The First Attention War: Update
Two eschatological templates, no institutional template, and no off button.
Twelve days ago I wrote that the escalator had gone vertical. I was right - but underestimated the outputs of my own model.
On March 2nd, three leaders held three enormous stocks of political identity capital that were structurally incompatible with resolution. That was bad enough. But the framework I described, attention as product, war as content, identity capital as the thing being minted rather than spent, made a prediction I did not fully follow through.
I said there was no off button. I should have said there is no off button and the institutional template that previously contained Middle Eastern conflicts has been ejected from the system.
That has now happened. And the consequences are visible this morning in three headlines.
Iran has shed Hamas.
Hamas released a statement on Saturday affirming Iran’s right to retaliate while calling on Iran to avoid targeting neighbouring countries. Read that carefully. A client organisation is publicly telling its patron what to do. That is not alliance management. That is the sound of a body that already left, looking back at its former patron and saying: don’t take us with you.
The shedding did not begin with the strikes on Iran. It began in Gaza.
Iran’s identity clarity is maximally simple now: no Israel. Everything in the Iranian state identity template derives from that proposition. But Hamas’s destruction in Gaza produced an irreconcilable divergence. Gaza needs Israel to survive — to open borders, to allow reconstruction, to permit the material conditions of continued existence. Hamas has been migrating towards the institutional template, where Israel’s existence is not the enemy but the prerequisite for statehood, recognition, and survival.
That migration broke the template binding. You cannot hold “destroy Israel” as your identity clarity when your population’s survival depends on Israel’s cooperation. Hamas did not choose to leave Iran’s orbit. The template and the material conditions pulled apart, and Hamas moved towards the only well where its people can live.
How do we know the shedding is complete? Because Hamas called on Iran to avoid targeting neighbouring countries, and Iran struck Saudi Arabia.
Five US Air Force KC-135 refuelling tankers were hit on the ground at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia by an Iranian missile strike, according to the Wall Street Journal. The tankers were damaged but not destroyed.
That is Iran ignoring its last remaining client’s only public request and violating the sovereignty of a third country in the same action. The patron-client relationship is not strained. It is over. Iran has decided that the cost of dragging Saudi Arabia into the war is lower than the cost of letting the American tanker fleet operate unmolested. That is a calculation that only makes sense if Iran has already concluded that regional escalation is inevitable. They are not trying to contain this. They are spreading it. Because their template does not have containment either.
Saudi Arabia has now been pulled into the conflict whether it wanted to be or not. An Iranian strike on Saudi soil forces the Kingdom to either respond — entering the war — or absorb the hit, which destroys its own identity capital as a sovereign state that controls its territory. Either way, the field is widening.
The United States has shed the United Kingdom.
Starmer’s allies are briefing that his stance on Trump and Iran “could be the making of him.” They are misreading the field completely. They think they are choosing a position. They are not. They have been ejected.
Trump is a scalar identity actor. He extracts attention returns from anything regardless of direction. The UK’s directional commitments — alliance coherence, the rules-based order, the NATO framework — are precisely the vector components that get centrifugally ejected when the central body accelerates its rotation. The praise from Starmer’s allies is the sound of a shed body trying to pretend that ejection was a choice.
But the shedding is not just happening between countries. It is happening inside them.
Nigel Farage demanded on day one that Starmer “change his mind on the use of our military bases and back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran.” He called for regime change. He said “we should do all we can to support the operation.” Kemi Badenoch declared that the strikes were “absolutely right” and told Parliament: “We are in this war whether they like it or not — what is the prime minister waiting for?”
Within ten days, both had reversed completely. Farage said Britain should “not get ourselves involved in another foreign war.” Badenoch told the BBC she had never said the UK should have joined. Starmer accused them at PMQs of “the mother of all U-turns” and said that had either been leading the country, Britain would be at war.
Seventy-four per cent of UK voters now say British forces should either have no involvement or respond only defensively. Farage was snubbed by Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Only 24 per cent of Reform’s own voters back active participation. Both leaders were orbiting the scalar actor, were accelerated beyond the binding energy their domestic identity capital could sustain, and were flung off. The U-turn is not cowardice. It is physics. They were shed.
