The US - Israel - Iran conflict is exposing a deeper crisis of consent

The war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran has now passed the 100 day mark, and it is not going well in any dimension that matters.

According to multiple reports, the campaign has produced severe energy disruptions, the worst on record, as attacks and counterattacks ripple through the Strait of Hormuz and surrounding infrastructure. The IMF warns that even a swift end would mean higher inflation and a slower global economy, with poor energy importers hit hardest. Civilian casualties are mounting across Iran and the wider region, and spillover violence is evident in places like Lebanon and Gaza, where Israeli strikes and proxy clashes continue to widen the conflict’s footprint. At home, President Trump is failing to rally durable public or bipartisan support, and new US intelligence reports highlight an uncomfortable subplot, Israeli spying on American negotiators and military personnel in the midst of a war they are fighting together.

That is the factual scaffolding. The narratives built on it are diverging fast.

On the American and Israeli right, the dominant story is grim but resolute. The war is framed as a necessary confrontation with a long standing sponsor of terrorism and regional destabilization. Iran is cast as the central node in a web of threats, from Hezbollah to militias in Iraq and Syria and armed groups in Yemen. In this view, allowing Tehran to close or even intermittently disrupt the Strait of Hormuz is intolerable. The repeated US warnings that every power plant and every major bridge in Iran could be destroyed if the strait is not reopened are presented as credible deterrence, not escalation. The economic pain, in this narrative, is the price of confronting a regime that would eventually force a far worse confrontation if left unchecked.

The political angle on the right is equally stark. Critics who question the war effort are accused of emboldening Tehran and its proxies, much as doves were accused of emboldening adversaries in earlier eras. Public discomfort with mounting costs is acknowledged, but treated as a communications problem, not a strategic one. The alleged Israeli eavesdropping on US negotiators and the heightened assessment of Israeli counterintelligence risk are downplayed or contextualized as unfortunate but unsurprising behavior from an ally operating under existential pressure. The line is simple, we are in a necessary fight, messy things happen in war, stay the course.

On the left, the picture is almost inverted. The war is described as reckless, illegal, and strategically incoherent. The regional map does not look like a precise campaign to degrade specific military capabilities, it looks like a widening zone of humanitarian catastrophe and political blowback. The IMF’s warning about global inflation and energy disruption is not an unfortunate side effect but a predictable outcome of choosing military escalation in one of the most economically sensitive corridors on Earth. The left points to intensified civilian suffering in Lebanon and Gaza, the suspension of WHO evacuations after a contract worker was killed, and the growing displacement numbers, and asks the question that rarely gets a clear answer, what is the theory of success that could justify this?

Domestically, left leaning critics plug the war into a broader story about civil liberties, minority rights, and the rule of law. A government that is rolling back protections for transgender students and cheering aggressive immigration raids at home, they argue, is now exporting the same disregard for vulnerable lives abroad. The Supreme Court’s move to clear the way for dismissal of Steve Bannon’s contempt of Congress case is read less as a narrow procedural decision and more as part of a pattern, norms and constraints eroding just when concentrated power is being used most aggressively.

Centrist narratives are more strained, and that in itself is revealing. In establishment foreign policy circles, there is a lingering belief that a combination of pressure and backchannel diplomacy can still yield a negotiated outcome. The crossfire between US and Iranian forces is seen as dangerous but potentially channelable into a new equilibrium, if both sides retain some shared interest in avoiding all out catastrophe. The language here is about proportionality, signaling, leverage, and off ramps. It is an attempt to impose the logic of past crises on a landscape that is starting to look less familiar.

At the same time, centrist economic and political actors are increasingly nervous. They hear the IMF warning that energy disruption from this conflict is “the worst ever” and understand, in concrete terms, what persistent supply shocks mean for interest rates, asset prices, and fragile domestic political coalitions. They see public support splintering, not along neat partisan lines but along fatigue lines, and they understand that wars without clear authorizing consensus tend to fall apart in unpredictable ways. Authority is exercised, but consent lags behind.

There is a familiar way to interpret all this, another Middle East war, another round of predictable arguments and policy papers. That frame is comforting and wrong. Something quieter and more consequential is at work.

The most important feature of this conflict is not its geography or even its economic leverage. It is the breakdown of shared stories about who is deciding, on what authority, and to what end. Across the spectrum, people are losing the sense that there is a coherent decision making center that connects their consent to the use of force in their name.

On the right, the story is that strong leaders are doing what is necessary and being undermined by weak institutions and unpatriotic critics. On the left, the story is that unaccountable elites are dragging the country into disaster while hollowing out the very institutions that could check them. In the center, the story is that the system still works, more or less, but is under strain from extremes and bad luck. Each camp points to the same set of events, war in Iran, energy shock, intelligence frictions with Israel, domestic civil rights rollbacks, and draws a different conclusion about where authority legitimately resides.

Here is the non obvious angle for operators and executives who spend their lives making tradeoffs under uncertainty. This war is a live case study in what happens when leaders rely on inherited procedural legitimacy while their underlying consent models degrade.

Formally, the boxes are checked. The administration issues orders, allies coordinate, agencies brief, courts rule, multilateral institutions issue warnings. Informally, the public’s trust reservoir is shallow. People have accumulated a decade and a half of unresolved crises, from financial shocks to pandemics to technological disruptions, and they are approaching new “necessary sacrifices” with an instinctive skepticism. They no longer assume that the costs they are asked to bear are part of a rational, shared project that will eventually benefit them or their children.

In that environment, even a strategically sound operation, and there is serious debate about whether this one qualifies, can fail politically. The failure mode does not show up as a dramatic mutiny. It shows up as quiet noncooperation, contested narratives, and an inability to sustain policy over time. You can see early signs here. The president cannot rally stable support. Allies spy on one another even as they fight side by side. International financial institutions warn of consequences that elected leaders seem unwilling or unable to explain honestly to their publics.

For leaders outside government, the lesson travels. When your decision making relies heavily on “we have the authority” but lightly on “here is why this deserves your continued consent,” you are building time bombs into your strategy. People will comply with the first wave of orders because the forms are familiar. They will resist the second and third once they realize the pain is real and the story is thin.

One hundred days into this war, the most valuable thought experiment is not about how to move a carrier group or calibrate a sanction. It is about how to narrate power in a way that can survive contact with a skeptical, crisis soaked public. The conflict in Iran is, among many other things, a referendum on whether our existing institutions can still do that.