A preliminary remark: this paper is being written during a war that is still under way. On 28 February 2026 Israel and the USA attacked Iran and killed the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Iran struck back — missiles on Israel, on US bases in nine Gulf states. The Strait of Hormuz is blocked. A two-week ceasefire expires on 20 April. What comes after is open.
That makes this paper different from the others. Ukraine and Gaza analyse wars whose course is becoming clear. With the Iran war of 2026, the outcome is unknown while this is being written. What is not unknown: the structures that led to it. The Megamachine needed 70 years to produce this war. That can be described — regardless of how it ends.
I. 1953 — the origin
To understand the Iran war of 2026, one has to understand 1953. Mohammad Mossadegh is the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. He has nationalised the oil industry — because he holds that Iranian oil belongs to the Iranians and not to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). That is a reasonable position. It costs him his office.
On 19 August 1953 the CIA and MI6 carry out the coup — Operation Ajax. Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, arrives in Tehran with suitcases full of cash. Bribed clerics, a bought press, paid street riots, 300 dead in the streets of Tehran. Mossadegh is arrested, convicted, and dies under house arrest. The Shah is reinstalled. Forty per cent of Iran's oilfields go to American corporations.
That is the beginning of the causal chain. Not because Iran has been innocent ever since — the history is more complex. But because the humiliation of 1953 became the founding narrative of the Islamic Revolution. The demonstrators of 1979 carried pictures of Mossadegh. The CIA coup destroyed Iranian democracy and thereby created the vacuum that Khomeini filled. Western interference produced the anti-Western theocracy. That is the Megamachine in its purest form: today's solution produces tomorrow's problem.
II. The escalation staircase 1953–2026
1953–1979: The Shah rules with Western support and the SAVAK secret police. The CIA trains SAVAK. The repression is brutal. Inequality grows. Oil wealth flows to the elite while the mass of the people is impoverished. This is the model the West considers stable — until it collapses in 1979.
1979: Islamic Revolution. Khomeini returns. The hostage-taking at the US embassy — 444 days. The trauma that sits deep in America to this day. And the American conclusion: Iran is the enemy. A conclusion that structures every subsequent decision.
1980–1988: Iran–Iraq War. Saddam Hussein attacks Iran. The West — the USA, Germany — supports Iraq with weapons, intelligence and precursors for chemical weapons. A million dead. Iran learns: whoever has no nuclear weapon is vulnerable. The motivation for proliferation is born here.
1990s: Sanctions regime. Iran is economically strangled. The Revolutionary Guards — a state within the state — increasingly take over the economy in order to circumvent the sanctions. The result: a Megamachine within the Megamachine. The Revolutionary Guards have a vital interest in isolation — because isolation secures their economic power.
2003: US invasion of Iraq. Iran's strongest regional enemy is destroyed. Iran gains strategic room. The Axis of Resistance emerges: Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis — all financed and armed from Tehran. Proxy warfare as a substitute for direct confrontation.
2015: The JCPOA nuclear agreement. Months of negotiations, an ambitious construction. Iran limits its nuclear programme, the West lifts sanctions. It is a fragile but genuine agreement. 2018: Trump pulls out. Without any Iranian breach of the treaty, without a UN resolution, without consulting the Europeans. Iran resumes enrichment. Second fatal lesson: agreements with the USA are not binding. Whoever relies on diplomacy is vulnerable.
2020: Trump's assassination of Soleimani. General Qassem Soleimani — architect of the Axis of Resistance, possibly the most influential military figure in the Islamic world — is killed by drone in Baghdad. Iran swears revenge. The escalation spiral turns faster.
2025: First Israel–Iran war — twelve days. Missile strikes, counter-strikes, then a ceasefire. The Iranian economy weakened further. The nuclear programme accelerated: in February 2026 the IAEA reports that Iran has 408 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 per cent — with further enrichment, material for nine atomic bombs.
28 February 2026: Israel and the USA attack. Khamenei killed. Four further leading figures of the Revolutionary Guards killed. Nuclear facilities attacked. Iran responds with missiles on Israel and on US bases in nine countries. The third Israel–Iran war begins — this time without a quick end.
III. The Megamachine actors
Iran as Megamachine: the Islamic Republic is not monolithic. There is the elected president, Pezeshkian, who argues for diplomacy. There are the Revolutionary Guards, who profit from the war and secure their position of power through isolation. There is the clergy, which draws its legitimacy from the anti-Western narrative. There is the population — 90 million people — who chose neither the regime nor the war. This Megamachine has no unified war aim. It has competing interests that the war holds together in the short term and tears apart in the long term.
Israel as Megamachine: Netanyahu's government, with the settler parties of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, has pursued ever more far-reaching aims than the Israeli security establishment. Security experts wanted to destroy the nuclear programme. The political leadership wants — by all that can be discerned — regime change. That is a strategic difference which decides the success or failure of the war. Nuclear facilities can be destroyed. A regime resting on 85 million people cannot be toppled by air strikes.
