In his 1873 book On War, the great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that: “War is the realm of uncertainty.” He would have been at home in Washington this week where Clausewitz’s “fog of war” appears to have descended on the White House, at times obscuring reality.

On Tuesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, briefed reporters that the US plan was to get the Strait of Hormuz “back to the way it was: anyone can use it, no mines in the water, nobody paying tolls”.

This was, of course, the way things were before the war actually started.

But uncertainty about what this war was actually all about has been a hallmark of the past two months. When the conflict began on the last day of February, the US said it was about preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Although the US president, Donald Trump, added a layer of complexity by saying it was also about regime change.

Trump’s closest ally, the Israeli prime minister, added another later by insisting this was also about getting rid of Iran’s ballistic missiles and launchers and neutralising its proxies in the region.

Christian Emery, an expert in international relations at University College London – who specialises in US-Iranian affairs – sees this lack of coherence about what the war is for as underscoring “that this entire enterprise has been a colossal strategic failure”.

As things stand it now appears possible that an interim deal could well open the Strait of Hormuz to allow the global economy to return to something like normal. But the main reasons the US and Israel launched the war are unlikely to be resolved any time soon and the episode has proved to Tehran – and the rest of the world – that Iran can use its geography to its strategic advantage whenever it chooses.

Read more: Trump administration claiming a ‘win’ against Iran – here’s a report card

For Bamo Nouri and Inderjeet Parmar, experts in international security at City St George’s Unversity of London – who have been regular contributors to our coverage of the conflict – the episode has been an object lesson in the limits of power. The US and Israel exercised considerable military superiority to Iran and have used it to devastating effect. But this is not how conflict works in the 21st century.

The US and Israel were chasing different outcomes so there was no strategic coherence to their war aims. And they underestimated Iran’s durability under pressure. Iran didn’t need to win, just to endure. “As the war progressed” they write, “the fantasy of decisive victory collapsed under the weight of economic, political and strategic reality”.

Read more: Iran war has become a lesson in how power really works

Interestingly, the Trump administration is now saying that Operation Epic Fury finished about a month ago. US forces are now engaged in Project Freedom, a humanitarian operation to help ships stranded in the Strait of Hormuz to transit the waterway.

As Andrew Gawthorpe, an expert in US foreign policy from Leiden University, notes, this change of emphasis appeared to emerge as Republicans in Congress were insisting that the administration was legally obliged under the War Powers Act to seek authorisation for the conflict.

Gawthorpe believes the war’s unpopularity is allowing Congress to claw back some of the influence it had over the way the US uses its military.

Read more: US declares war in Iran ‘over’ to avoid row with Congress over whether it was legal

As we’ve noted before, the main theme of the past few weeks, since the US launched its blockade of Iranian ports to match Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, is which side can absorb more pain and pressure. US consumers are facing increased prices at the gas pumps which has fed through to a higher inflation rate generally.

But the headline US CPI increase of 3.3% last month is dwarfed by inflation in Iran which is reported to have hit 50%. It’s worth noting that it was inflation and the general economic malaise which kicked off the huge protests that wracked Iran in January.

More pressingly, Iran’s inability to export its oil thanks to the US blockade means that sooner of later it will need to close down its oil production. As engineers and oil production experts Nima Shokri and Martin J Blunt explain, this can be done, but it’s by no means easy and risks seriously damaging the wells.

Read more: Shutting Iran’s oil wells may be straightforward – but the consequences are not

Global affair

They’ll be watching this all very closely in Beijing of course. The US president is due to visit Beijing next week to meet Xi Jinping for the first time since the two met on the sidelines of the Apec conference in South Korea last October.

So it was interesting to see that Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, visited Beijing this week to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. In normal times, China buys between 80% and 90% of Iran’s seaborne oil exports – and it has been very clear that it wants to see the Strait of Hormuz opened and “a complete cessation of fighting…without delay”.

But China-watcher Tom Harper of the University of East London, believes that Beijing can see advantages in the US getting bogged down in a fullscale war in the Middle East and might go as far as to offer military support to Tehran if that happens. While China has denied providing shoulder-launched Manpad missiles to Iran, Tehran is using its BeiDou satellite navigational system (a sort of Chinese GPS) to aim its missiles.

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Wang also said that China recognises Iran’s “legitimate right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy” – something it sees as a sovereignty issue. Which should all make for an interesting encounter between Trump and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping (if the trip goes ahead, that is).

Read more: China has played a key role in the Iran war – and will continue to do so

The surprise player in all this has been Pakistan, writes Natasha Lindstaedt, an international affairs expert at the University of Essex. But as Lindstaedt points out, Pakistan has a long diplomatic track record with both the US and Iran. In 1981, two years after Washington and Tehran severed relations in the wake of the revolution that brought the Islamic Republic into being, Pakistan established a dedicated section of its Washington embassy to handling Iranian affairs in the US.

