The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is on the verge of superseding the limits of the liminal conflict. What is liminal conflict?  Liminal conflict is a way in which states deploy bounded violence to shape the international order and to reproduce that order over time (Lacey 2024).  Liminal conflict is oriented toward system maintenance rather than disruption.  But in the case of the Persian Gulf, the regional order is now experiencing systemic disruption, which may escalate into systemic collapse.  Both Israel’s geopolitical ambitions and Iran’s capacity to engage in horizontal escalation exceed the limits of liminal conflict.  There are diplomatic responses to this conflict that can be characterized as entropic diplomacy. The goal is not to establish order but to minimize the disorder toward which the system tends. 

The historical aspiration of the United States has been to order the international system rather than to permit the system to order itself (Bacevich 2010).  This is because if the world orders itself, the U.S. position of the primacy within it will become eroded. But, of course, this primacy is already badly eroded from the point of view of technology and production, as Time Sahay and Kate Mackenzie (2026) emphasize with regard to energy production.  The U.S. is still a financial and military power that exercises some degree of the structural power over the physical infrastructures of the global economy – financial networks, geopolitical and geoeconomic choke points.  The Strait of Hormuz is significant with respect to the type of power the U.S. has – in particular, its long-term policies of power projection into the Persian Gulf to supply the world market with cheap energy.  

The Carter Doctrine underscored the strategic interests of the U.S. in the Persian Gulf in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. U.S. military interventions into the region put the Carter Doctrine into practice.  Moreover, the Strait of Hormuz is a central site for the reproduction of U.S. centered carbon capitalism (Stokes and Rafael 2010).  It is the thermostatic valve of carbon capitalism and central to the ordering vocation of the U.S. – namely, that the international system must be ordered and that the U.S. is the only country capable of doing this and thus U.S. hegemony maintains the resource flows that are indispensable to carbon capitalism.  

Historically, the U.S. engaged in liminal war as a way of implementing the Carter Doctrine and sustaining the U.S. centered petro-economy.  This was true even before Carter Doctrine.  Liminal conflict informed Roosevelt’s oil for protection relation with Saudi Arabia and the imposition of the Shah in Iran in 1953.  It was the policy of dual containment that operated through Iran and Saudi Arabia – and, when this broke down, the Carter Doctrine.  Then it became tanker wars, proxy conflicts, sanctions regimes, and the U.S. wars on Iraq – all of them techniques of order through........

© E-International