The Real Lesson of America’s Decades-Long Conflict with Iran
Washington needs a strategy grounded in realism and reciprocal diplomacy.
Donald Trump entered office promising to end America’s endless wars. Instead, he chose a war openly aimed at regime change in Iran that has predictably become a quagmire, trapping the United States in an open-ended cycle of tit-for-tat strikes, economic blockades, and escalating confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz, with no plausible military path to victory.
The immediate crisis is dangerous enough. The larger problem is that Washington is once again doubling down on a decades-long strategic obsession with Iran that has repeatedly produced the opposite of what American policymakers sought to achieve.
My recent report for the Center for International Policy, Beyond Maximalism, examines U.S. policy toward Iran from Iran-Contra through the 2015 nuclear deal, “maximum pressure,” and the ongoing war. The conclusion is uncomfortable but difficult to escape. The current catastrophe was not inevitable. It is the predictable result of a strategy that consistently overestimated what coercive U.S. policies could accomplish while underestimating how Iran would respond.
The first mistake has been treating Iran as an irrational ideological actor rather than a state pursuing what it believes are its security interests.
This does not mean the Islamic Republic is benign. Tehran supports non-state armed groups across the region, represses its own citizens, and has often pursued policies that have undermined regional stability. None of that should be minimized.
But neither should it obscure an equally important reality. Again and again, American military leaders, senior national security officials, and realist scholars have described Iran as a rational actor responding to incentives rather than seeking conflict for its own sake. Its support for Hezbollah has long functioned as a deterrent against Israel. Its expanding nuclear program accelerated after Washington abandoned the nuclear agreement. Today, its effort to consolidate greater control over the Strait of Hormuz reflects a similar logic. Having concluded that American sanctions relief and political commitments are inherently reversible, Tehran views leverage over the world’s most important energy chokepoint as the most durable guarantee it can create against renewed coercion or attack.
One need not approve of any of these policies to recognize that they follow a strategic logic.
The second mistake has been America’s strategic obsession with Iran.
Relative to the threat it poses to core American national interests, Iran has occupied an extraordinary place in Washington’s strategic imagination. Its economy is roughly the size of Connecticut. Its conventional military spending is dwarfed by that of the United States and its regional partners. It lacks the ability to project sustained military power far beyond its borders. Yet for nearly half a century, successive administrations have treated Tehran as though it were one of America’s foremost strategic adversaries, devoting enormous diplomatic, military, and political capital to containing or transforming it.
The results have repeatedly been the opposite of what Washington intended.
The invasion of Iraq eliminated Iran’s principal regional rival and dramatically expanded Tehran’s influence in Baghdad. Withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal accelerated the growth of Iran’s nuclear program while empowering the very hardliners the agreement had marginalized. The Trump administration’s first-term maximum pressure policy failed to produce capitulation while driving Iran closer to Russia and China. And now the collapse of the memorandum of understanding and the resumption of fighting have only reinforced Tehran’s conviction that it cannot entrust its long-term security to promises of future sanctions relief. Instead, they are attempting to create leverage that rests in their own hands.
Trump’s latest decision to restore a blockade illustrates the problem perfectly. Economic strangulation is once again expected to produce political concessions. But if both recent experience and the broader historical record are any indication, renewed coercion is unlikely to produce capitulation. It is more likely to convince Tehran that preserving every remaining source of leverage, especially Hormuz, is indispensable to its security.
That should concern Washington.
The United States enters this renewed phase of conflict with strategic petroleum reserves still historically low and global energy markets far tighter than in any previous crisis. The room for absorbing prolonged disruptions has narrowed considerably. Continued escalation therefore risks imposing substantial costs not only on Iran but on the United States and the broader global economy.
Diplomacy requires credible and reciprocal incentives. Yet American policy has too often assumed that Iran should surrender its principal sources of leverage, from its nuclear program and missile and drone capabilities to its growing leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, in exchange for economic benefits that U.S. administrations remain free to easily revoke. That asymmetry has become one of the central obstacles to diplomacy. Washington continues to ask Tehran to make permanent concessions in return for commitments that Iranian leaders increasingly view as temporary.
There is no military solution to this problem. There never was.
America’s objective should not be to force Iran’s unconditional submission or pursue another futile search for decisive victory. It should be to manage a long-term rivalry in ways that reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation, regional war, global economic disruption, and an ever deeper strategic alignment between Iran, China, and Russia.
That requires a fundamental shift in strategy. As I lay out in my report, Washington must move beyond the illusion that ever greater coercion will eventually produce a more compliant Iran and instead pursue a policy grounded in strategic realism, reciprocal diplomacy, regional integration, and long-term risk reduction.
The real lesson of America’s nearly half-century conflict with Iran is not that Washington lacked military power or economic leverage. It is that those tools were repeatedly used to achieve political objectives they could not in fact deliver. Until that lesson is absorbed, America is likely to keep winning battles while losing the broader strategic competition.
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