No One Knows How to End the War with Iran

Both Washington and Tehran want to inflict enough pain that the other side buckles. But neither side seems to be living in reality The United States and Iran appear locked into their six-month-old war, with both lacking a clear path to victory and each clinging to unrealistic ideas about what their adversary will accept to end the conflict. Iranians are already suffering immensely. Thousands have been killed in strikes by America and its allies, while thousands more have been murdered by Tehran’s ruthless security apparatus, and the country’s economy has been devastated by decades of sanctions and war. More than 750 U.S. service members have been wounded since the war began on Feb. 28, with 18 killed in action. America is spending tens of billions of dollars on military operations in the region. The Pentagon is now focused on protecting the transit of oil through a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf, in an effort to return maritime trade there to its pre-war levels. It’s a resource-intensive effort whose effectiveness is hotly debated while independent data begins to accumulate. But even if the effort is working as successfully as the White House claims, only a fraction of the daily volume of pre-war oil traffic is passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations brokered by multiple third parties have led nowhere. Iran does not trust the United States, nor vice versa. Experts say Tehran’s goal now is to make the conflict costly enough that the United States and Israel are deterred from carrying out future attacks. “The lesson in Tehran is that neither diplomacy nor a temporary ceasefire has yet produced durable restraint from the United States. That deepens the argument that Iran still has not established enough deterrence,” says Negar Mortazavi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, and the host of The Iran Podcast. “Iran’s doctrine is now shifting from primarily defensive deterrence toward a more offensive form of coercion. The thinking is that simply responding when the United States escalates is not enough,” she says. While its regular military has been eviscerated in the conflict, Iran has other tools at its disposal. Editor’s picks “Iran definitely still retains the capacity and will to conduct asymmetric operations outside the region,” says Colin Clarke, the executive director of the Soufan Group. “Iran has been very deliberate and proportional with its [asymmetric] responses, and so could be holding a terror attack in the West as an ace up its sleeve, if the situation escalates again or Trump tries to send ground forces to Kharg Island.” There have been indications that Tehran wants to expand the conflict outside the Gulf, and both Iran and its adversaries are already engaged in a shadowy game of hybrid warfare, regularly carrying out cyberattacks, sabotage, and disinformation campaigns. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC — which protects the regime in Tehran — maintains multiple departments dedicated to actions abroad. It has also in the past carried out terror attacks aimed at U.S. interests overseas, and sponsored assassination plots against dissidents and American officials. “The assassinations are definitely something to take very seriously. Trump killed [IRGC commander Qasem] Soleimani and had a hand in killing the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei],” Clarke says. “He’s likely to remain on Iran’s hit list for the foreseeable future, as are members of his family.” Iranian state-run media recently carried messages implying that Barron Trump, the president’s son, could be targeted by Iran. Related Content “The hardcore IRGC figures currently in charge of Iran are unlikely to drop their attempts to kill Trump, even if the U.S. and Iran agree to a ceasefire,” Clarke says. Any strike against a U.S. official, let alone American military targets, will almost certainly result in another round of air strikes. But although military planners at the Pentagon may want to take more drastic action, they now seem aware of both the limitations of their resources and the vulnerability of U.S. facilities across the region. Experts who track Iran’s missile program say the country retains enough attack drones and ballistic and anti-ship missiles to continue plaguing vessels and hitting U.S. military facilities across the Middle East. While Israel, the United States, and their Gulf allies have destroyed a substantial amount of Iran’s offensive drone and missile stocks, launchers, and production facilities, they have not been able to eliminate the programs entirely, says Jeffrey Lewis, a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and expert on arms control and nonproliferation. At the beginning of the war, Iran’s biggest salvo was perhaps 300 missile launches per day. “There was this nice curve, where you saw all the big salvos happen, and then they dropped,” Lewis says. “And it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re dropping to zero’ — and then they were just hanging out at 30 launches a day for a couple of weeks, before the ceasefire.” “All of these attack plans are based on a kind of theory of the case that there are people or components or materials that we can destroy, and then they can’t be replaced. The evidence seems to be that you can always replace these things,” Lewis says, noting that Israel’s effort to dismantle and destroy Iran’s ballistic missile program goes back to the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel. “What they did was make judgments about bottlenecks in what they hit. And it seems like those judgments were wrong.” Both the U.S. military and Washington’s partners across the Middle East expended hundreds of advanced interceptors designed to defeat Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones in the first 30 days of open conflict. Experts are now concerned the U.S. may lack sufficient numbers of such critical air defenses to keep Iranian drones and missiles at bay. Tehran is well aware of this vulnerability, and will certainly attempt to hit back if military strikes resume. “Iran views the U.S. military infrastructure surrounding it as part of the problem. American bases across the Persian Gulf and the wider region are seen not as defensive installations, but as the architecture that makes repeated attacks on Iran possible. That is why Tehran has targeted U.S. bases so extensively: it wants to raise the cost of maintaining the military infrastructure that could enable the next war,” Mortazavi says. The United States — for now — appears content to hold off on further air strikes, or complex ground operations. There have not been any new major movements of personnel, beyond rotations involving the 50,000 troops, hundreds of aircraft, and nearly two dozen naval vessels already committed to the region. President Trump routinely promises to take game-changing action. But Trump’s rhetoric often departs from reality, and since a ceasefire was announced in April, he’s done nothing concrete to change the strategic impasse. While he continues to deploy his signature rhetoric — “maximum pressure,” “unconditional surrender,” “a civilization will cease to exist,” “Epic Fury” — this has not fundamentally altered the dynamic of the conflict. His latest plan is to carry out an “Economic D-Day,” in which the U.S. is betting that additional sanctions on top of the 47 previous years of sanctions will make life in Iran unendurable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, when unveiling the plan, held back from announcing so-called “secondary sanctions” — economic punishment against countries that help Iran dodge direct sanctions. China would be the primary target of such action, and Bessent may have tipped the administration’s bluff when he responded to a question asking why such secondary sanctions were not being enacted. “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” Bessent replied. In any case, there is rarely a straight line between sanctions and regime change, as decades of economic punishment against Iran, North Korea, and Russia have demonstrated. Iran’s nuclear program, which has been pitched as the central casus belli against Iran by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s for decades, is now barely mentioned by any of the belligerents, with fate of the Strait of Hormuz — through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passed before the war — dominating strategic discussions. Trending Stories The White House is going all out to convince international shippers and insurers that ships can move safely again through the Strait. If they somehow succeed in finding some measure of security, this will almost certainly prompt Tehran to change tack and seek another pressure point. After all, the regime is less interested in the war’s impact on the global economy, than in scoring a win against the U.S. — and staving off its own demise. “For Tehran, victory means survival, restored deterrence, a durable end to the war… and reducing the ability of the United States and Israel to launch another attack,” Mortazavi says. “Washington may possess military supremacy, but Tehran believes it is fighting for survival. And the side that considers the war existential is often prepared to absorb costs that the more powerful but less committed adversary is not.”