Master of the Strings: Strategic Command in the Iran War

Commander of the Narrative

President Donald Trump is a master of the strings.
Not in the theatrical sense his critics imagine, but in the strategic sense they fail to understand. He does not simply react to events; he shapes them. He pulls at the levers of media, markets, allies, and adversaries with an instinctive grasp of pressure, timing, and effect that is rare in modern leadership.

To watch him operate is to see a Commander-in-Chief who understands that war in the 21st century is fought as much in the information domain as it is on the battlefield. A single post can redirect global attention. A calculated provocation can flush out a response. A moment of reassurance can steady markets. At times, even a deliberately abrasive or provocative message on Truth Social can shift the media cycle, drawing focus away from the main effort and onto a carefully selected point of distraction. Carrots, sticks, and diversion—applied not sequentially, but simultaneously.

Critics mistake this for chaos. It is not chaos. It is control.

And it is precisely this control—this command of narrative and tempo—that has defined the U.S. response to Iran under the Administration of the 47th President.

A War Decades in the Making

The conflict we are now witnessing did not begin in March 2026. It traces back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when a revolutionary regime fused ideology with state power and declared itself in opposition to the West and its allies. For decades, that challenge was managed, deferred, and, at times, misunderstood.

The Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the clearest expression of that approach—an attempt to contain rather than resolve. But strategy is unforgiving. Time is never neutral. It empowers one side or the other.

In Iran’s case, it enabled expansion.

Hezbollah entrenched itself further in Lebanon. Hamas strengthened its grip in Gaza. The Houthis extended their reach to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a narrow maritime chokepoint through which a significant share of global trade flows. Disruption there does not remain regional; it ripples through the global economy.

At the same time, within Iran itself, military and security infrastructure expanded in scale and sophistication to a degree difficult for many in the West to fully appreciate—encompassing missile forces, drone programmes, underground facilities, and an extensive internal security apparatus.
This expansion did not occur in a vacuum. The financial relief enabled by the JCPOA injected billions into the regime—resources that were not directed toward improving the lives of ordinary Iranians, but toward strengthening proxy networks and military capability, both at home and across the region.

This is not a new pattern. In 1983, 241 American service members were killed in the Beirut barracks bombing—a stark demonstration of Iran’s long-standing proxy warfare model. What has changed since is not intent, but capability—now amplified by decades of investment, funding, and strategic patience.

From its inception, the Islamic Republic has been explicit in its worldview. The United States has long been labelled the “Great Satan,” and Israel the “Little Satan.” The chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” have echoed through state-sanctioned rallies and proxy movements for decades. This is not rhetorical ambiguity. It is ideological consistency.

As Douglas Murray has argued in substance, when movements repeatedly declare their intent to destroy you, it is prudent to take them at their word.
For too long, much of the West has chosen to interpret such language metaphorically, politically, or contextually. But strategy requires clarity.

When an adversary defines itself through hostility, and sustains that hostility across decades, institutions, and proxies, the burden is not on them to prove intent. It is on us to recognise it.

Shaping Operations: Setting the Conditions

For many, this is deeply uncomfortable. For adversaries, it is destabilising. For strategy, it is effective.

Statecraft is not the purview of unicorns and rainbows. It is the disciplined application of national power—diplomatic, economic, informational, and, when required, military. That includes the calibrated use of lethal force to achieve defined strategic outcomes. To pretend otherwise is to misunderstand both history and the nature of power.

In the hostile modern information environment, it is also entirely rational not to telegraph every intended outcome in advance. To do so is to invite partisan political opponents, hostile media, and adversaries alike to mobilise immediately against them. Serious strategy does not always advertise its destination before the necessary conditions have been set.

The campaign now unfolding is not ad hoc. It reflects a deliberate operational sequence: isolate the battlespace, degrade command and control, and dismantle the adversary’s capacity to resist and reconstitute.

Iran has been progressively isolated—economically, diplomatically, and militarily. U.S. and Israeli leadership have been explicit in signalling expectations: compliance is offered a pathway; non-compliance carries consequences. Leadership nodes are targeted to disrupt decision-making and fragment control. Weapons caches and launch systems are identified and destroyed. Naval combat capability is degraded and neutralised to remove the conventional maritime threat. Air and integrated air defence systems are suppressed to secure freedom of action across the battlespace.

