حرب أمريكا وإيران
قراءة جيوسياسية في الزمن الفعلي بأدوات نظرية اللعبة

Game Theory #9: The US-Iran War

Original Transcript

I hope everyone had a nice break and welcome back to the end of the world. As you know, World War II has started — the United States and Israel have started to attack Iran, and we are now in the fourth day of this war. We can expect this war to last for many weeks, possibly many years. But I promise you that after this war is done, the world will never be the same again. What we will do these next few weeks is use game theory to understand and analyze the geopolitical situation. I'm going to teach you the ideas, the theories, the techniques to understand the world around you and make predictions. And we can know if our analysis is correct because all this is happening in real time, so we can test it against reality.

Let's go over some basic facts about what has happened so far. In the early morning of Saturday in Tehran, the Israelis and Americans launched a decapitation strike against the Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. There are arguments and disputes about what happened. The Americans and Israelis said they had real intelligence about where the leader was and so they sent airplanes to bomb that location. They also had a spy who was able to record the body of the dead. At first, the Iranians denied this and insisted he was still alive. But eventually state media admitted that he did die in the airstrike. They also said he was eighty-six years old and chose to die — he could have gone to Moscow, but instead he chose to stay in Tehran and die for his people. And not only that, but he died along with many of his relatives — his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandchildren. It was also reported that he had prostate cancer and was going to die fairly soon anyway.

What you need to understand first about this war is that even though the Americans and Israelis claim great success in decapitating the Iranian leadership, from the Iranian perspective this is a martyrdom. The religion of the Iranians is Shia Islam, which is different from Sunni Islam. Sunnis are the majority — about ninety percent of all Muslims in the world. The Shia have always been the minority and as such have always been persecuted. In the Shia faith, the core value, the force that binds everyone together and gives them purpose and meaning — that galvanizes them into action — is the idea of martyrdom, which compels jihad: to sacrifice yourself for your religion, for the common good. So think of the death of Khamenei as a self-sacrifice to motivate the Iranians in this war. For the Iranians, this is not a political war, not an economic war, not a war of resistance. This is a jihad — a war against the Great Satan to avenge their leader. They will fight to the death.

That same morning when Khamenei was killed, there was a strike on a school in the south of Tehran killing about a hundred and fifty school children — girls in primary school. There is debate about what happened. The Israelis said the school was next to a military base and they were targeting the military base, and that it was an air defense missile that went off course. The Iranians insisted the Israelis purposefully attacked the school to kill the children. And then you look at what the Israelis have done in Gaza and Palestine over the past few years, and it's fairly consistent. This action is meant to show to themselves and to the world that they are all in — they have made the sacrifice, they are committed to winning this war at all costs — and it has also provoked the Iranian people to resist with their full might.

Next I want to show you Dubai. Dubai is considered one of the wealthiest and safest cities in the world — tens of thousands of westerners move to Dubai because it's clean, there are no taxes, you make a lot of money, and there are great restaurants. This is the economic model of Dubai, one of the GCC — Gulf Cooperation Council — countries. For the longest time, Dubai had a great deal: under the protection of the American military, they didn't have to pay for defense. Located in the oil-producing center of the world, they focused on aviation, logistics, finance, and tourism. Dubai airport is the busiest in the world. And Dubai said to the world: listen, we're like Switzerland, we're neutral, we don't want involvement in any wars, we're here just to make money and take care of our citizens. But right after the war started, the Iranians attacked the GCC — Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait. These places said: what's going on? We're neutral. And the airport was shut down in Dubai. At one point, rich people in Dubai were willing to pay about two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars just to get on a plane and get out.

The reality is this: for the longest time, Dubai had a reputation for being safe, and that's why people moved their money there. After what the Iranians did, that's finished. Dubai as a city in the long term is dead — a wealthy westerner is not going to move to a place that could be attacked at any time by the Iranians. You might move to Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, or South America, but not Dubai.

The big question is: why did Iran attack the GCC when it's really the Americans who attacked them? The short answer is because these places, even though they pretend to be neutral, house the American military and allow the Israelis and Americans to use their airspace to attack Iran.

Bahrain is particularly important. Bahrain is the location of the American Fifth Fleet — the US naval base in the Middle East. The Iranians are attacking it with missiles. Bahrain is also interesting because it has about fifty percent or more Shia — the religion of the Iranians — but the people in charge are Sunni. What makes this strike really important is that the Iranians are not only attacking US military assets and destroying the economies of the GCC — they're also trying to ignite a religious war. If you're Shia, you are religiously obligated to your Ayatollah, and if he's dead, then as a religious obligation you must commit jihad against his enemies. It's no different from any other religion — if someone killed the Pope, Catholics would be extremely enraged and would want vengeance. So we can expect the Shia in Bahrain to eventually rise up and create a revolution. I think Bahrain will be the first to fall. Dubai will probably go bankrupt. And in the long term we can expect the entire GCC area, including Saudi Arabia, to eventually collapse.

We will understand how this war develops just based on geography. This map, even if you don't know the war, the participants, or the weaponry, will tell you exactly how this war will progress. There's a very small area — about thirty-three kilometers wide, people can swim across it — called the Strait of Hormuz. This one area is the nexus, the pivot of the world.

