A month after the United States and Israel began military strikes on Iran, any hopes of a quick and decisive victory have been tempered by weeks of counterstrikes. The immediate prospects for a diplomatic off-ramp look inauspicious as Washington and Tehran believe that their respective campaigns are putting the other side under sufficient duress to make maximalist demands.
A particular kind of confidence precedes wars of choice. It belongs to leaders who believe they can calibrate violence: The strikes will be sharp, the aims limited, and the escalation controlled. The adversary will be chastened rather than provoked, and the war will remain obedient to those who began it.
A month after the United States and Israel began military strikes on Iran, any hopes of a quick and decisive victory have been tempered by weeks of counterstrikes. The immediate prospects for a diplomatic off-ramp look inauspicious as Washington and Tehran believe that their respective campaigns are putting the other side under sufficient duress to make maximalist demands.
A particular kind of confidence precedes wars of choice. It belongs to leaders who believe they can calibrate violence: The strikes will be sharp, the aims limited, and the escalation controlled. The adversary will be chastened rather than provoked, and the war will remain obedient to those who began it.
Over the course of the war, the United States and Israel have been able to deliver significant blows to Iran: targeting senior political and military leaders, degrading Iran’s stocks and production of missiles, and sinking scores of its naval assets. Yet Tehran has been able to launch regular salvos of drones and missiles in response at Israel, U.S. bases in the region, and Gulf Arab states. A string of attacks against vessels off its southern coast, especially in and around the Strait of Hormuz, has helped sharply curtail traffic through the vital waterway.
Talk of potential off-ramps and negotiations has swirled over the past week. But given the wider irreconcilability of Washington’s and Tehran’s positions, an escalatory turn seems likelier. For the United States, that could take the form of deploying U.S. forces to Iranian territory or stymying Iran’s own, ongoing use of the strait; for Iran, the entry into the fray of its Houthi allies in Yemen could inject added volatility by threatening traffic in the Red Sea.
Historically, strong states take their greatest risks when they are coming off a run of apparent victories. Successes such as the Venezuela raid in January helped cement for Trump the impression that force could be used cleanly, predictably, and without long-term cost. Perceived success produces an illusion of control, expanding leaders’ tolerance for risk and driving escalation.
This is the dynamic now shaping the United States and Israel’s war with Iran. What was presented as a campaign of precision increasingly looks like a familiar story of strategic overconfidence. Washington has mistaken its early military gains for political traction and confused its tactical success with a path to durable order. Iran may have lost its supreme leader, commanders, nuclear facilities, and military assets. But the larger question was never whether it could be hurt but whether this pain would lead to the government’s capitulation.
There is the illusion of air power at work. Regimes under attack often harden rather than crack. Societies under bombardment do not always turn against their rulers; often, they first turn against the foreign power dropping the bombs.
Iran is no exception. Before this war, the Islamic Republic faced profound domestic discontent, much of it justified. But outside attack has a way of rearranging political emotion. Nationalism is starting to fill spaces that dissent once occupied. A state that looked brittle in peacetime is appearing sturdier once the nation itself is under siege.
Much of the commentary in Washington still treats Iran as if it were merely absorbing blows and lashing out in anger. But Tehran is fighting according to a logic that has shaped its planning for years: If it cannot match the United States and Israel in conventional power, it can outlast them by making that power harder and costlier to use.
The emerging pattern of Iranian strikes suggests an effort less at theatrical retaliation than at strategic disruption. The target set points to four priorities: blinding radars, degrading command networks, straining missile interceptor stockpiles, and raising economic pressure by bringing shipping and energy transit through the Strait of Hormuz to a near halt.
From Tehran’s perspective, this reflects an attempt to shift the war from a contest of firepower to a contest of endurance. Iranian planners have long assumed that the opening phase of a conflict would require firing at a high tempo in order to deplete interceptor stocks and expose seams in missile defense coverage. Only then would the war settle into a more sustainable phase of attrition, where fewer missiles and drones might stand a better chance of penetrating weakened defenses. Reports suggesting shorter warning times in Israel and thinner coverage in parts of the Gulf indicate that this logic may already be working.
The same is true of Iran’s regional targeting. If U.S. bases across the Middle East come under repeated pressure, then the cost of sustaining U.S. operations rises sharply. Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. military outright. It needs to make the exercise of that military advantage more expensive and more politically fraught.
This is where the Iranian perspective is often missed. Tehran’s objective is not simply to retaliate. It is to force a new strategic equation. That equation runs through geography as much as through missiles. The Strait of Hormuz has always been central to Iran’s deterrence doctrine, but this war suggests Tehran may be trying to turn abstract leverage into practical bargaining power. If passage through the strait increasingly depends on Iranian tolerance—or if states begin seeking side arrangements to secure safe transit—that would amount to a quiet acknowledgment of something Washington has long tried to deny: that Iran retains meaningful coercive influence over one of the world’s central economic arteries.
Nor is Hormuz the only pressure point. With the Houthis entering the war, the pressure could extend to the Bab el-Mandeb, shutting off navigation through the Red Sea as well. At that point, the conflict becomes a contest over the maritime chokepoints that bind Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
That is why U.S. President Donald Trump is now considering sending ground troops to take over Iranian islands to force Tehran to reopen Hormuz. But this is not simply another step up the ladder; rather, it is a step into the escalation trap. Air power can disrupt and degrade, but it cannot secure territory or impose lasting political outcomes. And when it fails to achieve those goals, pressure builds for ground forces. Once that threshold is crossed, the structure of the conflict changes.
At the same time, the killing of the Islamic Republic’s old guard—men with experience who acted with more calculated cautiousness—renders Tehran more amenable to risky gambits. Even without this, introducing ground forces onto Iranian territory would sharply increase the incentives for escalation, including mining the strait, targeting U.S. ground troops, torching the regional infrastructure, and potentially activating the Houthis to close the Bab el-Mandeb.
Iran remains under severe strain, militarily and economically. Its people are paying a terrible price. But weakness does not preclude strategy. The stronger side assumes it can dominate escalation because it can inflict greater pain at every rung of the ladder.
But escalation dominance does not translate into escalation control. The United States and Israel can win every exchange of force and still lose control of the conflict’s trajectory and aims. That is the core danger of wars driven by the illusion of control: Each step appears justified by the last, even as the overall path becomes more dangerous and a U-turn more difficult.
The reality is that if there is not a serious push for a cease-fire—one that addresses deterrence, sanctions, sovereignty, and the nuclear issue in terms more serious than slogan and fantasy—the war will escalate in a way that is not controlled by the United States or Israel alone. As that happens, and the war extends from weeks into months, the costs will become harder to reverse. Regional actors will face increasing incentives to widen the conflict, and the risk of terrorism beyond the immediate theater will rise.
The most dangerous moment when countries succumb to the illusion of controlled war is not the opening strike. Rather, it is the moment after apparent success—when leaders believe the next escalation will work for the same reasons that the last one did. That is how countries become trapped by their own strength and how wars escape their authors.
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