Washington and Islamabad have had their ups and downs, but things have grown closer with Trump in the White House – and Pakistan has tried to do all the right things to court Trump, including nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize and joining his board of peace. Lindstaedt walks us through this intriguing ménage à trois.

Read more: How Pakistan became the primary mediator between the US and Iran

Brent crude oil surged to US$126 (£94) a barrel after US president Donald Trump announced that he was willing to prolong the blockade of Iranian ports for “months if needed”. This conflict has been billed as a matter of who can absorb the most pain. And Trump is betting on it being the US.

Trump has been rather bullish in his public pronouncements of late, declaring that Iran is in a “state of collapse”. Reports that the country’s inflation rate has risen to 50% from 40% since the war began at the end of February would seem to back this assessment.

The damage done to Iran’s economy will be made worse if the country is forced to shut down oil production due to a lack of storage capacity, something Trump is also confident about. He told Axios: “The blockade is somewhat more effective than the bombing. They are choking like a stuffed pig.”

Now in its eighth week, the conflict is having knock-on effects throughout the region and beyond. Perhaps the most telling sign this week was the announcement by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that it was quitting Opec, the oil producers’ cartel.

Adi Imsirovic, an energy expert at the University of Oxford, believes that while this decision has been brewing for some time – UAE and Opec’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, are at loggerheads over the civil war in Yemen and conflicts in Sudan and across the Horn of Africa. But the war has sharpened political sensibilities across the Gulf. Abu Dhabi has been unhappy about the lack of support from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) after being on the receiving end of intense bombardment from Iran.

Meanwhile, it has chafed under production quotas imposed by the cartel, which it sees as being well short – unfairly so – of its production capacity. When the Strait of Hormuz opens and countries begin to restock their reserves, UAE believes it can cash in on increased demand.

For Imsirovic, the episode reveals something deeper: as the transition by much of the world to retool their economies away from dependence on fossil fuels, big producers like the UAE worry about being left with oil in the ground that nobody wants. Hence the desire to pump out more oil without being constrained by Opec quotas.

Read more: UAE’s departure from Opec tells a story about the limited future of oil production

Another question inevitably raised by the Middle East conflict and the chokehold that the Strait of Hormuz has over energy markets is why nobody has figured out an alternative route. After all, Iran has been threatening to close the strait whenever threatened since the early 1980s.

The fact is, various countries have figured out an alternative route, writes David B. Roberts of King’s College London; it’s just not big enough to cope. The East-West Pipeline (or Petroline) can pipe oil across the Saudi peninsula at a rate of 5-7 million barrels a day. This compares with an estimated 20 million barrels that transit the Strait of Hormuz in normal times.

The Abu Dhabi crude oil pipeline, which takes oil from the Habshan onshore field in Abu Dhabi and runs to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman handles less than 2 million barrels per day. Both pipelines have been damaged by Iran during the war. And both were operating before the Strait of Hormuz was closed, so the idea that these pipelines can replace the strait is not feasible.

Read more: What alternatives do Gulf states have to the Strait of Hormuz?

Trump assassination attempt

It was shocking and depressing to read of another apparent attempt on the US president’s life – the third in two years – at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday. It was the first of these dinners that Trump had attended since 2011 when he was famously the butt of Barack Obama’s jokes in the by-now familiar comedy “roast” that is traditionally a highlight of the evening.

A man armed with two guns and a knife attempted to enter the ballroom where the dinner was being held, so the principals were evacuated and the dinner broke up in disarray. It later emerged that the would-be assassin had written a “manifesto” in which he revealed his hatred for the US president.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed what she called “hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump”, which she said had “helped to legitimise this violence and bring us to this dark moment”. She pointed the finger at the US Democrats and “some in the media”.

Seeking to link the assassination attempt to political rhetoric is a pretty direct attack on the first amendment to the US constitution, which protects free speech, writes Eliza Bechtold, a US constitutional law expert at the University of Oxford. The Trump administration has a track record of lionising the first amendment when it suits them (the January 6 US Capitol rioters were characterised by some as peaceful protesters exercising first amendment rights). But attacking the media or the Democrats for their criticisms of Trump’s administration is, writes Bechtold, a denial of everything the first amendment was designed to do.

Read more: Trump uses assassination attempt to justify his assault on first amendment rights to free speech

But not everyone in Trump’s Maga movement is now singing from the authorised songbook, writes Clodagh Harrington of the University of Cork. First it was Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a fervent Trump fan in the House of Representatives, now a bitter critic – who jumped ship in 2025, largely due to what she sees as his mishandling of the Epstein files.

More recently, it has been former Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has gone from introducing Trump at election rallies in 2024, to apologising to the US public for “misleading” them into voting for Trump. For Carlson, it’s the Iran war that flies in the face of one of Trump’s core election promises: no new wars.

Mind you, Harrington notes, Carlson’s move may also be dictated by a dream to launch his own presidential run in 2028. A TV personality running for president? Well, it has been known.

Read more: Is Trump losing the support of his Maga base?