Iran, Epstein, and the Fossil‑Fueled Endgame We Refuse to See

The U.S.–Israeli war on Iran is being sold as decisive: a necessary strike to end a threat, topple a regime, and keep nuclear weapons out of “the wrong hands.” In reality, it is something far darker and more banal, a strategically unwinnable war of choice that accelerates the breakdown of a brittle global order while serving the immediate political needs of a cornered president and the long‑standing ambitions of Israel’s ruling Zionist bloc.

To see this, you have to look at what the war can realistically achieve, what it conveniently distracts from, and what it is doing to the material systems, energy, food, and finance that keep billions of people alive.

The Airpower Illusion

Start with the core military claim: that precision airstrikes and “decapitation” can coerce Iran into capitulation or regime collapse. Across more than a century of modern warfare, this promise has never been kept. From Hamburg and Tokyo to Belgrade and Baghdad, cities have been burned and infrastructure shattered, yet not one functioning regime has fallen solely through bombardment.

Robert Pape, one of the leading scholars of airpower and coercion, has spent decades charting why. Bombs can destroy buildings and kill leaders, but regime collapse is a political event driven by elite fracture: insiders deciding the ruler cannot protect them, soldiers refusing to obey, the coercive core of the state coming apart. Under foreign air attack, that dynamic usually runs in reverse. External bombing fuses the fate of the regime with the fate of the nation. Elites who might privately resent the ruler now know that “switching sides” in the middle of a foreign assault means prison, exile, or a bullet from their own security services. Nationalism hardens, not softens, the regime’s grip.

Iran has spent forty years structuring its security apparatus around these lessons. Born in revolution and nearly destroyed in an eight‑year ground war with a U.S.‑backed Iraq, the Islamic Republic institutionalized a “mosaic defense”: dispersed command, redundant leadership nodes, decentralized missile and proxy capabilities meant to survive exactly the kind of precision bombing now underway. Kill one senior figure and another, often with even stronger ties to the security apparatus, steps in. Crater one bunker and authority reroutes. The system is built not for elegance, but for endurance.

That is why the opening U.S.–Israeli strikes, tactically impressive, with leadership compounds and missile sites obliterated, did not produce the advertised political effect. The Iranian state did not collapse. The government did not sue for peace. Instead, it absorbed the blow, reconstituted its chains of command, and escalated its own campaign.

The Escalation Trap

Pape calls the pattern we are now watching the “escalation trap,” and it has three stages.

Stage one is tactical success paired with strategic failure. Militaries hit almost everything on their target list. Air defenses are degraded, leadership decapitation appears to work, command hubs are reduced to ash. On paper, the opening salvo of the Iran war fits this description almost perfectly. Yet the political objective, regime change, denuclearization, or at least a docile Tehran, remains unmet. The regime holds. Its coercive organs remain intact. Its retaliatory capacity, though reduced, is far from eliminated.

Stage two is doubling down. Convinced they hold “escalation dominance,” the ability to climb the ladder faster and higher than their opponent, leaders respond to disappointment not by reconsidering their strategy, but by expanding it. More sorties, broader target sets, longer campaigns. If the first round weakened the enemy, surely the next round will break them. Precision bombing, in this logic, becomes a kind of narcotic. The images of successful strikes create an illusion of control that is untethered from political reality.

That is where the United States and Israel are now. Airstrikes are intensifying, hitting a greater number and range of targets, while the regime in Tehran remains in place and Iran’s nuclear materials are nowhere near “secured.” The gap between tactical success and strategic fantasy widens, not narrows.

Stage three is where the trap snaps shut: when expanded bombing still fails to deliver collapse, the menu of available options is dominated by catastrophes, ground troop deployments, seizures of territory, direct attacks on additional states, or covert operations so risky they amount to rolling the dice on wider regional war. By then, domestic political narratives are so invested in the war’s supposed necessity that backing down is framed as surrender. Leaders who launched the war under the illusion of control find themselves driven by its momentum.

This dynamic is not an accident or an aberration of the Iran case. It is a recurring pattern of the airpower age. Wars are begun with promises of quick victory and controlled escalation; they evolve into protracted quagmires precisely because bombing cannot achieve the political outcomes it is tasked with delivering.

