The US and Israel went to war against Iran with such clear advantages that the outcome seemed predetermined in their favour.
During Operation Epic Fury, Iranian air defence was reportedly neutralised, missile manufacturing bases were destroyed, naval units were wrecked and senior political leadership and military officials were eliminated. According to the CSIS assessment, Iran’s missile attacks fell sharply during the opening phase of conflict and much of its conventional capability was purportedly destroyed. Yet the Islamic Republic continued to retaliate relentlessly, disrupting Gulf shipping and attacking regional targets, clearly exercising escalation control to force Washington to negotiate.
Buoyed by surgical success in Venezuela, the American strategy against Iran was based on a model similar to that of the 1991 Gulf War, which succeeded through relentless military pressure that coerced the adversary into compliance. However, the US underestimated Iran’s perception of the war. Iran’s asymmetrical approach could not be undermined by the US military and technological superiority alone. Nudged by Israel, the war was a policy choice that Washington had to sell to the voters, allies and markets, while for Tehran, it was survival of the political order.
This misreading by the US stemmed from a deeper misunderstanding of Iranian strategic culture. Iran does not consider itself a modern Middle Eastern state but a successor to a several-millennia-old civilisation. Its decision-making process has always been influenced by the confluence of revolutionary ideology, historical memory and pragmatic adaptation. In particular, the shadow of the Iran-Iraq War left behind a doctrine that prioritised decentralisation and extolled endurance as a means to eventual gain. Iranian strategy, therefore, involves maintaining the status quo, spreading out capabilities, expanding the conflict and gradually eroding the opponent’s will rather than seeking a decisive victory.
Successive invasions and dynastic upheavals reinforced a strong national narrative of cultural survival and resistance to external domination. This approach is further supported by a political system that combines ideological motives with institutional redundancy, allowing it to operate despite long-term external pressures. US foreign policy, by contrast, has often equated material advantages with strategic success. In doing so, it underestimated the Iranian leadership’s perception of cost, risk, and victory. Tehran paid that cost as its capabilities were severely degraded while defending a political system that derives its legitimacy from resistance to foreign intervention.
The Strait of Hormuz is the most obvious example. Iranian drones, mines, missiles and small boats did not aim to defeat the US Navy. Instead, they aimed to create enough risk for commercial shipping to surge insurance premiums, disrupt energy markets and pressure governments thousands of kilometres beyond the battlefield. Being militarily weak, Iran turned a maritime chokepoint into a point of strategic leverage.
Washington also overestimated the fragility of the Iranian state system. Years of sanctions, covert pressure and confrontation spanning decades have driven the Islamic Republic to create overlapping security institutions, disperse capabilities underground and develop mechanisms for leadership continuity. Foreign attacks did not just bridge the gap between society and state; they also enabled the government to appeal to nationalistic sentiment, ignore dissent and offer survival as a form of collective resistance.
A history of American interventions should have better instructed its foreign policy. The US ousted the Taliban regime in 2001, but was able to regain control 20 years later. It toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in weeks, but was unable to establish a stable political system in Iraq, though it still controls Iraq’s oil resources. Similarly, overwhelming firepower did not prevent the Fall of Saigon in Vietnam. Although the conflicts stood in sharp contrast to each other, in each case, the lesser power managed to triumph politically by lasting longer than the greater power was willing to commit.
The conceptual error was to believe that operational dominance would automatically translate into victory. Thomas Schelling’s theory of coercion posits that force succeeds politically only when it alters an opponent’s decision-making. In ‘Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War’, Robert Pape contended that aerial punishment rarely compels a determined state when its leaders believe surrender would be more costly than resistance.
A similar conclusion emerges from the RAND study on US Military Theories of Victory. Coercion requires a realistic mechanism to either eradicate the adversary’s goals or compel surrender without fighting. Without such a mechanism, destruction may just weaken an enemy without yielding compliance, as observed in the case of Iran. The US might be able to attack anywhere in Iran, but it would be difficult to know how Iranians would rank survival on their list of values, what price they would pay, or what pressure they would endure to alter their decisions.
However, Iran stands as a case of caution and warning. Its infrastructure was destroyed, the economic situation worsened and almost the whole upper echelon of power was assassinated. Although it proves the durability of Iranian political acumen, regime survival does not substitute for these losses. The war also offers lessons to other states like China and Russia. They are unlikely to conclude that American military power has become ineffective. They are more apt to believe that the US can be thwarted by decentralised forces, institutional redundancies, economic disruptions, and sufficient retaliatory strength to prevent Washington from having a clean ending. Any future adversary of the US may not try to win the battlefield. It might try to stay politically viable until the opposition splits, public and allied support wanes, and dialogue becomes more attractive than confrontation.
The Iran war did not end American military dominance but exposed the limits of its political primacy. As was obvious, the US war objectives kept on changing from nuclear rollback and Iranian military degradation to regime change, with no clear exit strategy. Even the most loyal allies’ support waned because of mistrust and public sentiment in the US and globally shifted against the war.
Washington could strike ships, missile sites and command centres at will, but it could not automatically bring about a regime change. Iran survived knowing it did not have to match American power, but to prevent it from achieving the political outcome for which the war was waged.
The writer is a research assistant at the Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies (CASS), Islamabad. She can be reached at: [email protected]
