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The second month of the US-Israeli war on Iran remains in a fog. Losses, surviving capacities and intentions all around remain deliberately obscured. What is clear is that both sides believe they are winning, which is less a paradox than a reflection of the fact that they are fighting two different wars with different objectives, timelines and tolerances for pain. That divergence is precisely what makes this conflict so difficult to resolve and so easy to escalate.

A new over-riding objective has been added to the US-Israeli list: reopening the Hormuz Strait. The irony has been widely noted – the Strait was open when Trump decided to attack Iran.

The first month has not broken Iran. What it has produced is an attritional campaign in which both sides can claim partial progress. Hezbollah’s entry has expanded the war geographically; Houthi re-engagement – a ballistic missile fired toward Israel was intercepted over the West Bank – signals further widening. The conflict is no longer bilateral in any meaningful sense.

The shape of the campaign so far

The US-Israeli air campaign has moved through distinct phases: first, the targeting of Iranian missile stocks and production facilities; then naval assets and air defences; now industrial and civilian infrastructure. Iran had no effective answer to the aerial assault, and the pattern of recent strikes – universities, research institutes, steel plants, captive power units – suggests that Israel’s ambitions extend beyond degrading Iran’s warfighting capacity to undermining its ability to recover after the war ends. That is a different, and darker, objective.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Iran’s counter-strategy has been to absorb punishment while distributing pain outward – through missiles, drones, and the implicit threat of strangling Hormuz. After its steel plants were struck, Tehran has identified reciprocal targets: steel and industrial facilities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain. The recent strikes on aluminium facilities in the UAE and Bahrain were not opportunistic – they signal a deliberate shift toward economic warfare, with consequences that extend well beyond the immediate theatre. Today,........

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