Object Lessons

Are we living in an interregnum? Ever since the reascension of Donald Trump, and especially after the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran, left commentators have increasingly invoked Gramsci’s aphorism—an old world dying and a new one struggling to be born—to foretell American decline. On the one hand, such language is useful as a kind of shorthand for historical uncertainty, able to capture both the exhaustion of an existing order and the inability to name what comes after it. Yet at the same time, phrases like these tend to make the transition sound abstract, almost metaphysical, as though the future were unfolding somewhere above politics rather than in the material spaces where war, commerce, geography, infrastructure, and law meet.

The Persian Gulf is one such space, and the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway connecting it to the rest of the world, is the eye of the storm. Far more than a passageway for barrels of crude, Hormuz is a critical node in a network of global economic systems. Not only does Hormuz connect energy, liquefied natural gas, petrochemicals, and fertilizer to world markets; in the process, it shapes insurance, shipping, sovereign wealth, aviation, tourism, food systems, and debt structures across the globe. When one energy route is interrupted, risk gets redistributed across many systems at once. A threat to tankers in one part of the world can translate into fertilizer shortages thousands of miles away, lowering yields on what farmers plant and triggering food scarcity and inflation, which in turn produces sovereign debt distress. From the United Kingdom to India, such shocks can cascade into political crises in countries with no role in the original war.

It’s for this reason that the tense standoff in the Gulf since the ceasefire in early April has revolved around the Strait of Hormuz as both chokepoint and bargaining chip: Iran leverages the threat of disrupted passage, and the United States treats restored transit as the measure of de-escalation even as it imposes its own naval blockade. That the war in Iran has been a catastrophic blunder is now a consensus position in the United States, as the recent House vote to end the war makes clear. But that belated realization can do little to alter the damage wrought. The course of events set in motion by February’s decapitation strikes on the Iranian regime has settled into a ceasefire that is not merely a pause in hostilities—and, as each side continues to trade blows, is not even reliably that. It should be understood instead as generative, a prelude to an emerging, deeply precarious realignment. Here, in the ceasefire that has secured neither peace nor war, in the Strait of Hormuz that is neither open nor closed, in the Gulf states that are neither fully aligned nor neutral, we can see the beginnings of a future world coming into view. What are the initial contours of that world? What forms of power are beginning to harden within it?

Only by looking closely at each overlapping feature of the new order—part might-makes-right, part spheres-of-influence, part transactional hedging, and part hubris-driven late-phase unipolarity—can we understand how the pieces fit into one another. One thing, at least, is immediately certain: today’s landscape is one in which the United States, still holding fast to its position at the top of the global order, remains powerful enough to break things but is increasingly unable to stabilize the aftermath of its rampage. Instead, the very force that claimed to guarantee the system has become the principal accelerant of its unraveling.