BY PAUL T HORGAN
The news from what is being described as the ‘Iran War’ is that there is no news, well none about the actual fighting. This is normal.
A study of war reporting, especially of the wartime periodicals that would emerge for every major conflict up to WWII, demonstrates that the actualité of the combat would take at least several days if not weeks or months to emerge into the public gaze if not hidden for decades in secret files. The only events which tend to be reported immediately are those that it is impossible to conceal, like a major explosion in a public area, such as those caused by air raids. Even then, the locations of the impacts of German V2s in London were deliberately misstated to avoid giving the Germans targeting information, resulting in convincing them that they were overshooting and thus making them target Kent and South London more, saving Westminster and Whitehall, at the expense of southern suburbia.
A prime example of prolonged delay in war reporting is how the British efforts at Bletchley Park and elsewhere to decrypt German signals codes in World War II was successfully kept secret until the early 1970s, rendering numerous accounts of the war obsolete, not least the part-work Purnell’s History of the Second World War. To digress a bit further, a book on electronic computers published by Pelican in the mid-1960s completely omitted any mention of developments in tabulating machines and calculating devices after 1939 in its historic survey of the technology, picking up the story only in 1946. No-one at the time seems to have commented on this curious gap in the narrative caused by concealing the truth of the machines that were used to hack German encryption.
So this is what is happening in the current war. Iran has almost completely shut down access to the Internet. The USA and Israel only share what is necessary. The issues surrounding the war are quite polarising so there is a propaganda war being run in parallel to the actual war. Useful idiots for Iran from the hard left in the UK are, embarrassingly, in their element.
With every major battle and major war, there is a hinge of the combat around which the decision of the fighting will be made. In World War I, despite other theatres, the hinge was the Western Front, and specifically the lateral railway that sustained German fighting in the trenches. It was the loss of supplies connected with this line that was a significant factor in destroying the combat effectiveness of the Imperial German Army and led to the armistice.
There were several hinges in World War II. The River Meuse and its successful crossing by the Wehrmacht led to Entente defeat in 1940. Stopping the crossings was seen as so vital that the bridges in German hands were attacked by Fairey Battles of Bomber Command. None of the planes returned. The hinge then became the airfields in Southern England until the Luftwaffe switched to attacking London. In North Africa, the hinge was the Suez Canal, and the Western Desert campaigns consisted of attempts by the Axis to take the canal, and British Empire forces resisting these and trying to drive the Germans and Italians out. The hinges on the Eastern Front were at the gates of Moscow in 1941, Stalingrad in 1942, and Kursk in 1943, after which the Wehrmacht was a broken force, capable only of a fighting retreat, interspersed with small offensives.
I have recently written about how the hinge of the Russo-Ukraine War was the Antonov Airport at Hostomel. Had Putin been able to use this to land his transport planes loaded with troops and equipment, he may have gained sufficient local superiority on the ground to capture Kyiv and decapitate the Ukrainian leadership. His failure to do so has led to this war entering its fourth year with ongoing inconclusive trench-based fighting.
So what is the hinge in the ‘Iran War’?
Out of all the fighting, well, missile launches and bombings, this has to be the Straits of Hormuz.
As every person who follows the news should now know, some twenty percent of the world’s oil passes through this channel, which is 20 miles wide at its narrowest. The shipping lanes are in international waters, but safe passage is only guaranteed by the goodwill of Iran. In fact it is likely that the ability of Iran to close the Straits at any time of its choosing has been a key factor in the survival of the regime.
Furthermore, the permanent securing of free maritime passage through the straits represents a key strategic objective for the USA. The Carter Doctrine, announced in 1980, made free passage as vital to the interests of the USA as the defence of the mainland. That the USA has since become self-sufficient in oil may not diminish this as, if the rest of the world is impoverished by an energy crisis that passes the USA by, this means that trade targets for exports of USA goods and services would diminish. The USA would not be immune to the global recession triggered by a wartime hike in the price of oil.
Free passage is also a reasonable objective for the international community to the extent that making the Straits a demilitarised zone should be a common goal. In the 19th century, such issues were the subject of conferences of the great powers. It is therefore not unreasonable for there to be a great power conference to determine how this could be achieved. While the United Nations Security Council appears to be a forum for such deliberations, there would be more interested parties than just the permanent 5 members, which suggests that a special conference should be called. As it is Iran’s belligerence that causes the Straits to be closed, it is not unreasonable for it to have barely more than observer status. At the time of writing, the UK is calling for an international summit on free passage through the Straits. This Lord Grey-style call seems to have been lost in all the cacophony, despite being the most sensible proposal being made by any non-belligerent which is what the current Labour government has decided the UK should be, despite numerous indignities committed on our country and its people.
It should also not go unnoticed that American ground forces are being moved into the region. This makes the last month of air attacks look like nothing so much as the kind of prolonged aerial attack that preceded D-Day in 1944 and the 100-hour Desert Sword land campaign in 1991. The shifting positions of Donald Trump regarding negotiations could be all part of a campaign of deception for those whose knowledge of military history is lacking.
While America demands regime change, this is not necessary to secure freedom of the seas in the Straits. All that would be needed is for ground troops to secure critical coastal regions to a certain depth inland. There could be a cordon sanitaire, inside which no Iranian would be allowed. Of course the hard left would squeal in protest, but they would do so in a manner that they absolutely did not when the Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic did precisely the same thing in Berlin and also the Inner German Border. Since the hard left squeal in protest at every non-retrograde action of the USA, the squealing could be ignored as the usual noise from the usual suspects.
