The Iranian The Tit‑for‑Tat War: what Game Theory predicts
How a 60-year-old mathematical model predicted America's strategic trap — and why Iran's patient, asymmetric strategy is winning the logic war, even as its cities burn.
I have been fascinated by Game Theory for decades — particularly the prisoner's dilemma. The framework grows remarkably complex, yet applying it can yield surprisingly accurate forecasts when analysing competitor behaviour. Recently, I had a spirited debate with Anthropic's Claude, using Game Theory to analyse the US/Israel–Iran conflict. As a measure of just how intricate this subject is, here was Claude's conclusion:
US/Israel “win” the shooting war. Whether they win the peace is another question entirely - and history suggests that’s where these things get complicated.
I challenged Claude’s conclusions, assumptions and its corpus. Let’s say for now, that Claude got it wrong, very wrong.
Tit-for-Tat: In 1980, political scientist Robert Axelrod ran a computer tournament that became one of the most important insights in the social sciences. He invited game theorists from around the world to submit strategies for a repeated version of a classic puzzle — the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The winner, against all intuition, was the simplest program submitted: four lines of code called Tit-for-Tat.
This exceptional video by Youtube channel Veritasium did a deep dive into Axelrod’s experiment, with insights by the man himself: This game theory problem will change the way you see the world
Cooperate on the first move. After that, do exactly what your opponent did last round. Always. No exceptions.
Forty-six years later, that simple algorithm is playing out with missiles, drones, and aircraft carriers across the Middle East. Understanding it is the key to understanding who is winning - and who cannot win - the war that began on 28 February 2026.
First, the theory: What is the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
GAME THEORY PRIMER
Imagine two players - call them A and B. Each must choose, simultaneously and without communicating, to either cooperate or defect. Their payoffs depend on what the other player does. It looks like this:
The cruel logic of the dilemma is this: no matter what your opponent does, you are individually better off defecting. If they cooperate, you gain more by defecting. If they defect, you lose less by defecting too. Defection is the “dominant strategy” - and the rational outcome is that both players defect, ending in the worst collective outcome: mutual ruin.
This is the Nash Equilibrium. It is also, in broad strokes, what is happening between the United States, Israel, and Iran right now.
KEY CONCEPT: NASH EQUILIBRIUM
A Nash Equilibrium is a state where no player can improve their outcome by changing their strategy alone. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, mutual defection is a Nash Equilibrium — even though both sides would be better off cooperating. Neither can unilaterally switch to cooperation without being exploited.
The Iterated Game Changes Everything
Here is where Axelrod’s discovery becomes a game-changer. When you play the Prisoner’s Dilemma repeatedly - not once, but round after round, with the same opponent - the calculus transforms entirely. Suddenly, the future matters. Your opponent can reward or punish you based on what you did last round. Cooperation can emerge and sustain itself, not because the players are altruistic, but because it is strategically rational.
In Axelrod’s tournament, Tit-for-Tat won because it possessed four elegant properties:
1. Niceness. It never defects first. It opens with cooperation and signals good faith.
2. Provocability. It punishes defection immediately, in the very next move. It cannot be exploited.
3. Forgiveness. If the opponent cooperates again, Tit-for-Tat forgives and returns to cooperation.
4. Clarity. Its behavior is simple and legible. The opponent always knows what to expect.
Now apply this to the relationship between Iran and the United States and Israel over the past two decades. The pattern is unmistakable.
Iran has not been playing irrationally. It has been playing Tit-for-Tat - the most stable, cooperation-inducing strategy known to game theory.
The escalation ladder: A catalogue of strikes
PHASE ONE: THE SHADOW WAR (2010–2023)
Before missiles flew between capitals, the conflict was prosecuted through assassinations, cyberattacks, proxy operations, and economic strangulation. The Stuxnet worm, widely attributed to the US and Israel, physically destroyed Iranian centrifuges. Israel systematically killed Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian soil. Iran armed and trained Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza - resistance movements that were fighting their own wars of self-determination, but that Iran strategically supported.
Each operation was answered. Each answer was calibrated. Neither side escalated to direct state-on-state warfare. The iterated game held.
