On Iran and War and Hope
07 June 2026 — A series in three essays
A note before this begins. This essay is still being edited and is not finished to my own standards. I am publishing it now, rough, because I wanted it out while the war is still going, the argument is about this war and about this moment, and waiting would defeat the point. I have two kids and work full time, so the editing may take weeks. I would rather show unfinished work that is honest than sit on it until it is safe. Corrections are welcome.
Part One: America's Economic Hegemony Will Not Survive Losing the War in Iran
Before the current conflict with Iran I believed the United States should close its bases in the Persian Gulf and bring the troops home. I still believe the arguments for that position are sound. The basing structure is expensive. It entangles us in the politics of monarchies we have no business defending. It places American lives at risk to protect oil shipments that increasingly go to other countries. I held this position honestly and I would defend it today in any room where the question was purely one of policy. But policy does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in time. And the time for that withdrawal was before the shooting started, not during it.
The problem is not that retrenchment was wrong. The problem is that retrenchment now, under fire, sends a signal that cannot be unsent. If the United States withdraws from the Gulf while Iran is demonstrating that it can close the Strait of Hormuz at will, every ally and every adversary on earth will read that withdrawal as retreat. And the difference between a strategic withdrawal and a retreat is not the movement of troops. It is the conclusion that other nations draw about what the United States is willing and able to do the next time it is tested.
Consider the position of the Gulf monarchies. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait. These governments host American bases under an implicit bargain that has held for decades: you house our forces, we guarantee your sovereignty and the free passage of oil through Hormuz. That bargain made sense when the guarantee was credible. It no longer makes sense when your civilian population and infrastructure have become targets because you host those forces. Iran has struck not just American installations but the countries that house them. The Gulf states are watching their own people absorb the cost of an American security presence that was supposed to protect them. If you are a Gulf monarch watching this, the rational calculation is not complicated. You begin to accommodate Iran. You do not do it loudly. You do it quietly, over months, in back channels. You defer to Tehran on security questions. You explore pricing your oil in other currencies. And eventually, quietly, you ask the Americans to leave.
The Gulf is not a special case. It is a test case. Every government that hosts American forces or depends on American security guarantees is watching the same situation and running the same calculation. If the United States cannot protect the countries that house its bases in the Gulf, what does that mean for Taiwan? For the Baltic states? For the Philippines? Every defense minister in every allied capital is asking the same question: does the American alliance make us safer, or does it make us a target? They will conclude it makes them a target. And they will respond accordingly. Diplomatic language will hedge. Quiet overtures will be made to Beijing and Moscow. Defense procurement will diversify away from American systems. And the consequences will surface in a place that most Americans never think to look. The bond market.
To understand why, you need to understand one thing about the American economy that is almost never explained to the public. The United States dollar is the world's reserve currency. This is not an honorary title. It is a structural arrangement, and it has mechanical consequences. Global oil trade is priced in dollars. This means every country that imports oil needs to acquire and hold dollars to buy it. That creates a permanent, enormous global demand for dollars that exists independent of anything the American economy actually produces. Because the world needs dollars, the world buys American government debt.¹ Because the world buys American government debt, the United States can borrow at rates that would bankrupt any other country on earth. This system runs on the American security guarantee in the Persian Gulf.
Here is where the chain reaches your kitchen table. Most Americans believe the Federal Reserve sets interest rates. This is true for short-term rates. It is not true for the rate on your mortgage. The interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is benchmarked against the yield on 30-year Treasury bonds, and that yield is set not by the Fed but by the global market. It reflects what investors are willing to accept in return for lending money to the United States government for three decades. When investors are confident in America's long-term stability, they accept lower returns. When that confidence erodes, they demand higher ones. The Fed cannot override this. It can set the overnight rate wherever it wants. If the world does not want to hold 30-year American debt, 30-year rates rise anyway.²
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is not just a financial product. It is the mechanism by which most American families build wealth.³ In Canada or the UK, your mortgage rate resets every few years. If rates spike, your household budget absorbs it almost immediately. The American system is different. You lock in a rate for thirty years. Your payment does not change. This stability is what allows a family to plan. To know what they can afford. To buy the house, build equity over decades, fund retirement and college from the appreciation. Home equity is the American middle-class balance sheet. It is the retirement plan, the college fund, the emergency reserve. All of it rests on the assumption that a family can borrow at an affordable fixed rate for thirty years. And that assumption rests on the willingness of global investors to hold long-duration dollar debt. Which rests on their confidence in American power. Which rests, right now, on the Strait of Hormuz.