Netanyahu’s Long War and Trump’s Short Fuse

If the war is structurally unwinnable on its own terms, why wage it at all?
In Israel, the answer runs through the ideological core of Netanyahu’s project. For years, he has framed Iran as an existential threat to the Zionist state and pressed for confrontational options, from sabotaging diplomacy to covert killings to overt strikes, aimed at breaking the Islamic Republic’s capacity to project power. Analysts tracing the prelude to this war describe months of coordination in which Israeli officials sought, and eventually obtained, a U.S. “green light” for a large‑scale attack on Iranian leadership and nuclear infrastructure. For Netanyahu and his allies, this is not a tragic mistake; it is the culmination of a long campaign.

In Washington, the logic is more squalid and more familiar. Donald Trump has been engulfed in a widening legal and political storm as the U.S. Justice Department releases millions of pages of Epstein‑related files, including allegations of sexual assault against him and details of his presence in Epstein’s orbit. The DOJ’s botched redactions, where supposed anonymizations could be reversed, and the sheer scale of the archive have fed a deep sense that something is rotten at the core of the American elite.

The timing is not subtle. Within days of some of the most explosive Epstein disclosures, the administration has shifted the media environment from sordid court documents to images of “decisive” presidential action: airstrikes, briefings at the Pentagon, flags behind the podium. Activist groups and watchdogs have been blunt about what they see: a president “illegally waging war” in part to distract from his own scandals and legal exposure, including those rooted in the Epstein files. Social media has filled with slogans about “bombs instead of accountability,” while, tellingly, pro‑Iran propaganda networks have eagerly amplified the “Epstein distraction” narrative to deepen U.S. domestic cynicism.

There is no smoking gun memo yet that reads “start war to bury Epstein.” What we do have is convergence. A president under unprecedented legal and reputational threat, faced with documents that expose his proximity to a notorious sex trafficker and contain serious allegations against him, suddenly stands at the center of a fast‑escalating war that his closest ally, Netanyahu, has long desired. The war does not erase the files, but it does what all wars do for embattled leaders: it invites the public to look up at the flag instead of down at the evidence.

In this sense, the war’s pointlessness at the strategic level is a feature, not a bug. A quick, neat victory would be one kind of story. A drawn‑out, amorphous confrontation in which “patriotism” can be endlessly invoked against critics is another. The longer the escalation trap holds, the more opportunities there are to tar opposition as unpatriotic, to classify information, to bury scandals under the noise of “national security.”

Horizontal Escalation and Global Fragility

While Washington and Jerusalem chase the mirage of coercive airpower, Tehran is pursuing a strategy that does not require battlefield victory at all. Iran’s answer to overwhelming conventional force is “horizontal escalation”: widening the conflict geographically and economically so that the costs are felt far beyond Iran’s borders.

That strategy is already visible. Iranian strikes and proxy attacks have hit commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as fuel storage and energy infrastructure in Gulf states from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia. Shipping companies are rerouting tankers or pausing voyages as insurers either withdraw coverage or demand prohibitive premiums. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil typically moves through Hormuz; even partial disruption sends prices spiking, induces hoarding, and ripples through the entire global energy system.

The goal is not to defeat the U.S. or Israel militarily. It is to make the war so costly to everyone else, Gulf monarchies, Asian importers, European economies, that the political glue holding the anti‑Iran coalition together begins to dissolve. Horizontal escalation is a strategy of fracture: fracture the alliance, fracture domestic consent in partner states, fracture the illusion that this is a tidy, containable conflict.

This is also where the war stops being an “Iran issue” and becomes a planetary one. Modern civilization runs on tightly coupled systems. Fossil fuels feed not only cars and power plants but fertilizer factories, chemical plants, container ships, and cold chains—the refrigerated supply chains that keep food and medicine from spoiling. Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas; pesticides and plastics are hydrocarbon derivatives; the armada that moves grain from “breadbaskets” to cities burns bunker fuel.

Choke off or severely destabilize the Gulf energy flow and you do more than raise gasoline prices in rich countries. You risk fertilizer shortages and price spikes that can reduce crop yields, especially in regions already on the edge. You drive up shipping and insurance costs in precisely the markets that move bulk food. You stress debt‑burdened states that import calories and fuel, pushing some toward default or social unrest.

In a just‑in‑time, financialized global food system, “a few breadbasket failures” plus supply chain disruptions can cascade quickly. Export bans, panic buying, and currency crises feed on each other. Hunger becomes political tinder. Migration surges. The kind of populist authoritarian leaders who thrive on fear, scapegoating, and emergency powers find fertile ground.

