To TACO or not to TACO...that is the question

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of Tehran's asymmetric advantage...

Geopolitical analysis is exceptional at identifying what a state must do to survive (imperatives) and is incapable of doing no matter the circumstances (constraints). As such, it can be a predictive discipline, because once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. If only it were that easy, Sherlock. Leaders of states are not geopolitical analysts. They may be unaware or even indifferent to the state’s imperatives and constraints. Many wars in the history of human civilization have been started due to miscalculation rather than diabolically brilliant high-level geopolitical thinking.

My favorite example of this is the 1950-1953 Korean War.¹ The Soviet Union thought the United States would not defend South Korea.² The United States thought China wouldn’t dare enter the war, and that even if it did, that it could defeat China easily. China thought the U.S. was going to try to take Taiwan. Hence a three-year struggle in which millions died and nothing changed — North and South Korea remain divided today, almost exactly where they were divided before the war began.

In other words, it was a geopolitically asinine war…but it happened anyway. To predict it, one would have needed to understand how Stalin, Truman, and Mao were interpreting the situation. A perfect geopolitical explication of the situation, of the relative imperatives and constraints of the combatants, would have been useful for understanding the course of the war once underway, but also would have assessed its outbreak as extremely unlikely.

In 2022, when Russia was mobilizing military forces on the border with Ukraine, I dismissed it as political maneuvering. My analysis suggested that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would not be in Russia’s national interest. Aside from questions about the capabilities of the Russian military, which in the 2008 war with Georgia had shown itself to be much weaker than many, including Russia’s leaders, assumed, Russia was getting everything it needed out of Ukraine with politics. The Europeans were buying Russian energy. Ukraine was not being welcomed into NATO or the EU. Russia’s constraints were material, and it’s imperatives did not seem to necessitate the risk of a war.

My mistake was not understanding how Russian President Vladimir Putin interpreted Russia’s imperatives. I should taken his essay asserting Ukraine’s non-existence published in July 2021 seriously.³ In my view, Putin was misreading the geopolitics of the Russia-Ukraine relationship, but my view isn’t the one that mattered. What mattered was Putin’s. It is small consolation that I was ultimately correct that invading Ukraine would prove disastrous for Russia’s interests. Like all good analysts I tend to dwell on my mistakes, and I was wrong about Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine because geopolitics as I understood it was not driving the Kremlin’s decision-making process and I couldn’t see that.

We are approaching a moment in the Third Gulf War where I am wondering if I have made the same mistake.

Even as the U.S. amassed the most military force in the Persian Gulf since the Second Gulf War, I dissimulated and dithered. After all, in 2017, President Trump had deployed three aircraft carriers to the Korean Peninsula and threatened fire and fury…all so he could exchange some letters with Kim Jong Un.⁴ President Trump’s own National Security Strategy had just been published in November asserting a “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism.”⁵ Israel and the U.S. had just finished pummeling and embarrassing Iran in June 2025, and the White House insisted that, “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been obliterated and suggestions otherwise are fake news.”⁶ A U.S.-led war against Iran simply didn’t make sense geopolitically.

The geopolitical logic behind that assertion rests on a few simple points:

1. The June 2025 Israel-Iran War was embarrassing for Iran…but it also showed a weakness in Israel’s position. Missile defense interceptors are very expensive. Iran’s drones and rockets are not. There is a limited supply of the former. As a result, a conflict with Iran must be short. The longer it goes, the more Iran’s asymmetric advantage works to its favor. Nine months was not enough time for the U.S. and Israel to refill and increase its capacity of interceptors for anything more than a short conflict with Iran.

   

2. Headline inflation in the U.S. had been lower than I expected — but prices were creeping up. Overall, however, CPI had been kept largely in check due to low energy prices, especially crude and natural gas, which President Trump’s policies had a lot to do with. Even so, President Trump’s approval ratings on the economy had reached the same level as Joe Biden’s as his party gears up for the midterms. Insert Iran’s other asymmetric advantage: The Strait of Hormuz, through which passes 20+ percent of global crude, LNG, and fertilizer exports.⁷ It doesn’t matter that the U.S. doesn’t import much crude from the Gulf anymore: a disruption to shipping through the Strait, and worse, damage to energy infrastructure in the region, would at minimum send energy prices higher.

