Ambiguity has always been a tool of war - a way to deceive an adversary, conceal intentions, or give a commander more room to maneuver. This Iranian-American war is different. Ambiguity is not one of its symptoms; it is the substance of which the war is made.
From the outset, the most basic questions went unanswered. Why did the war break out now? What is its ultimate objective? Is the aim to topple the Iranian regime, weaken it, eliminate its regional "arms," or force it into a new nuclear agreement? Does the confrontation take in the whole of Iran's conduct, or only the nuclear file, in pursuit of terms tougher than those of the Obama-era deal?
These are not minor details. They determine the war's limits, its direction, and where it can end. A war with no clear, declared political objective blurs every line. It becomes hard to tell a ceasefire from an escalation, a negotiation from pressure for a deal, deterrence from a slide into open war.
Trump deepened the confusion. He managed the crisis in a way that struck even his own supporters, and analysts across American and European think tanks, as personal and erratic. The world came to hang on a post on Truth Social rather than on any clear statement from the world's foremost power.
The rhetoric swung widely. It moved between threats to erase "Iranian civilization," talk of an imminent ceasefire, and threats to seize Kharg Island, the heart of Iran's oil industry. Washington floated a plan to charge ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, then said days later that the strait should remain open and free to every country in the world.
This was not tactical flexibility. It was the absence of any plan for what would follow the strikes. And the constant reversals do one thing above all: they spread instability. Markets are disrupted, and so are the daily lives of ordinary people, East and West.
There is a fundamental difference between strategic ambiguity and the ambiguity of confusion. Strategic ambiguity is deliberate. Leaders use it to keep an adversary under pressure, conceal their intentions, and hold open the door to a retreat or a settlement, allowing each side to enter negotiations without appearing defeated.
Confusion is the opposite. It sets in when the objectives are undefined, when force is not aligned with any political aim, and when neither allies nor adversaries can say what might end the war or make it expand.
Iran, for its part, met the war's ambiguity with a nihilistic logic. It fought as though this were an existential battle that entitled it to shift the cost onto others. It did not confine its response to the state fighting it. Instead, it sought to turn the war into a contest over the economy, energy, and shipping, striking the infrastructure and strategic assets of its neighbors long after it was clear the strikes were not aimed at bringing the regime down.
This is where the danger of the "armed factions" model lies. The Iranian state does not take direct responsibility for its own decisions. It turns instead to armed groups operating outside any state, groups whose operations Tehran can disavow in public while still reaping their military and diplomatic gains. Ambiguity is thereby converted from a means of managing a war into a means of evading responsibility for one. The militias become a way to wage wars without declaring them, and to impose their costs without answering for them.
The Strait of Hormuz was not the center of the confrontation at first, but it soon became its most dangerous point. The memorandum of understanding on the strait was meant to ease the crisis. It did the reverse: its terms were vague, and each side could read them to suit itself.
A crisis whose roots run back nearly five decades was never going to be contained within days by a phrase such as "exerting every possible effort to ensure the passage of commercial vessels." Washington read the wording as a commitment to keep the strait open to international navigation. Tehran read it as implicit recognition of its sovereign right to control the waterway.
Between the two readings, the central question went unanswered. Is Hormuz an international passage, governed by international law and freedom of navigation? Or is it a pressure card that one state holds in reserve for its next confrontation?
Seen this way, Saudi Arabia's persistent calls for de-escalation amount to more than a defensive posture or an expression of political prudence. They are an attempt to correct, after the fact, the very climate that produced the war, and to lead the region out of a cycle of ambiguity, impulsiveness, and miscalculation. The Saudi approach begins by cooling the crisis and preventing its spread. An end to escalation is not the conclusion of politics; it is the precondition for politics to resume at all.
The deeper value of that approach, which many overlook, is that it seeks to move the region away from adventurism, nihilism, the use of armed factions, and gray-zone warfare, and toward the logic of statehood and international law - from uncertainty to the virtue of stability, "the essence of Saudi strategy."
