Ho deciso di rispondere a Michael Froman che ha scritto il seguente commento:
«Much of the commentary on the war in Iran has focused on whether the mounting costs of Operation Epic Fury are worth it. The most common question I hear now, though, is how does this all end? The choice now before President Donald Trump may be to pick between the lesser of three unattractive options: a dramatic escalation, a conciliatory deescalation, and a continuation of today’s messy stalemate.
The first approach would be to shoot our way out. Trump is reportedly giving this serious thought, having said earlier this week that he is considering a restart to sustained and high-intensity strikes akin to the start of Operation Epic Fury. In his own words, “[Iran hasn’t] received enough pain yet.” Or, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it yesterday, the United States could pursue a strategy of a “head for an eye.”
The United States could strike Iranian critical infrastructure—including oil and gas facilities, power plants, critical transportation infrastructure, and desalination facilities—in the hopes of wreaking further havoc on the Iranian economy and society. But the cruel logic of this approach is obvious, and we have avoided it for good reason. Strikes of this nature could cause a humanitarian crisis in Iran, stain the United States’ moral standing, and would by no means guarantee capitulation from the regime. That is to say nothing of the Pandora’s box that a “total war” might open, placing the Gulf states’ critical infrastructure, energy and power facilities, civilian population centers, as well as desalination plants at the top of Iran’s target list.
Trump could also put boots on the ground, including to seize Kharg Island—which facilitates the lion’s share of Iran’s oil exports—and secure a strip of Iranian territory adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz to ensure safe passage for vessels transiting the strait. But such operations would put thousands of U.S. warfighters and prized naval assets at risk.
The United States could also begin to re-target senior Iranian leaders. But the regime has proved remarkably adept at replenishing itself, if not stiffening its resolve, in the wake of such strikes. As Ray Takeyh and Reuel Marc Gerecht aptly observed in a recent essay for the Wall Street Journal, “Tehran has a wartime advantage over Washington because the ruling Iranian elite wants to fight and has been willing to endure far more pain than Donald Trump.” That said, Rubio noted that “they’re probably not ready to do a deal yet, but they will be soon because the price they’re paying is very high despite their tough talk and their flowery language.”
That brings me to the second option that the president could consider: deescalation. In practice, this runs the risk of looking like capitulation. The United States could significantly scale back its military presence, declare victory (again) with respect to most of Operation Epic Fury’s stated military objectives, and accept—at least to some degree—Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz.
The costs of the war are already high, and it’s not clear whether the president nor the American people have an appetite for such costs. Three U.S. military service members were killed in Iran’s recent attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq, Jordan, bringing the total to eighteen service members killed and nearly 450 wounded. New polling shows 68 percent of Americans believe the Iran war was not “worth fighting.” Then there are the strategic costs, namely a further and accelerated draw-down of munitions, which are already in short supply, and the repositioning of forces from priority theatres, such as the Indo-Pacific, which could invite opportunistic actions from China in the Taiwan Strait.
This option would be a hard sell politically. If the United States were to implement the provisions of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding as written, Iran would remain in a position to continue to choke off the Strait of Hormuz at will—or at least charge a toll for passage while kicking down the road any real discussion of unresolved issues around its nuclear program. A unilateral deescalation would also shatter the confidence of our partners in the region—not to mention partners elsewhere—in the United States as a trustworthy guarantor of security.
Suffice it to say that both the escalatory and deescalatory options before Trump are both unappealing. That is why he has understandably tried to chart a middle course: a tit-for-tat strategy of strikes and new deal offers playing out simultaneously in the military and diplomatic domains. But it remains to be seen whether this approach is likely to succeed on either front.
The costs mount every day, and the ultimate outcome is far from clear, but given the perils of a significantly more dovish or hawkish approach, the current conflict in the strait may become the new status quo.
The Strait of Hormuz is neither fully open nor closed. The ceasefire is punctuated by attacks almost daily, though it might be producing “shooting in a more moderate manner” to borrow the president’s own words. And the price of oil is high, though seemingly not crippling to the global economy, at least as of today. In the absence of a breakthrough on either the military or diplomatic front, this state of affairs is calcifying.
So, how long could this all last? The astrophysicist J. Richard Gott offered an infamous rule of thumb: absent better information, the odds are even that a phenomenon will endure at least as long as it already has. By that grim arithmetic, the five month old stalemate in the strait stands an even chance of grinding on through the end of this year. And every month it continues, its odds of surviving the next only improve.
