James E. Thorne@DrJStrategy
Food for thought.
Welcome to the New Great Game: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not an outburst, it is a long‑planned move on a board Washington has been studying for decades.
Donald Trump’s Iran gamble is being judged against the wrong baseline. Nobody serious expected regime change by airstrike; the bet of Operation Epic Fury was narrow but brutal, halt Iran’s march to a bomb, break the infrastructure that threatens Americans and allies, restore deterrence and, by closing Hormuz, demonstrate that even in a “multipolar” age the United States can still reach for the world’s most strategic chokepoint.
The question is not whether Iran looks worse than in peacetime, but whether it is weaker than the Iran we were otherwise on track to face: near‑weapons‑grade enrichment, hardened sites, ICBMs a tested weapon within a year, and implicitly backed by China. Against that counterfactual, a regime that has lost senior commanders, core nuclear facilities and major war‑making capacity has not “emerged stronger”.
Nor did this war suddenly hand power to the IRGC. The Guards have run Iran for years; the conflict stripped away the clerical façade and killed many of their most capable officers. They are not true religious believers but calculating military men, interested in power, money and survival more than theology. Such men can be negotiated with, if the terms strip away their most dangerous options. A discredited IRGC with degraded capabilities and no viable nuclear path is weaker than the old clerical‑IRGC hybrid with a bomb option. This looks less like a revolutionary vanguard and more like a brittle military dictatorship.
Venezuela shows why this is not neo‑conservatism in disguise. There, Washington helped force Nicolás Maduro from power with sanctions, isolation and support for the opposition, but it did not send Marines into Caracas or attempt to remake the country in America’s image. The objective was pressure and transition, not permanent US stewardship. The same bounded playbook now applies to Iran: maximum economic and military pressure to fracture the regime from within, not an occupation or bayonet‑installed government.
Seen from that perspective, Hormuz is not a shocking improvisation but the central artery in a strategy that has been war gamed out : use control of sea‑lanes and finance to punish Iran first, but also to remind China and Europe that their growth models still depend on flows Washington can disrupt. What cannot be allowed is for this world to turn Iran into a Chinese staging point on the Gulf.
The endgame in this first round of the New Great Game is narrow and knowable: no enrichment, real caps on missile reconstitution, no Chinese forward base, no open chequebook for terror, and enough sustained pressure that when the Iranian people finally move, they are pushing against a weakened security state rather than a confident nuclear one.
The world has changed; Iran has lost the war, Pax Americana is dead. Trump’s national security doctrine, coercion without occupation, leverage without crusades, is the planned successor, and the Strait of Hormuz is its chosen proving ground. Is the Strait of Malacca next?
Why should investors care? Because if this strategy succeeds, it removes a looming nuclear breakout risk, curtails state‑sponsored terrorism, re‑establishes a credible fear of US hard power and, for a time, compresses the geopolitical risk premium that has hung over energy, shipping and global equities for a generation. It offers the possibility, however briefly, of a peace dividend: lower volatility, higher investment and a world that, for a moment, rhymes with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.
In that window, capital will scramble to reprice assets that assumed perpetual Middle Eastern and Nuclear escalation. The New Great Game is not just about guns and chokepoints; it is about who captures that re‑rating.