First: from the GCC, twenty percent of all the world's oil flows through this narrow strait, going to Asia — India, Pakistan, South Korea, China, Japan. India depends on sixty percent of its oil from this area. China depends on forty percent. Japan seventy-five percent. The Prime Minister of Japan has said: if the Strait closes, Japan runs out of oil in about eight or nine months and the entire Japanese economy would collapse. And the Iranians have closed the Strait of Hormuz. So we can expect that the entire global economy will suffer greatly over the next few months.

Second: the GCC sends oil across the Strait and what do they get back in return? Food. People don't appreciate the GCC, but it is really the linchpin of the American Empire. The American Empire is the petrodollar — the US dollar is worth nothing except that GCC nations say: if you want oil from us, you have to pay in US dollars. That is the basis of the value of the US dollar. So if the GCC collapses, the American economy and American Empire both collapse at the same time. The GCC is an artificial construct of empire — it does not exist naturally, because there is no food there, no fresh water. These cities grew to millions of people because of petrodollars flowing in. If you close the Strait, there's no food coming in and they all starve. How much food does the GCC import? Eighty percent. They do not grow their own food; they import it. So the Strait of Hormuz is really the key, and the Iranians will close it to strangle the global economy and bankrupt the American Empire.

Second thing you'll notice on the map: these mountains. This is Iran. Iran is mountains. GCC is desert, flat, exposed. From the mountains you can hide rocket bases, drone bases, missile bases. That's the entire Iranian offensive strategy. From there they attack three things: American military bases, oil and energy infrastructure, and — most important — water. The GCC has almost no access to fresh water. The only way it produces fresh water is through desalination plants — factories that take seawater and convert it through electrical and chemical processes into fresh water. Sixty percent of the GCC water supply comes from desalination plants. Is it hard to blow up a desalination plant with a drone? Very easy. So you have this absurd situation where Iran is a mountain fortress with hidden offensive capacity, and the GCC is a flat desert, completely exposed, with nothing it can do about it. At any point in this war, the Iranians can choose to simply destroy the entire GCC.

But Iran also has a weakness, and this is fundamental. Iran has a severe water problem. They suffer from drought driven by climate change. So the plan of the Israelis and Americans is to destroy the water supply of the Iranians — because the mountain fortress can also be a mountain prison where people are trapped inside with no access to water. We're already seeing attacks on civilian infrastructure, hospitals. In the future, expect attacks on water supply, dams, reservoirs, and power plants. The idea is to make Iran so uninhabitable that the people will rebel against their government or there will be a massive refugee crisis.

So as you can see from this map, both sides have the potential to destroy each other. It's really a question of how far do they want to go — almost a game of chicken. We can blow each other up; how far are you willing to go? And the problem is that the Iranians are Shia who believe in martyrdom, and you've killed their religious leader. They're willing to go very, very far. The GCC countries are Muslim but materialistic — they love money, and ninety percent of Dubai's population are foreigners. If they suffer, they're going to run away. This is not a fair matchup.

The big question is: will the Americans use ground troops? Because the only way to defeat Iran is with ground troops — half a million, two million soldiers to topple the government. That's question number one. Question number two is nuclear weapons: if you're losing a war, would you choose to use them? And who gets involved? Europe — specifically Germany, France, and Britain — are talking about entering this war. And if that happens, it's possible that Russia and China will also enter on the side of the Iranians. This could become a world war because of the importance of the Middle East — everyone has to get involved at some point.

The American bases in the GCC were originally established not to protect these nations from external enemies but to protect the monarchies from their own people. These are monarchies imposed on these nations by the Anglo-American Empire — first the British, then the Americans came to support them. Now remember — we said these American bases can't actually defend the GCC from Iranian attack. That's true. The American military was built during the Cold War. And the Cold War was characterized by MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction — because both superpowers had nuclear weapons, so they never actually fought each other. These bases aren't really designed to fight a war. They're designed to impose American authority. Empire is really an image, a hallucination, an aura of invincibility. If you fear it, you obey it. It's not really designed to fight a war. And because there are so many American bases in the GCC, that gives the Iranians the perfect pretext to attack them in order to destroy the GCC economy and with it the American Empire.

Now let me explain the concept of asymmetry. Asymmetry means that two sides are choosing to fight different wars using different techniques because one is much stronger than the other. America has a great empire, unlimited resources, the US dollar, and controls the world. Iran is a country that has been under economic sanctions for forty-five years — poor, with very limited technology. But as we've learned in this class, nations that are poor have more energy, they're more open, and they're more cohesive.

The Shahed drone: each one costs fifty thousand dollars at most. Sometimes as cheap as thirty-five thousand. You can fit a lot of these drones on one truck, and they can go anywhere and hide anywhere in Iran. Iran makes about five hundred of them per day and currently has an estimated eighty thousand. They can go on for a very long time. One of these drones can knock out a desalination plant, knock out an oil field, knock out a hotel. Easily transportable and easily hideable.