If you don’t find that logic persuasive, there are always the prediction markets. Expectations there put a 50 percent chance on commercial vessel traffic in the Strait of Hormuz “returning to normal” (a proxy for the end of conflict) by the end of 2026—basically aligning the wisdom of crowds with a Princeton astrophysicist. Go figure.»
La mia risposta:
Dear Sir,
Your arguments, while interesting, remain trapped within the artificial communicative framework that portrays the Iran–USA–Israel war as a fight to assert the right to security in the Middle East and to prevent the Iranian regime from building nuclear weapons. Even my thirteen-year-old daughter has realised that this is a pile of lies, for the following reasons:
Security in the Middle East is threatened by the ongoing war between Israel and the complex reality of the representatives and supporters of the Palestinian people, who have been in diaspora since 1948. This is a conflict that has overstepped every boundary and taken on the characteristics of genocide—the systematic destruction of a people by a state entity, with the backing of a portion of its own population. This is the true threat to security in the Middle East. Iran has assumed an active role in this context solely because of the involvement of its regional allies.
The second issue is even more risible. After the famous “Twelve-Day War,” the President of the United States officially assured the world that Iran no longer possessed any capacity to enrich uranium for any purpose. Yet the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that as of June 13, 2025—immediately before those strikes—Iran possessed 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, a level close to the 90 percent needed for a weapon and far above the 3.67 percent limit set by the 2015 agreement. Since June 2025, the IAEA has been unable to verify the fate of this stockpile, with Tehran refusing access to inspectors at sites ravaged by US and Israeli strikes. Furthermore, Iran—unlike Israel—has adhered with full compliance to all international non-proliferation treaties and has submitted to constant monitoring by the IAEA. By withdrawing from the protocols signed by his predecessor Obama, the United States effectively placed itself outside any international framework for verifying the Iranian government’s conduct, reinforcing its own characterisation as a state authority operating above international law—like any outlaw of the Wild West who proclaims himself the law simply because he possesses the most powerful weapons in the territory.
Your profession as an analyst should have obliged you, by deontological duty, to report the facts—not the fairy tales suitable for the press conferences of the War Department, which daily celebrate the successes of the bombings while concealing every material and human loss.
It would therefore be appropriate to establish the factual truth. Since 2022, with Russia’s invasion of Donbas—exploiting a submerged civil war that had been ongoing in that area since 2014—Western chanceries have been presented with the prospect of using war as a simplified instrument for the transition to renewable energy. Was it really a coincidence that, immediately after the Donbas war began, European leaders rushed to accelerate REPowerEU while simultaneously approving unprecedented military budgets? And that the very same fossil-fuel companies that funded Trump’s campaign saw their share prices soar?
Was the Kremlin truly unwilling to confront the EU and the Biden–Harris administration over this? Or did the strategic designs of the Anglo-Saxon and Franco-German powers simply coagulate around the project that only war could convince Western populations to drastically cut energy consumption? Was this not a reckless gamble—sacrificing the Ukrainian and Russian people to an exhausting war of attrition, while diverting devastating financial resources toward unproductive military expenditures, at the expense of investment and GDP growth? And when that gamble was not won, did the fossil-fuel lobby not simply change the administration, bringing Trump back to extend the *Donbas experiment* to the rest of the planet?
Was Trump not the ideal figure for this operation—a climate-change denier who, by claiming excellent relations with Putin, could find an arrangement for Donbas and redirect resources toward Venezuela and Iran? And did Zionist ambitions not fit perfectly into this framework, using the chronic Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a pretext for military confrontation with Iran, enabling the occupation of southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights?
Was the massacre of 7 October 2023 not the perfect *casus belli*—an event that placed the Biden–Harris administration in a cul-de-sac, unable to deny support to Tel Aviv yet unable to abandon Ukraine and the Arab world? What truly happened that day will be definitively revealed once Netanyahu leaves the scene. But has the application of the Hannibal Directive—the Israeli military protocol specifying that soldiers should be killed if necessary to prevent their capture—not already exposed the non-random nature of those events? Former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant confirmed giving the order to implement it; an internal Israeli army probe reaffirmed that the air force was ordered to carry it out within hours of the operation. Is the war in Gaza against Hamas not merely the prelude to the confrontation with Iran? And was EU support for Israel not functional to remedying the failure of the Donbas gamble?