Now follow the chain backward from your mortgage to the Persian Gulf. The Gulf states price their oil in dollars because the United States guarantees their security. If that guarantee fails, the Gulf states will accommodate Iran. If they accommodate Iran, they will have no particular reason to continue pricing their oil in a currency managed by a power that could not protect them. They will begin to accept payment in yuan, in euros, in whatever currency the buyer prefers. This does not happen overnight. These things move slowly. But once it begins, it compounds. If oil can be purchased in currencies other than dollars, then countries that import oil no longer need to hold as many dollars in reserve. If they hold fewer dollars in reserve, they buy fewer Treasuries. If they buy fewer Treasuries, there is less demand for American government debt. If there is less demand for American government debt, the United States must offer higher yields to attract buyers. If yields on 30-year Treasuries rise, mortgage rates rise with them. Each step follows from the one before it. None of them require a crisis or a collapse. They only require that the world begin to doubt whether the United States will still be the dominant power in thirty years. That doubt is now reasonable in a way that it was not before the conflict with Iran.
The United States has lost wars before. It lost in Vietnam. It lost in Afghanistan. Both defeats were humiliating. Neither one threatened the chain I have just described. The skeptical reader will note that people said Vietnam was existential too. That was the domino theory: if Vietnam falls, all of Southeast Asia falls, and the balance of global power shifts irreversibly. The domino theory was wrong. Saigon fell in 1975 and the dominoes did not fall. No central bank on earth reduced its Treasury holdings in response. The Soviet Union did not conclude from Vietnam that the dollar was finished. I am not making a domino theory argument. Domino theory was about ideology. It predicted that communism would spread from country to country by force of example. It did not. What I am describing is a mechanical chain, and I am predicting that a break at one end will transmit to the other. I could be wrong. But the nature of the prediction is different. Domino theory required you to believe that Vietnamese communism would psychologically inspire Thai communism. This requires you to believe that global investors will demand higher yields on American debt if American power is visibly declining. One of those is speculative. The other is what bond markets do every day. Kabul fell in 2021 and mortgage rates did not move, because Afghanistan did not sit on this chain. The Strait of Hormuz does.
So what does the United States look like if this chain breaks? The simplest comparison is the 1970s. Americans over fifty remember that decade or grew up hearing about it. Gas lines. Stagflation. Malaise. The sense that something fundamental was broken and nobody in charge knew how to fix it. The difference is that the 1970s ended. Paul Volcker raised the federal funds rate, the short-term rate the Fed does control, to twenty percent. The 30-year Treasury yield, the rate that actually determines your mortgage, peaked at about fifteen percent.⁴ This worked because the threat to the dollar in the 1970s was inflation, not structural decline. Investors were losing confidence in the dollar because its purchasing power was eroding. Volcker demonstrated that the United States would accept a savage recession to defend the dollar's value. That was a credible commitment, and the world responded to it, because the underlying system was intact. The world still needed dollars to buy oil. American hegemony was not in question. Volcker was not asking investors to trust in American power. He was reminding them that American power was not going anywhere, and that the dollar would be managed responsibly. If the reason investors are losing confidence is not inflation but the visible erosion of the hegemony itself, there is no interest rate high enough to fix it. You cannot remind the world of your strength while you are losing a war. The 1970s were a crisis within a functioning system. What I am describing is damage to the system itself.
Picture it. Mortgage rates that have hovered between three and seven percent for a generation settle between ten and fifteen and stay there. The family that could have afforded a house in 2024 cannot afford one in 2028. The family that already owns a house watches its value flatten or fall because there are no buyers at these rates. Home equity stops growing. For millions of families it starts shrinking. The retirement plan built on home appreciation no longer works. The college fund that assumed the house could be refinanced no longer works. Interest rates ripple outward. Car loans. Student loans. Business credit. The small business that was going to hire two people does not. The construction company that was going to break ground does not. Growth slows and then stalls.