And then there is Rupert Lowe, who was never in the same orbit at all. Lowe — who split from Reform to launch Restore Britain, backed by Elon Musk, with an ecosystem that Matt Goodwin himself described as “riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists” — came out against involvement from the start. Not because he opposes war. Because this is an American-Israeli war, and Lowe’s constituency sits inside the Protocols template. He was never aligned with the dispensationalist well. He occupies the other eschatological position — the one where this is the wrong war. Same mechanism as the dispensationalists opposing Iraq. Not anti-war. Anti this war.
Three British political actors. Three different ejection trajectories. All predicted by the same field dynamics.
Trump continues to escalate towards a dispensationalist template.
This is the development that changes the structural category of the conflict.
In the original piece, I described three regimes of attention value operating simultaneously: Trump in the second regime (attention is the product), Putin in the third (attention carries negative value), and Zelenskyy occupying a unique position where genuine existential resistance generates identity capital.
That framework still holds. But I need to make the underlying landscape more explicit.
Iraq and Afghanistan were institutional-template wars. State department process, NATO alliance structure, UN resolutions or the pretence of them, coalition building, defined objectives. The institutional template has its own internal logic and — critically — it contains its own termination conditions. Mission accomplished. Troop drawdown. Handover to local forces. Status of forces agreements. The template includes off-ramps because the template was designed by institutions that need to continue operating after the war ends.
The Protocols-derived groups and the dispensationalist groups both opposed those wars. Not because they are anti-war. Because those were the wrong wars. The institutional template was the wrong template. It would end before reaching the eschatological endpoint that their templates require.
This war is different. This war is running on their template.
Kharg Island. Iran. The geography is eschatologically correct. The rhetoric is eschatologically correct. The shedding of institutional allies is not a bug — it is confirmation that the institutional template has been displaced. Every NATO ally ejected, every state department professional marginalised, every institutional off-ramp destroyed as content — these are all signals to the template-invested audience that this time it is real.
What we now have is an anti-Israel template facing a pro-rapture template with no institutional template between them.
The anti-Israel template — Protocols-derived, Iranian state identity, the resistance axis — requires the conflict because the template runs to the destruction of Israel. The dispensationalist template — premillennialist, rapture theology, Second Coming — requires the conflict because the template runs to apocalyptic fulfilment through Israel. Israel is not the object of support. It is the instrument of prophecy. The template needs Israel to exist in order for the prophecy to complete — which ends not with Israeli security but with the apocalypse.
Both templates require the war. Neither has a termination condition short of its eschatological endpoint.
The war is the point. For both sides. Simultaneously.
The institutional template that previously sat between them — the one that produced Oslo, Camp David, the JCPOA, the boring procedural machinery of diplomacy — has been shed. There is no third body in the system whose identity capital is invested in stopping. The mediating structure has been ejected by the rotation.
And both audiences are receiving increasing attention returns from escalation. The attention market is rewarding both sides for continuing. The rent structure is symmetric in its incentive to escalate and symmetric in its inability to stop.
On Friday, the United States ordered 2,500 Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli to the Middle East. They are currently in the Pacific, more than a week from the waters off Iran. Military commentators immediately noted the obvious target: Kharg Island, Iran’s primary oil export terminal, which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” military targets on earlier that day. An amphibious seizure of Kharg would cross a threshold that no previous Middle Eastern conflict has approached.
The same day, thirteen American service members were dead. Over 1,200 Iranian civilians had been killed. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was reportedly wounded and in hiding. Iran’s navy was at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed.
Asked when the war would end, Trump said: “When I feel it in my bones.”
That sentence is the framework made visible.
An institutional-template war has termination conditions. Objectives met. Territory secured. Treaty signed. The language of ending is procedural: benchmarks, drawdown schedules, status of forces agreements. Iraq had “mission accomplished.” Afghanistan had the Doha agreement. The institutional template contains the vocabulary for stopping because the institutions need to continue operating after the war ends.
