There is a point at which wars cease to be merely military campaigns and become systemic crises. In the conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran, that point has a precise name: the Strait of Hormuz. But stopping at Hormuz, essential as it is, is still not enough. Because the war now underway is not only calling into question global oil traffic. It is simultaneously affecting energy prices, maritime security, the Gulf’s water supply, the global fertilizer chain, the food stability of many importing countries, and even the internal balance of the Iranian regime. In other words, this is not a regional war with global side effects. It is a global war in its economic, strategic and geopolitical implications, even if it is being fought within an apparently limited geographic perimeter.
The mistake of many Western readings is to believe that military superiority is enough to govern escalation. But this war shows the opposite. The United States can strike Iranian targets, degrade infrastructure, push allies to cooperate, and increase pressure on Tehran. Yet it is showing that it cannot quickly guarantee the full security of the most important energy corridor on the planet. That is the contradiction weighing more than official statements: Washington helped open a crisis that affects the core of the global energy system, but it has no immediate solution for neutralizing the backlash.
The American fracture in the Strait of Hormuz
The Strait of Hormuz is the point where global vulnerability and Iran’s ability to inflict systemic damage converge. A decisive share of the oil and refined products traded by sea passes through it. When traffic slows or comes under threat, the effect does not remain confined to the Gulf. It spreads to industrial Asia, to energy dependent Europe, to financial markets, to shipping rates and to insurance premiums.
This is the first strategic fact. The United States has effectively admitted that it is not ready to guarantee the safe passage of tankers immediately, because its military resources are focused on destroying Iran’s offensive capabilities and the industrial apparatus that supports them. It is an extremely grave admission. It means that the leading power in the world is capable of striking, but not of restoring strategic order in the immediate term. And in the Middle East, as elsewhere, the difference between the use of force and the production of order is the difference between a still-hegemonic superpower and a merely destructive one.
Hormuz as a weapon of asymmetric warfare
From the Iranian point of view, the strait is not simply a stretch of water. It is the most effective lever of asymmetric warfare available. Tehran knows full well that it cannot sustain a prolonged frontal confrontation against the American and Israeli air and naval apparatus. It therefore strikes where the adversary’s strength meets its structural dependence: the flow of energy. Closing, slowing, or even maintaining a persistent threat over Hormuz serves a purpose that goes far beyond tactics. It does not only stop tankers and merchant shipping. It signals that if Iran is hit on its own territory, then the world that lives on oil will have to live with risk.
In this framework, mines, drones, coastal missiles, indirect attacks and psychological pressure on shipowners become more effective than a classic naval battle. Tehran is not seeking maritime victory in the conventional sense, which would be impossible. It is seeking to wear down the adversary, to raise permanently the cost of conflict, to partially paralyze traffic, and to increase the political and economic price of war. This is the real grammar of the confrontation. Hormuz does not merely destroy. It paralyzes.
Oil, insurance, strategic reserves
The geoeconomic dimension of the conflict appears brutally in its immediate effects. Crude prices rise and remain volatile. Maritime transport costs increase. Insurance premiums explode, because war risk becomes a permanent factor in commercial calculation. Asian and European importers see their energy security deteriorate while many economies are already fragile. Strategic reserves can soften the shock, but they cannot resolve it. They are a buffer, not a political or military solution.
The decisive point is this: there are no alternative routes capable of fully absorbing the traffic that normally crosses Hormuz. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have alternative corridors, but their capacity remains limited compared with normal volumes. If the strait seriously slows or closes, the global system comes under strain. The decision to resort massively to strategic reserves is already proof that the crisis is systemic, not episodic.
Water: the Gulf’s hidden vulnerability
And yet the war has brought out a second truth, perhaps even more important than oil. In the Gulf, the decisive resource is not only the one that powers engines, industries and markets. It is the one that comes out of the tap. Drinking water is the region’s real exposed nerve. The Gulf monarchies possess immense energy wealth, but they suffer from a historic shortage of fresh water. For this reason, beginning in the 1970s, they invested oil revenues in desalination plants. Today nearly all urban life in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain depends on these facilities.