This framework—beyond its inevitable simplifications—must be placed within the context of increased energy consumption caused by the explosion of LLMs and AI agents, and the confrontation with China.
Is China not genuinely implementing the transition to renewables—the low cost of its electric vehicles being tangible proof—while its leadership pursues a win-win-win strategy in which the economic-productive dimension takes priority over all else? Is it therefore not realistic to think that Beijing understood the war against Hamas as the antechamber of the subsequent *fossil wars*?
Thus we proceed to the famous Twelve-Day War with Iran. Did Iran not deploy military power and logistical-technological organisation sufficient to withstand a joint US–Israeli attack, responding with devastating effectiveness? Was a *coup de théâtre* not necessary to end the conflict immediately, pending better times?
Conversely, was striking Venezuela not made possible by Moscow and Beijing’s limited tolerance for Maduro’s media arrogance, and by the many opponents of his *caudillo* style within the Bolivarian movement? Was the kidnapping of Maduro—and Trump’s declaration that the United States would “run” Venezuela, securing new oil contracts for US fossil-fuel giants—not an operation that killed only a handful of Cubans and a few Venezuelans? Perfect in every detail.
Yet the Donbas war finds no solution. Is this not because Ukraine and the EU refuse to pay tribute to the US fossil-fuel industries after the previous bloodletting? So we must return to Iran.
This time, LLMs are relied upon to eliminate the Iranian leadership. Was the treacherous attack on the Minab school not a direct consequence of this reliance?
Consider the facts. On February 28, 2026—the first day of Operation Epic Fury—a Tomahawk cruise missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. The Pentagon later admitted it was at fault. The death toll: according to the UN and Iranian officials, 168 people killed—more than 100 of them under the age of 12. Other reports put the figure at over 170.
The Pentagon’s own investigation concluded that the school was targeted because the Department relied on outdated information provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The building had been part of an IRGC naval base until between 2013 and 2016, when it was converted into a school. Satellite imagery confirmed it had been a civilian educational facility for a decade. Yet the DIA database still classified it as a military target. One analyst had raised concerns about this assessment as early as 2019. Those concerns were ignored.
Now ask yourself: what system generated those target coordinates? The Maven Smart System—built by Palantir Technologies under a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract. It is the US military’s primary AI operating system. It fuses satellite imagery, drone feeds, radar data and signals intelligence into a single interface, then classifies targets and generates strike packages in near real time. At its heart is Anthropic’s Claude AI model—the first LLM approved to operate on classified military networks. Claude helps semi-autonomously rank targets by strategic importance, drafting automated legal justifications for each strike. In the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, Maven generated hundreds of strike coordinates, enabling attacks on more than 1,000 targets. In 38 days, it processed 13,000 targets. The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, Cameron Stanley, confirmed that Maven “frontier workflows” enabled US forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours.
At a Palantir technology conference in March 2026, Stanley displayed a Maven map of Iran that showed a red target marker precisely where the Minab school stood. The map overlapped with Pentagon strike maps.
Was it not the LLM that selected that school? The Pentagon’s own investigation says the target coordinates were generated from outdated data and “added to attack lists created by AI without adequate human oversight”. Investigators believe “AI-driven targeting—in addition to human error that failed to check whether target maps were up to date—may have played a role in the bombing”. Even Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, when asked whether his company’s AI had played a role, did not deny it—he simply said that “a human made that final call”.
So let me ask you directly: when the Pentagon admits the school was hit because of outdated data fed into an AI targeting system built by Palantir and powered by Claude—and when that same system’s map shows the school precisely marked as a target—is it not the LLM that bears responsibility? Or are we to believe that the “human in the loop” who approved the strike in seconds, overwhelmed by Maven’s speed, is somehow innocent? Military experts call this “automation bias”—the tendency to blindly trust machine recommendations. Is that not precisely what happened?
Now consider the aftermath. Iran reacted with unanticipated violence, causing chaos across the Arabian Peninsula. Real estate values in Dubai and Abu Dhabi collapsed. Lloyd’s recorded losses not seen since the COVID era—Hapag-Lloyd posted a net loss of €219 million in Q1 2026. Yet the extra-profits for other actors in the fossil-fuel system are considerable: Russia and sovereign funds celebrate the unexpected windfall. Brent crude surpassed $100 per barrel in March and again in July. According to the IEA, world production was below pre-war levels by approximately 9.4 million barrels per day.
