Why the strait is lost, whatever Trump says.
One of the great articles about power and the human condition is Dexter Filkins’s The Shadow Commander. It details the sinister genius of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force and the man responsible for Iran’s hostile takeover of Iraq after the botched American invasion of 2003.
Soleimani armed Iraq’s Shia militias with explosively formed penetrators pioneered by Lebanese Hezbollah, which they buried along nondescript desert highways. Nearly two hundred American troops were eviscerated into spatter by those roadside bombs. Even the Mossad feared the man the Iranians called sardar-e delha, the Commander of Hearts. Former director Yossi Cohen said Soleimani had “personally tightened a noose around Israel’s neck.” Hamas later credited Soleimani with the idea of turning Gaza into a warren of tunnels and rocket pits.
Trump ordered the assassination as the new year broke in 2020. Soleimani was fittingly blown to smithereens by a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport; what remained was identified by the ring on his hand. The Iranians have never forgiven the affront. The death of their favourite son remains the pretext for ongoing efforts to kill the American president.
In life, Soleimani held the Americans in contempt over what he considered a lack of stomach. Obama was a coward in the face of ISIS, he sneered. Trump he rated lower still: a man defined by “night clubs and gambling halls”. When Trump threatened the Iranian president by tweet in 2018, Soleimani answered with a speech: you might have started this war, but we will be the ones to impose its end.
Source: New Yorker
His taunt survived the grave. An IRGC spokesman repeated it in February 2026, and the regime is now confident it has Trump cornered. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, demands America lift its naval blockade, withdraw its forces, end all sanctions, free Iran’s frozen assets, pay war reparations, stop striking militia allies, and cease its threats and insults before Iran will open the strait.
The United States will not be able to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and keep it open. I hope I’m wrong. But the articles you read this week, many justifiably critical of Trump, miss the strategy Soleimani built to outlive him. There is no one in Tehran who can order the drones and missiles to stop, and make that order stick.
Which Iran?
Media debates over what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ deal often rest on a flawed premise: that the regime is a single actor, able to bargain its way out of the war. In truth, Iran has four factions: the Revolutionary Guard, the foreign ministry, the old-school clerical establishment, and the remnants of the Green Movement. None want the same future. And more importantly, they do not have the same ability to impose their preferred outcome on the others.
The Revolutionary Guard and the deep state around Mojtaba Khamenei run internal security and most of the real economy. The war has been a godsend: cover to crush their enemies, who by now include most of the population. They have no appetite for concessions. The populist uprising that Trump and Netanyahu encouraged in the early days of the war died with up to 50,000 young Iranian women and men. The regime had massacred a generation of organisers before the first bombs fell.
On the other side sit President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi, who want a settlement that preserves the regime and lifts sanctions. These are the people to whom the West talks. The ageing clerics of Qom, ever suspicious of politics and the temporal world, supply the regime’s paper-thin religious legitimacy and are increasingly uneasy about the social and spiritual costs of war. Reformists like Mir Hossein Mousavi – under house arrest since 2011 for protesting a stolen election – are irrelevant to anything decided today, though they remain the seed of an Iran that does not hang its children from cranes.
The Guard has held all the cards since March. So when you read that Iran has offered something, or rejected something, ask first: which Iran? When Trump announces talks, the foreign ministry is on the other side of the table. When Tehran denies the talks exist, that’s the Guard correcting the record. All political systems have factions. But few have a gap so wide between those sent to negotiate and those who shoot.
The advantages of mosaic defence
Iran’s strategy against the United States was birthed in Iraq, and once again, the Shadow Commander was its architect. In 2008, at the height of the surge, he sent General Petraeus a message through the Iraqi president: you should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan. Whatever Petraeus signed in Baghdad would not bind the men firing rockets and laying IEDs. They answered to Soleimani.
