America Has No Good Options in Iran

Three weeks into the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the outlines of a familiar and dangerous pattern are emerging. The current conflict may for now be significantly different than American wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam—it has not yet drawn in U.S. ground forces in great numbers. But the Iran war shares a deeper strategic reality with these predecessors. Washington is once again fighting a weaker regional power without having clear objectives, a defined theory of victory, and a viable exit strategy.

The result is a different kind of quagmire, but a quagmire nonetheless. U.S. forces may get bogged down in air and sea operations that drag on for months or years, impose mounting costs on the global economy, destabilize the wider Middle East, and exact a growing toll on civilian populations in Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and beyond. As in past conflicts, the asymmetry at the heart of the war favors the weaker party. For the United States to win, it must achieve expansive and ambiguous goals—regime change or an Iran so weak that it cannot destabilize the region or disrupt global oil markets. For Iran, victory may simply mean survival and the ability to impose costs on the global economy through intermittent attacks that dramatically limit passage through the Strait of Hormuz or damage delicate and vital oil infrastructure in the Gulf states.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the current U.S.-Israeli campaign of missile and drone strikes is not about to topple the entrenched regime. Nor will it entirely knock out Iran’s conventional capacities such that Tehran cannot interfere with passage through the Strait of Hormuz or threaten facilities vital to the global energy trade.The United States might now feel the urge to escalate, potentially using ground forces to seize Iranian facilities and territory or backing separatist forces around the country. But the risks of these forms of escalation far outweigh their possible gains. At this point, with the global economy jittering and the Middle East in convulsions, Washington’s best bet is not to further commit to a war it entered recklessly but to find a way out.

NO VICTORY IN SIGHT

From the outset, the American war effort has been defined by strategic incoherence. When President Donald Trump launched military operations, he did so without preparing the American public or articulating a clear set of achievable objectives. His initial remarks, delivered in the middle of the night, called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government, effectively setting regime change as the bar for success. That was an extraordinarily high—and likely unattainable—standard. It also handed the Iranian leadership a simple path to victory: endure.

Early developments suggest that, if anything, actions by the United States and Israel have actually consolidated hard-line control. If Washington and Jerusalem expected the deaths of top Iranian leaders to lead to the collapse of the Islamic Republic, they have been proved wrong. No doubt the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other top officials has led to some increasing challenges for the regime, but there are few indications of security forces starting to stand down or turn against their commanders. Iran’s war effort is still coherent and demonstrates clear structures of command and control. The regime has developed a web of institutions that have continued to function in the face of an assault on its leaders. It has decentralized authority to launch attacks, allowing the Iranian military to continue the war effort even as commanders and leaders get picked off.

Indeed, killing Khamenei may have made it harder, not easier, to loosen the regime’s grip on the country. Prior to the war, many analysts believed that Khamenei’s eventual death (he was sickly and 86 years old) could open space for internal recalibration. That may not have resulted in a democratic transformation, but it could have engineered a shift toward more pragmatic leadership that reconsidered Iran’s regional posture and nuclear ambitions with the larger aim of improving the country’s economic position—as well as the Islamic Republic’s odds for long-term survival.

That possibility has now almost certainly been foreclosed. By forcing a leadership transition under conditions of extreme duress, the war has empowered the most hard-line elements in Iran. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba is now the supreme leader. He is a hard-liner with close ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And he has lost much of his family to Israeli strikes. His appointment as supreme leader is not a step toward change or any softening of the regime but a guarantee of entrenchment.

It is increasingly clear that the U.S.-Israeli campaign is not about to topple the Iranian regime.

