U.S. and Iran Exchange Military Strikes Amid Strait of Hormuz Tensions
The Strait of Hormuz Is Now a Roman Forum With Rockets
In the U.S.–Iran exchange of blows over ships and bases, I see not madness but the usual arithmetic of survival, reputation, and badly managed tumults in a world that refuses to stand still.
A damaged merchant ship limps in the Strait of Hormuz, its crew forced into a lifeboat; soon after, Central Command boasts of striking some 140 Iranian targets, while Iran answers with missiles on a U.S. base in Jordan and shots toward Arab states. Around them, the small Gulf powers swat at incoming drones and shrapnel wounds a child. This is the stage. There is talk of deals and ceasefires, but the facts we actually see are ships hit, bases struck, air defenses firing, and leaders explaining after the fact why they were compelled. When the cannon speaks and the diplomat only complains, believe the cannon. The effectual truth lies in the craters, not the communiqués.
I start, as I always do, from necessity. The United States must keep the Strait open if it is to maintain its power; Iran must show it can close or disrupt that passage if it is to project influence and avoid encirclement. The Gulf monarchies must prove they are not mere stages on which others fight. In such a field, morality follows survival, it does not lead it. When ships are struck and bases targeted, any prince who fails to answer invites future blows. When I wrote in *The Prince* that men will always act according to necessity rather than choice, I had in mind precisely such moments, when the first duty is to maintain the state and everything else becomes commentary.
Hitting 140 targets is not a temper tantrum; it is a theory of deterrence written in explosives. To strike missile and drone launch sites, ammunition dumps, communications — this is an attempt at virtù, at raising dykes against the next flood of Iranian attacks. The question is not whether the U.S. president speaks crudely when he says he “bombed the hell out of them”; princes have always decorated slaughter with jokes or prayers. The question is whether the blows are concentrated, swift, and tied to a clear aim, or whether they become a habit that teaches the adversary to absorb punishment and adapt. Severity is well used when it is short, sharp, and then stops because the point is made.
Iran’s answer shows its own calculation. It claims a “first phase” of retaliation, strikes at a base in Jordan, and pressures multiple Arab states at once, while complaining that the deal was violated by the other side. This is classic: you accuse the enemy of breaking the peace, then demonstrate that you can reach his outposts and his friends. In *The Prince*, I said it is safer to be feared than loved, provided you avoid hatred, and here Iran seeks to be feared by its neighbors while making itself the aggrieved party to its own people. That a navy officer is reported killed is tragic, but for the regime it is also useful blood, proof of sacrifice to sustain its narrative of resistance.
Yet all these actors cling to old playbooks in a region where nothing stands still. The United States answers a ship attack with a massive air campaign; Iran responds to pressure on shipping with missiles at bases and Gulf capitals; each declares the ceasefire dead while blaming the other. Rome saw this pattern in its declining years, when every frontier skirmish risked pulling legions into yet another grinding war because no one could imagine new modes and orders. As I argued in the *Discourses on Livy* (in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation), when peoples and princes will not reform their ways with the times, they force fortune to reform them with disaster.
Notice also the arms that sustain each policy. The United States uses its aircraft and drones based across the region; Iran leans on the Revolutionary Guard, its missiles, and its ability to harass shipping and threaten bases. The Gulf states, though small, prove they are not mere spectators by intercepting Iranian missiles and drones. None here relies only on mercenaries or borrowed strength; each brings its own steel or risks irrelevance. But the conflict between the great and the lesser — which in a healthy republic would be channeled by laws, councils, and courts — is here expressed in open sky duels over Qeshm Island and Jordan. Where tumults are not institutional, they are violent.
Reputation runs through everything like powder through a fuse. The president’s televised boast aims to reassure his own people and frighten his enemies; Iranian officials insist they are the ones whose deal was violated; small states like Oman protest “irresponsible” acts, trying to appear sovereign even as missiles cross their skies. In *The Prince* (as W. K. Marriott translated me), I compared fortune to a raging river that overwhelms those who built no dykes in fair weather. Here, I see leaders building their dykes with bombs and television lines, hoping that fear and spectacle will hold back the next flood. It may, for a while. But if they do not also construct institutions that can carry these conflicts into words instead of warheads, the river will claim them in the end.
From the works cited
- The Prince — Virtù versus fortuna — the raging-river figure: preparation in fair weather is the whole difference between the drowned and the dry.
- The Prince — The economy of violence and the feared/loved calculus: better feared than loved if one must choose, but never hated — fear rests on the prince's will, love on the fickle will of others.
- Discourses on Livy — Managed conflict between the great and the people is the source of a free state's vigor — Rome's tumults produced its liberty.