“When I feel it in my bones” contains no objective, no condition, no benchmark. It is a scalar statement from a scalar actor. It means: the war ends when the attention returns from ending it exceed the attention returns from continuing it. Not when a goal is achieved — because there is no goal. Not when the costs become too high — because the costs are borne by other people. When the feeling changes. When the content cycle moves on.
But the content cycle cannot move on, because the dispensationalist template does not have a content cycle. It has a prophecy. And the prophecy does not end when someone feels it in their bones. It ends at Armageddon.
The 2,500 Marines heading for the Gulf are not a strategic deployment in the institutional sense. They are the next scene in the content. And the template-invested audience is watching, and their identity capital is appreciating with every escalation, and there is nobody left in the system with the authority or the incentive to say stop.
Meanwhile, the template is rewriting the global strategic map and nobody in charge appears to have noticed.
Iran has struck not just Israel but Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. Six sovereign states hit by Iranian drones and missiles. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Oil prices have spiked to their highest since 2022.
In response, Ukraine — the country that has spent four years learning how to kill Shahed drones on a budget — has deployed interceptor drone teams and specialists to Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Zelenskyy has spoken to the leaders of every affected Gulf state. Ukraine is now simultaneously defending itself against Russian-launched Shaheds and defending American bases against Iranian-launched Shaheds. The country Trump told “you don’t have the cards” is holding the only card that works.
And here is where it becomes a closed loop.
To manage the oil price chaos caused by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil. Around 130 million barrels of Russian crude stranded at sea can now be sold. The Kremlin’s envoy posted a Russian flag on X with the caption: “Buy Russian oil and gas.” Putin’s spokesperson said their interests “coincide.”
Follow the money. Trump’s war on Iran closes the Strait. The closed Strait spikes oil prices. The spiked prices force Trump to lift Russian sanctions. The lifted sanctions fund Russia’s war machine. Russia’s war machine fires Iranian-designed Shaheds at Ukraine. Ukraine, the world’s leading expert in killing those Shaheds, is asked by the United States to deploy that expertise to the Gulf — to defend against the same drones, made by the same country, in the war that created the price spike that funded the drones in the first place.
It is a perfect circle. And it is invisible from inside the dispensationalist identity well.
This is not a filtering problem. The template is not blocking information. Information in this system is asymmetric and local. It depends on your position in the field. If you are inside the dispensationalist identity well, the Ukraine-Russia-Iran-oil loop is on the other side of an event horizon. You cannot see it. Not because you are choosing not to look. Not because someone is hiding it. Because from your position in the field, the information does not arrive. Iran is visible. Israel is visible. The prophecy is visible. Ukraine, Russia, the oil price, the closed loop — these are beyond the horizon.
And it works in the other direction. From inside the institutional template — the Guardian editorial desk, the European Council, the retired state department officials writing op-eds — you cannot see into the dispensationalist well. That is why they keep writing “no clear goal” and “escalation trap.” They are observing the same events from outside the event horizon and the behaviour appears irrational, because the information that makes it internally coherent is on the other side. It is not irrational. It is locally rational. The goals are clear. You just cannot see them from where you are standing.
Nobody is stupid. Nobody is irrational. Information is local.
This is what it means when I say the institutional template has been shed. An institutional framework would look at the closed loop and say: we are funding our adversary’s ally while asking our adversary’s victim to defend us against our adversary’s weapons. That is incoherent. Stop.
From inside the dispensationalist well, that sentence does not parse. The loop is not incoherent. It is not visible.
People are assuming this will stop. They are mapping Iraq and Afghanistan onto the situation and concluding that at some point the costs will exceed the benefits and a rational actor will choose to de-escalate.
This is the wrong model. Iraq and Afghanistan were institutional-template wars where costs were measured in policy terms. This conflict’s costs are denominated in faith.
Faith-denominated identity capital has the highest binding energy of any template class. It is not discounted by evidence. Military setbacks become tests of faith. Civilian casualties become martyrdom. Economic collapse becomes tribulation. Every cost that would break a rational-strategic actor or an institutional-template actor gets absorbed and reprocessed as confirmation by an eschatological template.
The template has an immune system against disconfirmation.
When both sides are on a mission from God, the conflict does not end because someone decides it should. It ends when the costs become existential for one or both sides — not existential in the diplomatic sense, but existential in the sense that the population carrying the template can no longer physically sustain it.
