THERE IS NO PEACE, ONLY WAR
A follow up to my past article
(read: the piece from earlier)
(Editor’s note: 8/10/2025: so. the total war has yet to come. my analysis still holds true. without major policy shift from America, the whole region is set for total war, regardless.)
Today, the President Donald Trump “Truthed” out major breaking news, that Iran and Israel had agreed to a “Complete and Total CEASEFIRE”.
As I laid out in last week’s article, this is antithetical to Israel’s (personal and state) war aims. As much as Trump may want this conflict to not escalate, he is not the only actor with agency here. Iran has agency. Israel has agency. And of course, the US Defense Department absolutely has agency.
Let’s recap what’s happened, in short, from the side of the Axis of Evil:
Israel has unilaterally bombed and degraded all of Iran’s regional allies, committing several genocides in the process.
Earlier this month, Israel directly struck Iranian territory (an escalation from last year when they merely struck an embassy), killing scientists, civilians, and military officials.
All of these Israeli aggressions were fully funded and supported (in diplomatic, economic, and military ways) by the US. The US even admitted to bluffing Iran with a fake nuclear diplomacy, and even allowed Iran’s negotiators to be assassinated (like it had okayed the Hamas and Hezbollah anti-leadership strikes)
The United States then followed up by dropping bunker buster bombs on Iranian nuclear production facilities.
I want to stop here before I turn to Iran’s responses. Each and every one of those above acts is an act of war. A plain naked read of international relations, going back to the 1640s, would cause any reasoned diplomatic scholar to say that not only is Iran at war with both the US and Israel, but that Iran has a just cause to be in said war with Israel and the United States. Judging by the war aims (again: see previous article), this is war of plain national survival for Iran, nothing more. As such, it would make little sense for Iran to sign a peace treaty with the US and Israel, both of whom have lied through their teeth over the last nearly 20 years of negotiations. But I’ll turn to what Iran should do after I detail what they’ve done.
Iran, in response:
Has penetrated the Iron Dome completely, wrecking several parts of the Israeli military industrial complex with precision missile night raids. This is damaging the Israeli economy and further the already-fractured morale of the Israeli people.
Has struck at US military bases once again with missile and drone attacks.
Is threatening to shut down the Gulf of Hormuz.
My apologies to the Ayatollah, but these all read as 2017-era Democratic “moral victories”, for those familiar with the discourse of that time. For those not: imagine losing a campaign, but doing slightly better than anyone on your team had ever done before. In effect: “several thousand civilians may be dead but hey—at least we can hit an empty warehouse in Tel Aviv now”.
Iran: you are at war with the United States. You have been at war with the United States indirectly for years, and now you are very directly at war with them. You should not trust American or Israeli diplomacy, not now, not until you’ve changed material conditions on the battlefield itself. If you accept the so-called “peace deal” you are accepting becoming Lebanon, where Israeli F35s can bomb your country at will and you cannot fire back.
You need to wage this war on the terms that Israel has set: as a war of national survival. This is not a picnic. We are not making a basket. Declare total mobilization. Nationalize your defense industry. Harden your hearts. Bomb the desalination plants. Bomb the refineries. Bomb the cities, bomb the ships, bomb the terror factories.
America will bomb you in turn. But they already will, regardless. Trump will always need a quick win again for domestic political reasons so he’ll kill your Ayatollah next. Maybe bomb your Parliament. And he’ll do this even if there is a signed-in-gold-and-oil peace deal between your two countries.
As a final word of not-advice (just stating causal facts!), as a consumer economy built on cheap energy, America’s chief weakness is on its reliance to Middle Eastern oil. Iran is uniquely positioned with the means to strike directly at the heart of the American consumer economy. I just think they lack the desire to, which forces me to raise the uncomfortable question: do they really want to be a state? Do they really want to be sovereign?
They need to start acting like it, starting by returning Israeli and American aggression tit-for-tat. Else they really will all be wiped out. And we will say is “sorry, we did tell you so!”