PHASE TWO: THE FIRST DIRECT STRIKES (APRIL–OCTOBER 2024)
PHASE THREE: THE TWELVE-DAY WAR (JUNE 13–24, 2025)
Israel launched a surprise attack, allegedly bombing nuclear facilities, assassinating scientists, generals, and politicians, and systematically destroying Iran’s remaining air defenses. Iran retaliated with over 550 ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 drones, striking civilian areas, military installations, and energy infrastructure. The U.S. then directly entered the conflict, bombing three Iranian nuclear sites on 22 June, 2025. Iran responded by launching missiles at the US base in Qatar. A ceasefire was brokered under US pressure on 24 June.
Iran’s survived and it demonstrated that it could reach US bases across the region.
PHASE FOUR: THE OPEN WAR (FEBRUARY 28, 2026 — ONGOING)
The arithmetic of attrition
THE COST ASYMMETRY THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING
In a war of attrition where the weapon of choice is missiles, the math ain’t matching for the U.S. The U.S. and Israel built their air defense on expensive interceptors designed to destroy incoming threats. Iran has built its offense on cheap, mass-produced drones and ballistic missiles. The cost ratio is catastrophic for the side playing defense.
Senator Mark Kelly put it plainly in congressional testimony: "Patriot and THAAD interceptors cost millions of dollars per launch, while Iranian Shahed drones can be produced for roughly $30,000. The math on this doesn't work." The U.S. has reportedly used "years' worth" of critical munitions — including advanced Tomahawk cruise missiles — in under a fortnight. Estimated expenditure: $2 billion per day.
THE INTERCEPTOR CRISIS
Iran produces over 100 missiles per month. The U.S. produces six to seven interceptors per month. At current exchange rates, the U.S. will run out of THAAD and Patriot interceptors in weeks, not months. Israel entered this war already depleted from the 2025 conflict. Four days into the February offensive, at least one U.S. Gulf ally was already running critically low.
Applying Tit-for-Tat: Who is playing the model correctly? (hint: its not the US and Israel)
The properties that make Tit-for-Tat so powerful. The Veritasium video brilliantly breaks down these concepts.
1. Niceness: Never defect first
Iran did not initiate an unprovoked strike. Every Iranian attack has followed a U.S. or Israeli strike. Iran scores highly on “niceness” in the iterated game sense.
The U.S. and Israel, by contrast, initiated the February 28 strikes with no immediate provocation. The stated justification was preventive: to destroy Iran’s capacity before it could be fully rebuilt after the 2025 ceasefire is not plausible. In game theory terms, this is defection. A significant one.
2. Provocability: Punish defection immediately
Both sides score high here. Iranian retaliation has been swift — typically within 24 of any significant strike. The US-Israel coalition has also responded immediately to Iranian counter-strikes. Neither side is absorbing punishment quietly.
Forgiveness: Return to cooperation when the opponent does
Iran is currently signalling forgiveness. The partial opening of the Strait of Hormuz, the reduction in missile launch rates by day ten (which could also reflect other strategic considerations), and back-channel communications through Oman all represent classic Tit-for-Tat cooperation signals. The question is whether the U.S. and Israel will respond to these signals before the interceptor stockpiles run dry.
The U.S. has not signalled reciprocal forgiveness. Trump’s statement that tanker crews should “show some guts” and his continued rejection of any ceasefire framework represents a continued defection posture.
Clarity: Legible, predictable behavior
Iran’s behavior over the past two years has been remarkably consistent. It has mirrored escalations, offered off-ramps, and behaved in a way that even adversaries can predict. US-Israel behavior appears disorganized, oscillating between negotiation (the 2015 JCPOA, the 2023 nuclear talks, the 2024 ceasefire) and maximal strikes (the 2025 twelve-day war, the 2026 decapitation campaign). This unpredictability undermines stable deterrence.
Trump’s aggressive, maximalist posture arguably points to the chilling reality that the U.S. and Israel have no strategy. If I’m wrong, what does a US/Israel victory look like?
"When you kill the supreme leader and declare regime change as your objective, you have not just defected. You have exited the game entirely."
The game-theory verdict: I asked Claude: what happens next?
THE SHIFT FROM PRISONER’S DILEMMA TO CHICKEN
There is a crucial distinction between the Prisoner’s Dilemma and a game called Chicken. In Prisoner’s Dilemma, both players can choose their strategy independently of the other. In Chicken — think of two cars driving toward each other — the payoffs change: if both refuse to swerve, the outcome is catastrophic. But crucially, in Chicken, one player can “win” by committing credibly to never swerving, forcing the other to blink.
