"Stuck in the Strait of Hormuz"
"Blockade"
by Robert Gore
"The world is threatened by a blockade more deadly than Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. That blockade is the refusal among the West’s ruling class to allow entry of any thoughts not conforming to their prejudices, slogans, and unattainable objectives. Their minds are more tightly sealed than Hormuz or Bab-el-Mandeb ever has been. In their credentialed arrogance they preen about their intelligence. They are fools repeatedly rushing in where no angel would tread.
If President Trump’s Iran adventure represents what now passes for his and his administration’s mental processes, the U.S. and the world are in grave danger. This fiasco in progress has bypassed every marker of intellectual proficiency. It offers no cognizance of history, geography, or military reality, no recognition of past mistakes, no lessons learned, no acknowledgement that their may be things about which its perpetrators are ignorant. It’s bereft of elementary common sense, much less wisdom tempered by experience and humility.
Trump is not playing with a full deck. Not only are his mental processes visibly deteriorating, but he’s morally compromised in every way possible. His abject servility to Netanyahu, Israel, and the American Jewish lobby may well be due to their ruthless blackmail. He is leading the U.S. to humiliation and defeat that will spell the end of the last vestiges of its failing empire.
That fall may come to be regarded as the first phase of the Age of Chaos. Many of us will be probably be alive to see the culmination of this first phase, but the entire Age of Chaos will probably play out long after we’re all dead. An empire must have the ability to expand its dominion and to subjugate the people within it. Both expansion and subjugation have become problematic.
The American empire is a confederation constructed after World War II. Unlike the Roman empire, its lifespan will be measured in decades, not centuries. The U.S. confederation has been unable to expand its dominion to North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or most of the Middle East. The exception to the latter is the imposition of the Zionist state of Israel, but that “success” may ultimately lead to the downfall of both Israel and the U.S. empire. The one unambiguous success has been the incorporation of Warsaw Pact nations after the fall of the Soviet Empire. That incorporation has reached its limits with the confederation’s attempt to absorb Ukraine, which may well fail due to Russia’s opposition.
Notwithstanding this litany of mostly failure and the obvious difficulties inherent in an effort to subjugate Iran, Trump and Netanyahu went ahead with what was within a few weeks a readily apparent fiasco. There are, as Jeffrey Sachs and others have pointed out, disturbing indications of megalomaniacal insanity in both men. Failing empires get the leaders they deserve; the fall of the Roman empire had its crazy emperors
Empires are inherently offensive. Sustenance comes from plunder; they must grow or die. The problem for the U.S. and imperialism in general is the yawning disparity between the costs of offensive and defensive warfare and the emerging dominance of asymmetric, or guerrilla, warfare. Historically, guerrilla warfare has been the weapon of the weak, usually defensively employed. The problem for would-be invaders is that the weapons of the weak have become so effective against the weapons of the strong (assuming nuclear weapons are off the table) that it’s stymied offensive warfare. The former are orders of magnitude cheaper than the latter - $30,000 drones are taking out multimillion dollar aircraft, tanks, and seagoing vessels.
Recent history is replete with examples that only fools and madmen (i.e. Trump and Netanyahu) ignore. Exhibit A would be the Russia-Ukraine war, which featured the debut of the newest “star” of asymmetric warfare: drones (See “The Ants New Weapon,” Robert Gore, SLL, June 17, 2025). That war has settled into a World War One-style battle of attrition as drones and artillery have made advancement for either side difficult and costly. New drone-based tactics and counter-tactics evolve almost daily with only measured progress by the Russians; certainly not what they expected when they began their offensive over four years ago. And this is in eastern Ukrainian territory that’s Russia friendly!
Exhibit B would be Yemen’s Houthis, whose closure of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the southern end of the Red Sea was a test drive for ally Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis have punched well above their weight, waging often effective land, aerial, and naval warfare against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and the U.S. They are part of the Axis of Resistance and receive both tangible and rhetorical support from Hezbollah and Iran. The U.S. government alleges that they also receive support from the Russian, Chinese, and North Korean governments.
The Houthis have employed increasingly sophisticated drones and missiles, many of which have been supplied by Iran. President Trump’s Operation Rough Rider, which launched air and naval strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen; a subsequent cease fire forced by Houthi attacks on more than 190 ships, and Trump’s dubious declaration of victory were a preview of U.S. and Israel’s two subsequent attacks on Iran and their attendant lipstick-on-a-pig propaganda.
The foundation of guerrilla warfare is decentralized cells, operating with a high degree of autonomy from central command. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iranian government has adopted this guerrilla strategy, named Mosaic, as its mode of defensive warfare. Iran has been turned into 31 autonomous operational zones with substantial drone and missile capabilities. Thus, killing most of Iran’s formal leadership and extensive bombing, particularly of Tehran, did not achieve the stated objective: a quick Iranian capitulation. Nor did it prevent a lethal Iranian counterstrike.
Guerrilla warfare works because it engenders chaos against forces attempting to either impose order or their own brand of “managed” chaos, from which order will supposedly emerge. The Iranians have certainly engendered chaos in the Middle East, and if order emerges, it will apparently be on their terms. Most important, Iran could exercise control of the Strait of Hormuz with its sovereignty intact and greatly enhanced influence in the region.
