The First Attention War
Iran, three identity wells, and why there is no off button.
On Saturday, Donald Trump linked a military strike on Iran to the 2020 election.
Not subtly. Not through implication. In a social media post, he stated that Iran had tried to stop him and now faced war with the United States. The grievance and the bombs were presented as the same thing.
On the same day, he called every major journalist in his phone to workshop timelines and objectives for the war he had just started. Two or three days, he told one outlet. Four to five weeks, he told another. Freedom for the Iranian people, he told a third. We identified three potential successors but killed them in the initial strikes, he told a fourth.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Vladimir Putin said nothing.
Farida Rustamova, one of the best reporters on Kremlin dynamics, explained the silence. A source close to the Kremlin told her that Putin is avoiding criticism of Trump because he still hopes Trump will help him conclude a favourable deal in Ukraine. Commenting on Iran would be pointless. It would only draw attention to his weakness.
“He has his own war.”
Three leaders. Three wars. Three enormous stocks of political identity capital that are structurally incompatible with resolution.
This is the first attention war.
I need to explain what I mean by that.
Every previous war had a propaganda dimension. States have always managed information during conflict. But the strategic objectives existed independently of the media strategy. You bombed the factory because you wanted to destroy the factory. The propaganda told your people why the factory needed destroying.
What is happening with Iran is different.
Trump is not workshopping strategy with journalists. He is workshopping narrative. Four outlets, four timelines, four objectives. The policy contradictions are not errors. They are features. Each version generates content. Each contradiction generates debate. Each debate generates attention.
The attention is the product.
The bombs are serving the content, not the other way round.
I have spent the last two years developing an economic framework that explains this. The short version: political identity has become a rent-bearing asset. It generates income through attention, audience loyalty, and conflict maintenance, independently of whether anyone wins an election, passes a law, or achieves a strategic objective.
Economic rent is the oldest concept in the discipline. David Ricardo described it in 1817 by looking at farmland. Some land is more fertile. The people who own it extract income not because they work harder but because they control a scarce resource.
Political identity works the same way. Some identities are more fertile — they generate more attention, more engagement, more revenue. The people who control them extract rents from that fertility. The shouting is not irrational. It is the business model.
The framework identifies three regimes. In the first, attention serves electoral survival — politicians use media to win office. In the second, attention itself becomes the primary payoff — the office is a bonus, the content is the product. In the third, attention carries negative value — civil servants, administrators, and cautious leaders avoid visibility because scrutiny means career risk.
All three regimes are operating simultaneously this weekend.
Trump is in the second regime. Attention is the product. The Iran strike is not serving a foreign policy objective — the contradictory timelines and goals make that clear. It is serving the attention production function. The 2020 election grievance has been fused to the military operation because the grievance is identity capital that appreciates through repetition. Every time it is reactivated, it reinforces the narrative his market rewards. He is not spending political capital on Iran. He is minting new identity capital by attaching the strike to his most resonant identity product.
De-escalation would require abandoning the grievance frame. Abandoning the frame would mean writing down identity capital. The incentive structure points one way.
Putin is in the third regime. Attention carries negative value. His ally’s supreme leader has been assassinated and he cannot respond, cannot comment, cannot acknowledge the event without activating dynamics he cannot control. Silence is not weakness concealed. It is the rational strategy when visibility exposes the gap between your identity product (”Russia is a great power that protects its allies”) and reality (”Russia could not prevent the assassination of its most important Middle Eastern partner”). The identity well is deep but the water level is dropping. Everyone watching can see it.
Zelenskyy occupies a unique position that makes the three-body problem insoluble. His identity capital is built on genuine existential resistance — not performance, not content generation, but survival under bombardment. Every day Putin is distracted or weakened, Zelenskyy’s relative position strengthens. But his identity capital as the wartime president requires the war. Any peace that concedes territory destroys the asset on which his domestic and international position rests.
Three actors. Three enormous stocks of domestic identity capital. Each degraded or destroyed by genuine resolution.
The model predicts not just stalemate but structural irresolvability — not because the geopolitics are complex, but because the domestic rent economics of all three parties require continuation.
The Telegram channels are already aggregating Trump’s NYT interview. He told the paper that the US had identified potential successors in Iran but killed them in the initial strikes.
Read that again.
He is narrating the destruction of his own stated exit strategy as content. The incoherence is not a failure of planning. It is the plan. Coherent policy produces a single outcome. Incoherent policy produces continuous content — debate, contradiction, clarification, escalation, each feeding the next.
Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent whose thread was reposted by the military analyst Michael Kofman, put it plainly: Trump is throwing spaghetti at the wall. He just wants to say he solved a problem that has vexed every president since Carter. But there is no clear idea of what “solved” looks like and no plan for getting there.
Carlstrom is right about the observation. The framework explains the mechanism. Trump does not need to solve it. He needs to say he solved it. The identity product is “I solved Iran.” The actual outcome is secondary. Resolution does not need to be real. It needs to be narratively sufficient to generate the content.
Northern Ireland is the proof that this can end.
For decades, the island operated as a closed identity market. Two communities, geographically bounded, no exit, escalation spiralling. The Troubles were the model’s prediction made real under zero-penalty conditions.
But in the 1990s, something changed — not beliefs, not exhaustion, not moral awakening. The market structure changed. EU membership, the Celtic Tiger, free movement, and access to a vastly larger identity and economic market meant that the actors suddenly had access to higher-rent opportunities outside the closed violent market.
Mo Mowlam, Gerry Adams, and Ian Paisley did not make peace because they were persuaded. They made peace because the EU offered a bigger market. The rational move was to leave the violent closed identity market and enter the larger one, where the rents were higher and the costs were lower.
The Good Friday Agreement was not diplomacy triumphing over hatred. It was a market-switching event. Peace was the entry price.
The question today is whether anyone is offering a bigger market.
For Ukraine, the answer exists: EU and NATO membership would flip all three principals’ incentive structures simultaneously. Putin’s identity product collapses because you cannot claim a country is a fascist threat when the entire Western security architecture has formally accepted it. Trump can claim the deal of the century. Zelenskyy’s identity capital transforms from wartime resistance to the leader who won — who brought his country into Europe.
For Iran, no such market is being offered. And so the escalator keeps running.
This Substack will apply this framework to events as they happen. Not partisan commentary. Not vibes. Just the incentive structure, the prediction, and the outcome.
The model has been generating correct predictions for two years. The formal academic paper is under review. The book will be called The Outrage Dividend.
But the events are not waiting for the publishing schedule.
So here we are. The first attention war. Three identity wells. No off button.
And the escalator just went vertical.