Land force command and leadership elements are systematically targeted and degraded. Industrial infrastructure—particularly that enabling force regeneration—is also being dismantled. Within this framework, operational art is applied to preserve freedom of action—maintaining a spectrum of options, including calibrated escalation where required.

Less visible, but no less decisive, is the financial domain. Regime-linked assets, offshore holdings, and access to international financial systems are identified, seized, or frozen. This constrains the regime’s ability to regenerate capability, sustain proxy networks, and prolong conflict. War is not won solely by destroying what an adversary possesses. It is won by denying its capacity to recover.

These are not end states. They are shaping operations.

They establish the conditions for what follows.

The Three Decisive Objectives

The campaign can therefore be understood through three remaining decisive objectives—each complex, each critical, and each long anticipated in serious military planning.

Objective One: Denial of Nuclear Capability and Control of Fissile Material

First: the seizure, extraction, or in-situ neutralisation of weapons-grade fissile material.

The imperative to deny Iran a nuclear weapons capability has been discussed ad nauseam. It is, and has long been, non-negotiable. But that focus—necessary though it is—has tended to obscure a parallel strategic risk that is no less serious: the control of material already enriched and dispersed within a contested battlespace.

It is not enough to prevent weaponisation. It is essential to secure, remove, or neutralise what already exists.

The world’s most dangerous regime—or its remnants—cannot be permitted to hold the international system hostage.

The International Atomic Energy Agency assesses Iran holds over 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity—a short technical step from weapons-grade. Much of this material is believed to remain within hardened sites such as Fordow and Natanz, both struck with heavy ordnance during Operation Rising Lion in June 2025.

But damage is not destruction.

The world cannot accept the risk that regime remnants, ideologically motivated groups, or opportunistic criminal networks could seize such material for use—or transfer it to jihadist actors. Yet, in reality, it is only the United States and Israel that have demonstrated the resolve to act.

It was therefore notable that even German Chancellor Friedrich Merz—hardly a figure given to rhetorical excess on such matters—acknowledged the burden Israel was carrying when he said in June 2025: “This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.” He went further: “We are also victims of this regime. This mullah regime has brought death and destruction to the world.”

Such remarks reflect a truth often left unsaid: the threats being confronted are not regional. They are systemic, and their consequences are global.
Iran’s stockpile includes uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity—meaning the proportion of uranium-235 has been increased from its natural level of roughly 0.7 per cent to a level just short of weapons-grade. Once enrichment reaches this threshold, the remaining technical step to weapons-grade is comparatively small.

Even absent a nuclear detonation, the misuse of such material would carry serious consequences. A radiological dispersal device—a so-called dirty bomb—detonated in a densely populated commercial hub such as The Dubai Mall would likely cause immediate casualties from the blast, followed by contamination across multiple city blocks. Tens of thousands could be forced to evacuate.

Authorities would be required to establish exclusion zones, conduct radiation mapping, and undertake complex decontamination operations. Parts of a major commercial precinct could remain restricted for months—and in some cases, years. The economic and psychological impact would be immediate and enduring, disrupting trade, tourism, and confidence in one of the world’s key financial and transport hubs.

And would such an attack be a one-off—or the first of many? The world cannot afford to take that risk.

Too many across the Western alliance, however, have chosen distance from consequence over the burden of decision. That choice will not be without cost. Alliances such as NATO and ANZUS depend not only on shared interests, but on shared willingness to act. Once resolve is questioned, it is difficult to restore.

The objective of such an enemy attack would not be annihilation, but disruption—area denial, economic paralysis, and psychological shock.
Preventing this outcome requires deliberate military action. This is, in military terms, a cordon-and-search operation at scale.

Conventional ground forces—likely a brigade-minus construct—would establish outer and inner cordons around suspected sites, sequentially or concurrently, supported by intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and precision fires. Within these perimeters, specialised teams—engineers, explosive ordnance disposal, and nuclear specialists—would conduct systematic site exploitation.

