# Iran > [!info] Gateway page > Orientation on Iran is here. Operations directed at the United States are at [[Iranian Influence]]; the full historical cluster is at [[Iranian History Hub]]. **Iran** is, as of 2026, the subject that connects this vault's foreign-policy material to its domestic economic material — because the war being fought with it is arriving in American households as the price of diesel. **The through-line is the chokepoint.** Iran sits on the [[Strait of Hormuz]], and its allied forces now sit on the [[Bab el-Mandeb]] at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula. Together those two passages carry more than a quarter of the world's seaborne crude. That geography is the reason a regional war converts into an American kitchen-table number faster than any other foreign conflict the vault tracks, and it is why [[Gas Prices]] is a foreign-policy page as much as an economic one. **The war has its own timeline.** [[Iran War 2026]] opened in February 2026 and is documented in detail at [[Iran War 2026 Timeline]]. The material worth arriving with: the war was launched during ongoing nuclear negotiations, produced a memorandum of understanding in June widely read as favorable to Iran, collapsed within weeks, and by September had reached a point where the President and his own senior advisors were publicly offering incompatible forecasts of when it ends. **The proxy structure matters more than the state's own forces.** The [[Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]] is the institution that runs it, and the [[Houthis]] are the case study — the cheapest and most effective of the network, capable of imposing costs wildly disproportionate to what they spend. The cost-asymmetry problem they pose is a live question for American defense procurement and appears throughout the vault's defense-tech material. **The domestic politics run through an older argument.** Iran policy is where the American right's internal split between hawks and restrainers is sharpest, because the same movement contains people who regard the [[JCPOA]] as appeasement and people who regard any Middle Eastern war as the establishment's recurring mistake. Unlike the Ukraine split, this one predates the current era by decades and maps imperfectly onto every other factional line. The caution: Iranian state conduct, Iranian domestic opposition, and Iranian-American communities are three different subjects, routinely merged in American commentary in ways that make the first harder to think about clearly and the third unsafe. ## Where to go from here | Destination | What's there | |---|---| | [[Iran War 2026]] | The current war | | [[Iran War 2026 Timeline]] | Detailed chronology | | [[Iranian Influence]] | Operations directed at the United States | | [[Iranian History Hub]] | The historical arc, including 1953 and 1979 | | [[Strait of Hormuz]] | The eastern chokepoint | | [[Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]] | The institution running the proxy network | ## See also [[Bab el-Mandeb]] · [[Houthis]] · [[Gas Prices]] · [[JCPOA]] · [[World History Hub]]