Day 18: US-Iran War

See All News by Ravish Kumar
<<< Previously

The headline arrives before the truth

On March 17, 2026, Israel claimed it had struck at the top of Iran’s power structure again — this time targeting Ali Larijani, one of Iran’s most senior security figures, and also claiming a strike on Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani. But even as those announcements raced through television studios and timelines, the facts were still unsettled. Reuters reported that Larijani’s fate remained unclear, while Iran had not confirmed either death. That uncertainty is not a side note. It is the story. In this war, the claim itself is part of the weapon. First comes the headline, then the atmosphere, and only later — if at all — the truth. Reuters+1

This is why one has to be careful with triumphalism. When a war becomes saturated with declarations of “we got him,” “we eliminated him,” “we struck the nerve center,” it is tempting to assume that military decapitation equals strategic victory. But war is not a press release. It is not a social-media graphic. It is not a photograph of a leader on the phone. It is a test of whether the targeted state can still retaliate, still impose costs, still bend markets, still frighten neighbors, still shape decisions far beyond its borders. On that test, Iran has not disappeared. Reuters+1

Kill the leaders, but the war does not end

For nearly three weeks now, the argument behind the U.S.-Israeli campaign has seemed straightforward: strike the leadership, degrade the command structure, and the rest will unravel. Yet the opposite impression has begun to take hold. U.S. intelligence reporting cited by Reuters says Iran’s government is not at immediate risk of collapse despite the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28 and sustained bombing since then. Other reporting suggests the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has, if anything, consolidated power inside the system. The state may be wounded, but it is not absent. Reuters+1

That matters because this war has exposed the limits of the fantasy that a country can be bombed into political obedience from above. Iran has kept the Strait of Hormuz at the center of the crisis, continued missile and drone pressure across the region, and retained leverage over the global oil route that handles roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade. If the point was to prove overwhelming control, the result has been the opposite: the battlefield widened, shipping slowed, energy prices jumped, and governments across Asia began preparing for shortages. Reuters+2Reuters+2

So the basic question remains: if the top is being hit and yet the state still shapes events, what exactly has been achieved? Military power can destroy buildings. It can kill commanders. It can terrorize populations. But it cannot automatically produce political submission. This war has now made that lesson visible in public. The leadership is under attack, and yet Iran still has the capacity to force the world to negotiate with geography. Reuters+1

The real battlefield is Hormuz

The most important map in this war is not the map of airstrikes. It is the map of the Strait of Hormuz. That is where military violence turns into economic language. That is where a missile becomes inflation, where strategy becomes shortage, where geopolitics enters the kitchen. India’s foreign minister told the Financial Times, in remarks reported by Reuters, that there was no “blanket arrangement” for Indian ships and that each passage had to be handled individually. That one sentence reveals the whole fragility of the moment: diplomacy is now ship-by-ship, exception-by-exception, plea-by-plea. Reuters

Reuters reported that Iran allowed two Indian-flagged LPG tankers to pass through the strait, but India still has 22 vessels stranded around the region and continues to seek safe passage for more. Separately, New Delhi denied reports of a quid pro quo involving three tankers seized in Indian waters, while confirming that talks with Tehran are continuing. This is not normal trade. This is bargaining under the shadow of war. Reuters+2Reuters+2

And if anyone still believes a naval show of force can simply switch the old order back on, the head of the International Maritime Organization has already warned otherwise. Naval escorts, he said, cannot guarantee safe passage and are not a sustainable solution. That is an important point. The strait is not just a lane to be patrolled; it is a chokepoint controlled by fear, calculation, and political will. Once a war reaches Hormuz, no admiral can promise normalcy on command. Reuters

The loneliness of Washington

The war has also revealed a second truth: military strength is not the same thing as diplomatic authority. President Donald Trump has been pressing allies to help reopen Hormuz, asking countries to send warships and contribute to escort missions. But Reuters reported that key partners including Germany, Spain, Italy and others declined, while Poland also made clear it would not send troops. The refusal is politically devastating because it shows that even governments aligned with Washington do not necessarily trust Washington’s judgment, timing, or endgame. Reuters+1

This is where the war begins to look less like command and more like isolation. Trump can still order strikes. He can still threaten escalation. He can still boast of targets hit. But when allies refuse to militarize his plan, the limits become visible. Reuters also reported that Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, rejected reports of fresh backchannel contact with Trump’s envoy after the war began and said such stories were being circulated to influence oil markets and public perception. Even diplomacy now seems to arrive wrapped in market signaling and confusion. Reuters+1

There is an even deeper irony here. Reuters reported that Gulf Arab states, while cautious in public, are pressing the United States to weaken Iran decisively because they fear what an unfinished war might mean for their future security and oil economies. So the same region that fears escalation also fears an inconclusive American exit. Public caution, private pressure. Strategic dependence, political hesitation. This is not leadership. It is a trap. Reuters

