Iran’s Chess Game: The Grandmaster is Not far from Checkmate
Sid Shniad
Iran’s Chess Game: The Grandmaster is Not far from Checkmate
By Jeremy Salt
In this analysis, Jeremy Salt examines the expanding US-Israeli war on Iran through the metaphor of chess, arguing that Washington and Tel Aviv entered a conflict they fundamentally misunderstood. Framing Iran as a patient and strategically prepared actor, Salt contends that the war has exposed the limits of US power and accelerated a profound shift in the balance of power across West Asia.
Chess is derived from an Indian board game (chaturanga) but is Persian in its development since ancient times. Concentration, patience, calm under stress, abstract reasoning, and strategic thinking are some of the steps on the way from the novice to the grandmaster.
The game is won with the cry of ‘checkmate’ or ‘the king is dead’ (shahmat in Farsi). In the chess game now playing across West Asia, the shah in the White House is not quite dead, but he is certainly not looking very well.
The Americans entered the game as novices and the Iranians as grandmasters, so no surprise at the outcome so far. Iran has checked every move made by the US and Israel.
These partners in crime have killed thousands of people with their air power but have failed to achieve any of their stated objectives. Hamas has not been destroyed; Hezbollah has blocked Israel from occupying southern Lebanon; Iran still has its ballistic missiles and nuclear reactors, with its control over the Strait of Hormuz bringing it closer to checkmate; and the Israeli settlements along the 1949 armistice line remain emptied of most of their inhabitants.
In the first weeks of the war, Iran wrecked the United States ‘security architecture’ in the Persian Gulf by poking the eyes out of radar installations and bombing US bases, rendering most of them useless for offensive operations and even uninhabitable.
Retaliatory strikes were launched against civilian infrastructure in the Gulf dynasties supporting the US/Israeli onslaught, such as the Ras Tanura oilfield in Saudi Arabia and the Jebel Ali port in Dubai.
Overall, the Iranian defense showed long-term strategic planning, weapons development, and use that left the US looking outdated. It was fighting a war with battleships and destroyers that had to stay well away from the Iranian coast because of the danger of hypersonic missiles.
The US boasted of ‘air superiority’ over Iran when many attacks were launched from beyond Iran’s borders. Damage was done to above-ground missile launchers, but most were deep underground, as were Iran’s nuclear installations. The US bombed civilian ships in Iranian ports and then claimed it had destroyed Iran’s navy, which in fact it had scarcely touched.
The sole US ‘victory’ was the killing of 87 sailors with 61 missing in the torpedo destruction of an Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka as it returned from naval war games off the coast of India in the name of international friendship and cooperation.
Iran retaliated with fleets of drones and missile attacks that drove US aircraft carriers and destroyers from the Iranian coast and wreaked destruction on US bases in the Gulf. The swarms of drones simultaneously sent into occupied Palestine overwhelmed all Israeli missile defense systems, as they had done in June 2025.
Cheap to manufacture, they were intended to exhaust Israel’s stock of interceptors, which they did. Older missiles launched amidst the swarms of drones were used up before newly developed and far more destructive hypersonic weapons were called into play. Israel could not stop them, and used blanket censorship in an attempt to hide the damage to military bases, airfields, regime intelligence sites and research institutions, port facilities, and residential locations.
In southern Lebanon, occupation forces struggled to capture towns a few kilometers from the 1949 armistice line (the ‘border’).
The losses in men and material included scores of Merkava tanks destroyed in and around the town of Bint Jbeil, along with troop carriers and armored bulldozers.
Frustrated on the ground, they took revenge from the air, destroying or devastating dozens of Lebanese villages and ordering a civilian ‘evacuation’ – the media’s word – of the south. In fact, this was not an evacuation but an expulsion at the point of a gun.
Trump launched this war as a joint US-Israeli venture. Only later, when the grand plan for a quick victory failed, did he call on NATO countries to come and help them. Their reasonable response was that ‘this is your war and we want no part of it.’