The federal government, which has been borrowing at rates subsidized by global dollar demand for decades, now borrows like everyone else. The deficit does not shrink. The programs do not go away. But the cost of servicing the debt doubles and then doubles again. Something has to give. Either taxes rise sharply, or Social Security and Medicare get cut, or both. Every entitlement debate becomes a fight over a shrinking pie. It has happened before. Southern Europe after 2008. Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal. Youth unemployment above fifty percent. A decade of zero or negative growth. Mass emigration of educated young people who could not find work at home. Marriage rates collapsed. Birth rates cratered. An entire generation's capacity to form families was effectively destroyed. The social fabric thinned in ways those countries have not recovered from. The American version will not be identical. But the mechanism is the same. A way of life built on a financial subsidy that vanished, with no replacement and no warning.⁵
This does not arrive as a single catastrophe. There is no day the empire falls. There is no broadcast, no surrender, no moment the country looks up and sees what has happened. It arrives as a decade of things quietly getting worse while nobody can explain why. Gas is more expensive but there is no shortage. Houses are not affordable but they are not worthless. Jobs exist but they do not pay enough and there are not enough of them. Every year is a little harder than the year before. Every plan takes a little longer to come together. The young delay marriage. Then they delay children. Then they stop planning for either. And nobody connects it to a strait on the other side of the world that most Americans could not find on a map.
¹ This step is not obvious and I do not want to derail the argument to explain it fully. The short version: foreign governments do not hold their dollar reserves as cash in a vault. They buy US Treasury bonds, which are the safest and most liquid dollar-denominated asset available. You park your reserves somewhere that earns interest and can be sold quickly. At the scale of national reserves, that means Treasuries. The result is that global demand for dollars translates directly into global demand for American government debt.
² I am simplifying. The relationship between Treasury yields and expected inflation, term premiums, and Fed policy is genuinely contested among economists. What is not contested is that sustained global demand for long-duration Treasuries keeps yields lower than they would otherwise be, and that this demand is a function of confidence in the dollar system. That is the only claim I need for the argument to hold.
³ I have argued elsewhere that Americans should not use their homes as primary vehicles for wealth building, and I stand by that. But the fact that they should not does not change the fact that they do, and that the entire economy is structured to encourage it. I am describing the system as it exists, not endorsing it.
⁴ The full story of how the oil shocks of the 1970s transmitted into persistent inflation, and why that inflation did not resolve on its own after the shocks ended, is worth telling but would derail this essay. The short version is that inflation, once it becomes embedded in wage expectations and price-setting behavior, is self-sustaining. Volcker broke the cycle by force.
⁵ Call me Cassandra.
Part Two: The Price of Victory
Essay 1 described what America loses if it cannot secure the Strait of Hormuz. The mortgage. The alliance structure. The dollar. The quiet, invisible machinery that makes American middle-class life possible. This essay asks the next question. What does it take to win?
The current air campaign has failed and clearly more is required to win. Iran has absorbed precision strikes and continued to contest the Strait. Precision warfare was supposed to make this easy. Smart bombs. Surgical strikes. Minimal collateral damage. The language itself is designed to make war sound like medicine. For thirty years that promise held. It is not holding now. Iran is still standing. Hormuz is still contested. The Gulf states that host American bases are watching their own civilians absorb the cost of a security arrangement that was supposed to protect them.
So what does victory require? If precision strikes have failed, the next step is strategic bombing. The term has a specific meaning. It does not mean hitting military targets more accurately. It means targeting a nation's civilian population and the infrastructure that keeps them alive. The objective is not to destroy an army. It is to kill enough civilians, and destroy enough of what a society needs to function, that the government has no choice but to surrender. Iran's capacity to wage war runs through a small number of cities. Tehran. Isfahan. Shiraz. Mashhad. Tabriz. Its industrial base is concentrated. Its economy is fragile. The regime is already domestically contested. The 2022 uprisings showed the depth of internal opposition. A government that cannot protect its own people cannot hold power. The Iranian people need to fear American bombs more than they fear the IRGC. When they do, the regime falls. Strategic bombing does not need to kill every soldier. It needs to make the political survival of the civilization impossible without surrender.
It may not even require strategic bombing. Water infrastructure is concentrated and fragile. Destroy it and a city of nine million people faces a humanitarian catastrophe within days. The explosion is not the weapon. The thirst is. Surrender and NATO engineers move in to turn the water back on. The infrastructure can be rebuilt. The dead cannot be unburied. This is coercion, not annihilation. It is a war crime under international law. But it is a war crime with an off switch, and the off switch is surrender.
The objection will be raised that even if the regime falls, a rogue IRGC could run an insurgency in the Strait. Small boats, mines, coastal missiles. The kind of asymmetric warfare that beat America in Vietnam and Afghanistan. This objection confuses two different problems. An insurgency needs a state behind it. It needs logistics, funding, safe haven, resupply. Destroy the state and the insurgency loses its supply chain. The Strait of Hormuz is not the Hindu Kush. It is a narrow, surveyable waterway that can be patrolled and monitored in ways that Afghan mountain passes cannot. And it is not America's problem to solve alone. Every nation that prospered under the American order has an interest in keeping Hormuz open. Japan, South Korea, Europe, the Gulf states. They benefited from the empire. They can help patrol the waterway. A rogue IRGC harassing shipping is a manageable security problem. An intact Iranian state contesting American hegemony is not.