The war reaches South Asia’s kitchens

The war is not only in Tehran, Tel Aviv, Beirut, or the Gulf. It is in India’s gas cylinder. It is in the dhaba that cannot cook. It is in the hostel mess that starts serving reheated food. Reuters reported on March 17 that India is facing its worst LPG crunch in decades because shipping through Hormuz has been disrupted. Household demand has been prioritized, industrial and commercial use has been squeezed, and the crisis is already altering daily life. When a distant war begins to decide whether tea stalls, restaurants, and hostels can function, foreign policy stops being abstract. Reuters+1

This is not just an Indian story. The Associated Press reported that countries across Asia are moving into energy triage, conserving fuel and cutting usage as the conflict squeezes supply. Sri Lanka has already shifted to a four-day workweek to save oil and gas. Bangladesh and Pakistan have taken austerity steps of their own. Reuters also reported that Asia is pivoting toward coal as LNG supplies choke. In other words, war at sea is becoming dirtier air, costlier food, and harsher choices on land. AP News+2The Guardian+2

And the map of energy distress is even wider. Reuters reported that Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed on March 16, leaving around 10 million people in darkness, in a crisis worsened by a U.S.-tightened oil squeeze. That is why it is impossible to read this war narrowly. The same global order that talks of stability is producing blackouts in one place, gas shortages in another, and aviation disruption in a third. It is one system of punishment, not separate events. Reuters+1

When hospitals become targets and heritage becomes rubble

One of the most dangerous things a long war does is normalize the unthinkable. Hospitals begin to enter military vocabulary. Schools are reclassified through intelligence slides. Civilian sites become “adjacent infrastructure.” Reuters reported that the World Health Organization has verified 18 attacks on healthcare sites in Iran since the war began, with additional attacks documented in Lebanon. Six hospitals in Iran have been evacuated. This is not collateral rhetoric anymore; it is a pattern. Reuters+1

Reuters also investigated a girls’ school in Minab that was destroyed in a U.S. strike on February 28, reporting evidence that the site had long been visibly identifiable online and through satellite imagery. If a school can be mistaken, or ignored, or absorbed into the language of targeting, then the war has crossed a moral border that no strategic memo can repair. In Afghanistan too, Reuters reported that the Taliban government accused Pakistan of killing more than 400 people in a strike on a Kabul drug rehabilitation hospital, though Pakistan denied targeting civilians. India condemned that strike. Different wars, different actors, same collapse of restraint. Reuters+2Reuters+2

And there is something else being damaged beyond the living. UNESCO said at least four of Iran’s World Heritage Sites have suffered damage. At the same time, Al Jazeera reported that Iranian authorities say 56 heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed. Whether the independently verified number is four or the Iranian claim of 56, the meaning is grim enough: war does not only kill people; it also attacks memory, continuity, and civilization itself. Reuters+1

The dead are missing from the frame

Pope Leo has said something the media should hear very carefully. Reuters reported that he urged journalists to show war through the eyes of those who suffer, and warned against turning war into propaganda or entertainment. He also said violence cannot open the road to justice or peace, and called for a ceasefire. Those are not ornamental remarks from the Vatican. They are a rebuke to an era of war coverage that too often centers statements, maps, missiles, and men in power — and leaves the wounded in the margins. Reuters+1

Because look at how this war is now consumed. Drone footage. monochrome strike videos. arrows on maps. oil-price dashboards. alliance speculation. What gets lost is the cemetery. Reuters reported from Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, where families were burying relatives killed in the war that began on February 28. That is the real measure of a conflict: not how precise the animation looks, but how many fresh graves are being dug when the cameras move on. Reuters

The crisis in aviation tells the same story in another form. Reuters reported that the UAE briefly closed its airspace again on March 17 after missile and drone threats, following a drone-related fire near Dubai airport the day before. British Airways and KLM have both extended or maintained flight cuts in the region. Air travel, medicine logistics, family travel, migrant routes — all of it gets disrupted. Yet the conversation still returns, again and again, to strategic posture instead of human insecurity. Reuters+2Reuters+2

India’s uneasy mirror

India cannot watch this war as a spectator. The government itself said on March 3 that developments in the Gulf caused “great anxiety,” and nearly 10 million Indians in the region remain a central concern. That is the human side. The economic side is just as serious: ships, remittances, aviation, oil, LNG, LPG, fertilizers — all are exposed. Reuters has already reported disruptions to gas, shipping, and fertilizer supply chains affecting India. Reuters+2The Times of India+2

There is also a political mirror here. In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Reuters reported that India was trying to evacuate about 16,000 nationals still stuck there; Operation Ganga soon became a major public exercise. Four years later, India is again confronting the vulnerability of its citizens abroad and the fragility of its supply lines, only this time the pressure is not only on students trapped in a war zone but also on workers, merchant crews, households, and small businesses linked to the Gulf. Reuters+2Press Information Bureau+2

The difference is that the West Asia crisis does not arrive in one dramatic television frame. It arrives in fragments: a stranded vessel, a delayed flight, a gas shortage, a diplomatic call, a market tremor. But fragments are still a full picture if you know how to connect them. That is what this war demands from India — not slogan, not performance, but clarity about dependence, risk, and the cost of pretending distance where there is none. Reuters+1