The realisation of this limited but highly necessary strategic objective could leave the rest of Iran to be run by whatever regime would persist, which would probably be the current one, as its will to repress has not apparently diminished despite all of the decapitation attacks and strikes on centres of oppression. Iran and Israel could still duke it out, but the flow of oil could resume unhindered. Of course Iran could focus its asymmetric warfare on this new US-occupied territory, seeking to resume the drip-feed of ground force fatalities that tend to erode support in Western societies for military presences overseas, but it is possible that technology may make roadside bombs, snipers, and suicide bomb attacks as obsolete as the the rifle and Maxim gun did with mass charges by sword- and spear-carrying natives in the late nineteenth century. This may not just be wishful thinking.
The development pace of drone technology and artificial intelligence means that human movement can be tracked and predicted with disturbing accuracy. Insurgent attacks could be stopped before they even start.
The Iranian regime faces challenges outside of the hard pounding it is receiving at the hands of American and Israeli forces. Even before the first missile hit a bunker, the country was on the verge of economic collapse, as a private bank making dodgy loans had allowed five billion dollars worth of cash disappear to who-knows-where, but probably into the hands of the friends of the bank’s owners. The Iranian currency, the rial, is worthless, and inflation abounds, so to preserve the value of their money Iranians will always try to convert their rials into dollars as fast as they can. To save this bank and to prevent a cascade of bank failures, the Iranian central bank created five billion dollars’ worth of rials to replace the money that had disappeared so ordinary depositors, attracted by high interest rates, could get their cash from their accounts. So there was an extra five billion dollars worth of freshly-printed rials chasing an unchanged quantity of US dollars for conversion. The exchange rate collapsed. Inflation, already high, rose to 40%. This was the background to the protests, which the Iranian leadership countered by murdering over 30,000 of their own people.
It is a harsh but terrible truth that when a despotic regime murders its own people by the thousands within its borders, this has not been a casus belli since 1877, when the Great Powers took objection to the Ottomans massacring kilotombs of Bulgarians. So Iran has a free pass to cull dissenters every few years as part of its political process with both minimal hindrance and little criticism. Population culls have thus become a routine method of governance in Iran to curb discontent in a manner not dissimilar to their employment by the Ottomans. This is what passes for politics in the Middle East.
Then there’s the malnutrition crisis. In October 2025, Iran’s Ministry of Health reportedly admitted that 35% of all annual deaths in the country (approximately 130,000 people) are linked to poor nutrition. In October 2025, Ahmad Esmailzadeh, the Director of the Nutrition Improvement Office at Iran’s Ministry of Health, reported that approximately 35% of all annual deaths in Iran – roughly 120,000 to 130,000 people – are linked to malnutrition and dietary deficiencies. This announcement, made during a National Nutrition Conference coinciding with World Food Day, highlighted a public health crisis driven by economic instability and soaring food prices.
The third Iranian horseman is drought. It appears that the effort to maintain and improve Iran’s water supplies was diverted to construct missile-proof bunkers under mountains. The effect is that numerous reservoirs in Iran are below 10% capacity, and this is before high summer. There was talk, even before the recent disorder, of evacuating Tehran, as supplying water to its 10 million population would become increasingly difficult. Absence of water also feeds into diminished domestic harvests, as irrigation systems start to collapse, which compounds the malnutrition crisis.
However, it seems clear that the regime cares little for mass dissent, impoverishment, starvation, or thirst, even if these become existential issues. Iran might even leverage these self-made disasters to appear a victim state in the same way that Hamas allowed journalists unfettered access to its subjects’ suffering during Israeli military operations to destroy the terrorist regime. Iran’s will to repress is intact, and it has on hand tens of thousands of fanatics on whom it can focus largesse to keep the millions at bay using mass terror. Regimes like this have to be physically destroyed, but there is always much collateral damage; to destroy such a regime, large parts of the country would also have to be destroyed. While this could be done to Germany, and Germany also attempted it on Stalin’s Russia, this is largely seen as a method of war that the world should have left behind to the first half of the 20th Century.
So a limited war aim by the USA (Israel has different goals) of securing for the foreseeable future the free passage of the Straits seems reasonable. Secondary goals of limiting Iran’s ambitions regarding nuclear weapons and various types of missilery seem fair, but do require the presence of weapons inspectors, and if there is one thing the world has learnt in the last 40 years it is that weapons inspectors are not able to function with uncooperative regimes. At present the USA dominates the skies over Iran, and this could be leveraged to keep a close eye on regime activity after the Straits coast has been occupied.
While US military action may seem to be a flagrant breach of UN rules, the nature of the UN is that permanent members of the Security Council get a degree of a free pass on the rules set up for other countries to follow. That’s the reward for stopping the Axis powers from conquering the world. The Allies inadvertently conquered the world instead, but decided not to exploit this conquest as blatantly as the Axis would have done (Britain and France, after being slapped down over Suez, are second-tier permanent members). There’s also the issue that Iran has broken or bent so many aspects of international law that it deserves limited protection under it. The world looked away when Iraq invaded Iran in a manner that the world decidedly did not when Iraq invaded Kuwait almost a decade later.
So there is an awful lot of realpolitik on show in the Hormuz War. This may continue should the USA put some carefully-located boots on the ground to secure the Straits. At present there is no real news. This is normal. It will also be normal should there suddenly be an awful lot of news. Both the USA and Iran have wargamed this conflict for decades. The only difference is that the wargames are now being checked against reality.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.