The Illusion of Retreat
Why the West’s “De‑Escalation” Toward Iran Is Just a Quieter War
A narrative is gaining traction: faced with rising risks and Iranian warnings, the Trump administration is supposedly backing away from confrontation with Tehran. A reported partial pullback of a carrier group, talks in Muscat in Oman, and a softer US tone are being interpreted as signs of restraint, recalibration, even a new realism in Washington. This reading is dangerously short‑sighted. It misunderstands the strategic logic now governing the Atlantic system, what I have called the Bunker State. What looks like de‑escalation is, within that logic, simply the transition to a more sustainable, more ruthless form of warfare. The transatlantic system is shifting to the method best suited to the long‑term management of its own signs of decline: economic strangulation through maritime control, covert destabilization operations, and kinetic strikes held in reserve. The form of warfare has changed. The objective has not.
Most mainstream analysis still uses a 20th‑century template: escalation equals visible troop build‑ups, massive bombing, and invasion, or at least the preparation for such operations. Pause those, or stop threatening them publicly, and you have “de‑escalation.” Viewed through that lens, these recent developments do look like a retreat: The reported partial repositioning of the USS Abraham Lincoln from the Arabian Sea. The diplomatic choreography of indirect talks in Muscat, Oman, and media stories that frame renewed sanctions as a bargaining chip instead of actually being part of an ongoing war effort against Iran.
But this reading ignores that the blockade preparations and sanctions architecture remain fully in place and are being expanded, not relaxed. Further, covert and financial warfare against Iran is intensifying, not slowing. Last but not least, the US force posture in the Gulf consisting of 30,000–40,000 troops in range of Iranian missiles, has not meaningfully changed. The story is therefore not one of retreat, but of open preparation for a condition of a permanent hybrid war that the transatlantic system now prefers.
From Airstrikes to Economic Warfare: Blockade & Siege as Primary Weapons
If we define war only as something that happens when bombs fall or parliaments formally declare it, we miss the fact that the hybrid war on Iran is already in full swing. Since late 2025 Washington’s measures have added physical control of energy flows to the sanctions already in place.
In December 2025, Trump ordered a complete naval blockade of sanctioned oil tankers bound to or from Venezuela, a step that, under classic international law definitions, clearly qualifies as an “act of war.” In Iran’s case, the same administration is advancing not (yet) a formally declared “total blockade,” but a rapidly narrowing de facto oil blockade: After nuclear talks in Oman stalled in early February 2026, Washington announced additional sanctions on Iran’s oil sector, targeting firms and intermediaries that trade in Iranian crude and petrochemicals. In parallel, the State Department has begun systematically dismantling Iran’s “shadow fleet.” In a February 2026 statement, it designated 14 shadow‑fleet tankers as blocked property and sanctioned 15 entities and 2 individuals involved in transporting or trading Iranian‑origin oil, petroleum products, or petrochemicals, vowing to “continue to act against the network of shippers and traders.” Further, US forces have physically seized multiple tankers: the Marinera after a two‑week chase in the Atlantic near Iceland; the Sophia, carrying two million barrels of Venezuelan crude in the Caribbean; and other ships linked to Iran’s shadow fleet.
This is a targeted effort, and not just symbolism: Iran exports around 1.3–1.8 million barrels of oil per day, roughly 90% of it to China. Cutting a substantial fraction of that is functionally equivalent to sustained strikes on the main arteries of Iran’s economy.
“Making Iran Broke Again”
Trump officials have been unusually explicit about what they are doing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted that the maximum pressure campaign was “designed to collapse Iran’s already buckling economy,” to “collapse Iranian oil exports,” and to “shut down Iran’s oil sector.” He celebrated the results: currency depreciation, bank failures, dollar shortages, import paralysis, and then added:
“This is why people took to the street… this is economic statecraft. No shots fired.”
Addressing Wall Street at the Economic Club of New York in March 2025, Bessent said it even more bluntly: the goal was “making Iran broke again.” The room of financiers applauded.
Sanctions as Structural Warfare
What we are watching is the structuralization of sanctions as a permanent state of war. World Bank and UN human rights data show a clear pattern: After sanctions were eased under the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, Iranian inflation fell to about 7% in 2016. When Trump tore up the deal unilaterally in 2018 and re‑imposed sanctions in violation of the UN Security Council resolution, inflation shot back up into the 40–50% range and has stayed there. UN special rapporteurs have repeatedly warned that unilateral US sanctions on Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela violate international law and risk “man‑made humanitarian catastrophes,” with starvation and denial of basic rights likely outcomes.
