One word can make a war last forever if it only interrupts it often enough. According to multiple sources, the U.S. Department of Defense is considering a new approach toward Iran: periodically bombing the country so oil tankers can keep passing through the Strait of Hormuz. One expert calls it exactly the endless war Donald Trump once swore to avoid. Periodically sounds measured and orderly, yet what it means is violence with no final day. The language of the administration calls permanence a procedure and turns the exception into standard operating practice. Trump had announced the war as a matter of a few weeks, now it is getting a rhythm for an unforeseeable length of time. A war that was sold as short is returning as a standing arrangement.
The plan is laid bare in its own language. American officials are considering striking Iran regularly in order to move dozens of oil tankers out of the Gulf relatively safely every day. War Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose department has called itself the Department of War since Trump's renaming, supported the proposal, administration officials said. This is not about defeating Iran, it is about keeping traffic in the Gulf moving, strike after strike. Dozens of tankers a day, that is the measure by which the sustained bombardment is being calculated. A goal that presents itself again every day has no endpoint, because tomorrow there will be tankers again. Defense becomes a permanent assignment.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, pushed back Monday evening. Previous administrations had already tried to sell a war against Iran while acknowledging themselves that military strikes would not eliminate the nuclear program, but would instead require regular new attacks to keep it permanently in check. The United States had rejected this approach precisely because it did not want a permanent state of war with Iran. A fire that you never put out and instead keep stoking again and again was too expensive for them. What Washington rejected back then is now considered strategy by today's administration, and of all people, Trump's War Secretary is pushing it forward. Bombing a program that no strike can destroy inevitably leads to repetition, and the repetition is the war itself.
The reversal is remarkable, Parsi said. Just a week ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had said sanctions made a military strike unnecessary. Six days later, the United States bombed Iran again, and now it turns out that the Pentagon had long been preparing a series of periodic attacks. The administration is giving up on the military solution just as it is giving up on the economic one. It never seriously pursued the diplomatic one anyway, and in its place comes a permanent war that merely manages the problem. Managing it here means never solving it and always repeating it. The sequence reveals the intention: first the promise of sanctions, shortly afterward the bombs. Even when the means change, they always lead to the same goal, to keep bombing. Make no mistake, Parsi wrote, periodically bombing a country means fighting an endless war.
Even its own generals are warning against it. America's military leadership said that continuing major operations against Iran for an extended period would not be sustainable, making smaller strikes more likely, though with no clear timeline. No clear timeline in practice means no end. A military reporting its own exhaustion is now becoming the tool of a strategy with no finish line, and for now the secretary has the upper hand. When the uniform warns against permanent war and the politician wants it anyway, the relationship between advice and command begins to tip.
On the ground, it is already escalating. On Monday, Trump threatened to hit Iran hard after Iran responded to U.S. bombardment with attacks on American bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. This followed the American bombardment of Larak Island, the first exchange of strikes in weeks in an expensive and unpopular war that Trump had called short and that is dragging on with no foreseeable end. Iran announced that it would respond dozens of times more forcefully to future attacks; no target in the region was beyond its reach. The General Staff of Iran's armed forces said the invading U.S. military had only one option left, withdrawal. Every threat draws the next one, and the calendar of strikes already reads like a calendar of counterstrikes.
And so a war that no one can win and no one wants to end gets its rhythm. Bombs on a schedule manage the problem they create, and periodically is the word for a war with no final day. A fire that you schedule instead of extinguishing burns the longest. Keeping the bottleneck of Hormuz open with periodic strikes means signing up for a war of indefinite duration. The few weeks Trump promised are becoming the eternity he swore off. A war with appointments has no end, only the next appointment, and Iran is already promising that the bill will grow with every beat.
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