Hammers and Nails
What happens when military power is the only tool you have left.
Years ago, I published a short book in Cornell’s Studies in Security Affairs Series. Humbly, The Power Problem wasn’t like any other book in that series – and not in a good way. It was undertheorized, to put it charitably. It didn’t fit the model of most books in international relations, and it wasn’t a work of history, either. It’s what happens when a historian spends a lot of time with political scientists.
The central argument boils down to “when you have a really big hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
A friend reminded me of The Power Problem a few weeks ago, not long after the war with Iran started. “This is exactly what you were talking about,” he said.
He meant it as a compliment. It doesn’t feel like one. The Power Problem might explain how we got into this mess. It doesn’t explain how to get out of it.
On this week’s Net Assessment, Zack, Melanie, and I focused on Caitlin Talmadge’s piece at Foreign Affairs, “The Hormuz Minefield.” I also called attention to the work of Rosemary Kelanic at Defense Priorities (here and here). Both are genuine experts on energy markets and Gulf security — not pundits, not talking heads, but scholars who have spent years studying exactly this problem. If you want to understand what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz right now, read them. (I should also shout out my colleague Emma Ashford who, in addition to this very timely column at the Financial Times, wrote the book — literally — on petrostates.)
The numbers surrounding energy costs over the last month prove the point: the threat posed to shipping in the Strait is a problem. “From Feb. 20 to March 20,” explained a recent Yahoo! News article, “the price of Brent futures soared from $71 a barrel to about $110 per barrel – a 54% increase.” It dropped below $100 briefly after Trump postponed his threat to target Iranians power plants, claiming that the U.S. and Iran had launched “very strong talks” to end the war (Iran disputed those claims).
Gasoline prices move with the price of oil. “Since Feb. 20, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. has shot up by more than a dollar, from $2.93 to $3.98, according to the American Automobile Association.” That’s the largest one-month increase in thirty years. Americans are paying for this war at the pump, and these costs are going to get worse before they get better.
Talmadge explains why. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has spent decades building capabilities specifically designed to threaten traffic through the Strait. They never fully deployed those capabilities before, partly because closing the Strait would hurt Iran’s own oil exports, and partly because deploying them would invite exactly the kind of response they were trying to deter. But when a government concludes that its survival is at stake, the logic of restraint collapses. That is where we are. The IRGC is no longer holding anything back.
Talmadge’s conclusion is unsparing:
if Iran effectively mines the Strait, all U.S. response options are suboptimal. The United States should therefore focus aggressively on preventing Iranian mine-laying in the first place and finding an off-ramp from the larger war. If it does not, Washington should expect that ongoing harassment of traffic in the strait will be but one of a number of responses that Iran has long prepared and will now deploy.
I want to focus on is her recommendation that the United States “focus aggressively on preventing Iranian mine-laying in the first place, and find an off-ramp from the larger war.” I think both of those windows have now closed, or are closing fast.
On the military options: yes, you can bomb launch sites, take out command and control, jam communications, run mine countermeasures. Melanie walked through the list of options on our show. The problem is that this approach is slow — weeks or months of operations — and a lot of the damage may already be done. (It’s also really dangerous; after we recorded, my colleagues Kelly Grieco and Marie-Louise Westermann published a piece at Stimson documenting why countermine operations are so hard.)
The apparent alternative to clearing the Strait that the Trump administration has settled on is seizing Kharg Island. I want to be direct about something that seems to get lost in the coverage: Kharg Island has nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz. It is hundreds of miles away from the Strait. Yes, it is where tankers load Iranian oil. And, yes, the United States could take Kharg -- though I explained in my last Substack why it shouldn’t.
The point is that the Strait could remain just as closed as it is right now, even if the United States took control of Kharg. The idea connecting the two is coercion: controlling Iran’s primary oil export terminal allegedly gives Washington something to threaten. The problem, as noted above, is that a regime fighting for its survival has every incentive not to cave to coercion.
On the presumption that Iranian leaders know that capitulation equals their total destruction, they could bomb and shell and drone Kharg themselves, after the U.S. forces seized it. And the Trump administration just removed sanctions on Iranian energy exports, which undercuts the message that they’re serious about strangling Iranian oil revenue.
If you actually want to reopen the Strait by force, you need ground troops on the Iranian side of the Strait. You need to hold territory. That is an honest-to-God ground war of a kind the United States has not fought in a very long time. I would like to be able to say this administration would never go that far. I cannot say that. That is what concerns me the most right now.
As for off-ramps: I am not optimistic. Look at how Iran responded to the killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, and then to the strikes on their nuclear facilities last year. In both cases, Tehran’s retaliation was measured and telegraphed in advance. The object was to demonstrate a response without triggering further escalation – and it worked, for a time.
But the Trump administration and the Israelis interpreted restraint as weakness. The Iranians drew the same conclusion. Accordingly, I do not think the Iranian government is currently interested in finding an off-ramp, even if the Trump administration were genuinely looking for one — which I am not convinced they are.
I also want to say something about the administration’s tone regarding this war. It has been bothering me since day one. Phil Klay, a novelist and Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war, wrote about it in the NYT on Sunday. This administration has celebrated the killing in this conflict in a way I find genuinely grotesque — memes, videos, social media posts treating explosions like entertainment. I wrote with Michael Cohen last year about Pete Hegseth’s obsession with lethality as an end in itself, and divorced from any mission or higher political purpose. We are watching that philosophy play out in real time. Clausewitz, among others, is rolling in his grave.
And one side effect of a focus on killing, and a general disregard for collateral harm, was seen on the first day of the war. The Pentagon has a “Civilian Protection Center of Excellence” whose job is to minimize civilian harm. Hegseth gutted it. He also fired the lawyers (JAGs) who might have scrutinized targeting decisions, or subjected them to review after the fact. So, when a girls’ school is hit in the opening hours of a war, and the response is denial and deflection, remember that the institutions designed to prevent exactly that type of tragedy were deliberately dismantled by Hegseth and the Trump administration.
To bring it back to The Power Problem, we have reduced American influence to the ability to swing a hammer. We are swinging it as hard as we can. And we are frustrated that the other side has not simply rolled over.
That is not a strategy. It is what happens when you have no strategy, but only the mistaken belief that enough force will substitute for one.
One postscript: just after the episode went live, my colleague Emma Ashford called attention to a piece in yesterday’s New York Times by Lydia Polgren. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The author fixes on the very problem that I have been struggling to describe most of my professional career. It is not a pleasant read, but I dare say it is a necessary one. Americans must come to grips with the fact that we do not, and we cannot, control the world. When we fail, it is not because of self-sabotage or a failure of will. It’s not because we didn’t try hard enough, or killed enough, or stayed long enough. We fail because the world is a really big and complicated place, and other actors have interests, too – some, even, that they are willing to fight for.
Note: This post was written with an assist from Anthtropic’s Claude. I ran the podcast transcript through Claude, it generated a draft based on my remarks in the show, and then I edited and added material.