Of course, none of this is conceptually new regarding the use of sanctions. A 1960 State Department memo on Cuba already articulated the blueprint: the goal of embargo was to “weaken the economic life of Cuba” and “bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.” What is new is the Bunkerization of this logic: plans once treated as policy options are now embedded as standing structure, applied by default to any state that enables multipolar resilience.
Venezuela as a Test Case: Securitocracy and the War on Multipolarity
What unfolded in Venezuela on 3 January 2026 should not be seen as an aberration, nor as a sudden escalation driven by short‑term domestic events. This was far from any such notion. Instead, tt was the execution of a geopolitical operation that has been intellectually, institutionally, and doctrinally prepared for some time. Calling it a geopolitical coup d’état is an apt description of what unfolded that day. Venezuela has lived under various forms of siege since Hugo Chávez broke with post‑Cold War hemispheric subordination. But the current phase is qualitatively different. It is unfolding in a world where US primacy is no longer taken for granted, growth outside Western control no longer automatically leads to collapse (or rather being collapsed), and multipolar alignments pose a structural, not merely ideological, challenge, for Western power elites. The anxiety driving this escalation is that alternative financial, diplomatic, and security relationships can persist and can grow. That is intolerable to a declining hegemon whose power rests increasingly on coercive leverage.
One of the most revealing articulations of this logic appears in the work of R. Evan Ellis, Latin America Research Professor at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. His September 2025 article “Finally the Endgame for Venezuela?” models how escalation might unfold. Force in today’s geopolitical context becomes a signaling mechanism where kinetic action becomes communication. At least coming from the US.
Ellis describes recent operations as demonstrations of “willingness to escalate beyond prior restraints”, a phrase that captures escalation as iterative testing of thresholds. If symbolic force fails, limited strikes follow. If those fail, escalation continues, up to a “Just Cause‑like operation,” explicitly invoking the 1989 invasion of Panama and the seizure of Noriega. Sovereignty in the hemisphere is framed as conditionally revocable:
“The recent attack against the speedboat is a demonstration of the US government’s willingness to escalate beyond prior restraints. The US has a range of options moving forward, which include seeing if this demonstration of force was sufficient to cause Maduro to ameliorate US concerns to additional, limited strikes all the way to a Just Cause-like operation to bring Maduro and his cronies to justice in the United States like what happened to Manuel Noriega.”
At the same time, Ellis assures his readers no long‑term occupation is intended; the force assembled is insufficient for sustained control. This reflects post‑Iraq and post‑Afghanistan constraints of outcomes without entanglement, control without responsibility. He anticipates violent fragmentation, criminal competition, and sabotage after regime removal but frames these as externalities to be “managed,” not decisive arguments against intervention. Responsibility for the chaos is displaced onto Venezuelan actors or external “spoilers” like Russia, China, and Cuba. Destabilization is both predicted and disowned.
What makes Ellis particularly significant is his position inside the US defense apparatus. As an Army War College SSI (Strategic Studies Institute) research professor since 2014 and a former member of State’s Policy Planning Staff, he operates at the interface of intelligence, operations, and strategic narrative. His analyses are best read as pre‑structured cognition emerging from within the planning ecosystem itself.
In a parallel piece on China in Latin America (titled Preparing for PRC Military Actions in Latin America), Ellis admits that Chinese security activity in the hemisphere remains empirically modest: arms gifts, training exchanges, limited port calls. Yet he insists that for the Pentagon these must be interpreted “through a lens of the threats that they potentially pose.” Empirical modesty becomes irrelevant; what matters is latent potential. Commercial projects are re‑coded as dual‑use, diplomatic engagements as pre‑positioning, civilian infrastructure as future battlespace.
Read together, his Venezuela and China work exemplify the securitocratic mindset: societies are understood as systems to be disrupted, stabilized, or denied to rivals. Democracy is just a variable in this understanding and sovereignty a conditional status.
The 2023 RAND report Great Power Competition and Conflict in Latin America—written for the US Air and Space Forces—makes this explicit: the region is treated as a strategic rear area, politics subordinated to military necessity. The core tasks are to sustain proxies, prepare to deter or deny the use of Chinese dual-use assets in the region, and choose the military option over diplomacy by preparing for “increased demand for U.S. Air Force assets in the theater.”
