The Iran War Is Lose-Lose
The American Conservative · R · trust 42/100
A realist analysis of power and interests points to a mutually beneficial outcome.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The conflict between the United States and Iran has laid bare a profound failure of political judgment and strategic adaptation in Washington and Tehran alike. Both sides locked themselves into rigid adversarial paradigms and prioritized short-term tactical military successes at the expense of long-term strategy. For the United States in particular, this failure is a symptom of a much larger, more dangerous disease—a stubborn adherence to a militaristic, interventionist grand strategy that refuses to accept the realities of a multipolar world in which its relative financial and military resources are much more limited.
The on-again, off-again conflict, characterized by tit-for-tat retaliatory strikes, is a lose-lose situation for both parties and for the region as a whole, yet we are unlikely to escape this tragic dynamic unless more realist strategic thinking prevails in both Washington and Tehran. Neither side can “win” this war, but they can cut their losses before they incur even higher human, financial, and military costs. The realist school of thought offers a compelling diagnosis of this conflict, and points the way to a mutually beneficial conclusion.
At the strategic level, Washington’s approach to Tehran has been trapped in a tragic cycle best understood through the theoretical lens of Robert Jervis’s “ security dilemma .” Aggressive American and Israeli actions to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons only made Tehran want to increase its military capabilities, nuclear and otherwise. The operating assumption in Washington was that sustained economic “maximum pressure,” combined with overwhelming military coercion, would inevitably force either Iran’s complete submission or the structural collapse of the regime.
This approach fundamentally misunderstands how states behave under anarchy and existential threat. As Jervis famously articulated , in an anarchic international system, the very means by which one state attempts to increase its own security often inadvertently decreases the security of others. Over the years, American and Israeli coercive actions may have been intended to buttress regional stability by mitigating Iran’s nuclear threat, but they were predictably interpreted by Tehran as a campaign of aggression. It’s hardly surprising that Tehran, in response to a U.S.-Israeli war actually aimed, in part, at collapsing the regime, dug in and fought for its very survival, countering with a doctrine of asymmetric resistance rather than capitulating.
Since late February, when the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury, heavy-handed military confrontation has consistently failed to achieve structural change within the Iranian regime. Instead, it has compelled Tehran to acquire more disruptive capabilities to escape the effects of American pressure. Rather than recognizing this classic security dilemma and the reality that unyielding coercion was making the region vastly more volatile, the U.S. has doubled down, forcing Tehran to further entrench its doctrine of resistance.
Given this basic misunderstanding of the relationship between U.S. military pressure and Iranian fragility and amenability, it was all too predictable that the Memorandum of Understanding achieved last month quickly collapsed . When disagreements arose about what the MOU required, the Trump administration turned to coercive pressure. The hardliners in Tehran are now holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage and threatening U.S. bases all around the region, thus escalating the conflict horizontally. Tehran has in some ways proven itself to be a savvy actor, but the wrecking of Iran’s economy and infrastructure , mounting casualties, and massive civilian displacement demonstrate the self-defeating nature of its own hardball strategy.
Therefore, both states are pursuing aggressive strategies that reinforce each other in a vicious cycle. As I explored in my book Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy , when states lock themselves into rigid grand strategic frameworks and fail to embrace emergent adaptation, they court disaster.
Ultimately, the most glaring failure of political judgment was Washington’s inability to match its military means to its political objectives. In other words, the Trump administration ignored Clausewitz’s first and most important warning to leaders contemplating military action: War is an “instrument of policy,” not something autonomous, and leaders should understand what kind of war they are planning to wage and what it is meant to achieve.
The intense U.S. air campaign achieved distinct tactical successes—such as the destruction or degradation of Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile and air defense installations, and their modest Navy—but utterly failed to secure its primary objectives. Those included neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program and, if possible, instigating regime change. Once failure became clear, there were some modest signs of learning on the part of the White House, as when Vice President J.D. Vance pushed successfully for the ceasefire and MOU, but alas this shift was short-lived , and the U.S. military resumed its tactically successful but strategically useless airstrikes.
Hawks are now calling on Trump to take out a critical nuclear facility at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain. Defense experts assess that the facility is buried 300 to 450 feet beneath solid granite, likely placing it beyond the reach of even bunker-buster bombs. High-end airpower alone cannot permanently dismantle nuclear infrastructure dispersed deep underground. As former UN weapons inspector David Albright bluntly concluded regarding precision munitions, it is “just not possible” to use a bunker-buster to pass through a mountain.
Furthermore, as realists have long understood, external military bombardment rarely precipitates the collapse of entrenched regimes;…
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