   

3. President Trump campaigned as a leader who would end forever wars, as a President of Peace, a leader who wouldn’t get trapped into interminable conflicts, sacrificing American blood and treasure for ill-defined interests, but instead would end them. His record on this until March was actually pretty good!⁸ The decapitation strike in Venezuela was remarkable. It was President Trump who held Israel back last June from escalating the conflict. Cuba looked ready for the taking. The hemispheric strategy taking shape — asserting U.S. dominance from Greenland to Argentina — was blunt in its application but it was also working and made strategic sense.

In other words: It was not a U.S. imperative to go to war with Iran. The constraints on the U.S. did not make a war impossible, but it did mean it would be extremely hard to achieve any objective that could reasonably be defined as in the U.S. national interest. Going after Iran after the midterms (and after wrapping up Cuba and a few other issues) made more sense. Assassinating Iran’s leaders in January, when the country was in turmoil and protesters seemed ready for regime change, also would have made good geopolitical sense. But a special military operation illegal war of choice in the Persian gulf? Against a civilizational nation-state run by leaders with marrow-deep religious faith in their regime’s mission?

The most common rejoinder to this analysis I’ve gotten is some version of, “Jacob, you just don’t understand. This is all. about. CHINA! What a master stroke! China imports a lot of crude from the Persian Gulf, a shipping lane that is protected by the U.S. Navy. Trump is effectively nationalizing the Strait of Hormuz and anyone who wants Middle Eastern oil will have to go through the U.S.” By the way, why does it seem like proponents of this sort of thinking also think a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is imminent? More on that in a minute. I’ve also seen a narrative out there that suggests that the U.S. wants to throttle the global energy trade because the U.S. is rich in crude and LNG. The best way to re-industrialize the U.S. is to make the logic of globalization more costly than re-shoring — what better way to do that than shut the Strait of Hormuz.

The China rejoinder is silly. I explained why in an earlier post, but the short version is — China is beating the world on installing renewables and nuclear by a healthy margin, plus it has Russia as its own personal gas station next door (good job Putin!) Yes, China will feel some short-term economic pain due to the war. But if China can manage to deflate its real estate bubble without a crisis, a few months of higher energy prices because the U.S. invaded another country in the Middle East will be easy for Beijing to metabolize.

The deindustrialization narrative is slightly more interesting. I say slightly because it forces two unsubstantiated assumptions: 1) President Trump is BRILLIANT, he’s playing 4-D chess while we are all playing checkers and 2) President Trump is unlike any political figure in U.S. history. He does not care about his poll numbers, higher prices, legacy, or potential impeachment. He’s doing this because he thinks in the long-run, it is good for America, and in the short-run, he’s willing to be vilified for the stagflation that is coming if the U.S. gets intro a protracted war in the Middle East that halts the flow of energy and other products through the Strait of Hormuz. Possible? I guess. But I think the burden of proof is on the folks doing the daydreaming.

All of which is a wind-up to say: When the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, I was a little surprised. My base case was similar to North Korea in 2017 — threaten fire and fury, eventually meet with the Iranians, sign a Trump-branded nuclear deal…and on to Cuba. But the attack also wasn’t completely shocking. I found several arguments convincing. Iran had just been convulsed by major protests in January — maybe the regime was weaker than I thought. My mentor George Friedman made the case that Iran’s nuclear program had not actually been obliterated and Iran’s possession of nuclear material was unacceptable for U.S. national interests, so why not hit Iran hard again while it was still licking its wounds from the damage incurred in June 2025.⁹ Even so, I assessed that the war had to be wrapped up in 3-4 weeks (and I thought 3 was closer to the mark).

I did not think the U.S. was ready or capable of “winning” (whatever that means in this context) a protracted conflict against Iran, and I thought U.S. decision-makers knew what I did, which is that the longer the war drags on, the more the pressure shifts to the U.S. Iran cannot defend itself from U.S. military might, but the U.S. cannot eliminate Iran’s asymmetric advantages, which become more pronounced over time. Moreover, most Americans can’t even locate Iran on a map, let alone be convinced that spending hundreds of billions on bombing Iran is a good idea when they are so dissatisfied with the economy. The war would quickly become unpopular, especially for Trump’s MAGA base, which was already feeling queasy due to the U.S.’s brief participation in Israel’s war against Iran last June. Meanwhile in Iran, the war would rally the people around the regime. They are the ones being bombed into a parking lot — not by their leaders, but not the countries their leaders have been calling Satan for decades.

The events of the last 48 hours are making my consider whether my analysis that the war could only last 3-4 weeks is broken.