It is a formidable paradox: oil wealth financed the system that guarantees civilian survival, but that very system is extremely vulnerable. Desalination plants are essential civilian infrastructure and in theory protected by international law. But in the reality of Middle Eastern wars, the value of conventions is always measured against the logic of missiles, drones and retaliation. It is enough to hit a power station, a main pipeline, a pumping node, or a control system to put millions of people at risk without having to flatten an entire plant.
The Gulf’s cities: apparent power, real fragility
This vulnerability becomes dramatic when one looks at the urban geography of the region. Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates depend almost entirely on desalination. Metropolises such as Dubai live through an extremely delicate technical system. Saudi Arabia too, especially with regard to Riyadh, depends heavily on major coastal plants linked inland by very long pipelines. The case of Jubail is emblematic: from there, through hundreds of kilometers of infrastructure, passes a large share of the water that supplies the Saudi capital. For years, observers have known that serious damage to that plant, to the pipelines, or to the connected energy infrastructure could quickly turn a military crisis into a crisis of statehood.
This means that the center of gravity of the Gulf monarchies is not located only in oil terminals, refineries and ports. It is also located in water networks. If a major capital loses access to drinking water, the problem is not only sanitary. It immediately becomes political, administrative, social and a matter of public order. Without oil a state loses income. Without water it risks the collapse of urban life.
Energy, water and food: the chain of crisis
The relationship between water and energy in the Gulf is extremely tight. Desalination plants require enormous amounts of energy to operate. That means water and energy form a single system. If the war strikes power stations, transmission grids, terminals or logistical infrastructure, water production suffers directly. This is where military crisis becomes economic and civilian crisis.
But there is an additional level, too rarely considered. The Gulf is also a major hub for the production and export of fertilizers, particularly urea and ammonia, essential for world agriculture. If Hormuz is blocked or slowed, not only oil is affected: supplies of critical agricultural inputs are disrupted as well. The effect could reproduce, in another form, the shock that followed the war in Ukraine in 2022: rising agricultural costs, higher food prices, lower harvests in the most vulnerable countries, and the risk of social tensions and famine in the areas most dependent on imports.
So the three interconnected shocks of this war are clear: an oil shock, a regional water shock, and a global food shock. This is the true geoeconomic nature of the conflict.
Western protection and its limits
For decades the Gulf monarchies built their security under a Western, above all American, umbrella. But this war is showing that no protection system can absolutely guarantee infrastructure that is so widespread, so vulnerable and so interconnected. Missile defense batteries, modern aircraft and naval patrols are not enough. One would have to defend simultaneously refineries, desalination plants, power stations, pipelines, ports, communication networks and logistical nodes. It is an enormous mission, extremely costly and still imperfect.
That is also why Washington struggles to secure automatic mobilization from its allies. The White House is trying to turn a war chosen together with Israel into a matter of collective security for all major energy importers. But many partners hesitate. They know that sharing the costs of militarizing Hormuz means exposing themselves to retaliation, economic losses and domestic tensions for a crisis they did not choose. The reluctance of various countries, from Japan to France and other key players, signals that American hegemony no longer translates automatically into allied discipline.
Iran enters the war weak, but does not collapse
Turning to the interior of the Islamic Republic, one encounters a third major Western misunderstanding. Many assumed that years of sanctions, economic crisis, social frustration and the weakening of Iran’s regional network of allies would make the system collapse under the weight of a prolonged war. But history teaches that structural weakness does not automatically mean regime سقوط. Wars often do the opposite: they consolidate power around the apparatuses best equipped to fight and survive.
That is what is happening in Tehran. The death of the old leader and the rise of Mojtaba Khamenei do not indicate rupture, but the resilience of a system built to avoid power vacuums. The Islamic Republic is not held together by one man alone. It rests on overlapping institutions: the office of the supreme leader, the clergy, the security apparatus, the Revolutionary Guards, strategic councils and intelligence. This architecture was designed precisely to guarantee continuity under attack.
