In a rambling address to the American people on Wednesday last week, US President Donald Trump said that the US war against Iran has been a success, vowing to “finish the job ... very fast.”
It was a statement in obvious conflict with the facts. Trump is still pretending that Iran is just another small US adversary that can only absorb punishment, lash out locally, and ultimately buckle under sustained military and economic coercion. In reality, Iran has upended the model on which US interventionism has long relied.
For decades, the US has nurtured the belief that it could wage wars abroad without exposing itself to the risk of serious retaliation. This was made possible by the careful selection of targets — such as Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Libya and even Venezuela — that lacked the capacity to impose significant costs beyond their borders, such as by striking US assets or allies in a sustained or meaningful way. Even when insurgencies wore down US forces, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the conflicts remained geographically contained.
Illustration: Mountain People
This “asymmetric cost” model — a war the US starts would ultimately cost the other side far more — has proven vital in sustaining the illusion of US invincibility and limiting domestic political resistance to US military adventurism. Now, Iran has broken it.
Iran’s security doctrine is built on “forward defense,” which makes use of asymmetric military capabilities — including ballistic and cruise missiles, drones, and a network of partners and proxies — to protect itself and project power beyond its borders. When the US and Israel attacked, Iran was able to leverage this strategic depth to retaliate immediately against targets across the region, including US allies, military bases and forward-deployed assets.
By threatening infrastructure, airbases and economic chokepoints, such as the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb across the Gulf, Iran is forcing US partners to share the costs of conflict. As the Gulf states, which have long hosted US bases in exchange for a place under the US’ vaunted security umbrella, bear the brunt of Iran’s response, strategic friction is growing within Washington’s coalition. Thanks to Iran, allies that once enabled the US to project power in the Middle East now have a strong incentive to restrain it.
The US should have seen this coming. Following the US assassination of Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani in 2020, Iran responded not with proxy action or deniable escalation, but with a direct ballistic-missile attack on a US military installation: the Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq. This should have dispelled any doubt that Iran could retaliate against US forces with precision and without fear of immediate retribution. Since then, Iran has only refined its strategy of distributed retaliation.
The Trump administration failed to anticipate this perfectly predictable response partly because of another longstanding illusion among US military planners and politicians: That higher military spending automatically confers battlefield superiority. The US could strike its “enemies” with such overwhelming force that they would have no choice but to heed its demands almost immediately. Yet, from the Vietnam War to the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the US has instead found itself trapped in expensive wars of attrition that it could neither decisively win nor politically sustain, resulting in its humiliating withdrawal.
Nonetheless, the illusion has persisted. With Iran’s defense budget amounting to a small fraction of the US’, the Trump administration apparently assumed that the country could not possibly put up much of a fight. What it failed to recognize is that Iran does not need parity; it needs disruption. Its arsenal of low-cost, high-impact systems is tailored not for a conventional victory, but for strategic denial. Swarms of relatively inexpensive drones or missiles can overwhelm even the most sophisticated air-defense systems, as Israel is learning.
With this strategy, Iran has turned the US’ greatest strength — its global military footprint — into a source of vulnerability. It has also exposed a fundamental weakness in the American way of war: dependence on high-value, high-cost assets that can be degraded by persistent asymmetric pressure. The imbalance is tactical and economic. The US is now being forced to spend vast sums to defend its assets and allies against weapons that cost very little to build and launch.
The US waged war on Iran with a framework honed against weaker, more isolated adversaries. It assumed that military force, combined with economic pressure, would ensure submission. Instead, it encountered a state that had spent years preparing for precisely this kind of confrontation and could absorb punishment while steadily ratcheting up the costs of escalation. Yet Trump continues to anticipate a quick capitulation.
The Trump administration’s strategic miscalculation extends beyond underestimating Iran’s retaliatory capabilities. It reflects a fundamental misreading of the nature of modern conflict. In a world of economic interconnectedness, geographically dispersed military capabilities and low-cost weapons systems, a country that appears weak in conventional terms can cause serious harm. The message is clear: The age of relatively cost-free US wars is over.
The US can still unleash overwhelming force and inflict immense devastation, but it can no longer control the consequences or contain the fallout. What Iran has demonstrated is not just resilience, but the ability of a weaker state steadily to erode a superpower’s advantages. A superpower that once felt invulnerable must now reckon with adversaries that can drain its coffers, bleed its allies and upend its strategic calculations.
The future of the Middle East — and of US power — hinges on whether the US internalizes the lessons of its miscalculation in Iran. If it fails to do so, it would continue to stumble into wars it cannot decisively win, cheaply sustain, or strategically justify.
Brahma Chellaney, professor emeritus of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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