The historical precedent is the Thirty Years’ War. Two eschatological templates, both on a mission from God, no institutional mediating structure, thirty years, a third of Central Europe dead. It stopped when there was nothing left to burn.
I am not predicting that scale of destruction. I am pointing out that the current field configuration has the same structural signature. No off-ramp. No friction. No institutional mediation. Two self-reinforcing eschatological templates. An attention market that rewards both for escalating.
In the original piece, I said that for Iran, no bigger market was being offered. That remains the structural absence that is doing the killing. Without an alternative market to switch into — the mechanism that ended the Troubles, the mechanism that could end the Ukraine war — the only dynamics available are the ones already in motion.
And the dispensationalist template does not have a market-switching event in its internal logic. It has Armageddon.
See also my article from August 2025 - discussing exactly this scenario
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.
Three identity wells. No institutional template. No off button. No friction.
And twelve days later, the machine is running exactly as predicted.
Postscript: The Vice President and the Wrong War
As this piece was being written, Politico reported that Vice President JD Vance was “skeptical,” “worried about success,” and “just opposes” the war on Iran, according to senior Trump administration officials.
Vance has publicly defended the operation. He has not echoed Trump’s triumphant language. He has never said “we won.” When asked, he draws lines to Iraq and Afghanistan and insists this will be different — that Trump has “clearly defined what he wants to accomplish.” Two days before the strikes began, he told the Washington Post he views himself as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions.”
The commentary frames this as a personality clash or a policy disagreement. It is neither. It is the framework operating inside the White House.
Vance was not selected as a non-intervention institutionalist. He was selected as a Protocols-template vice president — aligned with Musk, Thiel, the tech-right ecosystem, the anti-institutional orientation. His constituency invested in dismantling the domestic “deep state,” not in a Middle Eastern war. His non-interventionism is not diplomatic. It is template-derived. The wars are distractions. The real enemy is at home. Fight the cathedral, not Iran.
This is the same mechanism operating on Vance that operated on Farage, Badenoch, and Lowe — and the same mechanism that operated on the dispensationalists who opposed Iraq. It is the wrong war. Not wrong because war is wrong. Wrong because this war serves the dispensationalist premillennialist template, not the Protocols template. Every marine deployed to the Gulf, every news cycle consumed by Iran, every dollar spent on Kharg Island is a resource diverted from the project his identity capital is built on.
The dispensationalist template captured the container. Vance is a Protocols-template actor trapped inside it. His identity capital is depreciating — not because he is failing, but because the container changed template underneath him.
But he cannot leave. Trump is a container, not a cluster. Containers do not shed members through gradual attrition. They hold or they collapse. There is no graceful exit from inside a container. Vance’s only available strategy is the one the model predicts: minimise additional identity capital destruction while remaining inside. Defend publicly. Withhold the triumphant language. Let senior officials leak your scepticism to Politico. File the dissent on the public record. Preserve the residual for 2028.
The leaks are not indiscipline. They are investment. Vance is banking identity capital against the day the container either collapses or the template rotation stops. His bet is that the Protocols-template constituency — Musk’s audience, the tech-right, the America First non-interventionists — will still be there afterwards, and will remember that he was the one who was sceptical.
He may be right. But the model also predicts this: the dispensationalist template does not have a pause button. And the longer the war runs, the more identity capital Vance has to write down to remain inside the container. His surplus is running. The claims are accumulating. The question is whether his reserves hold until the template changes — or whether the template runs until there is nothing left to hold.
“When I feel it in my bones,” said the President.
The Vice President is feeling it in his.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/13/jd-vance-skeptical-iran-operation-00826780
An awkward read, the language seemed stilted, but probably an inciteful take on the way the war is going.
I hope it's wrong.
There is a point you shall consider: a part of the dispensionalist camp (the institutionalists), is really anti War because they think that the Messianic War was II World War, the Messianic forces won, Israel was established and we are already living in the Messianic Age.
As a consequence they are allways for estabilization, cabinet Wars, and integration. There are good guys out there, unfortunately they are no longer in charge.