None of this is new. America has faced this exact question before, and the first time it answered without hesitation. On the night of March 10, 1945, three hundred B-29 bombers flew low over Tokyo carrying incendiary bombs. Sixteen square miles of the city burned to the ground in a single night. Roughly 100,000 civilians were killed, most of them burned alive. This was not an accident. This was not collateral damage. General Curtis LeMay designed the raid to maximize civilian casualties. He had tried precision bombing. He had tried hitting factories from high altitude. It was not working. The factories were not falling fast enough. So he burned the workers instead. And their families. And their neighborhoods. It worked.
Dresden, February 1945. A city of refugees and hospitals and baroque architecture. The Allied bombing created a firestorm that consumed the city center. Tens of thousands dead. The military justification was thin and everyone involved knew it. The purpose was demonstration. This is what we are willing to do. It worked. And Dresden was not unique. Hamburg, July 1943. Operation Gomorrah created a firestorm so intense it generated its own weather. 37,000 dead. Cologne. Darmstadt. Pforzheim, where a single raid destroyed eighty percent of the city and killed a third of the population. The Allied strategic bombing campaign killed somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians. In the Pacific, LeMay's incendiary campaign burned over sixty Japanese cities. Osaka. Kobe. Nagoya. City after city after city. And strategic bombing was not even the oldest tool. The British blockade of Germany in the First World War starved an estimated 400,000 to 750,000 German civilians to death. The blockade continued after the armistice, while Germany negotiated the terms of its surrender. The mechanism is older than aviation. Cut off what a population needs to survive and wait. Each time the strategy was the same. Make civilian life impossible until the government surrenders. Each time it achieved the objective.
The men who ordered these operations were not tried as war criminals. They were decorated. Curtis LeMay received the Distinguished Service Medal. He later ran for Vice President. Arthur Harris, who ran the British bombing campaign against German cities, was knighted. Harry Truman is remembered as a decisive leader. The nations we burned rebuilt under our protection and became our closest allies. Japan. Germany. They did not rebuild in spite of what we did to them. They rebuilt because of what we did to them. The destruction demonstrated a simple fact: this country will do whatever is necessary.
And from that destruction came everything. Bretton Woods. The Marshall Plan. NATO. The dollar as reserve currency. The security architecture that made the 30-year mortgage possible. The entire American middle class. Every claim made in the previous essay about the chain from Hormuz to your kitchen table traces back to this moment. To the fire. And the prosperity was not just American. Japan, the country we burned, became the second largest economy on earth. Germany, the country we bombed into rubble, became the engine of Europe. South Korea, behind the American shield, built a technological civilization. North Korea, outside it, starves. The pattern is not subtle. Every nation that accepted the American order prospered. The empire is not a zero-sum extraction. It is an order. And the order works.
If precision has failed in Iran, and if the stakes described in the previous essay are real, then the logic that built the postwar order points in a single direction. The strong do what is necessary. The nation that flinches from the required cruelty does not get to keep what the previous cruelty built. There was no Marshall Plan without the firebombing of Hamburg. There was no 30-year mortgage without the demonstrated willingness to do what had to be done. Rome understood this. Britain understood this. Every empire that lasted more than a generation understood this. The ones that flinched were replaced by ones that did not. America understood it in 1945. Do we have the will to provide for our children and grandchildren what our grandparents provided for us.
Your grandparents had this. They had it because men in bombers over Tokyo and Hamburg made a choice that most people today would call monstrous. And your grandparents lived in the peace that choice created and never thought about it again. They had cookouts. They went to church. They went to the moon. They eradicated polio. They watched their children grow up masters of an empire.
Part Three: Follow Me
Dedicated to those who catechized me.
As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office; and he said to him, "Follow me." And he rose and followed him.
— Matthew 9:9 (RSV-CE)
The previous essay made a case that I cannot refute on its own terms. The empire works. Strategic bombing works. The postwar order was built on the willingness to burn cities and the world prospered because of it. I wrote that essay honestly. I felt the pull of it while writing it. I am a father. I want my daughters to grow up as the masters of an empire. I want them to buy homes and start families and live without the slow grinding decline described in the first essay. The logic of empire offers all of that. It has evidence. It has history. It has eighty years of results. I cannot argue that it would fail. I can only argue that it is wrong.