What this example of Venezuela goes to show is that the intensity and form of Bunker pressure on a state is a function of its positional value as a node or chokepoint and its distance from US force hubs. Thus, for example, Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela are in the inner ring of the American bunker; Iran is in an outer ring where siege is still possible but more contested. The closer the node, the less room there is for autonomous development. Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico are, thus, in a weaker position because their location in the US security perimeter and hemispheric strategy makes them easier to blockade, easier to infiltrate, and easier to punish without high kinetic cost to Washington. This much is laid out in the above mentioned RAND paper.
In this zone, the combination of distance (very short), projection capacity (maximal), and historical entitlement (“our” hemisphere) produces a specific pattern of pressure that Iran or even Russia never experience in quite the same way. Indeed, Latin America is part of a broader strategy to localize supply chains in the hemisphere, reducing dependence on China and preparing for a war that Washington China‑hawks openly timetable for around 2030. Thus, the pressure is not just to trade but to align national development with US rearmament needs. In a securitocratic logic where Latin America is coded as rear area, commercial dependency will deepen its vulnerability. For the case of Mexico, for example, the more central its minerals, logistics, and manufacturing become to US war planning, the more justified future interventions will appear whenever Mexico’s choices deviate from Washington’s expectations.
Iran, on the other hand, is more resilient partly because it sits at a different distance and theater, has hard deterrent tools and the opportunity to develop them (e.g. its missiles, the strait of Hormuz), and it can plug into Eurasian support networks through Russia and China. Latin American countries cannot simply replicate such strategies being under US naval and financial dominance. Still, the relevance for Iran is straightforward: the methods tested in the Caribbean basin—blockade, decapitation, elite reconfiguration under external pressure—are now being adapted to the Persian Gulf. The Bunker State is exporting its laboratory protocol from one node of multipolar connectivity to another.
US and Israeli analysts are now explicitly discussing this Venezuela model as a template for Iran. A CNN analysis from January 2026 spoke openly of “leadership decapitation without regime change” and suggested that Washington could “reference Venezuela as an example” when planning options for Iran. Meanwhile, Israel’s intelligence service has demonstrated unmatched reach inside Iran: In June 2025, during “Operation Rising Lion,” the Mossad and allied units utilized pre-positioned weapons and covert teams to destroy Iranian missile launchers and air defense systems near Tehran, while assassinating at least 14 nuclear scientists and numerous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders. Investigations show that the Mossad had smuggled precision weapons and explosives into Iran, maintained caches for months or years, and coordinated teams deep within Tehran, all while evading Iranian security.
Iranian authorities announced in January 2026 that they had foiled new sabotage plans linked to the Mossad, which targeted oil, gas, electricity, and telecommunications infrastructure in several provinces; proof that this clandestine network is active and not a thing of the past. This is precisely the kind of infrastructure for covert degradation and targeted leadership assassination required to reproduce a Venezuela-style decapitation attempt against Iran. Accordingly, the goal is not full occupation; it is about generating sustained attrition pressure, shattering the cohesion of the chain of command, and forcing a surviving rump government into “strategic submission”; meaning the acceptance of the dismantling of nuclear and missile programs, the surrender of energy sovereignty, and the alignment of foreign policy with US lines.
The Slow Strangulation
Why is this method preferred? The current US military strategy is not geared toward decisive and politically costly wars. It is constructed for permanent crisis management and permanent attrition. Within this logic, the following applies: A large, openly declared war against Iran would be risky, expensive, and domestically explosive. A form of blockade combined with sanctions, sabotage, and intermittent strikes, on the other hand, is cheaper, deniable, and far more flexible.
Indeed, within this process of slow strangulation the diplomatic confusion is part of the attrition. While US envoys may dangle the prospect of a “deal” the reality on the water will be one of a relentless escalation of piracy and interdiction. This confusion aims to create a factional conflict inside the targeted nations: a “pro-deal” elite is tempted by false promises of relief, while the military reality on the ground (or at sea) tightens the noose. The US strategy is to use this diplomatic fog to delay a unified response from Russia, China, and Iran, allowing the “war at sea” to dismantle their trade routes piecemeal before they can agree on a joint naval defense.
A strangled Iran bleeds China, which depends on Iranian oil and would have to invest money and political capital to keep Tehran afloat. Furthermore, it could weaken Russia, which must provide weapons, technology, and diplomatic cover to avoid losing a key partner. It would deter the Global South from pursuing similar independent projects. Finally, such an approach provides an endless pretext for the US troop presence in the Gulf, justifying budgets and domestic securitization. This is a strategy with lower risk and higher yield than a dramatic bombing campaign, the political blowback of which could accelerate Western disorder.
