I first met Lokman Slim in an Italian restaurant in downtown Beirut.
As a young diplomat, I had rehearsed the etiquette in my head. Lokman was a Shia Muslim. No wine. No pork.
He was late. A thick-set man ambled through the door as I waited by the window with the menu.
He sat down, studied me for a moment, and lit a cigarette.
His voice was gravelly from years of smoking, and once the formalities were dispensed with, he delivered political analysis faster than my pen could follow. Lokman traced the invisible wiring between sect, geography, and power the way other men discussed the weather.
Eventually he paused. Only to order a bottle of pinot noir and a ham pizza.
I’d later visit him at UMAM, a former fruit warehouse in Haret Hreik, a Hezbollah stronghold. He and his wife Monika had converted it into an archive of Lebanon’s civil war. Photographs of the missing lined the walls.
Sectarian hatred, he liked to say, was “the cells in which the Lebanese are jailed.” He reserved a special contempt for Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, whom he called the doorkeeper of Iranian arms: entrusted with the weapons, but not the authority to decide when to use them.
Being Shia, he told me once, was more a duty than an identity.
In Haret Hreik, every wall carried Nasrallah’s face and the green and yellow flag of the muqawama. Lokman lived there and said what he pleased.
The warnings arrived in the usual way: death threats scrawled on the wall of his house; anonymous messages suggesting he might live longer if he spoke less.
In 2019, he prepared his will. If anything happened, he told those close to him, they should treat it as a work accident.
His courage frightened me.
He understood the men he was defying. Hezbollah was an extension of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It had ministers in government, a private army larger than Lebanon’s own, and it killed with precision.
Two hundred grams of TNT could create chaos. So could one man with a knife. Lokman kept talking anyway.
Seven years after I left Beirut, I read the news.
They found his car on a rural road south of Sidon, in an area under Hezbollah’s control. Lokman was slumped across the front seats, one bare foot hanging out of the driver’s window. Four bullets in the head. One in the back.
Two young men had passed the car hours before. They assumed the driver was drunk and sleeping.
The crime scene was never secured. Men in civilian clothes wandered around the vehicle, touching it, even driving it. No one faced justice.
When the murder was confirmed, the son of Hezbollah’s leader posted a message on Twitter, quickly deleted:
“The loss of some people is in fact an unplanned gain. #notsorry.”
***
Of all the countries I have known, Iran is the one that refuses to leave me. I crossed the great desert and climbed the Towers of Silence, where Zoroaster’s dead were left for vultures to pick clean of flesh. I stood beneath the Gate of All Nations at Persepolis, the hinge of the world, where the kings of Asia bowed before the Shahanshah, King of Kings.
And I remember Isfahan.
Inside Sheikh Lotfollah mosque I stood slack-jawed beneath its dome. It rises above you, at once intimate and immense. Green tiles catch the dappled light and return it, like a ceramic forest in the late afternoon. A belt of Qur’anic verse separates the dome from the blue strata below, where hundreds of tiles glazed in flowers and vines descend to meet you. Lotfollah is, to my mind, the most beautiful building in the world.
The world misunderstands. Iran is a nation of poets and lovers. Whatever the ayatollahs pretend, the national hero is Hafez, a fourteenth-century Persian Shakespeare who wrote of love and wine. Visitors to his tomb in Shiraz, the city that gave its name to the grape, throw flowers and scraps of his verse beneath the pergola. More come to pay their respects there than to any mosque.
I remember Friday prayers in Yazd, an ancient city in the desert. Twelve people showed up. As Hitchens observed, within the carapace of a theocratic state, an almost completely secular society has emerged.
That is the tragedy: a civilisation that has outgrown theocracy remains imprisoned by it.
The Iranian people are not the Islamic Republic. This is a regime that, with a straight face, ordered the rape of young women in Evin Prison before executing them. Under its own theology, a virgin who dies is guaranteed paradise; the rapes were designed to ensure the condemned would not reach it. It has buried one of the world’s great civilisations under organised thuggery for nearly half a century. It is evil in the full and unqualified sense of that word.
But it is competent.
