Why Can't Anyone Stop This?

The Paranoidist | Issue #8 By Paul Morin | March 28, 2026

Four weeks into the Iran war, the question I hear most often is not "what happens next?" I answered that in Flash Issues #1 through #8: the containment assumption failed, all five escalation vectors activated, and the conflict is outrunning the strategy. The question I hear now is different, and it is the more important one.

Why can't anyone stop this?

Both sides are being damaged. Iran has suffered nearly 2,000 civilian deaths according to its own Health Ministry, with independent monitors estimating total casualties, military and civilian, exceeding 6,500. At least 82,000 civilian structures have been damaged or destroyed. Fourteen American service members are dead. Nineteen Israelis have been killed and more than 5,400 wounded. In Lebanon, where Israel launched ground operations after Hezbollah opened a second front on March 2, over 1,100 people are dead. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed to commercial shipping: transits collapsed more than 80% within days of the war's start, approximately 2,000 vessels and 20,000 seafarers remain stranded, and Brent crude has traded above $100 for six consecutive weeks, closing yesterday at $108. Iraq has declared force majeure on all foreign-operated oilfields. Iran has fired retaliatory missiles at Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. Hezbollah has launched more than 3,500 missiles and drones at Israel since March 2. Israeli forces have crossed into southern Lebanon. A NATO ally's military base has been struck. The Pentagon has requested $200 billion from Congress to fund the war. Futures markets now price a greater than 50% probability that the Federal Reserve's next move will be a rate hike, not a cut, for the first time since the tightening cycle began.

Game theory says this should stop. Both sides are incurring costs that exceed what either expected. The rational outcome is a negotiated settlement: Iran accepts inspections, the U.S. declares victory, the Strait reopens, everyone saves face. The oil futures curve reflects approximately this expectation; the deep backwardation in Brent, with December futures priced near $80, signals that the market is betting on resolution within months.

But game theory requires rational actors with stable preferences operating on reliable information with a bounded set of players in a closed system. All five of those assumptions have failed. I documented them in the ScenarioPlan test case. So if game theory can't explain why the escalation continues, what can?

The answer, I think, is a concept I've been developing through the ScenarioPlan methodology that borrows not from economics or political science but from physics. I call it machine inertia.

In seven prior Paranoidist issues, I described what is happening: a portfolio of correlated risks, all active simultaneously. What I did not fully develop is why the portfolio keeps expanding. The reason is that every participant in this system is doing exactly what they are incentivized to do, and nobody has an incentive to stop.

Map the participants:

The U.S. administration is incentivized to continue strikes because it has staked political capital on the operation, midterm elections create pressure to show strength, and the domestic political cost of "losing" a war exceeds the cost of continuing one. The President's rhetoric oscillates between "talks are going very well" and extending strike deadlines, because both messages serve different audiences simultaneously. On Thursday, the administration extended its pause on strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure to April 6, even as it insisted Iran was negotiating. Iran's Foreign Ministry called that claim a fabrication.

Israel is incentivized to continue because its military chief has warned the IDF is under severe strain from expanded operational demands, yet 82% of the public supports the war, and the window to destroy Iran's nuclear and missile infrastructure may not reopen. Israel has explicitly stated it is not party to any U.S.-Iran talks and that military operations will continue until Iran's capabilities are eliminated. Israel has simultaneously expanded ground operations into Lebanon, opened a new axis of conflict, and struck targets across western Iran.

Iran's new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, elected on March 8 to replace his assassinated father, is incentivized to demonstrate strength because his legitimacy depends on it. The IRGC has rejected U.S. claims that its missile program is destroyed and continues launching salvos at Israel and Gulf states. Iran's Foreign Ministry says it will continue its "resistance" and has rejected direct negotiations with the United States. A regime fighting for survival under bombardment does not negotiate; it fights.

The defense industry is incentivized to supply weapons, advocate for sustained operations, and position for post-conflict contracts. The Pentagon's $200 billion funding request to Congress signals the scale. Nobody in the defense ecosystem has an incentive to advocate for de-escalation.

Energy traders are incentivized by the volatility itself. Brent crude has swung between $93 and $120 in a single month. Iran has begun charging transit fees, denominated in yuan, for the handful of vessels it permits through the Strait. Volatility is the product, not the problem.

The insurance market is incentivized to do exactly what it did: reprice risk to levels that functionally close the waterway. Lloyd's Market Association clarified that war risk insurance remains technically available, but at premiums that have tripled or more since March 1. The practical effect is the same: without affordable insurance, commercial shipping cannot transit, and the Strait remains commercially closed even when no Iranian missile is fired. The U.S. announced an insurance backstop program through the Development Finance Corporation on March 3; nearly four weeks later, no vessel has transited under it.

The media is incentivized by the conflict because it drives engagement. Every contradictory presidential statement generates a news cycle. The oil price ticker runs continuously. Casualty numbers arrive in real time. The conflict is the product.

