In a erratic speech Addressing the American people on April 1, US President Donald Trump declared the war against Iran a success, promising to “finish the job…very quickly.” It was a statement in obvious contradiction to the facts. Trump continues to pretend that Iran is just another petty adversary of the United States, capable only of absorbing punishment, responding locally, and ultimately bowing to sustained military and economic coercion. In reality, Iran has disrupted the model on which American interventionism has long been based.
For decades, the United States has nurtured the belief that it could wage wars abroad without exposing themselves to the risk of significant retaliation. This was possible thanks to careful selection of objectives—such as Grenade, Panama, Iraq, Libya and even Venezuela—that lacked the ability to impose relevant costs beyond their borders, for example, by attacking US assets or allies in a sustained or significant manner. Even when insurgencies worn out to US forces, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, conflicts remained geographically contained.
This “asymmetric costs” model—according to which a war initiated by the United States will end up costing the adversary much more—has been key to sustaining the illusion of American invincibility and limiting domestic political resistance to military adventurism. Now, Iran has broken it.
The security doctrine Iran relies on “forward defense,” which uses asymmetric military capabilities—including ballistic and cruise missiles, drones, and a network of allies and proxy forces—to protect itself and project power beyond its borders. When the United States and Israel attacked, Iran was able to take advantage of that strategic depth to immediately respond against targets throughout the region, including US allies, military bases and assets deployed abroad.
By threatening infrastructure, air bases and economic bottlenecks—such as Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb in the Gulf—Iran is effectively forcing America’s partners to share the costs of the conflict. As the Gulf states, which have long hosted US bases in exchange for protection under Washington’s prestigious security umbrella, bear the brunt of the Iranian response, threats are mounting. strategic tensions within the American coalition. Thanks to Iran, allies who previously facilitated US power projection in the Middle East now have strong incentives to contain it.
The United States should have seen this coming. Behind him assassination by Washington of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in 2020, Iran responded not through indirect actions or deniable escalation, but with a stroke direct with ballistic missiles against a US military installation: the Al-Asad air base, in Iraq. That should have dispelled any doubt that Iran could retaliate against U.S. forces with precision and without fear of immediate retaliation. Since then, Iran has only refined its strategy of distributed retaliation.
The Trump administration failed to anticipate this perfectly predictable response, in part because of another long-held illusion among American military planners and politicians: that greater military spending automatically translates into battlefield superiority. The United States could hit its “enemies” with such overwhelming force that they would have no choice but to comply with its demands almost immediately. However, since vietnam war Until the 20s, the United States has found itself trapped in costly wars of attrition that it could neither win decisively nor sustain politically, ending in humiliating retreats.
Still, the illusion has persisted. With Iran’s defense budget representing just a fraction of that of the United States, the Trump administration apparently assumed the country could not offer much resistance. What he didn’t understand is that Iran doesn’t need parity; it needs disruption. Its arsenal of low-cost, high-impact systems is designed not to achieve conventional victory, but to deny strategic advantages to the adversary. Swarms of relatively cheap drones or missiles can overwhelm even the most sophisticated air defense systems, as Israel is beginning to find out.
With this strategy, Iran has turned the United States’ greatest strength—its global military presence—into a source of vulnerability. It has also exposed a fundamental weakness in the American way of waging war: the dependence on high value and high cost assets which can be degraded by sustained asymmetric pressure. The imbalance is both tactical and economic. The United States is now forced to spend huge sums to defend their assets and allies against weapons that cost very little to produce and launch.
The United States waged war against Iran with a framework designed for weaker, more isolated adversaries. He assumed that military force, combined with economic pressure, would guarantee submission. Instead, he found himself with a state that had spent years preparing precisely for this type of confrontation and that could absorb punishment while gradually increasing the costs of escalation. However, Trump continues to hope for a quick capitulation.
He calculation error Trump administration’s strategic strategy goes beyond underestimate Iran’s retaliation capacity. 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 significant damage. The message is clear: the era of relatively cheap American wars is over.
The United States can still deploy overwhelming force and inflict immense devastation. But he can no longer control the consequences or contain the repercussions. What Iran has demonstrated is not just resilience, but the ability of a weaker state to steadily erode the advantages of a superpower. A superpower that once felt invulnerable must now face adversaries capable of draining its resources, wearing down its allies, and upsetting its strategic calculations.
The future of the Middle East—and of American power—will depend on whether the United States absorbs the lessons of its miscalculation with Iran. If you don’t, you will continue to stumble into wars that you cannot win decisively, sustain cheaply, or justify strategically.
*This article was originally published in .