The Fossil Paradox: Degrowth by Disaster

Some climate advocates have noted, half ironically, that a prolonged crisis in Hormuz might force a reduction in fossil fuel consumption. If the war strangles the world economy, they suggest, it could end the hydrocarbon era faster than any climate summit.

There is a kernel of truth here. Scenario work on fossil fuel futures shows that unburnable reserves and “stranded assets” become more likely as demand flattens or falls under the combined pressure of climate policy, technology, and economic stagnation. Wars and recessions can accelerate this process by destroying demand, people and firms simply become too poor to buy as much fuel, and by making some high‑cost projects uneconomic.

But this is the nightmare version of transition. It is degrowth by disaster: an involuntary, chaotic contraction driven by war, instability, and policy failure rather than by planned exit and justice.

We have a living example. The Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered some increases in European investment in renewables and efficiency, but it also produced a scramble for liquefied natural gas, reopened coal plants, and huge fiscal subsidies to fossil producers in the name of “security.” The immediate effect was not a calm, orderly glide path away from hydrocarbons, but panic buying, windfall profits for oil and gas firms, and political backlash against energy prices.

A protracted Hormuz crisis would likely look similar, only bigger. Rich states would fight to secure supply through whatever means are available: new drilling, sweetheart deals with other petrostates, subsidized consumption at home. Poorer states would be left to absorb the price shocks: fuel shortages, food inflation, blackouts. Some fossil assets would indeed become stranded, but not primarily because we chose, wisely, to leave them in the ground. They would be stranded because the system that might have burned them collapsed first.

This is what makes the Iran war such a bleak emblem of our moment. On one side, it hastens the unraveling of a fossil‑fueled global order that is, per the best available modeling, already on track to hit hard biophysical and economic limits by around mid‑century. The original MIT Limits to Growth work and its subsequent updates show industrial output, food per capita, and other welfare indicators peaking and beginning to decline somewhere between 2040 and 2050 under business‑as‑usual assumptions. A recent data check by Gaya Herrington, then at KPMG, found that real‑world trends in resource use, pollution, and economic growth remain broadly consistent with those “collapse” pathways if we do not change course. In that sense, war‑driven economic strangulation simply delivers, in cruder form, the downturn those models anticipate.

On the other side, the way it does so, through bombing campaigns, sanctions, supply shocks, and opportunistic authoritarianism, maximizes suffering while minimizing agency. The people who will endure the worst effects of this chaotic contraction will have had the least say in starting it.

If this war helps end the fossil‑fuel age faster, it will be in the way a heart attack ends a smoker’s habit, not as a plan, but as collapse.

Pointlessness as a Message

By 2100, as one popular shorthand has it, “we are really f**ked.” A more publishable version, and the more uncomfortable truth if you read the curves and not just the headlines, is that the hinge is closer to 2050. That is within the expected lifetimes of most adults alive today, well within the working lives of anyone currently in their twenties or thirties. It is the horizon within which today’s wars, today’s fossil infrastructure decisions, today’s financial bets will harden into the constraints those people live inside.

Within that window, the Iran war stands out not because it is uniquely evil—recent wars in Iraq, Gaza, Yemen, and beyond have their own claims—but because it is so nakedly and structurally pointless. It cannot deliver the strategic transformations its architects promise. It can and will kill, maim, and immiserate huge numbers of people. It can and will rattle an already fragile global economy and energy system. It can and will be used to bury scandals, discipline populations, and concentrate power in the hands of men who should be on trial instead of in the Situation Room.

For the first time in modern history, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed to tanker traffic, stranding around a fifth of the world’s crude, products, and LNG in a single stroke. Iran’s new supreme leader has promised to keep it shut until the bombing stops, even as Trump boasts there is “practically nothing left to target,” a perfect image of a war that is running out of military moves while it continues to manufacture systemic risk.

That pointlessness is a kind of message from the system to itself. It says that we have reached a stage where the machinery of empire is no longer even pretending to secure a better future. It is simply trying to survive the news cycle and the next election, even at the cost of accelerating the collapse its own engineers have had clear evidence of on their desks for fifty years.

We do not get a say in whether this order ends. The physics and the math are not taking a vote. We are not going to finesse our way out of the structural unwinding of a fossil capitalist civilization; the system has been slamming into the walls described by the Limits to Growth model for fifty years. What we can still choose, in a shrinking window, is the manner of that crash: how much more of our shared future we feed into unwinnable wars, and whether the descent is left entirely to airstrikes and cover‑ups, or is at least partly disrupted by people who refuse to die as collateral in someone else’s escape from accountability.

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