The IRGC has a (Stupid) Plan
(11 a.m. Eastern Time)
And then the whole mess started spilling over. Wars like to connect. Maybe they are drawn toward one another. If everyone's not careful this will escalate further in spite of the fact Iran's military is getting hammered. As I have said, whoever actually controls the Strait of Hormuz is winning the war.
The Houthis have opened another maritime front in the Red Sea, attacking Saudi tankers and oil facilities while threatening shipping connected to Saudi ports. On July 20 they formalized it into a declared blockade against Saudi-linked vessels in the Red Sea. Tankers have changed course, disabled tracking equipment, and accepted higher insurance costs to move through waters that had already become dangerous. Saudi-backed forces have resumed attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen, threatening to restart a civil war that had been mostly dormant since the 2022 ceasefire.
Iran's regional war now reaches both of the great shipping chokepoints connecting Europe and Asia. Hormuz controls the Persian Gulf. Bab el-Mandeb controls entry to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Saudi Arabia has now answered by announcing its own maritime defense alliance aimed at protecting shipping corridors, which tells you how far the improvisation has spread beyond Washington and Tehran.
The war has also reached the Caspian Sea. Iran accused Ukraine of attacking an Iranian commercial vessel, killing one sailor and injuring another. Ukraine has its own complaint. Iran supplied Russia with the drone technology used against Ukrainian cities, while Russia has reportedly provided Iran with satellite information useful for directing attacks in the Middle East. The Ukraine war and the Iran war now overlap because Iran and Russia made them overlap.
The Houthis have attacked Saudi oil installations. Iran and its allies have attacked American forces. Saudi Arabia and the United States have struck Iranian-backed groups, with Riyadh now joining Washington directly in hitting Iran-backed militias in Iraq after the strikes on Saudi oil facilities. A drone damaged two gas vessels at Egypt's Damietta port near the Suez Canal, hitting a Singapore-flagged LNG carrier and setting a second vessel on fire. Egypt has since confirmed the drone as the cause without naming who flew it, and this was the first attack of the war to land on Egyptian soil, five months in.
Iran's militia network has become increasingly interconnected, with Houthi attacks reportedly launched from Iraqi territory in cooperation with Iraqi armed groups and under IRGC coordination. Iran has since struck a Chinese-owned building in Kuwait, killing one worker, and fired five ballistic missiles at Jordan. Tehran has also warned Cyprus and Bulgaria against letting American forces use their bases, which puts two European Union members on notice for the first time in this war. The war keeps finding new borders to ignore.
The United States briefly paused its nightly attacks on Iran after thirteen consecutive nights of strikes. Reports suggested that Donald Trump and his advisers were concerned about expanding the war, alienating Gulf allies, disrupting the world economy, and further depleting American munitions. The naval blockade remained in place. Diplomacy received another few days to accomplish what months of bombing had not, and then the strikes resumed anyway, this time explicitly framed as retaliation for Iranian missile attacks on American forces.
Overnight strikes killed a couple and their two-year-old child in their home on Qeshm Island, in the Strait itself. Back home, the Senate failed to advance a resolution rebuking Trump over the war, 49 to 50, months after it had adopted a resolution during the June ceasefire calling for troop withdrawal and then walked that back a day later. Nobody in Washington has a plan either.
American airpower has severely damaged Iran. IRGC commanders have been killed. Missile facilities, air defenses, boats, radar stations, drone sites, and command centers have been destroyed. The United States has demonstrated that it can enter Iranian airspace and bomb almost anything it can identify.
It still has not reopened the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump's prediction that "it will open itself" looks as shallow now as it was when he said it.
I argued months ago that bombing Iran would not reopen the Strait. Tankers do not return because another radar station was destroyed. Shipping companies, crews, insurers, and governments must believe passage is safe. Iran does not need an intact navy or a fully functioning missile force to keep that belief from taking hold. It only needs enough mines, missiles, boats, drones, and uncertainty to make one successful passage a poor predictor of the next one.
Back in March, Trump ordered the Navy to prepare tanker escorts and had the Development Finance Corporation offer war-risk insurance for shipping through the Gulf. The Navy told industry at the time that no escort assets were available. By June the posture had changed quietly and without announcement, and the Interior Secretary was confirming that the Navy had been escorting more than twenty crude carriers some nights, some of them holding two million barrels apiece.
