Who Loses Control First? Threshold Competition in the 2026 U.S.–Israel–Iran Conflict

This working paper analyzes the 2026 U.S.–Israel–Iran conflict as a form of threshold competition rather than a contest for decisive military victory. It introduces the concept of the loss-of-control threshold (LoCT) to explain how actors lose the ability to regulate escalation under cumulative systemic pressure across interconnected military, political, economic, and informational systems. The paper identifies three distinct pathways to loss of control. The United States faces fiscal–strategic overextension driven by the strain of sustaining a globally distributed operational system. Israel confronts escalation lock-in, in which maintaining deterrence requires continued escalation, reducing strategic flexibility. Iran operates within a legitimacy–retaliation loop, where the need to respond to external attacks reinforces escalation dynamics. Despite these differences, all three actors converge on a shared structural condition: vulnerability to nonlinear escalation driven by cumulative systemic pressure. The paper argues that the key variable in contemporary conflict is not battlefield superiority, but the ability to delay crossing actor-specific thresholds of uncontrollability. This study contributes to emerging debates on systemic warfare, escalation dynamics, and cost-imposition strategies in networked conflict environments. It suggests that in modern warfare, strategic success is defined not by who wins first, but by who loses control last.