This post is opinion only. See full disclaimer below
I spoke very recently with a longtime friend who is a military veteran whom I haven’t caught up with in years, and our conversation quickly turned to the intense theater playing out around the White House and the Middle East. He brought up a fascinating tactical angle that I immediately wanted to pass on to my readers as I try to always give you top higher level ideas here: when key regional heavyweights lobby Washington for a “diplomatic pause,” we shouldn’t automatically assume things are merely as they appear on the surface. In many cases, calling for a timeout is a calculated ruse to buy vital time for preparation.
In high-stakes realpolitik, it is standard operational code for a government under potential threat to seek more time to prepare for a military escalation and look for ways to weather a potential storm. Iran has explicitly promised a heavy response to energy infrastructure throughout the Middle East if Washington or Israel pulls the trigger on their oil fields and infrastructure—specifically threatening to target major oil fields, critical gas processing facilities, and local desalination and power plants of countries throughout the region. If local allies are simply using the diplomatic window to button down their hatches against those specific threats, it means the underlying collision hasn’t been avoided—it has just been deferred.
We also have to ask whether it is truly credible that a world war level style attack to be conducted with a major ally with all the coordination and complexity that must involve would ever simply be called off via a social media post. I’ve recently written about the absurdity of this exact dynamic as it’s being reported in the news cycle, if it did indeed occur that way, and my friend thinks there is no way that narrative holds water either—dismissing the headline-grabbing cancellation tweet as yet another strategic ruse rather than a genuine method of initially notifying Israel of the change in military plans.
He also thinks that this imminent strike and pause scenario in this case is actually simply tactical. We saw this exact operational pattern he points out during the strikes against Iranian nuclear sites, where a coordinated misinformation and narrative of negotiation campaign successfully lulled Tehran into believing talks were still the primary track and that an attack wasn’t imminent right up until the ordnance dropped. That is my friend thinks the key precedent: using the threat of an immediate supposed attack to get the adversary to show his counter-positioning and then the smokescreen of ongoing negotiations so they are caught off guard when the real kinetic action is later unleashed.
I’m not totally convinced my friend is right on this one. Long time allies might simply want to avoid an attack with such catastrophically high risks entirely and prefer another more diplomatic path, or Trump might genuinely be fearful of a huge spike in oil prices and continually getting cold feet. Nor do I doubt that, given his leadership style, he might play the public theater card and actually tell an ally of a change in plans with a tweet or use such narrative tools to successfully beat the oil price back down for a while. Also, as I have written before, there is the “Socrates’s carpenter” problem: Trump might genuinely be so defined by his deal making real estate background in real estate that he is still single-mindedly chasing a grand deal despite all conventional logic.
However, military strategy per se is my friend’s wheelhouse and not mine, so I have to take his point seriously. For anyone tracking macro risk and energy markets, keeping a close watch on structural realities rather than optimistic public announcements remains the only way to consider the full range of possible scenarios.
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