Clearly, the war was not covered by the NATO charter. No member state was being attacked, requiring other members to come to its aid. Rather, a member state was attacking another country in violation of international law.
Trump made matters worse by abusing European leaders and then, much worse, by threatening to destroy Iran not just as a state but as a civilization. Given his participation in the Gaza genocide, the threat had to be taken seriously. What was he thinking of? Nuclear weapons?
The Europeans actively backed away. Spain closed its airspace to US military aircraft and banned the US from using the jointly-operated Rota and Moron air bases for war purposes.
France banned Israel from using its airspace for the transport of US military supplies, and Italy closed down landing rights for US military aircraft at the Sigonella base in Italy. Neutral Switzerland refused a US request for the use of its airspace. The UK, on the other hand, kept its airspace open to US military aircraft.
The chessboard stretched from Iran to all resistance fronts, including Iraq, where the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) have been attacking US and Kurdish forces and targeting positions in the UAE and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members.
Iraq’s prime minister, Muhammad Shia’ al Sudani, describes the PMF as a “fundamental component of [Iraq’s] national security system.” The Iraqi government has repeatedly demanded the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, but the US has refused to pull them out.
At the same time, it closed down the Al Tanf base in Syria, close to the Iraqi and Jordanian borders, more of a terrorist training center than a military base, and handed over bases in the Kurdish northeast to the collaborationist government of former senior Al Qaida figure Ahmad al Shara’a/Muhammad Abu al Jawlani.
Negotiations were a package for Iran. The US accepted the Iranian conditions that all resistance fronts would have to be covered before Trump tried to argue that Lebanon had not been included.
Within hours of a 14-day ceasefire being declared, Israel attempted to sabotage it by launching savage air raids on civilian targets in Lebanon, killing more than 300 people in the space of ten minutes and then boasting about such a great achievement.
It was at the same time obliterating entire Lebanese villages close to the ‘border’ and later declared the same invisible ‘yellow line’ as Gaza’s, with the same threat to kill anyone who crossed it.
Iran declared the strait closed following the Israeli air attacks, but after a 10-day ceasefire negotiated between Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf al Salam and President Joseph Aoun, it declared that the strait was open again to all commercial shipping.
The only item on the Salam/Aoun/Netanyahu agenda was the disarmament of Hezbollah, a task beyond the capacity and will of the Lebanese armed forces.
The ceasefire was not authorized by the Lebanese government as such and was widely regarded as base treachery, against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, its massacres, its destruction of villages, and its proclaimed intention to occupy the south of the country up to the Litani river.
Fearing the breakdown of the Lebanese ceasefire would collapse the US-Iran ceasefire, Trump asked Israel to “scale down” attacks on Lebanon. Netanyahu said he would “low key” them just before the Israeli occupation forces bombed two more villages.
With Iran having announced the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump declared he was closing it and Iranian ports through a naval blockade that would be maintained until a peace ‘deal’ was reached. He threatened to destroy the “little that was left of Iran” if the deal wasn’t reached.
Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, warned that the strait “would not remain open” if the blockade continued. As it continued, Iran closed the strait again. Two US destroyers and a minesweeper attempting to enter the strait turned back after being warned that cruise missiles were ready to be fired in their direction.
A US warship subsequently landed marines on the deck of an Iranian container ship sailing from China through the Sea of Oman towards the Strait and disabled its navigation system.
Would the negotiations continue in Islamabad after this act of state piracy? It seemed not. Trump canceled a planned trip to Pakistan by Witkoff and Kushner amidst a flurry of lies that are not worth repeating. The point of all of them is that the US and Trump personally are winning the war, which clearly they are not.
If Trump continues the blockade and, even worse, resumes the military campaign with even greater force, he will bring the developing global supply crisis to the point of a full-blown catastrophe for which he will be held responsible.
The Gulf dynasties are divided. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been talking tough about how the war on Iran must continue. Others are pleading for dialogue but all have already suffered severe infrastructural damage in Iranian missile attacks.