And how do the Americans defend against this? They use the THAAD — Terminal High Altitude Area Defense — and Patriot systems. This missile costs one million dollars. So a fifty-thousand-dollar drone is coming your way and you throw a million-dollar missile at it. And often these missiles miss, so you have to throw two or three. You're spending two to three million dollars on each fifty-thousand-dollar drone. And this system is really big and really slow, so it can't be moved easily — the Iranians can spot exactly where it is and attack it. When these defense systems blow up, that's a lot of money.

Why don't the Americans know this? They've seen drones used in the Russia-Ukraine war to devastating effect. The answer is military doctrine — military doctrine determines how you fight a war, it determines your bureaucracy, and it determines how you spend your resources. The Americans are designed for the Cold War — not to actually fight, but to flex, to look big and powerful and scare the opponent. These weapon systems are designed to impress and intimidate, not to fight and win. They cost a lot of money, don't do much, and they're not resilient, innovative, or open. And if you look at the American military, it's also corrupt — the Americans don't really care about winning a war; they care about spending as much money as possible because then they get a cut.

Now let's look at the water issue in the GCC and the Middle East. Looking at a water stress map of the world — if you're Brazil or Canada, you have nothing to worry about. Water stress at one hundred percent means you're consuming as much water as the environment produces. You want to be below one hundred percent, ideally at ten percent. Above one hundred percent means you're consuming more water than the environment produces — you're stressing the environment. Egypt is at six thousand four hundred twenty percent. Saudi Arabia eight hundred eighty-three percent. Bahrain almost four thousand percent. Dubai seventeen thousand percent. Water is a huge issue. Iran doesn't have to destroy American soldiers or military assets — it just has to destroy the desalination plants and the GCC is finished.

But Iran also has water issues — water stress at seventy-two percent is quite bad. So even though the Iranians could destroy the GCC much faster than the Americans could destroy Iran, Iran is still in trouble. Look at Lake Urmia in northern Iran — the sixth largest saltwater lake in the world. In 1984 it was enormous. Twenty years later, it's almost entirely gone. You can walk across where it used to be. That's how serious the water crisis is in Iran, and that's the weak point the Americans and Israelis will attack.

The second weakness of Iran is its ethnic makeup. Looking at a map of ethnic minorities in Iran — in the center are the Persians, but there are about ten other ethnic groups. In the borderlands it's basically a different country, with more in common with neighboring nations than with Iran. The strategy of the Americans and Israelis moving forward: destroy Iran as a coherent nation-state, divide it into ethnic enclaves, and have them fight over water. Persia would be reduced to its Persian core while all the borderland regions are sponsored by the Americans and Israelis — given money, weapons, political support — and this war over water would continue forever. That is the grand plan: fracture Iran so that it is no longer a viable threat. This is a pretty evil plan, which is why it has never been announced publicly.

But how can the Iranians respond? Looking at a map of the Muslim world: light green is Sunni, about ninety percent of all Muslims — approximately two billion people. Dark green is Shia, mainly concentrated in Iran. But Shia are spread throughout the world. So the first Iranian strategy is to create a jihad to unite all the Shia against the American Empire, and it's already happening. The Shia in Pakistan stormed the American embassy. The American embassy in Iraq was attacked. American embassies are being attacked in multiple places. This global jihad will continue for a long time because the Americans killed Khamenei and that requires vengeance.

But the other possibility is that this could unify the entire Muslim world. Most of the Muslim world is run by dictatorships that are not popular — they exist as clients of the American Empire. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria — all run by American client states. If you rally the people who hate their governments and help them overthrow those governments, then Iran becomes the leader not just of the Shia world but of the entire Islamic world. This creates what we call Pax Islamica — that is the end goal. If you achieve that, you don't have to worry about the Americans and Israelis anymore.

So the Israeli and American game plan: fracture Iran into ethnic enclaves, have them fight over water for the rest of their lives. The Iranian game plan: create a religious crusade that unifies the Shia, then the broader Muslim world, overthrows the American Empire, and establishes Pax Islamica.

The key is the GCC. The GCC sells oil in exchange for US dollars. Those US dollars get invested in the American stock market. Looking at the investments of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait into US financial markets from 2012 to today — it's been exploding. The US financial markets are one of the safest places in the world to put money. The Iranian strategy: cut off oil, these countries no longer accumulate US dollars, they're forced to spend whatever resources they have on protecting themselves, and then the stock market collapses. The stock market is the real growth engine of the US economy — the entire US economy collapses with it. There are about seven companies in America that account for about a quarter of stock market growth — Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Apple and the AI companies — and they are heavily invested in by GCC nations. If these nations are no longer able to invest, these companies collapse in value and that leads to economic depression in America.

A student asked: if other countries like Italy, France, China, or Russia join this war, would it be because of oil and resources? The easy answer is yes — energy access. Europe is now fighting Russia and therefore not buying energy from Russia, so it depends heavily on the GCC. If the GCC stops providing energy, Europe goes bankrupt. So Europe needs to enter this war on the American side. Russia cannot allow Iran to fall, because if Iran falls, Russia is next. China is actually neutral — China is okay with either scenario, depending on how the situation develops. And this war in the Middle East is actually connected to the Ukraine war, which we will explore as we move along.