Is it not clear who is profiting? ExxonMobil’s Q1 2026 earnings fell to $4.2 billion from $7.7 billion in Q1 2025—a decline that speaks volumes about the limits of war as a profit engine when it destabilises the very markets it is meant to exploit. But is the decline not relative? Are the fossil-fuel giants not still making billions?
Trump’s trip to China obtained Chinese neutrality in all ongoing fossil wars—but does it resolve the Iranian knot? The MoU was signed on June 18, 2026. Was it not a temporary victory for Tehran? On July 8, Trump declared the ceasefire “over” and resumed attacks. According to the Iranian Parliament’s National Security Committee, Trump violated most of the 14 articles of the Memorandum. Was this not predictable?
But let us not forget the stagecraft that preceded this “peace.” In December 2025, at the World Cup draw, Gianni Infantino—the president of FIFA—gifted Trump a specially created “FIFA Peace Prize,” complete with trophy, medal, and certificate. Infantino had cultivated a close relationship with Trump for years, introducing him at Davos and praising him as a “competitor” made of the same fiber as great athletes. By March 2026, when Trump posted on Truth Social that it would not be “appropriate” for Iran to play in the World Cup “for their own lives and safety,” it was Infantino who stepped in. He met with Trump, received assurances that Iran would be welcome, and announced to the world that “football unites” and that the World Cup could bring people together “more than ever”. When asked, Trump deferred to Infantino: “If Gianni said it, I agree. Let them play”. Iran’s team was allowed into the United States as a “goodwill gesture”—hours before the MoU was signed.
And what of the Nobel Peace Prize? Trump had been obsessed with it for years. He had been nominated by members of Congress for brokering ceasefires. He had demanded world leaders nominate him and even threatened Norway with tariffs if Oslo did not give him one. But the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize went instead to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado—who later gifted her medal to Trump. A convenient consolation prize—and a useful justification for the Maduro kidnapping—was it not? A way to grant Trump the legitimacy of a peace prize without the Nobel Committee having to officially award it.
So let me ask you: was the MoU signed because peace was at hand? Or was it signed because the World Cup was about to begin on American soil, and Infantino needed Iran to play—and Trump needed to look like a peacemaker? Was the Nobel Peace Prize—and its subsequent transfer to Trump via Machado—not a way to clothe a strategic pause in the robes of statesmanship? The ceasefire was never about ending the war. It was about managing its optics while the fossil-fuel machine regrouped.Now the situation has calcified. No significant successes can be achieved without striking civilian infrastructure—and the coffins begin to arrive again.
Why are the facts not being reported, and why are contrived questions being fuelled? Is it not because declaring the climate crisis and the necessity that the Anglo-Saxon fossil-fuel chain does not shut down its profits overnight would force the UN Secretary-General—if he were a free and independent person serving humanity in coherence with the 17 SDGs—to speak uncomfortable truths?
But you, Dr. Froman, are not a passive observer. You preside over the CFR. You move in the same circles as those who authorised these wars. You have access to the intelligence, the briefings, the decision-makers. You know who profits and who dies. You know that the Minab school was not a military target. You know that the nuclear narrative is a fabrication. You know that the Strait of Hormuz conflict is about fossil fuel dominance, not freedom of navigation. And yet, in all your public writings—including the very essay I am responding to—you have never once objected. You have never once called for a ceasefire. You have never once named the real beneficiaries of this slaughter. Instead, you offer “analysis” that sanitises war, reduces it to a chess game of “options” and “stalemates,” and treats the deaths of children and soldiers as variables in a geopolitical equation.
Do not insult my intelligence by pretending you are a neutral analyst. You are the president of the most influential foreign policy institution in the United States. Your words carry weight. Your silence is not professional discretion—it is complicity. You have chosen your side. You have chosen the side of the weapons manufacturers, the oil companies, the sovereign funds, and the politicians who serve them. You have chosen to lend your credibility—and that of the CFR—to a narrative that is demonstrably false. And by doing so, you have made yourself a co-conspirator in the very crimes you refuse to name. The difference between you and a Pentagon spokesperson is only the thickness of your suit and the prestige of your letterhead.
For my part, I find myself paying more and more for the fuel for my mobility and that of my family. National gasoline prices in the United States have surpassed $4 per gallon. I am exceedingly fortunate compared to the families of those poor young soldiers who died for the cupidity, the kleptocracy, and the egotistical characterisation of the American ruling class.
I hope you sleep soundly at night. May God bless you.
Rocco Santoro
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