The most demanding phase lies below ground. Facilities such as Fordow are deeply buried and designed for survivability. Clearance would likely involve joint U.S.–Israeli special operations forces, supported by advanced detection systems, robotics, and techniques refined in subterranean warfare environments such as Gaza.

This is not improvised warfare. It is a mission long anticipated and war-gamed over decades. Those tasked with executing it would have little appetite for the world’s chattering class dissecting operations in real time. They would prefer a Commander-in-Chief who dominates the narrative—directing attention toward less critical matters, preserving focus, and protecting operational freedom of action.

Objective Two: Kharg Island, Sea Lines of Communication, and the Contest for Hormuz

Second: control of Kharg Island—the economic centre of gravity of this nation state.

Approximately 90 per cent of Iran’s oil exports pass through this single node. Deny the regime access to this revenue, and its ability to sustain itself—funding patronage networks, proxies, and internal control—diminishes rapidly.

This is a seize-and-hold mission.

The first requirement is isolation. Maritime and air exclusion zones must be enforced—no unauthorised air, surface, or subsurface movement permitted. Small vessels, including fishing craft, must be treated as potential asymmetric threats. The surrounding Sea Lines of Communication must also be secured and dominated. These routes are not confined to Iran alone. Tankers carrying oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates all transit the same constrained waterways—most notably the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of global oil supply flows.

Control of Kharg Island, without control of these SLOCs, is insufficient. This is a regional system, not a localised objective.

This is not a permissive environment. It is not the domain of symbolic protest or performative activism. This is not a theatre for figures such as Greta Thunberg or others inclined toward high-visibility demonstration without exposure to consequence. What is at stake here is not expression, but outcome—secure energy flows, stable markets, and the everyday reality of affordable fuel at the bowser in the United States, Australia, and across Europe. That matters more to working families and national economies than the juvenile theatrics of anarchist protest.

The presence of unauthorised vessels—whether disguised as civilian traffic, irregular maritime militia, or ideologically motivated actors—must be treated as a potential threat. Miscalculation in such an environment carries immediate and lethal consequences.

Simultaneously, ground forces must secure critical infrastructure: terminals, storage facilities, and control systems. These tactical tasks are vital asset protection and key point defence. The primary risk is reserve demolition—pre-positioned charges designed to destroy infrastructure rather than surrender it intact. The secondary risk is offensive fires from missile, drone, artillery, or mortar.

Preventing this requires speed, precision, and intelligence. It is my judgment that clandestine elements are likely already in situ.
Once secured, Kharg Island becomes more than terrain. It becomes a strategic lever. Control of production and export infrastructure enables not only the denial of revenue to the regime, but the restoration and stabilisation of global energy flows under secure conditions.
But this objective cannot be understood in isolation from the broader contest in the Strait of Hormuz.

Some in the chattering class have treated pressure on Hormuz as though it were an unforeseen complication—evidence of strategic surprise or failure. It is neither. This is a battlespace that United States Central Command has studied, modelled, and war-gamed for decades. The vulnerability of the strait, and Iran’s reliance on it as a tool of coercion, has long been understood.

What we are seeing now is not a failure of foresight. It is the execution of a long-anticipated phase of the campaign.

The strait will remain contested for some time. As Iranian systems, proxies, and maritime threats unmask themselves, they will be identified, targeted, and eliminated. Coastal missile batteries, fast attack craft, drones, mines, logistics nodes, and command-and-control systems will be progressively degraded through sustained operations—maritime, air, and land. This is not resolved in a single strike. It is resolved through sustained, deliberate operations that progressively degrade capability and establish control.

Layered force will be applied: naval assets to secure freedom of navigation; air power to suppress and strike; long-range platforms, including bombers such as the B-52, and in time loitering unmanned ordnance delivery systems, to deliver precision effects and deterrence; ISR to identify, fix, and finish emerging threats. This is campaign design, not improvisation.

Criticism that fails to recognise this—reducing a complex, contested phase of operations to surprise or incompetence—amounts to little more than reflexive opposition. The relevant question is not whether Iran would attempt to pressure Hormuz. That was always a given. The question is whether the United States and its partners had prepared for it.
The evidence is that they have.

