That’s what the conflict with Iran is showing us.
It began, if we insist on marking a beginning, on 28 February, with coordinated strikes by the United States and Israel against Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure. But even that date feels less like an origin than a convenient fiction, a point selected after the fact to impose narrative order on what had already long been underway.
The missiles, the air sorties, the explosions over Tehran: these had the look of war in its familiar form, the sudden irruption of violence that signals a transition from peace to conflict. Yet nothing about the situation that produced it, nor the one that followed, conforms to that older grammar. The strikes were less a formal launch than a punctuation mark, an intensification within a process already in motion.
For years, the relationship between these three states had been defined by calibrated pressure: sanctions tightening and loosening, cyber intrusions probing infrastructure, covert operations targeting scientists and facilities, proxy conflicts rippling across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
The “Twelve-Day War” of 2025, itself bracketed by ceasefire agreements that expired as much by attrition as by design, offered a brief return to something like recognisable conflict, with identifiable phases and endpoints. But even that episode now appears as an anomaly, a temporary condensation of a much broader and more diffuse field.
What we are witnessing is not simply another iteration of geopolitical rivalry, nor even an escalation in a long-running regional conflict. It is something more elusive and, in a certain sense, more banal: the normalisation of warfare as a process.
Not for countries like Israel, of course, which has been immersed in a state of conflict for nearly a century. But definitely for the United States, which looks to the Jewish state as an ideological as well as military laboratory, when it comes to the routinisation of conflict and the blurring of distinctions between the military and civil society.
Hence, the longstanding partnership between the two countries has culminated in the Israeli-American conflict with Iran.
This year’s strikes on Iran and Iran’s response to them do not stand apart from the surrounding political landscape. Rather, they are continuous with it, embedded in the same networks of finance, intelligence, communication, and logistics that structure ordinary life.
War no longer resolves into a single, decisive confrontation.
The strikes still matter, of course. Infrastructure is destroyed; lives are lost; signals are sent. But their significance lies less in what they accomplish in isolation than in how they modulate the broader environment. They are less decisive blows than adjustments in a continuously shifting configuration.
A missile strike on a nuclear facility, a cyberattack on a financial network, a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz—each registers as a local intensification, a spike in a graph that never returns to baseline.
Indeed, the very notion of a baseline is starting to dissolve. Oil prices surge, shipping routes are disrupted, and global markets tremble not because a war has begun, but because the underlying condition of instability has been momentarily amplified.
This is what gives the conflict its peculiarly elusive character. It is at once highly visible and strangely indeterminate.
There are explosions and the familiar choreography of official statements and retaliatory threats. However, these are embedded within a much wider array of activities that do not announce themselves as war and yet are inseparable from it: the quiet enforcement of a naval blockade, the targeting of infrastructure under the rubric of “security”, the continual modulation of sanctions, the circulation of intelligence and disinformation.
What disappears in this configuration is not violence, but the conceptual framework that made it intelligible. Although older distinctions—war and peace, civilian and combatant, battlefield and hinterland—do not vanish entirely, they cease to organise experience in the way they once did.
Instead of a clear transition between binary oppositions, we confront a continuous gradient. The question is no longer whether one is at war, but at what level, in what domain, and with what degree of visibility.
This transformation has consequences that extend well beyond the conduct of military operations. It alters the conditions under which political authority is exercised. A world in which conflict is continuous, distributed, and often opaque is one in which the nature of governance itself changes.
We can see this most clearly in the domestic reverberations the conflict has triggered, such as heightened security alerts, warnings of potential cyber and terrorist retaliation, and the mobilisation of authorities in anticipation of diffuse threats.
The logic here is anticipatory rather than reactive. It does not wait for discrete events to occur; it operates on the level of possibility, seeking to manage risks before they fully materialise.
The attack abroad generates a field of potential disruptions at home, which in turn justifies the expansion of surveillance, the tightening of security protocols, and the extension of governmental reach into domains previously considered outside the purview of national defence.
This is not a simple matter of cause and effect. It isn’t simply that war produces insecurity, thereby necessitating stronger governance. Rather, the two are co-constitutive.
The persistence of low-level conflict creates a background condition of uncertainty. The government intervenes in response. And that intervention, in turn, produces new vulnerabilities, new points of pressure, new opportunities for strategic action.
While this dynamic is easiest to discern in the conflict with Iran, it can also be observed elsewhere throughout the region.
Strikes on Iranian infrastructure are accompanied by Israeli operations against Hezbollah, Iranian strikes against Persian Gulf states, and mercurial American moves that seem to reflect the mood of President Trump.
Each action is described as a response to another, but it’s impossible to establish a fixed starting point for this chain of causality.
It is tempting to describe this situation in terms of escalation, as though one were moving along a linear scale from peace to war. But this misses the point.
What we are dealing with is not a spectrum but a topology, a space of relations in which different forms of conflict coexist and interact. High-intensity strikes do not replace lower-level operations; they are layered on top of them, amplifying certain dynamics while leaving others intact.
The result is not a transition from one state to another, but a thickening of the field, an increase in the density and complexity of the interactions that constitute it. That is why traditional ways of understanding war falter.
Just war theory, for instance, relies on the ability to identify discrete acts of aggression, to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, to assess proportionality and necessity within a bounded context. But when conflict is continuous, distributed, and often indirect, these criteria become difficult to apply.
What counts as an act of aggression in a world of persistent cyber operations and economic coercion? How does one assess proportionality when the effects of an action are dispersed across time and space, mediated through complex systems whose behaviour is not fully predictable?
The conflict with Iran demonstrates how difficult it is to answer these questions authoritatively.
It can be framed–and certainly has been, by the United States and Israel–as a preventive measure against a potential nuclear threat, a necessary action taken in the absence of viable diplomatic alternatives. Or it can also be seen as an escalation within an already volatile region, a move that risks triggering further instability and retaliation.
Both interpretations rely on the assumption that we are dealing with a discrete event that can be evaluated in isolation. But in a context where the event is embedded within an ongoing process, such evaluations are necessarily partial. They capture something of what is happening, but not the conditions that make it possible or the dynamics it sets in motion.
If the category of war no longer functions as a clear boundary, then neither does the category of peace.
What replaces them are not new definitions, but a more fluid and indeterminate configuration in which elements of both are continuously present. This is what makes the situation at once familiar and disorienting.
We recognise the signs of war—strikes, casualties, official declarations—yet we cannot locate them within a framework that would render them fully intelligible. The danger, in such a situation, is not only that conflict becomes more difficult to resolve, but that it becomes more difficult to contest.
When war is an event, it can be opposed, resisted, and brought to an end. When it is a diffuse, ongoing condition, it becomes part of the environment, something to be managed rather than challenged.
The expansion of governmental power in the name of security appears not as an extraordinary measure, but as a necessary adaptation to a world in which insecurity is permanent.
In this sense, the most significant effect of the Iran strikes may not be the damage they inflict or the deterrence they achieve, but the way they reconfigure the field in which both are measured. It contributes to a world in which war is no longer something that interrupts political life, but something that organises it from within.
The conflict with Iran is not simply a military action. It is a moment within a larger transformation, in which warfare loses its status as a discrete phenomenon and becomes a pervasive condition instead.
To understand it requires more than an analysis of strategy or geopolitics. It requires a reconsideration of the very categories through which we think about conflict, and of the forms of power that those categories both enable and obscure.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