The USA under Trump as Megamachine: Trump attacked without a congressional mandate — which is triggering constitutional debates in the USA itself. His motivation, as he himself explains it: the conviction that Iran must never possess nuclear weapons. That is a legitimate security-policy position. What is missing is the answer to the question that follows: what comes after the regime if it is toppled? Who takes over? How does that become a stable order? These questions were not asked before the Iraq war of 2003 either. The answer to those non-questions was ISIS.
Russia and China as silent profiteers: both have propped up Iran — Russia with drone technology, China as an oil buyer that circumvented sanctions. Both profit from an American commitment in the Middle East that draws resources and attention away from Ukraine and Taiwan respectively. Neither has an interest in a stable Iran under Western influence — nor any interest in an atomic bomb that would destroy the regional balance. The ambivalence is structural.
IV. The Strait of Hormuz
Twenty per cent of world oil trade flows through the Strait of Hormuz — a strait between Iran and Oman, 39 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. Every day tankers carrying 20 million barrels of oil pass through here. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, the UAE — their entire export capacity runs through this bottleneck.
Iran has closed the strait. Trump says it will stay closed until there is an agreement. The consequences are global: the oil price has risen. Energy costs in Europe, already structurally higher since the Ukraine war, have risen once again. Shipping routes are being diverted — around the Cape of Good Hope, weeks longer, massively more expensive. German industry, already suffering under energy costs, gets the next wave.
Who holds the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon? Only Iran. That is its bargaining power — the only one it has. It cannot use an atomic bomb without risking total annihilation. It cannot field a conventional army against the USA. But it can take the world economy hostage. That is the rational calculation of a regional power that is structurally at a disadvantage and wants to survive nonetheless.
V. Who profits — who pays
The Iranian civilian population pays. Over 2,000 civilian dead according to Iranian government figures by the end of March 2026 — figures to be treated with caution for lack of independent verification, but which show the scale. Over 100 cultural sites damaged. An economy already shattered by sanctions before the war. And a population that hates the regime and still does not want its homeland bombed — both at once, as in many wars.
The Gulf states pay — twice over. They host US bases and are therefore targets of Iranian missiles. And their oil export capacity is worthless because of the Hormuz blockade. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar — all suffer from a war they did not want and do not control.
The global energy industry pays in the short term — through higher prices. And profits in the medium term: LNG exporters in the USA and Norway are once again seeing record demand. The pattern repeats itself: what is a catastrophe for consuming economies is a business model for producing economies.
The arms industry profits — as always. Lockheed, Raytheon, Rafael, Elbit. And the Iranian drone industry has proved that it produces competitive weapons — in this war the US military for the first time deployed a kamikaze drone based on a captured Iranian model. Technology transfer through war.
Russia profits strategically: American capacities are tied up. NATO's attention is divided. Aid to Ukraine is under financial pressure. A weakened America in several wars at once is Moscow's best geopolitical situation in decades.
VI. Why this war is different
Ukraine and Gaza are terrible wars. The Iran war has a potential for escalation that exceeds both.
First, the nuclear programme. Iran has material for nine atomic bombs if it is enriched further. The Israeli–American strikes hit nuclear facilities — but whether they really destroyed the programme or merely slowed it down is unclear. And: the more Iran is attacked, the stronger the internal pressure for the bomb. The attack meant to prevent the nuclear programme could accelerate it — if Iran survives and draws the lesson that only nuclear deterrence protects it. North Korea drew this lesson. Libya — which gave up its nuclear programme — was bombed in 2011 and Gaddafi killed. The cost of renunciation is visible to every ruler.
Second, the regional spread. The war has already directly drawn in nine countries — through Iranian missiles on US bases in Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait and others. Hezbollah has fired on Israel. Israel has attacked Lebanon again. A British base in Cyprus was hit by an Iranian drone. France and Greece have provided military help. This is no longer a regional conflict. It is a war that directly involves Europe.
Third, the unpredictability of the new leader. Khamenei's son Mojtaba has taken over the succession — a man with no foreign-policy experience, who has yet to prove his legitimacy, who is under enormous pressure to show strength. New leaderships in war situations that have not yet consolidated their authority are especially unpredictable.
The Iran war of 2026 is the result of 70 years of Western interference, Iranian theocracy, regional rivalries and the logic of nuclear proliferation — a chain of decisions each of which was locally rational and which globally lead to catastrophe. The Megamachine has no brake. It has only the next step.
VII. What remains open
As this paper is being written, the ceasefire is expiring. Negotiations in Islamabad — Pakistan is mediating — have not yet brought a breakthrough. Trump is maintaining the Hormuz blockade as a means of pressure. Iran wants talks without making concessions in advance. Both positions are rational in Megamachine logic. Both make peace difficult.
What the history of US interventions in the Middle East teaches — Iran 1953, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011 — is that the plan for the day after the regime is usually missing. The vacuum is then filled by local actors who are often worse than what was toppled. Whether it is different this time depends on whether Iranian society — which rejects the regime — is strong enough to build an order of its own. That is possible. It is no guarantee.
This paper will be updated when the war takes shape. As of: 20 April 2026.