What Epic Fury Stimulated

"It is important to remember that battlefield victories are not ends in themselves. Their worth is calculated from the strategic possibilities, military or political, that these stimulate." — David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East

We seem to have left the big action sequence opening of the movie and are now in the story development stage of the script. So what have Netanyahu and Trump stimulated with their attack on Iran? Stahel was writing about the Wehrmacht in 1941. About an army that won extraordinary battlefield victories and in doing so stimulated a Soviet mobilization Germany couldn't survive. Tactical brilliance was eventually overwhelmed by strategic catastrophe.

We’re at the point where we can now ask what did Roaring Lion and Epic Fury stimulate?

Well, the controlled closure of the Strait of Hormuz, obviously. The first sustained blockade of the world's most critical oil chokepoint in contemporary history. It stimulated a global energy shock, with gas in America pushing $4.45 a gallon approaching a four-year high, on a president who campaigned on cutting fuel prices.

It stimulated the collapse of Iran's civilian diplomatic structure, with the Foreign Minister publicly overruled by his own military, his negotiators reduced to motorcycle messengers who cannot commit to anything. It stimulated Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader — burned, operated on three times, issuing written statements from an undisclosed location, invisible, running a country at war from a bunker nobody can find.

It stimulated a ceasefire that exists on paper while the war continues in practice, now on what Trump himself called massive life support with a one percent chance of surviving. It stimulated $29 billion in American war costs and climbing, a Pentagon considering renaming the whole operation to reset the congressional war powers clock, and a Senate that has rejected restrictions on Trump's war authority seven times without resolving anything.

It stimulated Saudi Arabia launching secret strikes against Iran. It stimulated Iran's Basij fragmenting into mobile cells already reportedly attacking Iranians who supported the war. It stimulated Kuwait arresting four IRGC members who arrived by fishing boat, apparently attempting infiltration of a neighboring Arab country — the first known attempt of its kind during this conflict. It stimulated an Iran whose missile stockpiles, despite everything, remain at roughly seventy percent of pre-war capacity, with thirty of thirty-three missile sites along the Strait restored to operational status.

And it stimulated the IRGC.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was created in 1979 because the clerical regime didn't trust the regular army. The Artesh had been the Shah's institution. So Ayatollah Khomeini built something parallel, outside it, ideologically loyal to the theocratic Islamic revolution rather than to the secular state itself. You might call them the MAGA of Iran. Trump and his people are doing his narcissistic version of this in my country now.

Over four decades, the IRGC ideology was never primarily theological. The Quran was armor and identity, not intention. The intent was Iranian power — nationalist, anti-Western, permanently positioned against what they called imperial dominance. Populist in base, drawing from rural areas, the lower and lower-middle class, the religiously conservative Iranians who felt left behind by Tehran's secular modernizing elite. They didn't need the mullahs to legitimate them, so they were anticlerical in a way, certainly power first, religion second. They outgrew that relationship a long time ago.

They also outgrew the military. By February 2026, the IRGC operated Khatam al-Anbiya, one of Iran's largest construction and engineering conglomerates — roads, dams, pipelines, telecommunications infrastructure, built on no-bid government contracts awarded for four decades. They were a substantial part of the Iranian economy. You can bomb a navy. You cannot bomb a construction empire out of existence. At least not in one massive campaign.

Then they lost some players to the largely Israeli decapitation.

Hossein Salami had commanded the IRGC since 2019. Fire-and-fury rhetoricist. The man who after Soleimani's assassination threatened that American and Israeli commanders would find no safe place on earth. Israel killed him in the Twelve-Day War in June 2025. Ali Khamenei immediately appointed Mohammad Pakpour as replacement. Pakpour lasted eight months. He was killed on day one of Roaring Lion, February 28th, in the opening strikes.

Ahmad Vahidi was next in line. He had been appointed deputy commander just two months earlier, in December 2025. The succession wasn't planned. It was Darwinian. Every commander above him was killed. The most extreme man available inherited the institution by elimination.

Roaring Lion and Epic Fury hit it hard. Killed senior commanders. Destroyed naval assets. Trump said he obliterated their Navy. He was not entirely wrong.

And then the institution absorbed the vacuum.

Mojtaba Khamenei — burned, operated on three times, unable to appear in public — is technically running the country from an undisclosed location, issuing written statements delivered by motorcycle courier. One Iranian adviser described him as operating "like the director of a board." The board is the IRGC generals. Being the son of the previous ayatollah, he provides the bloodline. The theological fiction. The institutional seal. They provide the decisions.

The Supreme Leader was sidelined, perhaps irrelevant now. Supreme authority was not.

The civilians who might have checked this — the educated moderates, the diplomatic class, the reformist-adjacent factions — are dead, marginalized, or publicly humiliated. When Foreign Minister Aragchi showed flexibility in Islamabad, an IRGC general filed a complaint and the delegation was ordered home. When he posted on X that the Strait was open, the IRGC's own news agency called him an idiot within hours. The negotiators, per multiple sources, are glorified messengers. They cannot commit to anything.

This is Lenin to Stalin type stuff. The moderates who might have constrained the hardliners are out of the way. The hardliners assaulted the vacuum. The institution most adapted to permanent siege conditions got the keys to the siege.

Ahmad Vahidi runs it now. IRGC Commander. Wanted by Interpol. Responsible for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. Spent a decade building the Quds Force into what it became. One analyst described his predecessors as school teachers by comparison.

This is who Epic Fury handed the Islamic Republic to.

I've been saying since March — though not in exactly these words — that whoever controls the Strait of Hormuz is winning this war. Today the IRGC controls the Strait. Before the war passageway carried roughly 20 million barrels a day, about 21 percent of global petroleum trade. Only 40 ships crossed it the entire week ending May 3rd. Gas in America is pushing $4.45 a gallon on average, approaching a four-year high. Trump campaigned on cutting fuel prices.

The IRGC sets oil prices now. Not OPEC. Not Wall Street. Not a sovereign government with a foreign ministry and a UN seat. An institution that was supposedly “obliterated” in late February.

And now they want it in writing.

The IRGC's opening peace proposal demands formal international recognition of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. That’s as good a definition for Camus’s sense of the Absurd as anything Trump has done. It is almost laughable. No country is agreeing to that — not Washington, not Beijing, not the Gulf states whose own economies run through that water. They probably know that it won’t be accepted. It's an opening bid, not a closing argument. A negotiating position designed to be bargained down. Hopefully.

But six months ago, no Iranian institution was making that massive sovereignty demand. It would have been unthinkable.

That's a different Iran than the one that existed before the bombs fell. Before decapitation and obliteration. Before an overwhelming and “complete” victory. The IRGC has been bombed into greater importance. Today, and for many weeks now, it controls the Strait and, therefore, it controls the price of oil on this planet. That is an enormous amount of power the IRGC did not have before.

Epic Fury stimulated that.