East West by Rampini | «Escalation management» or «overwhelming force immediately»? Is a new American military doctrine emerging in the Gulf?

There Gulf crisis has entered a new phase: less classic fighting, more geoeconomic clash. While the truces are prolonged and negotiations should restart soon in Islamabad (the American delegation is on its way to Pakistan), the United States is trying to reverse its own tactics of economic strangulation against the Iranian regime. The war therefore moved mainly to this level: an endurance racewhere it’s a matter of seeing who succumbs to economic exhaustion first.

THE’Iran makes good on its threats to block Hormuzthe US Navy intercepting Iranian ships wants to deprive the scheme of funding. If this is the current context, the time could be prolonged.

Iran had in fact guarded itself against this type of embargo parking its “ghost fleet” in the seas of half the world, where a considerable quantity of oil floats. Among the subterfuges he uses there is also transfer from ship to ship, which makes interception more difficult (if an Iranian ship moored in international waters transfers its crude oil onto a Chinese tanker, from then on the oil travels under another flag). It cannot therefore be ruled out that the conflict has become low intensity but at the same time could last for a long time.

In the meantime, I suggest reading this analysis, written by a former American soldier who is now a strategy scholar. His thesis is interesting: the war in Iran marks the end of an American military doctrine and the inauguration of a new season, with new tactics. The following text is from Mike Lyonsretired U.S. Army officer, defense and national security scholar. Appeared on Wall Street Journal on April 23:

«The debate on the military campaign conducted by the United States and Israel against Iran is centered above all on the politics of one man (Trump), rather than on the war itself. This, however, deserves to be seriously studied in its specific characteristics. The war in Iran is the first large-scale American operation in a generation to abandon “measured escalation management” and “proportionate response.”replacing it with overwhelming force employed from the start. And it was conducted with moderation towards civilians. This will be an important part of the legacy left by this conflict.

For decades, the proportionate response it worked less as a strategy than as a ritual: hitting a cell tower, bombing a barracks. This theory, codified in Cold War deterrent doctrine, held that responding to force with more or less equivalent force would allow the “path and speed of escalation” to be controlled. In practice, these rules of engagement protected enemy sanctuaries.

The initial phase of Operation Epic Fury threw that manual away. Nearly 900 attacks in 12 hours simultaneously hit Iranian military infrastructure, air defenses and regime leadership. It was an overwhelming display of superiority, delivered as an opening blow. Iran attempted to revive the escalation by threatening the Strait of Hormuz and striking neighboring Arab states, but these moves did not change the strategic calculus on the ground. The doctrine of controlled escalation, with its tit-for-tat approach, was cast aside as the U.S. military imposed a strategic ceiling that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was unable to overcome.

Iran’s civilian infrastructure — power grid, water systems and oil export terminals — was largely spared. When American forces struck Kharg Island, the attacks concentrated on military targetsnot on the facilities that allow oil tankers to continue operating.

This reflects a deliberate calculation: the United States has turned Iranian civilian infrastructure into a bargaining chip. By sparing the electricity grid and oil facilities, Washington has preserved an incentive for the regime to survive. This is not just about humanitarian restraint; it is the construction of a “golden bridge” across which a crippled leadership can eventually retreat arguing that all is not lost. It also serves American interests. As a member of the Iranian opposition, the son of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, states, striking the regime’s “massacre machine” means weakening it enough to allow the Iranian people to conclude the struggle from within.

Which leads to a crucial question: What will be the way out of this war?

The first round of talks in Islamabadthe highest level of contact between the United States and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, lasted 21 hours and produced nothing. From there we moved to an American naval blockade, which represents the second phase of the new evolving US doctrine.

After dismantling Iran’s military infrastructure, the United States transitioned to a static siege. This block is the new proportionality: devastating in its economic effects, but capable of maintaining the strategic leverage guaranteed by the oil terminals left intact.

Exit will require architecture, not just negotiation. Iran’s new supreme leader leads a regime widely described as paralyzed and consumed by internal power struggles. It is not a government capable of signing an unconditional surrender. He needs a narrative to offer his loyalists to explain why he can stop.

There are possible agreements: release of prisoners, a hudna — a temporary truce explicitly provided for in classical Islamic law — linked to tangible concessions. The United States should seek the expulsion of young political prisoners to save them from imminent execution, while relieving pressure on an already stressed prison system and giving the opposition diaspora something it wants. They would not be capitulations. Instead, they would be the elements of an exit that both parties can survive politically.

The deeper story, the one that will matter far beyond any future peace agreement, concerns what this conflict demonstrated about the future of American military power. After the Cold War, the idea spread that US military superiority had become self-deterrent: so overwhelming that its use would cause a global crisis, effectively rendering it unusable. Iran has spent three decades building a strategic architecture of proxy militias, asymmetric capabilities, and nuclear ambiguity, all designed to exploit that American self-containment. The Revolutionary Guard Corps advanced toward nuclear capability not because it believed it could win a direct war, but because it calculated that America would never start one. That calculation turned out to be wrong.

Whatever one’s assessment of Operation Epic Fury, the signal is unmistakable: the United States is willing to use overwhelming force, with deliberate restraint toward civilian infrastructure and without anxiety about the risks of escalation. It is a different America from the one on which Iran and China had built their strategic models. Now they are updating those models. The media will continue to tell this war as a story about Donald Trump. It’s their right, and it’s their mistake. The real story is bigger than any one president and will last well beyond this news cycle.”