War without maps

Khalid Ahmad Al Habtoor, the Emirati billionaire, published an open letter to Donald Trump this month. It dripped with the cold, sardonic anger of a man who expected to be consulted and was not. It is unlikely this confidant of Gulf leaders would have written without royal approval.

The Gulf states, Al Habtoor wrote, have been dragged into a regional war without anyone asking whether they wanted to go. Their economic model – stability as brand, the world’s money as guest – was being destroyed while Washington and Tel Aviv made calculations in which Gulf preferences barely registered.

In previous Middle Eastern crises, the Gulf states were at least part of the conversation. Now they are writing open letters. Something has changed. And it is not just the fault of fog of war.

Every war produces uncertainty about facts. What is unusual about the current conflict is uncertainty about frameworks – not just what is happening, but what would count as success, what the war is for, where it could end.

Israel is a nuclear power; its ultimate military superiority over Iran is not in serious doubt. What is unclear is what that superiority is supposed to purchase.

Regional security? Iran’s behaviour has not changed in proportion to its losses. Deterrence? Every week raises the question of what is being deterred, and for whom. A new Middle East? New borders are being mentioned but they are inciting violence, not stabilising it.

This is different from ordinary strategic confusion. Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of politics by other means. That assumes that military means and political ends share a common currency: force can be converted into outcomes. Leaders sending soldiers and civilians to their deaths are expected to know the exchange rate. But what we are watching is the breakdown of that convertibility.

The disconnect between instrument and result is everywhere. The US attempts to shock Iran with its mighty arsenal – and Iran deploys cheap weapons that force the US to expend missiles costing orders of magnitude more to intercept them. Israel’s military dominance is fearsome – but it does not translate into the regional acceptance that would make dominance sustainable.

Elsewhere, Western economic power, demonstrated in sanctions regimes, does not produce the political compliance it is supposed to buy. Trump’s tariff threats generate pushback rather than capitulation.

European soft power – the ability to set norms, to make the rules feel like everyone’s rules – has been badly damaged; yet the global denunciation of both Israel and Trump suggests that the persuasion register still works perfectly well. The power exists; the conversion mechanism is broken.

When different forms of power – military, economic, legal, symbolic – cannot reliably be translated into one another, strategy loses its map. The strategists are not incompetent; but a map requires stable coordinates and the coordinates keep shifting. The conflict feels simultaneously overwhelming and illegible.

There is no shortage of information. There is a shortage of the framework that would make information readable – that would tell you which facts are signals and which are noise, what the end of this looks like and how you would know you were approaching it.

The dollar’s status as reserve currency helped finance wars; now it is unclear if wars will knock the dollar off its perch- Ranier Fsadni

Wars that lack a legible political destination become self-perpetuating. No one wants endless war but the absence of a convertible currency makes it impossible to calculate when enough has been spent.

In the space of a week, the Trump administration has gone from promising a four-week war to saying it is ready for a “forever war” if necessary, and from wanting to liberate the Iranian people to saying it is ready to inflict great unthinkable damage on the nation, including breaking the country up.

Multiple reasons lie behind these shifting answers. Some have to do with personality and personnel: Trump’s style of decision-making, the competing interests within his administration.

Others have to do with what is unsayable. You cannot say where you are going if your intent is to tear up the current map – say, where Iran is broken up and southern Lebanon and Syria have new borders imposed.

But the problem is not just a deficit of truth and sanity. It’s a framework crisis. The war seems to be without limits because it is no longer easy to know what the limits of war are.

The changing technology of war means political leaders can no longer estimate how much force will produce victory, how much economic pressure will produce capitulation, and how much legitimacy is needed to stabilise an alliance.

Financial power once guaranteed military potency. Now, geopolitics must reckon with geoeconomics – the control over extended supply chains and speed of manufacture. The dollar’s status as reserve currency helped finance wars; now it is unclear if wars will knock the dollar off its perch.

When war cannot be understood as a means to an end, strategy stops being a map of where you want to go. War now appears self-perpetuating and for its own sake.

It is not because the leaders have no goals. Reality has become too opaque and the consequences of war are too unclear for the declared purpose to be transparent and credible. 

War has always been terrible. But it was at least intelligible: a means to a political end. When the currencies of power stop being convertible, that intelligibility disappears.

Strategy loses its map and war begins to resemble something far older and more primitive: violence without a visible destination.