The Third Gulf War is raising plumes of smoke but could this appalling war have a silver lining?

If proof were needed that even after decades of globalization, the world isn’t flat, Iran’s chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz is providing plenty. The opposing view might be summarized in four words, ‘The Revenge of Geography,’ the title of geopolitical analyst Robert Kaplan’s prescient book more than a decade ago.

“Terrain determines the pace and method of fighting… the flat deserts of Kuwait and Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991 magnified the effect of air power, even as holding vast and heavily populated stretches of Iraq in the Second Gulf War showed the limits of air power and thus made American (ground) forces victims of geography,” Kaplan wrote, “Aircraft can bombard, but they cannot transport goods in bulk, nor exercise control on the ground.”As they embarked on the Third Gulf War, the US and Israel appear to have assumed their vastly superior air power and military intelligence would end the war in days. Iran, in response, launched drone attacks on US allies around the region in a bid to globalize the war and force the US and Israel to relent.

Assuming some sort of strategic plan precedes war in today’s world of majoritarian populists, the US-Israeli assumption appears to have been that with the senior Iran leadership killed, an acquiescent new leader in Tehran would capitulate, as in Venezuela. The recent ‘election’ of Ayatollah Khamenei’s son as supreme leader suggests the hardline faction is still in charge.

Now a war of attrition begins as the US and Israel seek to destroy Iranian infrastructure and Tehran responds by using drones and the proximity of geography to continue attacks on other oil and gas producers to make the global economy suffer collateral damage. US and Israeli casualties have been a fraction