Now, I recognize we are not at the end of my prediction window yet. By raising the analytical alarm, I risk what makes “foxes” so much harder to follow than hedgehogs, appearing to be vacillating on my views.¹⁰ If the U.S. wraps up the war in the next ~7 days, my original analysis will have held. But I also strive to be the type of analyst who is the first to raise his hand when he is wrong, and sitting here today in my office in New Orleans, I can no longer say that my base case is that the war ends in the next 7 days. Here are a few of the things that have happened that are making me revise my view:

1. The assassination of Ali Larijani, who has essentially been the supreme Supreme leader since the January protests.¹¹ President Trump has made light of the fact that the U.S. has killed so many of Iran’s leaders that there is no one left to negotiate with.¹² That may be true now — and that would mean the only folks left to talk to are hardliners with religious zeal in their regime’s mission. This is what bothers me the most. Even if President Trump is ready to TACO — and it doesn’t seem like he is — who would he TACO to? To a Supreme Leader whose family he just wiped out? To a regime of hardliners fighting for their lives? “God created Arrakis to train the faithful.” Are the only Iranians left to negotiate with Fremen? AND HAVE YOU WATCHED THE DUNE 3 TRAILER OMG.¹³

2. I found it absolutely stupefying that Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba was named the new Supreme Leader — the Iranian Revolution was a revolt against hereditary monarchy, and Khamenei Sr. was clear that he did not want his son to succeed him. Another sign that the hardliners are calling the shots — the same hardliners who didn’t blink at killing tens of thousands of Iranian protesters in January won’t blink at sacrificing tens of thousands more in an eschatological and existential conflict against the Great Satan.

3. The U.S. is making the same god-damned mistake almost every administration has made since the Vietnam War: It is mistaking firepower for strategy. Watching Secretary of Special Military Operations Crystal Meth Rumsfeld wig out about the awesome lethality of U.S. military power is cringe. Yes, Mr. President, you can wipe out every Iranian ship, plane, and tank…and Iran will still possess the asymmetric advantage of being able to wreak havoc in the Strait of Hormuz and hit critical regional energy infrastructure with low cost drones and rockets (or worse with higher level weapons Iran has been waiting to deploy once interceptors for U.S./Israel/GCC states are exhausted). The more this government talks about how awesome its military it is, the more I begin to think they don’t have an accurate view of the geopolitics of the situation.

   

4. The U.S. has not ruled out the use of ground forces and is sending more to the region in case they are needed.¹⁴ As Un-Diplomatic said in a recent post…troops are cheaper than missiles.¹⁵

5. There are rumors the administration is considering restricting U.S. oil and LNG exports. I’m on record as saying this will probably happen at some point in the next 5-10 years, but I’m shocked to see it being considered now. Chase Taylor has been on this. The U.S. is also temporarily waiving sanctions on Russian oil¹⁶ and making it easier for foreign tankers to move around the U.S.¹⁷

6. The U.S. is trying to bully other countries — rivals and allies — into helping open up the Strait. Those countries are either ignoring the U.S. (like China) or negotiating with Iran themselves (like India and France).

7. President Trump postponed his summit with Xi Jinping next month. Scott Bessent insists the reasons are logistical. President Trump says he needs to be in the U.S. while the war continues. Take that at face value and the president is at least saying he expects the war to continue through April. As for what this means for U.S.-China relations…were the Paris talks really so bad? Is the U.S. trying to impose onerous conditions on China that Beijing won’t accept? Getting to this moment with China has been a huge priority for the Trump administration, and it is surprising to see Trump willing to push it back or even give it up.

8. And the straw that broke the camel’s back: the Israeli bombing yesterday of the South Pars field, part of the world’s largest natural gas reserves, located offshore in the Persian Gulf. It is shared between Iran and Qatar. The entire ​gas field contains an estimated 1,800 trillion cubic feet of usable gas, enough to ​supply the world’s needs for 13 years.¹⁸ Iran responded by striking Qatar’s Ras Laffan¹⁹ energy complex, causing significant damage. Iran also hit²⁰ a refinery at Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, where a cross-Saudi pipeline has been trying to mitigate the impact of Hormuz’s closure.

   1. This has a few implications. It means Iran is treating this as existential — Trump says he might not know who talk to in order to negotiate with Iran — maybe they don’t want to negotiate. Maybe their missile and drone launches are starting to increase because their strategy is working. The asymmetric advantage is kicking in.

   2. It means the market reaction has been way to sanguine to what the potential short and long-term damage the war is going to mean for getting exports back on line.