The Tripwire Logic: 40,000 Soldiers as Sacrificial Assets
One of the most telling indicators that this is not de-escalation is the force posture. There are still roughly 30,000 to 40,000 US troops scattered across bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman; all within range of Iranian short-range missiles and drones. From a conventional perspective, this is insanity: Why leave so many forces exposed if you fear escalation? From the perspective of current US military strategy, such a thing could be intentional.
These troops serve as tripwires. If Iran responds to the blockade or sabotage with missile strikes on these bases, Washington instantly gains domestic legitimacy for massive “self-defense” operations. Transatlantic functional elites are, after all, increasingly willing to tolerate hundreds or even thousands of military casualties if doing so helps preserve the broader architecture of Western dominance. US soldiers would be used here as sacrificial proxies in an attempt to freeze or slow down multipolarity.
“Few Resources”
One might assume that a relatively modest visible military engagement, one carrier group, a few extra squadrons, no mass mobilization, signals no serious intent to confront Iran. However, the small footprint is itself a clue to the nature of the strategy: A potential economic blockade, as well as the enforcement of an oil embargo and the tanker interdiction measures already underway, require patrols, not armadas. A naval blockade does not require six aircraft carriers. It requires just enough presence and lethality to make commercial shipping, insurers, and third states bow to US “sanctions enforcement.” That is exactly the scale we are seeing. Covert sabotage costs nothing politically, and deniable intelligence teams and cyber units do not show up on satellite images. Decapitation strikes require special forces, not armored divisions.
Overall, the permanent containment of economic connectivity requires no occupation, only enough threat and instability to make long-term investment and integration unattractive and risky. Finally, on the structural level, the Brookings paper Which Path to Persia? from 2009 treated maritime pressure, sanctions, and airstrikes as separate options between which a rational hegemon could choose. In today’s situation, these options have solidified into a structure: a near-permanent posture of ships, bases, and embargo mechanisms around key nodes (Hormuz, Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico). The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is there because the US government now assumes that the containment of Iran at sea is a default condition.
In other words: This US operation is not resource-light because Washington has lost interest in destabilizing Iran, but because the chosen mode of warfare is blockade and destabilization through covert actions. The fact that the US force is insufficient for “victory” is a signal that the goal is ongoing attrition.
Not Policy, but Structure
Nothing of what is currently happening is conceptually “new.” The Brookings paper Which Path to Persia? from 2009 already cataloged options: sanctions, covert actions, proxy war, airstrikes, and invasion. Many of today’s tools appeared there as blueprints. However, we can discern a qualitative shift: In 2009, these were policies—positions on a menu that were selected, combined, or discarded based on a cost-benefit calculation. By the mid-2020s, they have hardened into structure. Once the anti-entropic logic is accepted—”we must stop multipolar integration at any cost”—sanctions, blockades, and covert destabilization become permanent instruments of the decaying unipolar order.
The point, therefore, is to keep Iran weak long enough so that it cannot function as a stable bridge between China, Russia, and the Global South. The more fundamental goal is systemic degradation: to transform Iran into a chronically unstable, economically depleted, politically fragmented space; a bad bet for long-term Eurasian connectivity.
Exactly the same logic underlies the maximum pressure on Cuba and Venezuela: Both are ideological enemies and geostrategic chokepoints; Cuba at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, Venezuela in the Caribbean energy theater. Shattering their sovereign functionality narrows the options for Mexico, Brazil, and others, and tightens the Western grip on sea lanes and regional logistics. Seen in this way, we are witnessing a brutal but coherent geopolitical triage through the application of controlled disorder to key nodes (Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and potentially others) before they can fully build up and connect into an alternative network.
The Contest of Two Logics
All of this is happening against the backdrop of declining US material and symbolic power due to deindustrialization, debt overhang, political polarization, and fading legitimacy. The emerging military strategies are a symptom of an adaptation to this weakness. The confrontation with Iran is thus a theater in a broader struggle between two organizing principles: on one side, a logic that seeks to enforce and control the preservation of hierarchy through the fragmentation and coercive control of other countries. On the other side stands the multipolar logic, which threatens this US-led status quo by fostering sovereignty through connectivity and diversification.
