The Trump administration is fighting the Iran war as a modern Western war. One state uses military force to force concessions from the other. Their contention blends strategic ambitions with economic motives. Victory is defined as forcing the enemy’s surrender and thereby attaining strategic and economic goals. This kind of war was formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1649, which shifted military competition away from dynasties and warlords and onto a new legal footing, the war between nation-states. The weakening of the Westphalian system is not just the West’s failure. The leveling of economic and technological battlefields has created other ways of waging war.