Now look at this map and ask: which participant has both the incentive and the authority to stop the machine?

The answer is: none of them.

Congress has tried three times to assert war powers. The Senate rejected resolutions on March 4 (53-47), with the House following on March 5 (219-212). On March 25, the Senate rejected a third attempt by the same margin. Senator Rand Paul remains the lone Republican voting to constrain the President. Senator Fetterman remains the lone Democrat voting to support the war. The bipartisan dynamics and the political cost of opposing a war that still commands majority public support make congressional intervention a dead letter.

China could theoretically broker a deal. But China benefits from the current arrangement: its ships are among the few transiting the Strait under Iranian consent, it is deepening Iran's economic dependence, and the United States is tied down in the Middle East. On March 26, Iran announced that ships from five nations, including China, Russia, India, Iraq, and Pakistan, would be permitted through Hormuz. China's top diplomat has told Iran that "talking is always better than fighting" while taking no action to impose costs on continuation. China has no incentive to broker a resolution that ends these advantages.

The UN Security Council is deadlocked by design. Russia benefits from elevated oil prices.

There is no participant in this system who is both willing and able to stop it. That is the machine.

Now here is where the physics becomes more than a metaphor.

In Newtonian mechanics, inertia is the property of a body in motion to remain in motion unless acted upon by an external force. The force required to change its trajectory is proportional to its mass. This is not a metaphor. It is a structural analogy that maps precisely onto the dynamics of self-reinforcing incentive systems.

The "mass" of an incentive machine is determined by three factors:

First, the number of participants whose incentives are aligned with the current trajectory. In this conflict: the U.S. administration, Israel, the IRGC and Iranian military establishment, the defense industry, energy traders, the insurance market, media organizations, Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and every proxy group whose relevance depends on the conflict continuing. That is not two adversaries. It is more than a dozen participants, many of whom are nominally on opposite sides but whose incentives all point in the same direction: continuation.

Second, the depth of those incentives. Shallow incentives (convenience, preference) are easy to overcome. Deep incentives (political survival, institutional preservation, financial return) require proportionally greater force. The incentives in this machine are among the deepest available in human systems: the U.S. administration's political survival heading into midterms, the IRGC's institutional survival, Israel's existential security calculation, the defense industry's financial structure. You cannot redirect these with a speech or a UN resolution.

Third, the coupling between participants' actions. In a loosely coupled system, changing one participant's behavior can break the cycle because the other participants can absorb the disruption. In a tightly coupled system, each participant's rational action directly enables the next participant's rational action, creating a chain that resists breakage at any single link. This machine is tightly coupled: the administration's strikes create Iran's retaliatory imperative, which creates the Strait closure, which creates the energy price spike, which creates inflation pressure and stagflation fears, which creates political pressure on the administration, which creates incentive for more strikes to "end this quickly." The cycle feeds itself.

Put these three factors together: many participants, deep incentives, tight coupling. In physics terms, this machine has enormous mass. The force required to redirect it is proportional to that mass. And when you survey the landscape for external forces capable of delivering that magnitude of redirection, you find that no single force is sufficient.

That is why nobody can stop this. Not (necessarily) because anyone is stupid, or evil, or incompetent. Because the machine has more inertia than any available intervention.

The value of machine inertia as a concept is not in the Iran analysis, though it explains the current situation with uncomfortable precision. The value is that it gives you a diagnostic you can apply to any self-reinforcing system.

Here is the diagnostic:

First, map the machine. Identify every participant whose rational self-interest benefits from the current trajectory. Do not limit yourself to the obvious adversaries. The machine includes everyone: the parties in conflict, the suppliers, the financiers, the insurers, the information intermediaries, the regulators. Everyone whose incentives are aligned with continuation, whether they are "for" or "against" the outcome, is part of the machine.

Second, measure the mass. How many participants? How deep are their incentives (convenience vs. survival)? How tightly coupled are their actions (can you break one link without the others compensating)?

Third, identify the candidate external forces. What events, decisions, or shocks could plausibly redirect the machine? Be specific. "Diplomacy" is not a force; it is a category. A specific diplomatic intervention by a specific party with specific leverage is a force. A mass casualty event that shifts domestic political calculus past a threshold is a force. An economic shock that makes continuation more costly than settlement is a force.

Fourth, estimate the magnitude. Is any single force sufficient, given the machine's mass? Or does redirection require a combination of forces arriving from different directions? If the answer is "combination required," you have identified why the system continues: the probability that multiple forces arrive simultaneously is lower than the probability that any single one does. This is the same portfolio logic I applied to the five escalation vectors before the war. The containment assumption was a bet on the benign extreme. The inertia assumption, the bet that "surely someone will stop this," is the same kind of bet.

This diagnostic applies far beyond geopolitics.

