1st October 2026
We should perhaps stop asking who is winning the war with Iran and start asking a much more uncomfortable question.
What happens if nobody can end it?
The war has now entered its eighth month. The United States and Israel have inflicted enormous damage on Iran, while Iran has demonstrated that military superiority does not necessarily translate into political surrender.
And now there is a danger that should concern everyone, including people thousands of miles from the Middle East.
What if this becomes another Ukraine?
Ukraine is now entering the fifth year of full-scale war. More than 10 million people still need humanitarian assistance and almost 6 million Ukrainians remain displaced abroad, according to the United Nations. The estimated cost of rebuilding the country over the next decade has reached almost $588 billion.
Nobody looking at that devastation would have chosen it as an acceptable outcome.
Yet wars have a habit of becoming longer than anyone originally imagined.
We are already paying part of the price
For people in Caithness, the war with Iran can seem impossibly distant.
But it is not distant when you fill your car with diesel.
It is not distant when you order heating oil.
It is not distant when food prices rise because transport, energy, insurance and fertiliser costs rise.
And it is certainly not distant when households are approaching another winter already under pressure from the cost of living.
Oil prices rose again on Wednesday as hopes of progress in US-Iran talks stalled. Brent crude closed at around $103.50 a barrel, having risen about 14% during September.
That does not mean every pound added to household costs can be blamed on Iran. Inflation has many causes.
But energy is the great transmission mechanism of modern economies.
A war affecting one of the world's most important oil-producing regions eventually reaches the supermarket, the taxi, the delivery van, the farm and the household heating tank.
We may not be fighting the war.
But we can end up paying part of its bill.
And ordinary Iranians are paying a much heavier price
There is another side to this story that is sometimes lost in geopolitical arguments.
Iranian families are not the Iranian government.
Someone living in Tehran or Bandar Abbas did not personally decide to go to war with America. They did not choose the sanctions, the blockade, the disruption to trade or the destruction of infrastructure.
Reports from Iran now describe a rapidly deteriorating economy, with the rial falling sharply and prices of essential goods, including medicines, rising. Iran's economy was already under enormous pressure before the war, but the conflict has made matters considerably worse.
It is possible to disagree profoundly with the Iranian government's policies while still feeling sympathy for Iranian families caught in a war.
Indeed, perhaps that is where ordinary people in Britain and Iran have more in common than their governments might imagine.
We both have an interest in the war ending.
The danger is that war becomes normal
This is where Ukraine should give us pause.
A war can begin with clearly stated military objectives.
Then it continues because those objectives have not been achieved.
Then the demands increase.
Then neither side can afford to be seen to back down.
Eventually the original question of what constitutes victory becomes almost impossible to answer.
Meanwhile people continue dying, infrastructure is destroyed, economies are damaged and governments spend enormous sums that could otherwise have been used elsewhere.
Ukraine provides a sobering example of what happens when a conflict becomes a war of endurance.
The United Nations says more than 10.8 million people in Ukraine require humanitarian assistance in 2026. The country's reconstruction bill is now estimated at nearly $588 billion.
Do we really want to see another country heading down that road?
Perhaps “winning” is the wrong objective
There is an uncomfortable question for Washington, Tehran and everyone else involved.
What if neither side can achieve everything it wants?
That does not necessarily mean one side has won and the other has lost.
It may simply mean that the time has come to ask what each side could accept in order to stop the killing and economic destruction.
There are already signs that diplomacy has not completely disappeared.
Iran has proposed a framework involving reopening the Strait of Hormuz in return for concessions from Washington. President Trump rejected the proposal in its current form, but Iran confirmed on Wednesday that it had received a US response through diplomatic channels. Reuters reported that the two sides appear to agree on some of the steps needed but remain divided over the order in which they should happen.
That may not sound like much.
But after months of war, the fact that people are still talking is important.
There is a common interest here
This is perhaps where ordinary people have something to say.
A British pensioner worried about the price of heating oil does not have the same experience as an Iranian family trying to buy food during a war.
A Caithness taxi driver facing higher fuel costs is not experiencing the same hardship as a Ukrainian family living under bombardment.
The situations are completely different.
But there is nevertheless a common thread.
Ordinary people generally have much more to gain from peace than from prolonged war.
That is true in Caithness.
It is true in Iran.
And it is certainly true in Ukraine.
Perhaps that is why we should be wary of the language of total victory.
Wars are sometimes unavoidable. Countries sometimes have legitimate reasons for defending themselves. Governments sometimes believe military force is necessary.
But starting a war and ending one are very different things.
And the longer a war continues, the greater the danger that its consequences become more important than the original objective.
We should not wait five years to ask the question
The lesson from Ukraine should not be that countries should surrender when attacked.
Nor should it be that military action can never be justified.
It should be something rather simpler.
Wars that are difficult to start can be even more difficult to stop.
We have already seen what five years of war can do to Ukraine.
The last thing the world needs is to discover what five years of war with Iran would do to Iran, the United States, Israel, the Middle East and the global economy.
And for those of us in Caithness, there is a very practical reason to hope that diplomacy succeeds.
Every additional month of uncertainty threatens to feed into energy prices, transport costs, food prices and household finances just as winter approaches.
Perhaps we should therefore stop asking:
“Who is winning?”
And start asking:
“How do we get everybody out of this before it becomes another war that lasts for years?”
That may not satisfy governments seeking victory.
But for ordinary people on all sides, it might be the most important question of all.
Postscript
American voters may have something to say in Novembers mid-term elections as the polls seem to be hurting Donald Trump's party.