The democracies of the world face a clear choice: support this collective effort, or live with the consequences of inaction. For too long, parts of Europe have drifted into a strategic muddle of their own making—outsourcing manufacturing capacity to Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and entrusting energy security to Vladimir Putin. The result has been a dangerous dependency—economic convenience traded for strategic vulnerability.

The contradiction is stark. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, France has committed approximately €8–9 billion in military and strategic support to Kyiv. Yet in parallel, it has continued to fund the very regime it opposes—purchasing tens of billions of euros in Russian energy since the invasion began. In some reporting periods, France and its European partners have collectively spent more on Russian fossil fuels than on supporting Ukraine’s defence.

What makes this more troubling is the tone of moral authority often adopted by President Emmanuel Macron. From lecterns across Europe, he speaks of sovereignty, values, and strategic autonomy—yet presides over a system that continues to transfer vast sums to the Kremlin. It is a form of strategic double-entry bookkeeping: condemning aggression with one hand while financing it with the other.

This is not simply inconsistency. It is brazen.

It reflects a broader failure of statecraft—where rhetoric has outpaced reality, and where difficult decisions have too often been deferred in favour of political convenience. The consequences are now evident: prolonged conflict, emboldened adversaries, and weakened credibility.

Across the European Union more broadly, the pattern has been even more pronounced. In the third year of the war in Ukraine, EU member states collectively spent more on Russian fossil fuels than on financial aid to Ukraine. Such decisions do not merely reflect poor judgement—they shape the strategic environment in which adversaries operate.

Compounding this is the strategic confusion surrounding energy policy, particularly the uncritical pursuit of “net zero” at any cost. In practice, this has too often meant the premature abandonment of reliable domestic energy sources without viable alternatives—deepening dependence on external suppliers, including hostile or unstable regimes. Australia is not immune to this mind virus. Energy policy divorced from strategic reality does not reduce vulnerability; it amplifies it.

Statecraft demands alignment between words and actions, between declared values and economic behaviour. The reality is this: adversaries do not fear statements of support. They respond to pressure—applied consistently, coherently, and without contradiction.

The question for the democracies of the world is therefore not whether the challenge is uncomfortable, but whether they are prepared to act with the clarity and discipline required to meet it.

That brings us back to the Middle East and its Sea Lines of Communication. Over time, as control is established over Kharg Island and the SLOCs of the Gulf—across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and beyond—the strategic equation begins to shift. A system once vulnerable to coercion becomes progressively more secure. Energy flows stabilise. Market volatility diminishes.

This will take time. It is not a tactical objective; it is a strategic undertaking.
It is, in many respects, the main game.

Objective Three: Internal Pressure and Empowerment

Third: the empowerment of anti-regime forces within Iran.
War is not fought solely by standing armies. It is fought by people—motivated, organised, and enabled.

The American War of Independence (1775–1783) remains the clearest example: a determined civilian population under arms, supported and supplied, defeating a dominant global power.

Modern doctrine reflects this reality. United States Army Special Forces, the CIA, and Israeli counterparts have long specialised in developing indigenous capability.

Inside Iran, the conditions already exist.

Years of repression have produced not compliance, but resentment and latent resistance—particularly among younger generations and among women who have borne the brunt of regime control. These are not abstract grievances. They are lived realities. Humiliation, repression, imprisonment, and violence do not extinguish political will. They harden it.
The task is to convert that resolve into capability.

That requires arms, communications, training, intelligence, and coordination. It requires networks that can move information, resources, and people. It requires patient cultivation of indigenous capacity rather than the fantasy that history is made only by regular formations in uniform. It also requires an abandonment of the narrow modern conceit that war is fought only by soldiers, and that political outcomes emerge only from conventional military manoeuvre.

That is historically false.

The American War of Independence was not won by polished formations alone. It was won by a people prepared to fight, endure, organise, and outlast a stronger imperial power. The same principle applies here. External force can shape the battlespace, but internal pressure is what fractures regimes.

