Israel Can Still Strike. It Can No Longer Promise Control.

The most dangerous illusion in modern statecraft is not that war is tragic. Everyone knows that. The more dangerous illusion is that a state can still convert violence into order with anything like the confidence it once claimed. That illusion is now breaking in full public view. Israel may still hit targets, eliminate commanders, and display operational reach. But the deeper question is no longer whether it can strike. The deeper question is whether it can still contain what its own escalation releases. Oil has jumped to highs not seen since 2022, shipping risk around the Gulf has widened, and markets are already pricing the conflict less as a contained campaign than as a spreading systemic shock. That is not a side effect. It is the strategic event itself.  

This is why the old language of success has started to sound hollow. A state may win tactically and still fail politically. It may destroy without closing. It may escalate without governing the consequences of escalation. In that case, the issue is no longer a mistaken operation or a flawed intelligence estimate. The issue is that the basic promise of the modern state begins to crack: the promise that the monopoly of force allows chaos to be translated back into order. What happens instead is simpler and uglier. Force returns home as inflation, transport risk, fiscal pressure, and a longer horizon of insecurity than the one it claimed to solve. Reuters’ coverage of energy and European markets already points in exactly that direction.  

That is the point many analysts still refuse to name. What is collapsing is not only a campaign. What is collapsing is the credibility of “controlled escalation” itself. That phrase should now be treated with the contempt it deserves. If each round produces wider economic exposure, deeper strategic uncertainty, and less confidence that the political class can contain the aftershocks, then this is not control. It is the management of spillover under the theatrical language of control. The longer the conflict runs, the less it demonstrates mastery and the more it exposes the shrinking capacity to govern what escalation sets loose.  

One more fracture is now opening inside Israel itself. The war with Iran is no longer only a test of military reach. It is becoming a test of who still has the political right to speak in the name of security after Netanyahu. That is why the most important domestic consequence may not be military embarrassment but succession pressure inside the security camp itself. Netanyahu entered 2026 already under heavy domestic strain, with his leadership under scrutiny after October 7, coalition tensions over conscription and budget politics, and Reuters describing early elections as a live possibility if those pressures deepened. A war that widens insecurity while raising its domestic price does not strengthen that class. It begins to consume it.  

For Israel, this matters at a level deeper than embarrassment for generals or intelligence chiefs. The real damage is slower and more corrosive. It touches deterrence, budget credibility, the cost of daily life, the endurance of households, and the public’s confidence that the state still knows the difference between projecting power and exhausting its own base. Even before the present phase of the war, the Bank of Israel had kept rates unchanged at 4%, citing geopolitical, inflationary, and fiscal risks. Reuters also reports that the war is estimated to be costing roughly 3 billion dollars a week. A country entering major escalation under those conditions is not acting from surplus strength. It is acting from suspended fragility.  

This is where the social meaning of war changes. The citizen is no longer mobilized toward a clear common end. The citizen is turned into a carrier of strategic cost. He pays through fuel, food, mortgages, taxation, shrinking fiscal room, and a longer uncertainty premium attached to ordinary life. That is not the classical conservative picture of the state as protector of continuity. Nor is it the liberal picture of a rational order in which force remains subordinate to stability and prosperity. Both languages now fail at once. Conservatism fails because the state no longer protects continuity without making life more brittle. Liberalism fails because markets do not stabilize politics when politics itself has become a generator of systemic economic stress. The drop in euro-zone investor morale and the weakening of recovery expectations show how quickly the penalty spreads beyond the battlefield.  

That is why the larger Western failure is not merely operational. It is cognitive. Washington and Western Europe still approach the Middle East as if superior hardware, sanctions, and deterrence messaging automatically produce political legibility. They do not. The region does not obey the fantasy of external administration. It is structured by memory, humiliation, symbolic thresholds, ideological patience, and long strategic temporalities that cannot be reduced to target packages. To confuse military reach with political understanding is the old imperial error. It always looks rational in briefing rooms. It always looks absurd once the economic and strategic blowback begins to arrive. The present shock to oil, shipping, bond yields, and investor expectations is not an unfortunate complication around the war. It is the receipt for not understanding the theatre one claims to manage.  

Clausewitz now begins to invert. War no longer appears as the continuation of politics by other means. More and more often, it appears as the continuation of political failure by more destructive means. Politics has been reduced to administering the secondary effects of violence that leaders can still unleash but can no longer convert into a stable architecture of order. That is the real scandal. Not that an operation may prove costly. Not that a campaign may overrun its optimistic assumptions. But that the strategic class still speaks as though force remains an instrument of construction when it increasingly behaves as an accelerant of decomposition.  

What Israel risks losing in such a moment is not only deterrence in the narrow military sense. It risks losing confidence in the state’s ability to promise containment. Once the public begins to suspect that leaders can still start escalations but no longer credibly delimit their consequences, a much deeper crack opens. Then the question is no longer whether this government miscalculated. The question becomes whether the governing form itself has entered crisis. A state that can no longer produce security except by multiplying uncertainty is not facing a strategic setback. It is facing a crisis of its own political form.  

That is the hard conclusion. Israel may leave this war not simply bruised, not simply more expensive to defend, not simply more isolated in perception. It may leave it less capable of sustaining the internal credibility on which modern power actually depends. The final humiliation would not be that the campaign failed to achieve enough. The final humiliation would be that it revealed something worse: that the state can still destroy at high speed, but can no longer convincingly govern what destruction unleashes. And that is not merely a military embarrassment. It is the exposure of a model nearing exhaustion.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig 

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)