What will future historians make of the US-Israeli attack on Iran? Above all, it confirms some hard-learned lessons, most of them old.
The first is that this will not be an ultra-short war. It has already outlasted the 12-day Israeli-US bombardment campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025. Washington seems to have fallen prey to the “short-war illusion.”
The pattern is well known. Before World War I, Germany’s elite convinced itself that a rapid campaign, executed with overwhelming force, would decisively improve the country’s strategic position on the European continent. The war lasted four, immensely bloody years. Russian President Vladimir Putin acted out of a similar illusion in February 2022, when Russian soldiers were expected to celebrate the beginning of spring in Kyiv.
The second lesson is an equally classic one: Starting wars is easy; ending them is hard. Initiating war is often a one-person decision. Ending one is a multiplayer game.
Even if US President Donald Trump forced Israel’s hand tomorrow and declared victory, there is no guarantee the conflict would end. Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei appears more radical than his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli strikes on February 28. For a regime fighting for its survival, a war on home soil against the “big and small Satan” may be more of an asset than a liability.
Using Chokepoints
The third lesson is another constant of history: Weaker powers turn to asymmetric strategies when facing opponents with vastly superior conventional forces.
Iran’s most powerful weapon is neither its missiles nor Hezbollah, its proxy force in Lebanon. If the US-Israeli campaign has delayed Iran from building a nuclear weapon of mass destruction, that is welcome. But it has also revealed something else: Iran already possesses a formidable weapon of mass disruption.
Before the war, roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Significant shares of industrial and agricultural commodities such as aluminum, urea, and helium did as well.
Using chokepoints has always been an instrument of war, and countering such use has always been difficult. In World War I, the Ottomans mined the Dardanelles, cutting off Russia’s main source of foreign income and threatening the United Kingdom’s grain supply. The Gallipoli campaign, launched in February 1915 by Winston Churchill who was then First Lord of the Admiralty and in command of the Royal Navy, to reopen the strait, ended with nearly 60,000 Allied dead (many Australians and New Zealanders among them) and the passage still closed 11 months later.
What has changed since then, however, is the cost of disruption as well as the effectiveness of the use of chokepoints. Activating a maritime chokepoint once required a navy. Today it requires far less. Iran needs only small boats to lay decades-old sea mines it possesses in the thousands.
Drones could make the task even faster, cheaper, and more effective—potentially placing the tactic within reach of many more actors. For instance, imagine separatists in southern Thailand disrupting traffic through the Strait of Malacca, which carries a huge portion of East Asian trade, with drone-deployed mines.
Moreover, often the threat alone is enough. If insurers and shipping companies believe a strait may be mined, they withdraw—whether a single mine has been laid or not.
Implausible Assumption
As the world enters the age of cheap Weapons of Mass Disruption, Europe has not yet accepted what that means.
Brussels is slowly recognizing that Chinese state capitalism and the United States’ new protectionism pose a threat to European industry and security. Yet it still treats each disruption of global trade as a temporary accident—a deviation from the norm after which flows will resume and business will continue as usual.
That assumption is increasingly implausible.
We are only halfway through the decade, but global trade has already been severely disrupted three times: by COVID-19, by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now by the Third Gulf War. A virus, a land war, a maritime chokepoint—the causes differ. The result is similar. Shortages, price spikes, inflation, economic slowdown, and all of this topped off by political backlash in Western democracies.
That list doesn’t even include the smaller incidences. What about the Houthis attack campaign after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel having led to a 90 percent decline in container shipping though the Red Sea for much of 2024. Or car production in Germany grinding to a halt should China stop exports of rare earths or chips, as Beijing threatened twice in 2025.
And the world’s biggest chokepoint has not even been activated yet.
Taiwan produces more than 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors and roughly 90 percent of the most advanced chips. A Chinese blockade of the island would make the current disruption in the Gulf appear manageable by comparison.
European and American industries—from defense to artificial intelligence—would come to a standstill. As US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January: “If that island were blockaded, that capacity destroyed, it would be an economic apocalypse.”
Change the Base Case
This reality should inform Europe’s economic strategy—including current debates over whether industrial policy should prioritize “made in Europe” or “made with Europe,” integrating partners whose goods must traverse multiple vulnerable chokepoints.
Europe’s economy cannot afford to seize up every time geopolitical friction erupts. Policymakers must plan for a world in which disruptions are frequent, the interval between them short, and the reliability of global trade flows thus no longer guaranteed.
In short: Europe must change its base case. The next disruption is not an anomaly. It’s the new normal.
This article is a preview from the IPQ Spring 2026 issue, out on March 26.
Joseph de Weck is IPQ’s Paris columnist and author of Emmanuel Macron. The revolutionary president.