The logic of the declining hegemon weaponizes internal fractures. As geopolitical analyst John Helmer warns, the US side has adopted a “gangster” logic of extortion, using discriminatory tariffs and the physical war at sea to force a lethal wedge into the ruling elites of the non-aligned world. Helmer observes that in every key capital—Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi—the US is actively fostering a schism between a “business-as-usual” faction (oligarchs and technocrats desperate to make a deal and relieve economic pressure) and a “resistance” faction (military and intelligence services who argue that any concession will only encourage Washington to up the ante). By targeting nations individually with discriminatory pain, the US aims to make the cost of maintaining the multipolar alliance higher than the price of submission, essentially betting that the deal-making factions will eventually tear up their own strategic partnerships to save their domestic economies. This hybrid war, therefore, is a race against time: can the resistance factions consolidate its alliance’s defenses before the business factions capitulate to the economic strangulation?
Iran is already responding within this multipolar logic. Iran has adopted a doctrine of anticipatory defense, signaling a willingness to strike US bases and potentially close the Strait of Hormuz if pushed to the wall, while deepening economic and military ties with Moscow and Beijing as lifelines against sanctions. US power elites are betting that they can inflict enough pain on key nodes like Iran fast enough to break the coherence of this emerging network before their own internal contradictions (social rifts, economic exhaustion, political crisis) break them. The critical unknown is the breaking point: for whom costs become unsustainable first.
Closing Notes: The War Has Changed Theater
Describing the current phase as “backing away” from Iran is to misread the nature of modern imperial power. It requires no thunderous invasions or a televised “Shock and Awe” campaign. The decaying hegemon can and will wage a silent, brutal war through economic suffocation (sanctions, blockades, financial exclusion), disintegration (sabotage, assassinations, cyberattacks), and narrative warfare (cycles of provocation, response, and legitimation that frame every act of self-defense as aggression). And it is already doing so. While leaving the option of kinetic actions and operations openly and visibly on the table.
The imperial superficial narrative of nuclear weapons, terrorism, and human rights only obscures what is really at stake. Namely: connectivity, which Iran represents as a Eurasian land bridge; the danger of de-dollarization; alternative state ideologies and ways of organizing societies; and, eventually, a demonstration effect—proof that resistance against the US hegemon can be successful. The goal is the prevention of the consolidation of a multipolar world, not the achievement of peace or stability.
Calling this “de-escalation” is a capitulation before the responsibility to call war by its name when it is waged by other means. For the goal remains the destruction or disabling of any bridge between East and West—any functioning connective tissue of a multipolar order. The only thing that has changed is the form: from discrete political options to a permanent operating structure; from wars that begin and end, to wars that officially never begin and officially never end. It is the war of a dying hegemonial order against the infrastructure of its replacement.
Addendum
These are the Notes that partly touch upon the topics discussed here:
The Illusion of Retreat— “De-Escalation” with Iran
On critical minerals, resource extraction, and imperialism
Inner-Ring Societies: Latin America in the Bunker’s Command Zone
Published first in German on NachDenkSeiten (text and audio).
Join the Conversation
If the current pause in major escalation marks not a retreat, but the Bunker State’s transition to a strategy of piecemeal bleeding—where kinetic strikes are not preludes to invasion but instruments of fracture—then we must recalibrate our observation. The essay argues that the Atlantic system is deploying a hybrid mix of maritime strangulation and targeted violence designed to slowly bleed and fragment the non-aligned world, rather than occupy it.
Do you observe this specific form of kinetic attrition—designed to fracture rather than conquer—manifesting in your own region? Is the “bleeding” and fracturing of independent development visible in your local political or economic landscape? This project relies on mapping these subtle but violent shifts globally. Your observations on whether this hybrid warfare is penetrating your national discourse are vital to testing the strength of the Bunker thesis. Leave a comment below.
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Stay curious,
Nel
Thanks for the analysis, Nel. I think you’re spot on. What’s clear to me is that this system depends on asymmetric power, narrative control, selective legality, and the ability to externalize suffering. But once enough people see that the rules are conditional, the law is instrumental, connectivity is weaponized - and that compliance buys time (not safety) - the foundation starts to erode and we withdraw belief. And systems without belief lean harder on coercion.
That’s the spiral we’re watching: a decaying hegemony using the tools it still has to preserve its position, even as that very behavior accelerates the loss of legitimacy.
If we’re honest, the failure is structural. The system is too good at short-term dominance at the expense of long-term coherence. Enough already...
The real fork is this: do we keep designing systems that reward compliance over conscience? Or do we design for responsibility under complexity?
An extremely impressive analysis and depressingly convincing.