In the 2008 financial crisis, the machine was the origination-to-securitization assembly line. The originators were incentivized to generate mortgages (they got paid per loan). The securitizers were incentivized to package them (they got paid per deal). The rating agencies were incentivized to rate them highly (they got paid by the securitizers). The CDO managers were incentivized to create synthetic products (they got paid management fees). The insurers (AIG, the monolines) were incentivized to write credit protection (they collected premiums on what their models said were safe assets). Every link in the chain was getting paid. The machine had enormous mass: dozens of major institutions, survival-level incentives (these were the revenue models that supported the firms' existence), and coupling so tight that each link's output was the next link's input.

The confusion between risk and uncertainty opened the door. The real, calculable risk of individual mortgage defaults gave the entire structure the appearance of mathematical rigor. But the systemic correlation across novel instruments was genuine uncertainty, and the risk layer was the Trojan horse that smuggled the uncertainty past everyone's analytical defenses. The incentive machine then kicked the door off the hinges, ensuring the mispricing scaled to a level that could take down the global economy.

Who could have stopped it? The Fed could have raised rates or tightened lending standards. The SEC could have regulated the securitization market. The rating agencies could have applied more rigorous models. Individual firms could have refused to participate. But none of these forces were sufficient individually, because every participant was embedded in the machine and benefited from its continuation. The machine ran until the external force (systemic collapse) exceeded its mass. That is not a story of incompetence. It is a story of inertia.

The SaaSpocalypse has machine inertia. Every AI company is incentivized to deploy faster (the market rewards first movers). Every enterprise customer is incentivized to adopt AI tools (competitive pressure). Every investor is incentivized to fund the deployment race (returns concentrate on winners). Every SaaS incumbent is incentivized to integrate AI features (survival). Nobody in the system is incentivized to pause and ask whether the displacement rate is sustainable, whether the workforce implications have been modeled, or whether the accumulated technical debt creates systemic fragility. The machine's mass grows with each funding round, each product launch, each enterprise deployment.

If you are a board director, CRO, or CEO, the machine inertia diagnostic tells you something your risk management framework almost certainly does not: that the scenarios most dangerous to your organization are the ones embedded in self-reinforcing incentive systems, because those systems resist correction until they hit a wall. The 2008 machine hit the wall of systemic collapse. The Iran escalation machine has not yet hit its wall, and four weeks in, nobody can identify where the wall is.

The practical application is this: when you assess a strategic risk, do not ask "will someone stop this?" Ask "who has both the incentive and the authority to stop this, and is the force they can bring to bear proportional to the machine's mass?" If the answer is "nobody" or "uncertain," your planning assumption should be that the machine continues until it hits a wall. Plan for the wall, not for the correction.

For the Iran conflict specifically: the machine inertia assessment suggests that the conflict will continue, in some form, beyond the administration's shifting timelines, because the machine's mass exceeds the force of any available single intervention. The Defense Secretary has already acknowledged the war could extend eight weeks, double the original estimate. The most likely redirection comes not from a negotiated settlement (which would require participants to act against their incentives) but from a combination of forces: military degradation reaching a threshold that changes Iran's calculus, domestic political pressure in the U.S. reaching a threshold that changes the administration's calculus (the $200 billion funding request and rising gas prices heading into midterms are early indicators), and economic pain reaching a threshold that gives a broker (probably China) an incentive to intervene. Until at least two of these forces materialize simultaneously, the machine continues. Plan accordingly.

It is possible that I am overestimating the machine's mass. The new Iranian Supreme Leader may prove to be a pragmatist who uses his IRGC credentials to negotiate from a position of institutional legitimacy rather than continuing to fight. The U.S. administration may find a face-saving formula that allows it to declare victory and withdraw faster than the incentive analysis suggests; the extended pause on energy strikes and the administration's insistence that "talks are going very well" could be the early signal of an exit ramp being constructed. China may decide that the economic costs of the Strait closure (which affect Chinese industry as well, despite preferential transit) outweigh the strategic benefits, and intervene diplomatically earlier than expected.

It is also possible that the physics analogy, while structurally sound, overstates the determinism. Human systems are not Newtonian billiard balls. A single individual, a surprising decision, an act of political courage or strategic imagination, can sometimes produce effects disproportionate to the "force" applied. History is not physics. The analogy illuminates the structural dynamics; it does not dictate outcomes.

But the point of productive paranoia is not to predict. It is to identify the structural forces that most decision-makers are not accounting for and ask whether their plans survive the scenario where those forces continue to operate. The machine inertia of the Iran escalation is a structural force. If your planning assumption is that "someone will stop this soon," you should be able to identify the specific someone, the specific force they can bring, and explain why that force exceeds the machine's mass. If you can't, your plan depends on hope. Hope is not a strategy. Machine inertia is.

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Paul Morin is the founder of DeepStrategy.ai and publisher of The Paranoidist, BoardroomRadar and ScenarioWatch. He has spent more than three decades in entrepreneurship, finance, risk management, and insurance, which is why he worries about the things that keep other people awake at night.

Researched, written, and edited in collaboration with Claude by Anthropic.