A world trapped in continuous war

If this moment feels familiar, that is because the world has been living inside one prolonged chain of conflict. Reuters reported in February 2022 on India’s scramble to evacuate citizens from Ukraine. Since October 2023, Gaza has remained a site of recurring Israeli strikes and death, with AP reporting that violence has continued despite a ceasefire framework. And now, since February 28, 2026, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has opened another front whose effects stretch from Lebanon to Dubai to India to Cuba. Reuters+2AP News+2

That continuity matters. War is no longer experienced as an exception that shocks the world into moral seriousness. It is being absorbed as routine. One day it is Ukraine. Another day Gaza. Then Lebanon. Then Iran. Then Kabul. Then a blackout elsewhere. The human nervous system adapts faster than the moral system reacts. That may be the most frightening part of all. We are not only witnessing destruction; we are also watching the normalization of destruction. Reuters+2Reuters+2

And so the final image of this war is not a bunker-buster, not a leader’s tweet, not even a closed strait. It is a broken world held together by logistics, fear, and exhaustion. Some states are still boasting. Some governments are still calculating. Some media outlets are still packaging war as strategy. But the ordinary person meets war in a simpler form: no gas, no flight, no medicine, no certainty, no sleep. Reuters+2Reuters+2

Trump’s Moving Script: From Bombs to Chess, From Boast to Bewilderment

One of the sharpest patterns in this war has been Trump’s constant movement from one point to another, often without any clear connection between his own statements. In one moment he is sitting at his desk admiring the B-2 bomber, almost aestheticizing destruction, speaking of its beauty and power. In another moment, he suddenly begins speaking the language of intelligence, subtlety, and strategy — praising Iranians as smart, high-IQ, intelligent people, even calling Iran a great power. It is as if the script shifts mid-sentence: first the celebration of force, then the discovery of complexity.

That inconsistency is not minor. It reveals a deeper confusion about what kind of conflict this is. When bombs are falling, the rhetoric is muscular. When the limits of those bombs begin to show, the rhetoric turns toward chess, toward negotiation, toward the intelligence of the adversary. The transcript points to this contradiction very clearly: leaders often feel unbeatable while ordering attacks, but the moment they are forced to think politically, they begin reaching for the language of strategy and caution. Trump appears to move exactly in that way — from the swagger of military power to the nervous respect of someone realizing the opponent is not easy to crush.

The inconsistency becomes even more visible in the way he speaks about escalation and support. At one point, he appeals to allied countries to help secure Hormuz, suggesting that reopening this route will require collective effort. But in another moment, he says he does not need anyone’s help. Which is it? If the mission requires global backing, then that is an admission of dependence. If no help is needed, then the earlier appeal begins to sound like weakness covered up by bravado.
Trump keeps shifting between commanding the world and complaining that the world is not standing beside him.

There is also a contradiction between surprise and warning. Trump says he was shocked that Iran struck neighboring countries, as though this was some unforeseen escalation. But the point raised here is simple: Iran had already warned that places used to attack it would be treated as hostile bases. If those warnings existed in advance, then surprise is not innocence — it is either ignorance or performance. This makes Trump appear less like a commander in control and more like a leader constantly reacting to consequences he should have anticipated.

Even his public communication style reflects that drift. One answer does not connect to the next. He threatens the press, yet remains surrounded by reporters. He projects certainty, yet keeps exposing uncertainty. He speaks as though events are under control, then suddenly sounds isolated, disappointed, and frustrated by allies. He praises force, then leans on the language of deal-making. He mocks complexity, then discovers it too late.

That is why the inconsistency matters politically. It is not only about changing tone. It is about the collapse of coherence. A leader who keeps shifting from bombast to confusion, from unilateral confidence to requests for help, from surprise to denial, does not merely look contradictory. He begins to look lonely, exposed, and overtaken by the very war he helped unleash.

Criticisms

• Nation and State Leaders: Leaders are announcing killings before independent confirmation. By doing this, they are not only waging war on an enemy, they are also waging war on public understanding.

• Israel, the United States, and All Warring Powers: Hospitals, schools, and medical spaces are being pulled into the logic of war. A war that keeps reaching civilian sites cannot claim moral seriousness.

• Trump and the U.S. Leadership: After starting a war, they are complaining that allies are not carrying it forward for them. That is not strength. It shows the limits of reckless power.

• Gulf Governments: They appear cautious in public, but they seem to want Iran weakened decisively in private. This kind of strategic ambiguity leaves ordinary people to pay the price for elite calculation.

• Mainstream War Media: War is being turned into graphics, missile footage, strategic maps, and dramatic analysis, while the dead, the wounded, and the displaced are pushed out of the frame.

• Governments Backing or Extending the War: They are treating fuel shocks, shipping disruption, shortages, and blackouts as secondary effects, when in reality these are the real consequences faced by ordinary people.

• Political and Military Establishments Everywhere: They speak casually about war, but it is never they who first suffer its consequences. The people who pay first are families dealing with fear, inflation, shortages, and uncertainty.