Today, the IRGC hit two tankers that were under active American military escort. Four other tankers changed course. CENTCOM insists Iran does not control the Strait. The IRGC has separately declared the Strait "not reopenable" as long as American "threats and interference" continue, citing what it calls a violated agreement from the Islamabad talks. Escort was the next rung above bombing. It failed inside of twenty-four hours of looking like it might have worked. That is not a coincidence and it is not bad luck. It is the same mechanism I described before, just applied one level up the ladder. An escort does not manufacture confidence any more than a destroyed radar station does. It only manufactures confidence until the first ship gets hit anyway, and then everyone remembers what kind of strait this actually is.
Hormuz remains Iran's great success in this war. It may be the most powerful asset the IRGC has left. The only thing the US cannot bomb is the geography itself.
The Guards have lost most of their equipment, all of their Navy, bases, commanders, proxies, and much of the military prestige they spent decades cultivating. Their country has suffered enormous economic damage. Their regional allies are being attacked across several countries. Yet the IRGC still has enough control over Hormuz to influence world energy markets, frighten commercial shipping, pressure Gulf governments, and force the United States into negotiations, and now into an escort mission it originally said it could not staff.
Iran has consolidated that control through mines, island checkpoints, naval patrols, selective passage arrangements, and demands that vessels receive IRGC approval. It has also expanded its definition of the Strait into a much larger operational area. Control of Hormuz has become more than a military position. It is the remaining basis of IRGC power.
Oman recently offered Iran a way to convert that power into a regional settlement. The proposal called for joint management of the Strait by countries bordering it, modeled loosely on the system used in the Strait of Malacca. Shipping companies could make voluntary contributions to support navigation, environmental protection, rescue services, buoys, and other shared needs. Iran would gain a recognized role. Gulf states would avoid mandatory Iranian transit fees. Commercial traffic could begin returning under a system larger than the IRGC. Iran rejected the proposal because it would not grant the control Tehran demanded. Its position is that Hormuz cannot return to the prewar arrangement in which ships moved freely through internationally recognized lanes. Iran was offered participation, influence, revenue, and recognition. The IRGC said no.
That refusal explains the war's present direction, and it explains why an American escort mission was always going to run into the same wall a diplomatic proposal did. Shared management, like a functioning escort corridor, would reduce the IRGC's power by making the Strait boring, procedural, and governable by someone else. Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iran's foreign ministry, commercial organizations, and international maritime authorities would become more important. The Guards would become one participant inside an arrangement they could no longer dominate. Peace has become dangerous to the IRGC, and so, it turns out, has a quiet Tuesday of successful tanker escorts.
Part of what the war stimulated was concentrating power in a small leadership circle dominated by the Guards. Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly legitimizes decisions reached by the generals rather than directing them himself. Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf serve as political and diplomatic conduits. The military direction belongs elsewhere. Ahmad Vahidi, commander of the IRGC, sits at the center of Iran's wartime leadership and reportedly attends every major meeting. Ali Abdollahi commands the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the joint command coordinating Iran's armed forces and translating the leadership's decisions into military operations.
Ali Azmaei, the new commander of the IRGC "Navy," controls the force enforcing Iran's authority in Hormuz. Esmail Qaani, commander of the Quds Force, owns another part of the strategy, sending commanders, advisers, and missile components to the Houthis. Vahidi and Abdollahi direct the wider war. Azmaei enforces the policy in the Strait. Qaani extends its reach beyond it. These men do not represent abstract historical pressures. They command the institutions carrying out the policy.
Peace requires someone to cede power to, and that requires a government the IRGC can hand the Strait back to. Take a look at who that would actually be.
Mojtaba Khamenei has still not been seen in public since he became Supreme Leader. Not once. He was reportedly wounded when his father was killed in the opening strike of this war, and since then he has governed entirely through written statements and audio messages read aloud by state television. When his own father was buried in July, three of his brothers appeared at the funeral to pray over the coffins. Mojtaba did not. The man who is constitutionally the head of the Iranian state could not manage to show his face at his own father's funeral.
Obviously, the IRGC leadership has decided cooperation is like an existential threat to them. Cooperation requires two functioning parties. Oman offered a framework built for coastal states, foreign ministries, and commercial authorities to negotiate with. Those institutions exist on paper in Iran. Araqchi exists. Qalibaf exists. The Supreme Leader, the man whose office is supposed to sit above the IRGC and give the whole system its legitimacy, does not exist in any form the rest of the world, or for that matter most of Iran, can see, hear, or verify. Even if they were willing to cede their power over Iran, who are they going to give it to? The Supremeless Leader people?
The Guards intend to preserve control of Hormuz, maintain the regional missile and proxy campaign, keep Iran under emergency rule, and emerge from the war as the institution nobody can govern without, partly because there is currently no one else standing in the room to govern with.