Matthew was a tax collector. Tax collectors in first-century Palestine were agents of the Roman Empire. They were collaborators. They profited from the most successful imperial system the world had ever seen. The system worked. It worked for Rome and it worked for Matthew personally. Roads, aqueducts, law, order, peace. The same case made in the previous essay, made two thousand years earlier, by the same kind of empire. Jesus did not tell Matthew that the system was failing. He did not argue that Rome was in decline or that tax collecting was inefficient. He looked at a man who was comfortable and prosperous inside a system built on domination and said two words. Follow me. And Matthew got up and walked away from all of it.
The previous essay argued that the horror and the glory are the same thing. The firebombing and the prosperity. The destruction and the order. I did not make that argument dishonestly. It is true. But it is also the structure of the cross. The cross is the most horrific event in history and the most glorious. The torture and execution of God is the salvation of humanity. Horror and glory fused into a single act. The empire and the cross share this structure. They differ in direction. The empire says: their children die so yours can prosper. The cross says: I die so you can live.
You cannot do evil that good may come of it. This is not my opinion. It is the teaching of the Church, grounded in Paul and formalized by Aquinas. The intentional targeting of civilian populations is intrinsically disordered.¹ It does not become rightly ordered because the 30-year mortgage depends on it. It does not become rightly ordered because the postwar order was good. It does not become rightly ordered because your children's futures are at stake. The previous essay demonstrated that strategic bombing produces good outcomes. This essay does not dispute the outcomes. It disputes the premise that outcomes are the measure of a moral act.
But I will not let the reader off easily. It is simple to oppose the bombing of Iranian cities from a comfortable chair in a house you already own. Most Americans who would call strategic bombing monstrous do not understand what their opposition costs them. They do not see the chain described in the first essay. They do not know that their mortgage rate is connected to the Strait of Hormuz. Their opposition to slaughter is genuine. It is also free. And a moral position that costs you nothing is not a moral position. It is a preference. If you do not know what you are choosing, you are not choosing. You are expressing a sentiment.²
The genuine moral act looks like this: I understand that my opposition to the destruction of Iranian cities means my family may never own a home, and I choose to oppose it anyway because the intentional killing of civilians is intrinsically evil regardless of what it costs me. That is not a preference. That is a sacrifice. And the weight of that sacrifice is not distributed evenly. The homeowner who locked in a three percent mortgage and opposes the war bears almost no cost for that position. The house is secure. The equity is safe. The opposition is real but cheap. The young family locked out of homeownership who opposes the war is choosing something far harder. They are accepting that their moral commitment may permanently exclude them from the primary way Americans build wealth.
I will not leave the reader with only two options. There is a third. A ground invasion of Iran without strategic bombing. It preserves the distinction between combatants and non-combatants that makes war morally tolerable at all. The cost falls on soldiers who volunteered, not on children who did not. I need to say plainly what that means for me. My cousin just commissioned as a Marine. A Marine whose wedding I stood in last year has a baby on the way. My daughters' godfather is in the Army. A ground invasion means some of them do not come home. I am advocating for sending people I love to die in order to protect the lives of Iranian civilians who have no particular affection for me or my country.
I am not presenting the ground invasion as the right answer. I do not have the authority or the certainty to say what should be done. I can say that the strategic bombing of civilian populations is categorically evil. That is the floor and it holds. Beyond that floor there are options that are not evil but are terrible. A ground invasion is not evil. It is terrible. Accepting the decline described in the first essay is not evil. It is terrible. I cannot choose between them for you. I can only insist that you see the choice clearly and that you understand what each option costs and who pays.
As a father and a Christian I am forced to ask myself, in my heart of hearts, how many Iranian children am I willing to kill to keep alive the American Dream? How many cities would I burn to guarantee that my children can get jobs, buy homes, and start families? For weeks as I agonized over this essay I thought my answers as a father and a Christian were in tension, but by grace I have come to realize they are not. My daughters by baptism are children of God and their inheritance is not of this world. We need not murder any children for my daughters to be the children of a king.
¹ "Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." CCC 2314, citing Gaudium et Spes 80.
² Aquinas on the moral act: the agent must apprehend the object, deliberate, and choose (ST I-II, Q.6-17). A choice made in ignorance of its consequences is not, in the relevant sense, a choice at all.