The War Between America and Iran.
It is one month since the USA and Israel started war on Iran. They started with a functioning strait of Hormuz. Today the biggest problem of the world is closure of Hormuz by Iran. Last Friday President Trump gave 48 hours warning to Iran to open Hormuz or face devastation by bombing on powerhouses. On Sunday he extended the limit to 5 days. On 26th March 2026 he extended it to 10 days.
American exceptionalism was always a story. Every great power tells itself a story. Rome told itself one. Britain told itself one. The story is not the problem. The problem is when the story replaces the thinking.
This situation reminds me of a very old fiction. A novel by Ayan Rand covered a similar situation. Unfortunately, her work has been labeled as ‘objectivism’ but no lesson has been learned.
Atlas Shrugged
After years of collectivist misrule, America is decaying. It has become a society where productive and creative citizens (primarily industrialists, scientists, and artists) have are exploited to benefit an undeserving population. In today’s lexicon Rand opposed subsidies.
In her novel a Jim Taggart (brother) and Dagny Taggart (sister) inherited Taggart Transcontinental Railroad.
Dagny Taggart fights to keep her family company alive while the government smothers industry with regulations. The country’s best minds like engineers, inventors, industrialists, begin to disappear one by one. Rand calls “the breakdown of cause and effect.”
John Galt, seeks to remedy by calling upon the productive people to ‘strike’. He argues that talented people are being exploited by a parasitic system that punishes success.
The Bureaucrats had assumed that their directives are sacrosanct and no one can disobey those directives.
But the strikers refused to follow. They withdrew to a hidden valley and watch the outside world collapse without them.
When the infrastructure finally fails and the lights go out, the government is left holding directives it cannot execute. The creators then prepare to return and rebuild America, on their own terms.
USA Today
The Bureaucrats in Atlas Shrugged passed directives and were genuinely shocked when the trains stopped. Here, the planners launched a war and appear genuinely shocked that a cornered Iran closed the Hormuz chokepoint that hurts everyone.
In Atlas Shrugged, the Bureaucrats refuses to trust their own judgment and wait for authorization from above.
Today the Commander in Chief of USA, refuses to trust professional judgment but consults loyalists who have never run anything of this scale.
Lindsey Graham is a senator. Witkoff is a real estate developer. Secretary of War is Pete Hegseth who was a TV host. Kushner is a businessman son-in-law. None of them have ever managed a military campaign, a strait, or a sovereign debt crisis simultaneously.
This is actually worse than the clerk/Bureaucrat problem Rand described. The clerk at least follows established procedure. These advisors have no procedure. They are improvising while the world economy is the collateral damage. The world is slowly approaching the Oil Crises of 1973.
It is America’s Suez Canal moment as predicted in my book called ‘Accidental Empire.’
The professional class in the State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence agencies spent careers studying Iran, Hormuz, and Gulf dynamics. They were the ones who would have said what Thatcher understood in 1980. She knew that Hormuz itself must never become the casualty of diplomacy or war.
New World Order
USA debt has exceeded $36 trillion. Iraq war cost two trillion and achieved nothing coherent. Afghanistan cost three trillion and ended with Taliban back in Kabul. Now add the cost of Iran venture, assessed at a billion dollar daily in running cost. Losses and attrition will cost more.
America is not accustomed to pain. Its voters feel gasoline prices every single week. Higher fuel cost will push prices of all commodities.
The boots on ground threat is the final bluff in a sequence of bluffs. Each previous bluff was called. This one will be called too, and for very concrete reasons.
Vietnam had jungles. Afghanistan had mountains. Iran has both, plus a nuclear hedging capability, plus Russian intelligence support, plus a domestically unified population that has been sanctioned for forty years and is genuinely accustomed to pain.
Iran holds the world’s third largest proven oil reserves, second largest proven natural gas reserves, and ranks fourth globally in rocket artillery systems. Iran’s land area ranks 17th globally at over 1.6 million square kilometers which is larger than all of Western Europe combined. Can an external army invade and hold this vast area?
A million Iranian soldiers in mountainous terrain with an underground tunnel network is something no military has tested in its war games. It is an unsolvable military problem for an army that cannot currently put a carrier within hypersonic missile range.
Now Iran is releasing recruitment videos on State TV. It is a message, not just a military action. It is psychological warfare directed at American domestic opinion as much as at any military planner. The clerks in Washington are working from manuals and models. Iran is responding to daily reality. One side is filing paperwork. The other side is recruiting, adapting, and releasing videos to signal resolve to a global audience.
The Gulf
In Atlas Shrugged, Rearden kept working under laws designed to destroy him. He was funding his own destruction. Here, Gulf states are buying THAAD and Patriot systems, selling gold, and purchasing treasuries under duress of a war that America engineered. They are funding the very system that holds them captive. That is Rand’s “sanction of the victim” playing out at a geopolitical scale.
The exceptional nation convinced itself it could start a war, control its consequences, solve its debt problem, freeze BRICS, corner China, and exit cleanly. All simultaneously. With Kushner and Witkoff in the room instead of professionals.
That is not exceptionalism. That is the clerk who believes the manual covers every situation, right until the situation the manual never imagined actually arrives.
Future
Every extended deadline is another week of closed Hormuz. Every week of closed Hormuz is compounding inflation in every economy on earth. At some point a desperate move becomes likely. Will it produce result, is the question begging for an answer. Only future can answer that.
The lights are not going out in America. But the rest of the world has stopped waiting for America to flip the switch. Is it Good Night already?
It is not Good Night. It is a very dangerous inflection point. Empires at inflection points can go two ways. They can reform around their genuine strengths. Or they can double down on the narrative that got them into trouble and accelerate the decline.
Britain chose reform after Suez. Slowly and painfully but it chose it. It shed the empire, rebuilt the economy, and remained a serious nation.
Rome chose narrative. It kept calling itself eternal while the borders moved inward.
America is at exactly that fork right now. Near a strait it cannot open. With deadlines it cannot enforce. Advised by loyalists instead of professionals. But still possessing the most powerful innovation engine in human history.
The creator does not need an empire. The creator needs freedom to create. America’s greatest periods of genuine strength were inward focused. The interstate highway system. The moon landing. The internet. None of those required a carrier group near Hormuz.
America can choose. But not from a casino table surrounded by gamblers. Only from the quiet honest moment after the last chip is lost, when the room finally empties and one clear-eyed person looks at what remains and decides to build something real with it.
Clerks could not make right choices in Rand’s America. Accidental Empire failed to make the make right choices yesterday. Can America choose now?
References:
- Accidental Empire: https://sandeepbhalla.in/accidental-empire-a-book-foretelling-the-fate-of-america/
- Call to Modi: https://sandeepbhalla.in/trump-calls-modi-to-resolve-blockade-of-strait-of-hormuz/
- Wait at Hormuz: https://sandeepbhalla.in/what-usa-is-waiting-for-near-hormuz/
- Economic Compulsion for War: https://sandeepbhalla.in/was-the-war-on-iran-an-economic-compulsion-for-usa/
- Iran permits friendly nations: https://www.timesnownews.com/business-economy/economy/only-friends-can-pass-iran-permits-india-pakistan-3-other-countries-through-hormuz-amid-war-article-153925712
- Iran army strength: https://www.globalfirepower.com/country-military-strength-detail.php?country_id=iran