From Kuwait and Bahrain down to the UAE, these dynastic kingdoms no longer have the protection of US bases. Of the 13 bases in the Gulf, all are badly damaged and many are now even “uninhabitable,” as the US has admitted, with soldiers relocated to luxury hotels. They were tracked by Iran, which then bombed the hotels.
If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Saudi Arabia still has the 1200-km east-West Petroline running from Abqaiq to terminal facilities at the Red Sea port of Yanbu’a.
On March 26, an Iranian drone attack damaged a refinery at Yanbu’a, with two ballistic missiles reported (by the Saudis) to have been intercepted. A second attack followed on April 8, the day Israel launched its murderous missile strikes against Lebanon.
Petroline has been built underground, “beyond the reach of any conventional military strike short of a ground invasion,” the Saudis claim. The pipeline moves seven million barrels a day.
Two million are fed to refineries along the way for domestic use, leaving a surplus of five million barrels. Current exports run at about three million bpd because pipeline and port loading capacities don’t match.
The Yanbu’a installations are defended by the same THAAD and Patriot anti-missile defense systems shown to have failed to stop incoming missile attacks on Israel.
Yemen closed Bab al Mandab to Israeli-linked shipping in 2024/5 and has warned that it will shut it again if the war is resumed, again posing a direct threat to Saudi oil exports from the Red Sea. If Saudi Arabia continues to support the war on Iran, Yemen proved its capacity in the failed Saudi-led attack of 2015 to strike damaging blows from the West.
The costs to the Gulf states already are enormous. They have affected the region as a tourist, business, banking, and civilian transport hub. If the US cannot soon be shown decisively to be ‘winning, ’ it won’t be long before all of them will be seeking a settlement with Iran. The UAE’s abandonment of OPEC because other Gulf states did not give enough support to the US/Israeli war has seriously split the ranks.
China’s reliance on Iranian oil has been emphasized, but China has capacious reserves, amongst the largest in the world, and is thus cushioned against the short-term consequences of the crisis in the Gulf.
In their wars of aggression on Iran (the first in June 2025 and the second launched on February 28, 2006), and in the negotiations that followed, the Americans showed no understanding or respect for the people, the culture, and the depth of the civilization they were dealing with.
They expected submission and a quick victory, but instead, people stood firm behind their government and military. They massed in the streets, challenging the US and Israel to do their worst and accepting martyrdom if that was their fate.
W. Morgan Shuster, the upright American called in by the majlis (parliament) as Iran’s Treasurer-General in 1911, before Russian and British intrigue secured his dismissal after eight months, referred to how “two powerful and presumably enlightened Christian countries played fast and loose with truth, honor, decency and law (The Strangling of Persia, 1913, p.8).
These words describe exactly the behavior of the US and Israel in the long campaign to destroy Iran from the moment the Shah was overthrown in 1979. Failing despite 46 years of sanctions, sabotage and assassination, both finally decided on military force.
This is the most significant war in the modern history of West Asia. Its outcome will determine the future of the region for decades to come, if not for the next century, as Sykes-Picot did after 1916.
So far, Iran has not put a foot wrong and Israel and the US have not a foot right. Iranian sophistication has been met with US crudity and bluster. Sending two real estate developers to Islamabad instead of experienced diplomats with actual background knowledge of Iran indicated that the negotiations were not being taken seriously but were a cover for something else.
Rational does not apply to Donald Trump as the meaning of the word is generally understood. What he says one day, he contradicts the next. He wants an ‘off ramp’ with dignity, but there isn’t one. Every time he tries to raise his head above water, Netanyahu pushes it down.
For the moment, there is a stalemate. Each move so far has taken Iran closer to declaring shahmat.
In his frustration, Trump might try to avert defeat by destroying Iran “as a civilization.” Mass destruction through the saturation bombing of civilian infrastructure, centered on the energy sector, would be the equivalent of the bad loser kicking the table over rather than admitting defeat. Chess is a game of rules, but the US does not play by the rules.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019).