The marginality of the presidency and the rise of the Guards
In wartime the presidency reveals all its limits. It may influence tone, communication and some narrow diplomatic margins. But the essential decisions on deterrence, retaliation, strategy and national security are taken elsewhere: by the Revolutionary Guards, the services, and the security and defense councils. In this framework, figures seen as too accommodating toward Washington or Israel are inevitably pushed to the margins. War narrows the field of diplomacy and widens that of security.
Those who benefit from this dynamic are the Revolutionary Guards. They control the missile forces, much of asymmetric warfare, the relationship with what remains of the regional alliance network, such as Hezbollah, and they possess growing economic weight in energy, construction, telecommunications and finance. They are not just an armed force. They are a parallel power system, perhaps the most important one inside the Iranian state.
Controlled continuity or open militarization
From this come two plausible scenarios. The first is controlled continuity: the successor to the supreme leader ensures the symbolic legitimacy of the system, while real authority shifts more and more toward a leadership group dominated by the security apparatus. The second is an even more explicit militarization of the Islamic Republic, in which the Revolutionary Guards exercise decisive influence not only over national security but also over economic policy.
Both scenarios merely accelerate trends already visible for years. In Iran the role of the traditional clergy has gradually diminished, while the security apparatus has gained political, regional and economic weight. A long war could make this transformation irreversible.
The real fragility is elite cohesion
Naturally, the regime is not invulnerable. All authoritarian systems appear solid as long as the elite remains cohesive. The real moment of danger does not necessarily coincide with external pressure, but with a possible fracture among the institutions tasked with maintaining order and managing the war. That is where such a system can truly enter crisis.
Yet here too one must remain lucid. The Islamic Republic has spent decades preparing for the scenario of external attack and possible decapitation of its leadership. It has developed replacements at multiple levels, parallel chains of command, intelligence networks and succession plans designed precisely to guarantee operational continuity even under extreme conditions. For that reason, the most realistic risk is not rapid collapse, but the adaptive survival of a system that, once struck, becomes even harder.
The great strategic irony
The great irony, if one can call it that, is that external military pressure may strengthen precisely the most uncompromising components of the regime. If Tehran concludes that the war aims not merely to contain the nuclear program or offensive capabilities, but to dismantle the state itself, then every position in favor of compromise becomes suspect or toxic. The language of national survival prevails: unity, resistance, mobilization and the supremacy of the military apparatus.
On a geopolitical scale, the result would be paradoxical but clear: the West could end up facing not a weaker and more negotiable Iran, but a more closed, more securitized, more militarized Iran, and therefore one that is harder to contain diplomatically. On a geoeconomic scale, this would also mean a greater centrality of the military complex in the management of resources, trade and Iran’s strategic rents.
The real lesson of this war
The final lesson is brutal, but clear. This war is not only about the destruction of military targets or the survival of the Iranian regime. It concerns the link between oil, water, transport, fertilizers, urban order, markets and state resilience. The heart of the conflict is not only in the skies above Iran, but in the strait where energy and finance intersect, in the desalination plants that keep Gulf cities alive, in the supply networks that sustain world agriculture, and in Tehran’s centers of power that turn external pressure into internal militarization.
Those who look only at bombs do not understand the historical meaning of this phase. The Middle East is no longer only the classic theater of wars over oil. It is becoming the laboratory of wars that strike simultaneously at energy, water, food, infrastructure and sovereignty. And from this laboratory there may emerge an even more unstable regional order: extremely wealthy but vulnerable monarchies, a superpower able to strike but not to impose order, and an Islamic Republic perhaps weakened materially but strengthened in its hardest component. This is the new face of war: not only destruction, but systemic attrition.
Hormuz, Strait of Hormuz, Oil Warfare, Energy Security, Water Security, Desalination, Iran, United States, Israel, Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, Maritime Security, Shipping Risks, Global Markets, Oil Prices, Strategic Chokepoints, Asymmetric Warfare, Critical Infrastructure, Infrastructure Warfare, Drinking Water, Food Security, Fertilizers, Urea, Ammonia, Supply Chains, Global Trade, Revolutionary Guards, IRGC, Tehran, Mojtaba Khamenei, Regime Resilience, Economic Warfare, Regional Stability, Geostrategy
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