A second tutorial came from watching the fall of Saddam. He had a large army with a centralised command structure. Every outward sign suggested a state capable of fierce resistance, yet the Americans blew it away in three weeks. Soleimani realised that Saddam’s divisions had stood waiting for orders from men already dead. If Iran could not win a conventional war, it would at least refuse to present its head for cutting.
Mohammad Ali Jafari, who took overall command of the Guard in 2007, called the solution mosaic defence. He broke the IRGC into 31 provincial commands, each with its own arsenal and intelligence network, alongside standing orders to fight on if Tehran fell silent. Israel tested the theory in June 2025 with the lightning decapitation of the Guard’s senior command. As they died, Iran’s missile salvos grew ragged. A humiliating defeat followed as the regime’s nuclear facilities were pulverised by B-2 bombers.
The Guard spent the next eight months understanding what went wrong, before empowering mid-ranking officers to order retaliatory strikes independently. When the latest phase of the war began in February 2026 with the assassination of the Supreme Leader, retaliation came within hours.
Mosaic defence solved the problem of overcentralisation that had bedevilled the Soviet-era military planning of Saddam. Today, it presents a new one for the world: a system designed to survive the forfeiture of its head does not much care for the promises made by its mouth.
The incentives of attrition
The Guard will never sign anything resembling a neutral deal. Sanctions have turned Iran into an economy of scarcity and workarounds. Those who control the bottlenecks have grown hard and rich. The tolling of Hormuz, which the IRGC is now confidently working towards, extends what is already working. Every shipment must pay, licit or otherwise. Trump’s tariff regime rests on the same mafioso notion of power, in which influence concentrates in individuals, to be doled out as favours at a price.
The regime thrives on the language of emergency. Dissent is treason punishable by death; communal hardship is the price of resistance. Iran’s educated, secular middle class has been gutted by sanctions and emigration. The Guard doesn’t mind. It calculates that it’s better to hold all of a broken nation than none of a free one.
Iran, as I argued in Iran Will Outlast America, does not need to win this war. It simply needs to outwait an unpopular president with a bantam attention span. As a young man, Soleimani entered the Iran-Iraq War on a fifteen-day assignment. He stayed until the end, eight years later. Trump, meanwhile, has a looming midterm problem in November of his own making; he’s the counterparty running out of time and the Iranians know it.
Predictable as Hollywood
They’ve seen this American movie before, and so have I. In 2013, I was a diplomat in Beirut when Obama drew his red line on chemical weapons. Assad crossed it soon after, gassing hundreds of children two hours up the road in the outer suburbs of Damascus. In the worst moment of his presidency, Obama hid behind a congressional vote he knew he would lose rather than honour his promise to the Syrian people. The Syrian and Palestinian refugees on the streets of Beirut were beside themselves. You don’t understand what it’s like here, they told me. The war will come. It always comes. From Syria, Israel, Iran, America. Spin the wheel.
UN and Western defence types got drunk in the empty Beirut bars. My wife and newborn daughter flew to Cyprus, out of harm’s way. Beirut was spared Assad’s terrorism this time, but Obama had crossed the Rubicon. Or perhaps had failed to cross it, for fear of getting wet. Putin took Crimea six months later, wagering that a president who flinched in the Mediterranean would flinch on the Black Sea. He came for all of Ukraine in 2022. The Taliban were watching too. You have watches, they liked to say, but we have the time. That ultimate sellout came under Biden. Today, they’re back in Kabul, making sure girls can’t read. The Guard has priced all of this in. It knows what an American promise is worth, and so does everyone else in the region. A birthday sparkler, burning bright at a thousand degrees, and then gone.
We’d love to hear your thoughts – email luke.heilbuth@bwdstrategic.com or message him on LinkedIn if you’d like to continue the conversation.
About the Author
Luke Heilbuth is CEO of sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat.
On Substack, Luke writes about the systems we’re breaking and the blindness that lets us — from climate and geopolitics to AI and the future of work. Read & Subscribe on Substack here.