This phase will be violent and prolonged—likely measured in years, not months. It will not require the sustained deployment of large-scale U.S. or Israeli conventional forces. Remnants of the regime—the Revolutionary Guard, intelligence services, local enforcers, and criminal opportunists—will not simply disappear. They will adapt, hide, retaliate, and attempt to reassert control through fear.

There is an uncomfortable truth here—one that sits poorly with the sensitivities of parts of the modern West: not all adversaries can be reasoned with. Some are ideologically committed to violence and repression as instruments of control. In such cases, they must be identified and eliminated.

For those far removed from consequence, this is difficult to accept. For those who have lived under such systems, it is self-evident.

If this were my own daughter—if she were imprisoned, brutalised, even raped, for defying the dictates of the regime, such as not wearing Islamic head coverings in public—if she had acid thrown on her face or her eye gouged out—I would not be searching for words. I would be seeking action. I would know exactly what needed to be done. And I would know I could not do it alone. I would need my brothers, my friends, and my community—organised, equipped, and prepared to act together. I would fight for my family’s very tomorrow, today. Such resolve is evident in the non-regime populace of Iran. It is inspiring. They need weapons and ammunition to take back their nation.

This is the reality of modern conflict. It is not fought solely by uniformed formations. It is increasingly enabled by networks—human and digital. Across contemporary battlefields, platforms such as WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging applications are used to share information in real time—images, locations, movements of enemy forces—connecting those on the ground with those capable of acting, such as the IDF and their firepower from the sky. What was once the exclusive domain of state intelligence services is now, in part, distributed—faster, more adaptive, and far more difficult to suppress.

That is confronting for many. It should be.

But it reflects the evolution of warfare. Resistance is built on people, on trust, and on the ability to communicate securely, share information, and coordinate action against those who seek to impose control through fear.
This is neither romantic nor tidy. It will offend modern sensibilities. But it is how regimes of this kind are ultimately broken.

It will require acceptance that success in this domain is rarely linear, rarely tidy, and rarely immediate. But over time, internal pressure—properly enabled—can achieve what external force alone cannot.

And if that pressure is sustained, the long-term picture changes dramatically. The Middle East of twenty years from now need not resemble the Middle East of the past twenty years. It is entirely conceivable that, in time, a flight from Australia to Israel might stop not in avoidance of Iran, but in Tehran itself.

That is not fantasy. It is strategy measured in decades rather than news cycles.

The Test of Leadership

These missions and objectives are complex. They are dangerous. And they are necessary.

They will be criticised—loudly—by commentators far removed from consequence. There will be no shortage of analysis from those who have never borne responsibility for outcomes.

More concerning is the tendency among some to critique action without offering alternatives, losing sight of long-term strategic interests in favour of immediate posture and fashionable pessimism.

If I were executing these operations, I would not want them debated in real time by the world’s chattering class. I would not want every tactical movement, contingency, and operational possibility openly gamed out by journalists, social media commentators, and professional sceptics. Surprise matters. Deception matters. Focus matters.

This is where the Commander-in-Chief matters.

President Trump will not be praised in real time. He will be criticised—by media, opponents, and allies uncomfortable with decisive action.
But leadership is not measured in comfort. It is measured in outcomes.
The alternative was clear: delay, accommodation, and ultimately a nuclear-armed Iran—an outcome that would almost certainly trigger regional proliferation, destabilise deterrence, and carry a very real risk of nuclear conflict.

If I were still serving, I would want a Commander-in-Chief who dominates and distracts the media—preserving surprise and freedom of action for those executing operations on the ground. As a father, conscious of the obligation to bequeath a better future, I would rather see existential threats confronted and eliminated while they remain weak.

We are competing today for our very tomorrow—while much of the West remains either unaware or unwilling to recognise the stakes.

In such an environment, the global press becomes something else entirely—drawn, redirected, and distracted. Like cats chasing a laser pointer, attention is pulled precisely where the strategist intends.

Because in modern war, the information domain is part of the battlefield.
And few understand how to command it better than the master of the strings.

Michael Scott CSC is a retired Australian Army Colonel, author and founder of a charity to combat antisemitism.