The U.S.-Israel alliance is confronted with a choice. It can recognize the epochal reality currently unfolding: short of nuclear attack, invasion and traditional offensive warfare are being rendered virtually obsolete. The implications of full reality recognition would be enormous. The U.S. would have little or no influence in the Middle East, perhaps withdrawing completely (other than commercial transactions), while that of nearby powers Russia and China would expand.. The petrodollar arrangement from which the U.S. has so greatly benefitted would be over. The development would herald the end of the American empire and the possible ascendancy of Russian and Chinese-led multilateralism.
That would have its salutary aspects for the U.S. Psychologically, it’s way past time for a well-deserved comeuppance. Economically, the empire is an unaffordable luxury for a government $39 trillion in debt. Politically, the nation has enough problems at home without creating more for itself abroad.
However, the outlook for Israel would be bleak. For decades it has fomented chaos and division in the Middle East to reduce the chances of unified Islamic opposition against it. An Iran that has defeated the U.S.-Israel alliance and become the dominant power within the region would be Israeli and American Zionists’ worst nightmare. Israel’s continuing existence would be in question. Not necessarily because Iran would acquire nuclear weapons, if it doesn’t already have them. Rather, the small Jewish state will stand revealed as militarily vulnerable, and it has many actual and potential enemies in the Middle East. That fact suggests that the alliance won’t choose reality recognition, but rather nuclear nihilism.
The Sampson Option is Israel’s well-known strategy should it be confronted with circumstances that its leaders feel threaten its existence. They would activate Israel’s nuclear weapons - if Israel’s going down they’ll take the rest of the world with it. It may have enough nuclear bombs to do so. The Israelis characterize the Sampson Option as a deterrence strategy, and if push came to shove nobody knows if they’d press the button. However, the apocalyptic rhetoric spouted by Netanyahu and his cohort, and American Christian-Zionists like Mike Huckabee, is not reassuring. If the Israel-American alliance opts for nuclear nihilism, global chaos is assured. The continuation of Homo Sapiens is not.
Regardless of the alliance’s choice, increasingly amplified chaos is in the cards. Even if the impossibility of maintaining an empire is fully, if begrudgingly, recognized, the American empire’s dissolution will be chaotic. Its satrapies will be left to scramble for alternative military and economic arrangements. Accommodations will have to be made with the global majority as centuries of Western domination draw to a close.
That’s not to say that multipolarity among the global majority will be any kind of nirvana. The ever-strengthening forces of decentralized chaos will be impossible for any government to contain. Power always corrupts; multipolarity won’t abolish rivalry among nations and venality among their rulers. Russia and China, the leaders of the multipolar bloc, are currently led by exceptionally adroit authoritarians; their successors probably won’t be as adept. Governments, as coercive political arrangements, are incompatible with human freedom. As such, they’re never permanent, and today’s tyrannical behemoths are well past their sell-by dates.
Chaos may be most intense within the U.S. Much of its apparent strength rests on the shakiest of foundations. Decisive defeat in the Middle East will undermine the military “glue” that has supported the U.S. since World War II and its fiat dollar since 1971. Then there’s the exponentially mounting debt. Those two factors will eventually obliterate U.S. financial markets. The burgeoning chaos reflects the mental chaos playing out in so many American minds - apocalyptic Christian-Zionist dispensationalism, woke, transhumanism, “art” and “culture” that are neither, elite depravity, and who knows what other mental and moral depredations (it’s hard to keep track). These are the ingredients for uncontrollable chaos.
Insanity inevitably meets reality, and the latter always wins. There’s a good chance the U.S. will splinter. The most optimistic scenario is that some of the resultant pieces become enclaves committed to protecting freedom and individual rights. They would have to have the capability to protect themselves from malign elements. They would also require an unswerving commitment to reason and mental clarity not currently apparent among any appreciable segment of the American population. However, chaos will impart wisdom among some of those who survive it, and they could potentially rebuild and institute order based on choice, incentives, and cooperation, not coercion and violence.
Contemplating bewildering day-to-day developments without a broader analytical framework only heightens the bewilderment. That framework doesn’t come from a social sciences perspective, but the physical sciences offers some understanding. Without getting into the weeds of the concept of entropy, it’s fair to say that entropy is associated with disorder and randomness; that in systems left to spontaneous evolution entropy remains constant or increases, that energy is required to slow, stop, or reverse the entropic process, and certain processes are irreversible.
For centuries, order - controlling entropy - has been imposed by governments, but now they’re being overwhelmed by entropic processes. They can no longer command the resources necessary to contain the decentralized and ever-increasing dispersal and power of computing, communications, and weaponry. The “energy” of governments is being overwhelmed by disorder and randomness, and that process is almost certainly irreversible. Ironically, most of what governments now do to impose order only increases disorder and chaos; they are adding to rather than subtracting from entropy.
This analysis yields no confident predictions about what happens next; chaos is unpredictable. Nor does it yield claims of knowledge about billions of unknowable data points. What it does yield is some comprehension of the epochal breakdown well underway. Not particularly comforting, but it at least offers insight amidst the unending confusion."
.jpg)