By killing Khamenei and declaring regime change as the war’s objective, the U.S. and Israel have attempted to switch games — from iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (where cooperation is rational long-term) to Chicken (where the player who commits hardest wins). The problem is that this switch only works if the opponent believes you will not swerve. Iran, whose government’s survival is the literal stake, cannot credibly swerve. According to Claude, Iran has nothing left to lose by not blinking.
The Hormuz Lever: Iran’s asymmetric weapon
One-fifth of global oil supply transits the Strait of Hormuz. It is 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest. It cannot be secured by air power alone; it would require a full naval invasion of the Iranian coast. Iran has not fully closed the Strait. It is using it as a throttle — a Tit-for-Tat signal in liquid form. “We are cooperating. We could stop cooperating entirely. The choice is yours.”
The domestic political dimension
In the beginning of this piece I referenced Claude’s incorrect assessment about who wins this conflict? It appears that Claude was swayed by endless western headlines about Iranian protests - much of which appears to be part of a major coordinated propaganda campaign by western nations. This seemingly complicated Claude’s application of Game theory to this conflict. Governments are not unitary actors acting in a vacuum.
The Iranian state, even with its leadership decapitated, has rallied national sentiment. Historical data from the Iraq-Iran war, the 2019 protests and the 2022 uprising all suggest that external military attack unifies Iranian public opinion around the state, regardless of underlying grievances. A population that was protesting a corrupt government in 2022 has become a nationalist population defending its homeland in 2026. This is well-documented in conflict studies and referenced by American political scientist and international relations scholar, Professor John Mearsheimer countless times in media interviews pointing to ‘rally around the flag effect’.
The coalition, by contrast, faces domestic fragility. Trump’s approval rating sat at 42% before the war began. Riots have broken out in Israel — a society already fractured by a constitutional crisis, the October 7 trauma, and 28 months of continuous warfare. Coalition governments depend on public tolerance for cost, casualty, and duration. Iran’s theocratic structure, for all its other failings, does not face the same electoral clock.
Who wins this war?
I’m not a military analyst or military expert. However, applying tit-for-tat, strongly aligns with analyses by experts like Douglas Macgregor, retired colonel in the United States Army.
Militarily, in the short term: The US-Israel coalition has struck more targets, killed more senior officials, and degraded more Iranian military equipment. Iranian missile and drone attacks have fallen by 90% in rate. Whether this is due to attacks or strategic reasons, is unknown. Let’s assume for now that the coalition is winning the hardware exchange.
Strategically, over time: Iran has more endurance and clearly produces offensive weapons faster than the US produces defensive ones. Based on Trump’s recent bluster about a US-led coalition storming through the Strait of Hormuz, not a single nation has publicly put up its hand to join that fight. The Strait of Hormuz cannot be captured. Iran’s leadership, though decapitated at the top, has devolved command to the IRGC, which retains decentralized functional capability. Russia and China are seemingly providing targeting intelligence and economic lifelines. Most importantly, the global south - more accurately, the GLOBAL MAJORITY - has and will not endorse the US’ framing of this conflict.
The game theory verdict: When one player in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma defects maximally, removes all future rounds by declaring regime change, and refuses to respond to cooperation signals, they have not won the game — they have broken it. A broken game does not produce capitulation. It produces attrition. And in a war of attrition at a 100:1 cost ratio, with $100/barrel oil, depleting interceptor stocks, and coalition domestic politics fraying, the side with the lower tolerance for sustained cost will blink first. US President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have not just started a war, they have talked themselves into an unwinnable position.
The most historically apt analogy for this conflict is Athens in the Peloponnesian War — a vastly superior military force that exhausted itself trying to subdue a resilient, distributed enemy it could hurt but never defeat decisively. Athens won every battle it chose to fight but lost the war.
Sources
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (1984) — the foundational text on iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma and Tit-for-Tat strategy.
IAEA Director General Reports, 2003–2015 — documentation of Iranian enrichment activities and absence of confirmed weapons program.
US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s Nuclear Intentions, 2007 and 2011 — assessment that weapons design work was halted in 2003.
Senator Mark Kelly, Senate Armed Services Committee testimony, March 2026 — interceptor cost ratio analysis.
IISS Military Balance 2025 — Iranian missile and drone production capacity estimates.
IMF Global Economic Outlook, Emergency Briefing, March 2026 — oil price trajectory and global economic impact modelling.