The stupidity here is that Hormuz won't open as long as they are hitting oil tankers in the Strait. The point has been made abundantly clear. The air strikes alone are not going to stop that. So, why do they need to attack their regional neighbors? It is almost like a temper-tantrum. Shipping would remain nervous. Insurance would remain expensive. Gulf states, China, India, and Europe would keep pressing Washington to reach an agreement. Trump would find it harder to justify another large bombing campaign, or another escort mission, without a fresh Iranian provocation.
Iranian missiles are launched at American bases. The Houthis attack Saudi tankers and oil facilities. Iraqi militias are pulled into the campaign. Each attack demands an American or Saudi response. Each response destroys more of the military power the IRGC claims it must preserve. The strategy is self-destructive for Iran and increasingly self-destructive for the Guards. It can still serve the IRGC politically.
Every Iranian attack brings another foreign strike. Every foreign strike allows the Guards to claim that Iran remains under existential threat. Continued danger preserves emergency authority, silences internal opponents, and delays the day when ordinary Iranians can ask what any of this accomplished. The IRGC remains in charge by behaving in ways that ensure it gets bombed again. It is a "deranged" self-destructive policy.
By definition, deranged regimes become psychotic about power. They pursue policies that protect their immediate authority while steadily destroying the country, institutions, and military power on which that authority depends.
Being deranged, the IRGC prefers a destroyed, unstable and dystopian Iran to accepting a subordinate role to anyone, including the Supremeless Leader "moderates" inside Iran. A regional settlement in Hormuz could allow Iran to rebuild. It could also return authority to diplomats, civilian officials, maritime agencies, and economic planners. The Guards would face questions about the war, the dead, the economy, and the destruction. Permanent crisis postpones those questions. It also happens to be the only mode of governance currently available while the man who is supposed to preside over the alternative cannot be photographed.
The derangement also turns inward. Iran has resumed executing people on charges connected to the January protests. The judiciary formally imposes the sentences, while the IRGC, Basij, intelligence services, prisons, and courts perform different parts of the same security operation. Mehdi Khaneki, a 26-year-old law graduate, was executed in July after being accused of participating in protests and assisting hostile organizations. Iranian media and the judiciary had already reported a series of executions connected to opposition groups during the preceding months.
A regime being damaged abroad, and effectively headless at the top, has intensified punishment at home. It cannot defeat American airpower. It cannot produce a Supreme Leader willing to be seen. It can still arrest, torture, sentence, and hang Iranians already inside its prisons. External weakness and internal invisibility both make the display of power more urgent, not less.
History offers several versions of this behavior. Nazi Germany continued murdering prisoners as Allied armies closed in. Soviet security forces executed political prisoners while retreating from the German invasion. The Khmer Rouge expanded its internal purges while launching attacks that helped provoke the Vietnamese invasion that destroyed it. The scale, ideology, and crimes differ. The movement is recognizable. Ideological regimes frequently become more violent as defeat approaches because fear, vengeance, paranoia, and purification replace any rational distinction between saving the regime and destroying everything around it.
Iran is nowhere near the Holocaust. The historical connection lies in the behavior of a failing security state. As control weakens, the regime tries to prove it still possesses control over someone. Prisoners, protesters, dissidents, and internal rivals are readily available. A Supreme Leader is not, apparently, even available to himself.
The IRGC attacks outward to preserve its necessity and represses inward to preserve fear. The outward attacks invite more bombing. The internal executions increase public hatred and keep the January uprising alive in Iranian memory. Each supposed solution strengthens the forces threatening the Guards.
Oman offered the IRGC a choice. It could accept influence inside a cooperative system and begin ending the war. That arrangement would protect some Iranian interests, reopen trade, and reduce the destruction of Iran. It would also weaken the Guards' exclusive control over the one asset that has made them indispensable, and it would require handing that control back to a government whose own head cannot be found in public. The IRGC chose control because they know that by controlling the Strait they are winning the war.
Control requires crisis. Crisis requires attacks. Attacks bring retaliation. Retaliation destroys the IRGC. The destruction then justifies more control. And underneath all of it, the office that is supposed to break that cycle by legitimizing something other than the Guards has not shown its face since February.
The IRGC has a plan. Unless something changes there is nothing to stop them from executing the plan. As battered and tenuous as they might be, no one can stop their plan no matter how cool all those blown up Iranian targets look on TV.
The Pentagon told Congress the war cost about $29 billion back in May, and the Office of Management and Budget said $30 billion a month after that. Independent estimates from AEI and CSIS put the real number closer to $40 billion. A fuller accounting, including the Pentagon's own $87.6 billion supplemental request, pushes the total past $113 billion. Pick your source and pick your number. Either way it also raised the price of oil worldwide.
It's all so stupid.
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