9. Here is Trump’s response to Iran retaliating on Ras Laffan:

I got a lot of flak for saying this on X, but that probably means I am striking the right nerve: If you are in the IRGC and you read this you think to yourself, “we are finally getting to them.” Up until now, President Trump has seemed very comfortable with the course of the war. His refusal to rule out ground troops or an extended conflict was accompanied with a bit of a wink and a nudge — oh it’s just an excursion, we’re winning, they want to negotiate, but obviously random reporter I can’t tell you what I’m going to do. That sort of thing. That X post above? There’s nothing “in control” about that. It is unhinged, at least in my view. And if I think that, what does the IRGC think? What does Mojtaba, or whoever is calling the shots now that Larijani is dead, thinks?

Ironically, it is this last point that has driven me to reconsider my analysis — but it might also be the sign that TACO is truly in sight. The June 2025 war ended because President Trump wanted it to end — Israel wasn’t ready to stop, but President Trump told Israel to stop. The President’s exact words were some of the best analysis I’ve seen him do in his entire presidency: “I’m not happy with Israel…We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”²¹ Leaving aside whether President Trump knew Israel was going to hit South Pars (Hegseth seemed²² to suggest the U.S. did know at a press conference earlier today), perhaps the pressure is finally going to force President Trump’s hand.

Or perhaps not. Maybe President Trump believes, as LBJ believed and Bush believed and Obama believed, that the strength U.S. military can cover all manner of strategic sins. Perhaps we really are lurching toward deploying U.S. soldiers on the ground to Kharg Island, or even to the coast of western Iran to secure shipping routes, or to military convoys escorting ships through the Strait at great risk and even greater cost. The evidence is piling up that President Trump and his administration don’t see what this geopolitical analyst sees. No President in my lifetime has been more willing to change tactics at the drop of a hat, and there is still time for my original framework to play out…but time is running out.

So is my analysis broken? Not yet. But the odds have shifted away from my base case of a 3-4 week conflict to a protracted war, which means it is imperative to sketch this alternate framework and to act on it accordingly. A protracted war would have massive implications for the global economy, so massive that it is frankly hard to model the secondary and tertiary effects that will result. The specter of rising food costs for the developing world is the stuff of geopolitical nightmares. I also think it could shake U.S. domestic politics to its core.

For 12 months now, I’ve been saying that the best way to understand how the U.S. is affecting the world is to think of the U.S. as using unipolar, McKinley-esque foreign policy in a multipolar world. It is very hard for my analyst brain to accept that the Trump administration thinks it can bomb Iran into submission or the Strait into opening, it is a bridge too far even for them. But hubris comes at you hard. This is what a senior White House official told Politico about the war: “We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude.” Ok, dude.

And let me head off the inevitable question that I have gotten countless versions of in the last 48 hours:

Could China use this U.S. misstep or distraction in the Persian Gulf to invade Taiwan?

No. It won’t. And I’ll debate anyone, anywhere, anytime in public who says different.

1. The Korean War is really two wars — a three-month Korean war followed by a 3-year U.S.-China war. Many books have been written about this but I think David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter is the best.

2. The Soviets interpreted a speech by then Secretary of State Dean Acheson at the National Press Club in January 1950 that omitted South Korea from the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia as the U.S. being unwilling to defend it.

3. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181

4. https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/12/politics/us-navy-three-carrier-exercise-pacific

5. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

6. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-facilities-have-been-obliterated-and-suggestions-otherwise-are-fake-news/

7.

8. Yes, I can compliment the President even though I am critical of him, imagine that.

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10. https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/0804136718

11. https://apnews.com/article/ali-larijani-dead-be5f46c171b2f9bf1dbd8325261a92a6

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14. https://abcnews.com/Politics/deployment-marines-middle-east-raises-specter-ground-troops/story?id=131129821

15. https://substack.com/@undiplomatic/p-190168770

16. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/world/middleeast/iran-war-putin-russia-energy-oil-prices.html

17. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/18/trump-shipping-oil-gas-law

18. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/middleeast/iran-qatar-south-pars-gas-field-explainer-intl

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QatarEnergy@qatarenergy

QatarEnergy Statement on Missile Attacks on Ras Laffan Industrial City QatarEnergy confirms that Ras Laffan Industrial City this evening has been the subject of missile attacks. Emergency response teams were deployed immediately to contain the resulting fires, as extensive

6:37 PM · Mar 18, 2026 · 5.34M Views

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399 Replies · 2.22K Reposts · 7.04K Likes

20. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/saudi-arabia-says-red-sea-refinery-hit-by-drone/

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22. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hegseth-israels-strike-on-south-pars-gas-field-yesterday-a-warning-to-iran/