War is not always waged for destruction alone. At times it is a means of forcing out information that negotiation could not uncover. Each side hides its true strength, its capacity to endure, and the losses it can absorb. A military strike puts those claims to the test. War then reveals whether a threat is real or a bluff. It shows whether the weapons work, whether the alliances hold, and whether a political system can keep fighting.
The idea begins with a question posed by Stanford political scientist James Fearon in his 1995 study "Rationalist Explanations for War." If war is costly and its participants are rational, why do they not reach a bargain both would prefer to war? Fearon's answer rests on three mechanisms: private information that each side has an incentive to misrepresent, the commitment problem, and issues that appear indivisible. To these he adds the effect of audience costs, which leave a leader little room to retreat once public threats have been made.
Begin with private information. A state knows its own capabilities and resolve better than its adversary does, and it has no incentive to disclose them honestly. To show weakness is to invite greater demands; to exaggerate strength may be to win concessions. Negotiation thus becomes an exchange of signals whose credibility neither side can gauge.
When threats and offers fail to persuade, war becomes the costly method of discovering what the adversary has concealed - its real capabilities, its tolerance for loss, the seriousness of its threats. Yet information alone solves nothing, because it must also be believed. Each side offers data and guarantees; each suspects the other of hiding part of the truth, or of presenting information designed to mislead. The problem is no longer a lack of information. It is the lack of confidence in that information, and the absence of any reliable means of verifying it.
Consider the reverse case. Both sides hold accurate information, and the settlement still fails. This is the commitment problem. An agreement may be acceptable today, but one party may fear the other will break it once the balance of power shifts in its favor. The weaker side may then conclude that fighting now would cost less than waiting until its adversary grows stronger and imposes harsher terms.
The difficulty runs further still. Even credible guarantees may not resolve it if the dispute concerns an issue both sides regard as indivisible - sovereignty over a territory, or the exclusive possession of a strategic capability.
Fearon himself is skeptical of this explanation. Most such issues can be divided through bargains and compensation. The central obstacle, in most cases, remains the absence of trust that an agreement will be honored.
To this must be added the effect of audience costs. When a leader raises the pitch of his threats in public, before his own people and his allies, retreat becomes politically costly, since it can be read as weakness or a loss of credibility. The room for compromise narrows, and the threats begin to carry themselves out.
Applied to the American-Israeli war on Iran, the framework fits closely. The failure to reach a settlement was bound up with private information, weak commitments, a dispute over what appeared indivisible, and audience costs. Before the confrontation, Washington and Tel Aviv lacked sufficient information about the progress of Iran's nuclear program, its ability to shield its facilities, its capacity to withstand attack, and its willingness and ability to retaliate.
Tehran, in turn, lacked information about its adversaries' aims. Did they want a stricter agreement, the destruction of Iran's capabilities, or the fall of the regime itself?
So, each side buried what it knew, and war became the means of forcing it out. The fighting answered part of the question. Iranian defenses proved effective; missiles and drones could retaliate; the US and Israel would press on; Iran could endure. But the information gap did not fully close. Trust had worn so thin that each side went on suspecting the other's statements of being a deception.
The commitment problem surfaced as well. The US and Israel feared that Iran would use any agreement to ease the pressure and rebuild its nuclear capabilities. Tehran feared making nuclear concessions without a guarantee that sanctions would be lifted or the attacks halted.
Enrichment was not technically indivisible. Its levels could be specified and tied to inspections and the phased lifting of sanctions, as the Obama-era agreement showed. Yet the absence of trust made any repetition of such arrangements unconvincing.
Finally, the audience costs came into play. Every side escalated its threats in public and staked its credibility on carrying them out. Retreat became politically costly, and the middle ground narrowed.
The Gulf states did not decide to begin the war. But their geography, infrastructure, airspace, and shipping lanes placed them at the center of its consequences.
The conflict exposed the region's blind spots: no clear knowledge of the parties' aims or Iran's true reach, little confidence in Tehran's assurances, and no credible guarantee against Iran's widening the fight. Missiles reached Gulf cities. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was disrupted. The threat to energy security and trade grew.
Neutrality, it became clear, was no shield. Any durable settlement will require monitoring mechanisms, phased implementation, and explicit guarantees for Gulf security so that war does not remain the costliest means of discovering what an adversary can do and intends to do.
In sum, this war arose not from the absence of a possible settlement, but from the parties' inability to trust the information and the commitments they offered one another. The Gulf states paid the price, though they did not choose the confrontation.
War will not recur if its causes are met directly, within Fearon's framework: information that can be verified, commitments that can be believed, settlements that allow for flexibility, and a lower political cost for retreating from a threat. Until then, the region's security will continue to rest on building the arrangements that keep war from becoming, once again, the costliest means of discovering an adversary's intentions and capabilities.
