemonies.
Strategic failure and the “escalation trap”
This failure directly validates University of Chicago professor Robert Pape's theory of the "escalation trap", whereby military powers mistake tactical destruction for strategic victory through four self-reinforcing phases.
The process begins with the "tactical illusion" (Phase 1), where initial precision strikes create the false promise of rapid victory by eliminating visible targets. It then progresses to "asymmetric retaliatory escalation" (Phase 2), as the opponent adapts through dispersed underground infrastructure, proxy activation and saturation attacks.
Frustrated by such resilience, decision-makers enter "vertical intensification" (Phase 3), expanding target sets under the mistaken assumption that increased physical punishment will eventually produce political submission.
Finally comes "political entrapment" (Phase 4), as sunk costs, nationalist rhetoric and global economic disruption trap both sides in an unavoidable war of attrition.
The Middle Eastern theatre mirrors this framework with remarkable accuracy. In the first phase, a massive US-Israeli strategic bombing campaign failed to produce regime change. Instead, the second phase triggered heightened Iranian nationalism and asymmetric retaliatory escalation.
A brief memorandum of understanding on 17 June 2026 temporarily granted Iran operational control of the Strait of Hormuz during negotiations. However, when US forces attempted to re-establish an exclusive naval corridor, the truce collapsed. Iranian retaliation immediately reignited full-scale hostilities, drawing Washington into an unstable "transition spiral".
The predictions of escalation trap theory
Pape's framework suggests that Washington faces an acute land-power dilemma: either deploy ground forces to secure regional sea lanes or accept Iran's strategic dominance and its status as a threshold nuclear power.
As the conflict moves into Phase 3, Iran is not merely absorbing Western strikes. It is actively challenging the geographical architecture through which the United States projects power in the region.
As forward facilities in Qatar and naval infrastructure in Bahrain became increasingly exposed to Iranian attacks, the Pentagon dispersed key military assets, including advanced fighter aircraft, intelligence platforms and drone squadrons, westward to secondary hubs such as air bases in Jordan.
Iran's ballistic missile attack on US Central Command infrastructure in Jordan shattered a fragile operational ceasefire. By targeting America's military posture outside the immediate Gulf theatre, Tehran's objective is not merely destruction but increasing the overall cost of US power projection.
Forcing American aircraft to operate from greater distances lengthens sortie times, reduces mission tempo, increases aerial refuelling requirements and heightens political risks for host governments.
The war against Iran is structurally difficult, if not impossible, to win because the United States cannot impose what strategists call "escalation dominance". The conflict has entered, or stands on the threshold of entering, the third phase of the escalation trap.
The weaponisation of geoeconomics
As military options reach an impasse, the conflict has evolved into a systemic geoeconomic crisis.
By maintaining joint operational control over the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab alongside Yemen's Houthis, Iran and its allies have sustained a dual choke-point blockade affecting routes that carry between 20% and 25% of global energy supplies.
This supply contraction functions as a direct tax on global industrial production, creating severe systemic vulnerabilities across international trade, finance and manufacturing.
In energy and economics, disrupted physical energy flows and surging market prices are generating stagflation across the West, increasing debt-servicing costs and fuelling capital flight.
Within the monetary system, the weaponisation of SWIFT and reserve asset freezes are accelerating the development of BRICS-led settlement systems that bypass petrodollar networks entirely.
Simultaneously, disruptions in the supply of critical industrial raw materials, including sulphur and helium, pose immediate risks to semiconductor manufacturing, medical technology and agricultural fertiliser production, while the high-intensity war of attrition is depleting Western stockpiles of precision-guided munitions.
The European Union represents the principal structural casualty of this systemic transformation.
Geopolitical crises provide political cover for looming sovereign defaults, unfunded pension obligations and decades of fiscal mismanagement. The loss of cheap Russian pipeline gas, combined with stringent decarbonisation mandates, has undermined the foundation of Europe's industrial model, leaving central banks unable to contain energy-driven inflation without triggering sovereign debt crises.
The crisis exposes the fragile architecture of the euro itself: a monetary union operating without a unified fiscal policy or a fully integrated government bond market. European banking systems remain heavily saturated with low-yield sovereign debt as capital markets increasingly distance themselves from vulnerable peripheral states.
Revisionist power
As Western military and economic power comes under strain from sustained attrition, a systemic power vacuum is emerging across the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean.
According to John Mearsheimer's theory of offensive realism, when an external balancer, in this case the United States, suffers from overstretch and fiscal exhaustion, ambitious regional powers move aggressively to consolidate spheres of influence and maximise their relative power.
In a desperate effort to preserve the regional security architecture and secure critical Gulf capital, Washington has compromised on nuclear non-proliferation norms by considering domestic uranium enrichment for Saudi Arabia within the framework of a bilateral security agreement.
The abandonment of strict non-proliferation safeguards prohibiting domestic enrichment for reasons of short-term strategic expediency has fractured the global non-proliferation regime, creating structural incentives for secondary regional powers to pursue independent nuclear deterrents alongside an Iran already positioned at the nuclear threshold.
Conclusion
The ultimate legacy of the war against Iran is not a renewed Pax Americana, but a fragmented regional order driven by transactional interests.
As coercive air power fails to achieve escalation dominance, the Middle East is shifting from a unipolar security umbrella to an unstable, multi-polar balancing system defined by four structural realities.
First, the failure of Western air power against fortified underground targets is pushing regional states to prioritise local asymmetric deterrence over distant security guarantees.
Second, the dual choke-point blockade at Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab is weakening petrodollar dominance, accelerating the emergence of multi-currency trade corridors and BRICS-aligned settlement networks designed to circumvent Western sanctions.
Third, the erosion of non-proliferation safeguards has ushered in a dangerous era of regional nuclear latency, with Iran at the threshold of nuclear capability and Saudi Arabia moving toward uranium enrichment. Stability increasingly depends on locally sustained mutual nuclear deterrence.
Fourth, as American power contracts under the burden of fiscal and military strain, revisionist middle powers possessing significant industrial capacity will move aggressively to fill the vacuum.