***
As a young diplomat I was once sent to the Iranian Embassy in Beirut to meet a senior officer of the Revolutionary Guard. In flawless Arabic he described how Tehran saw the region, and then began to probe: whether the Americans would strike, how their decision-making worked, what the military posture meant. He was not grandstanding. He was collecting intelligence while appearing to make conversation. I left that room understanding that the man who dreams of the Hidden Imam and the man questioning you across the table are often the same person.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, the war killed roughly half a million Iranians. To sanctify the slaughter, Ayatollah Khomeini’s lieutenants handed out small plastic keys to teenage volunteers. They were hung around the necks of boys sent to clear Iraqi minefields with their bodies. Branded as ‘keys of paradise’, they were meant to open the gates of heaven.
The lesson of that war still shapes Iranian strategy. Iran can endure.
The attention spans of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are measured in news cycles. Middle Eastern wars never go as planned, and the surprises are always to the downside. Trump needs this conflict over in weeks. Iran’s incentive is to stretch it into months. The Guard has no elections to lose.
Niall Ferguson and Richard Haass, who disagree on almost everything else, agree on this: time is the central variable. Ferguson argues the operation must be short, weeks not months, or it becomes a net loss for the United States. Haass calls it a classic war of choice, launched without congressional debate against a country that posed no imminent threat to vital American interests. Iran’s repressive system, he warns, can absorb punishment far longer than Americans will tolerate the cost. Both concede this odious regime deserves to fall. Both suspect the war to topple it is hurting Washington more than Tehran.
Walter Russell Mead sketches the likeliest ending: not victory, not defeat, but what he christens “the Mother of All Lawnmowers.” The Gulf reopened, the regime intact, its missiles trimmed but its power structure untouched.
Iran has always been good at waiting. It does not need to win. It needs to outlast. A narrow strait, a buried nuclear program, and the economic wreckage that follows when the world’s energy chokepoint shuts. These are weapons of patience.
34 kilometres
Iran’s most powerful weapon is thirty-four kilometres of water.
Twenty million barrels of oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz every day: roughly a fifth of global supply. A similar share of the world’s liquefied natural gas passes through the same water. Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar have no alternative. Pipelines can reroute barely three million barrels a day. The rest is stranded.
Iran does not need to close the strait by force. It needs to make the insurance prohibitive. In early March, insurers pulled war-risk cover for vessels entering the Gulf. Tanker traffic collapsed almost overnight. A dozen insurers paralysed a sea lane without a shot being fired. Patient friction against an adversary with a short attention span.
So far, Iran has only had to close a shipping lane. The oil is still being pumped. But if the war affects production – repeated drone strikes on the refineries, say – the shortage stops being temporary and the price of oil passes two hundred dollars a barrel.
Western sanctions already choke most Iranian oil exports; much of its crude moves through shadow tanker fleets to China at steep discounts. If Hormuz closes, the countries that suffer most are not Iran but America’s allies.
This has the makings of a bigger energy shock than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That crisis helped fuel the populist surge now reshaping Western democracies. A prolonged closure of Hormuz would be worse, and the politics that follows uglier still.
Robert Kaplan’s Revenge of Geography argues that terrain, not ideology, determines the fate of nations. Here it is unanswerable. This regime sits beside the world’s most important chokepoint and has spent nearly half a century learning how to exploit it.
When the strait closes, the consequences do not stay in the Gulf. Grocery prices rise in Sydney. Factories close in Shenzhen. When the tankers stop, there is no fallback. The assumption that any of this will be stable by 2027 is increasingly heroic.
A long shock
The economic damage accumulates slowly, then all at once. Brent crude surpassed ninety dollars a barrel in the first week, up roughly twenty-eight percent. Yet forward contracts for 2027 hovered around seventy dollars, and the S&P 500 barely flinched. Markets are pricing a short war. If they are wrong, the mispricing is severe.
Even if the fighting stopped tomorrow, normality would not return. Shipping lines need weeks to resume. Oil exporters behind the strait need months to restore output. Insurers need longer still. The supply chain does not have a reset button.
