| As long as they can’t reach out to touch our side… |
[NationalContext] The war has passed through three phases since February. The American and Israeli campaign that opened it failed to produce the collapse of the Islamic Republic, and the ceasefire of 8 April converted the confrontation into something slower: a full blockade, negotiations under siege, and recurring threats of renewed attack. The one-page memorandum agreed in June appeared to stabilise that arrangement. The attacks on shipping in early July destroyed it, and the weeks since have produced the widest fighting of the war: a surprise Iranian missile launch against American forces in Jordan on 28 July, Houthi missile and drone strikes on Saudi cities and tankers, Iraqi armed groups joining the attacks on Saudi Arabia, joint Saudi-American retaliation inside Iraq, simultaneous pressure on the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, and a drone attack on gas shipping as far away as Egypt’s Mediterranean coast.
This escalation becomes easier to understand once the war is described by its strategies rather than by its incidents. Two campaigns are now running against each other. Washington, having lost confidence in regime change by military means, is attempting to fracture the Iranian regime from within, through a coordinated mixture of public statements, intelligence leaks, episodic threats and a blockade whose pressure compounds over time. Iran, having concluded that the temporal structure of the war is destroying it, is attempting to fracture the regional coalition around the United States, through pre-emption, horizontal escalation and a deliberately cultivated image of recklessness designed to make continued confrontation intolerable for Washington’s partners. Each side has chosen fracture over conquest, and each is using time as an active instrument rather than treating it as a neutral background condition.
More at the link |