Clausewitz on the Iran war
It is the 28th of February 2026. In Israel and on US aircraft carriers outside the Strait of Hormuz, military strike aircraft are running up their engines. Precision-guided weapons hang menacingly from their wings. Their opening strikes kill Iranian leader Khamenei and other political and military leaders. The 2026 Iran War is underway.
It is yet another conflict in a region that has been plagued by war for decades. The Iran/Iraq war. The First Gulf War. The war to push the Taliban out of Afghanistan. The Second Gulf War in Afghanistan. The war against ISIS. Israel’s smaller scale incursions into Lebanon and its neighbours. Israel's war in Gaza. Israel's current attack of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
A conditional ceasefire follows in April followed by a memorandum aimed at formally ending the conflict. Every ceasefire that follows is broken.
The Strait of Hormuz closes to shipping and precipitates a global fuel crisis. Then the Houthies in Yemen fire on shipping in an act that could close the Suez Canal-Red Sea shipping route. The world plunges into uncertainty. We wait to see what happens there.
How are we to make sense of this war? Let’s see what the military theorist Clausewitz has to say.
1. War is the continuation of political policy, not a substitute for it
Clausewitz’s core warning is that military action must serve political strategy.
The US’s political objective is to prevent Iran building nuclear weapons and force regime change. But the US is reportedly running short of offensive munitions and defensive anti-missile weapons. It may be this, not achieving a military victory over Iran, that ends the war.
2. Center of gravity: misidentified
Clausewitz argued you must find a vulnerability, a critical centre of gravity whose collapse breaks the enemy’s capacity to resist.
The opening attack was a classic decapitation strike on Iran’s senior leadership. But, Iran’s actual centres of gravity and resistance turned out to be more diffuse. The IRGC command chain survived the strike and orchestrated retaliation. They exploited their own centre of gravity: the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint. A 95% drop in oil tankers transiting the strait followed.
Killing the head didn’t disable the body’s most effective weapon. Iran, it turns out, has well-learned the lessons of asymmetric warfare.
3. The law of diminishing returns comes with a vengeance
Every offensive has a point past which continuing to attack costs more than it gains.
The initial strikes were a tactical success. The subsequent months bring the Israeli war in Lebanon, Iranian missile and drone strikes on the Gulf states and US bases, and the spread of the war to the Houthies in Yemen.
And now the US faces a severe drawdown in munitions. The tactical costs mount. What looked like a short decisive campaign turns into an open-ended regional conflict.
The US and Israel are fighting a conventional war. Iran fights an asymmetrical war.
4. Friction and the fog of war
Clausewitz wrote that no plan survives initial contact. Contact produces uncertainty. Uncertainty and chance produce friction. Friction leads to confusion. Complications emerge.
The drawing-in of the Gulf states as well as Saudi Arabia come out of this fog. That was not considered in the US/Israeli plan, but geostrategists warned of it. This is the cascading, unplanned consequences Clausewitz meant.
Chance and miscalculation enter the conflict. Each additional factor multiplies the unpredictability of the next move.
5. War trends toward the extreme
War cascades into escalation. Remember Vietnam? Politics is the only thing that can stop it.
Trump’s back-and-forth over negotiating and then resuming attacks, Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon, the entry of the Houthies into the war illustrates how hard capping a war becomes becomes once retaliation cycles start and escalation gains the ascendancy.
6. Victory must produce a usable peace
Clausewitz’s point was that military success only matters insofar as it secures a better political settlement than existed before. With the strength of Iran’s resistance and the vacillations of a weak and confused US presidency, the possibility of a peace that ends Iran’s nuclear program and opens the Strait of Hormuz without it becoming an Iranian tollway is questionable.
The Strait of Hormuz remain effectively unusable. The possibility is that the Houthies might do the same to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, the strategic chokepoint of the shipping channel connecting the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Like the Iranians, the Houthies know their leverage comes from the drawdown of US munitions.
Clausewitz tells us that the war won’t be over until the contributing political factors are resolved, regardless of how the battlefield phase ends.
And then there remain the unknowns around Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The Americans positioned its dismantling as one of the reasons for doing what Israel manoeuvred it to do in attacking Iran. As yet, the program has not been destroyed and may well survive any political agreement to end the war. Iran may well continue its trend to becoming a major middle-level political and military power in the region.