At sixty days, the damage becomes systemic. The plastics that package food and equip hospitals, the solvents that produce India’s generic medicines – all trace back to the Gulf. A third of the world’s helium comes from a single Qatari complex that Iranian drones have already shut down. Shut the Gulf long enough and you raise the cost of every antibiotic, smartphone, and electric vehicle.
Lockheed Martin produces roughly six hundred Patriot-class interceptors a year. A single large Iranian volley can require more than a thousand to defeat. The United States and its allies are consuming air defences far faster than they can be replaced. Every battery sent to the Gulf is one Kyiv cannot receive. The munitions being burned in Iran are drawing down stockpiles meant for the Indo-Pacific.
China watches with patience. It has built strategic petroleum reserves of around a billion barrels: three months of imports if Hormuz closed entirely. While Washington bombs, Beijing presents itself as the partner that keeps the lights on. As Haass puts it, this war is good for China. Every week of disruption reinforces Beijing’s argument that the American security guarantee is conditional and brittle.
Now I am become Death
This war was launched to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It may be the thing that guarantees it builds one.
The fatwa from Khamenei against nuclear weapons was a fiction; the regime has always coveted the bomb. Naïve Western diplomats took it at face value, unfamiliar with taqiyya, the Shia concept that permits deception when the faithful are under threat.
Iran has been watching. Qaddafi surrendered his nuclear program and was sodomised with a bayonet and murdered. Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees and was invaded by Putin. North Korea’s dictator fast-tracked his weapon and got an affectionate nickname and a summit with the current American president.
The Obama-era nuclear deal was sold as a triumph of diplomacy. It slowed enrichment while leaving the infrastructure, the expertise, and the ambition intact. Iran emerged with a program it could restart at will, and the sanctions relief to fund it.
The infrastructure is dispersed across Isfahan, Fordow, and Natanz, buried deep underground and designed to be relocated. Israel and the United States are destroying centrifuges and laboratories. Israel assassinates Iranian nuclear scientists. It did so again last week.
But the knowledge remains. Iran’s many enemies cannot bomb away what its scientists already know. The IRGC learned from North Korea and Pakistan, both of which built their arsenals on stolen blueprints. Once you have a deliverable weapon, you are untouchable. There is no suggestion of regime change in North Korea.
With Khamenei dead and his son Mojtaba installed as Supreme Leader, the Guard has consolidated its grip. The men who send drones to Riyadh and Haifa are now the men who will decide how far to enrich uranium.
Remember, Iran has already paid most of the economic price of pursuing the bomb. Sanctions have bitten for years. The marginal cost of finishing the project is now lower than the cost of abandoning it. Every American and Israeli airstrike is an argument for acceleration.
If Iran builds a bomb, it will not build alone. Saudi Arabia is already positioning itself, with a civil nuclear cooperation agreement and longstanding links to Pakistan’s nuclear establishment. The Gulf monarchies will not accept nuclear inferiority. Turkey will not watch in silence. The Middle East would become the world’s most volatile nuclear neighbourhood.
Hitchens captured the nightmare in two words: thermonuclear theocracy. A state that rapes teen girls before hanging them, that sends teen boys with plastic keys into minefields, would possess weapons capable of killing hundreds of thousands at a stroke. Its rulers are not suicidally irrational. But they are familiar with mass death and comfortable with calibrated martyrdom. In such a world, everything comes down to hoping that, on a bad day in Tehran or Riyadh, nobody misreads a radar blip.
***
For the third time in fifty years, a crisis in the Persian Gulf is forcing the world to confront a dependency it has refused to outgrow. The legacy of this war will not be regime change. It will be the discovery, again, that 34 kilometres of water can hold the global economy to ransom, and that nobody in charge had a plan for when it did.
When I think about this war, I think about Lokman. He built his archive in the heart of Hezbollah’s stronghold and refused to leave, for years, until they killed him for it. The regime that trained those men is the one the United States has now chosen to confront. It is brutal enough to silence a good man for speaking the truth, and competent enough to make the world pay for trying to stop it.
Luke Heilbuth is CEO of strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat. Connect with Luke on LinkedIn or reach out to him at luke.heilbuth@bwdstrategic.com
Incredible piece of writing and analysis.