Regime change now seems less likely in the near term, but many proponents of the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign still think that it can succeed in the coming weeks in neutering Iran as a military threat. From the start of the war, the U.S. military, unlike the president, emphasized more limited objectives. It has insisted that it is focused on degrading Iran’s military capabilities, including Iranian missile forces, naval assets, and the nuclear program, as well as Tehran’s ability to arm and train its regional proxies. This framing is more realistic than Trump’s bid for regime change, but it recalls a familiar problem that the United States faced in the past in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To wage counterinsurgency campaigns in those countries, the United States discovered that it needed to achieve near-total control of territory, governance, and security in order to demonstrate to the population that they could trust U.S. forces and their local partners. The Taliban in Afghanistan and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, by contrast, needed only to hide among the population and sustain violence at a level that undercut the population’s confidence and security. A similar dynamic is now emerging in the Middle East, albeit in a different domain.

For Washington and its partners, success requires ensuring the free flow of energy, protecting critical infrastructure (especially that related to oil in the Gulf), and maintaining regional stability. For Tehran, it may be enough to periodically attack an occasional tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and bring transport through the narrow passage to a halt, strike energy facilities in the Gulf, or launch occasional missile or drone attacks that penetrate the defenses of Gulf states. Even if 90 percent of Iranian attacks are intercepted, the remaining ten percent can have outsize economic and psychological effects. A single successful strike on a tanker, an oil facility, or a commercial hub ruffles global markets and alters perceptions of risk.

This is not a war that Iran needs to win decisively. It just needs to demonstrate that the more limited U.S. objective of improving regional security—one well short of regime change—is failing. Thus far, Iran has been able to sustain consistent missile and drone attacks for three weeks. Even if it runs out of long-range missiles and launchers, there are few indications that the United States and Israel are capable of degrading Iran’s drones, short-range missiles, and mines to the point where it cannot wreak havoc in its immediate vicinity and across the Gulf. The aftermath of the 12-Day war last June is instructive. After pounding Iranian targets, Israel and the United States declared Iran’s capabilities dramatically set back. But they soon discovered that Iran was rearming at a much faster rate than they had imagined possible.

ESCALATION TRAPS

Faced with this dynamic, the United States may be tempted to escalate to more dramatically set back the nuclear program, compel Iran to cease its attacks on its neighbors, or try to overtly topple the regime. In past conflicts, such as in Iraq and Vietnam, the United States often addressed a deteriorating situation by committing more resources to the fight to try to pull victory from the jaws of defeat. In this case, as in most, the available options are unattractive.

By taking possession of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, Trump could try to give himself a pathway for declaring victory by striking directly at Iran’s nuclear program and Iran’s ability to quickly build a nuclear weapon. U.S. forces could directly seize the portion of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium currently stored in tunnels in Isfahan. This would at least allow the United States to claim a clear strategic achievement: depriving Iran of essential nuclear components and dealing a major blow to the nuclear program, long a central focus of U.S. policy if not the focus of this war.

But this would be far from a simple operation. According to public reporting, the uranium is stored in gas form in canisters that are difficult to transport and must be moved delicately given the nature of the material. Moreover, it is unclear how accessible the tunnels are after previous strikes last June blocked the entrances. This would not be a quick operation, like the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 or the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. It would likely require U.S. forces on the ground for hours or even days.

It would also take place hundreds of miles inside Iran, in what is likely one of the most heavily defended facilities in the country. Any U.S. action would almost certainly not enjoy the element of surprise since Iran is very likely expecting such an operation. Iranian forces would converge on the area, forcing the United States to establish and hold a land perimeter deep inside hostile territory surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers. It is not clear that such an operation is feasible, much less prudent.

Another way to break the resistance of the regime could be to target Iran’s economic lifeline. The United States could seize Kharg Island, in the Persian Gulf, through which roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports flow. U.S. and Israeli forces have already conducted strikes against military defenses on the island and Trump and a number of his allies have been publicly musing about the possibility of taking Kharg. Unlike an inland operation, an attack on Kharg could be conducted through an amphibious or airborne assault, and since the island is not deep inside Iran, it is harder for Tehran to defend and easier for U.S. forces to hold.

But the downsides of trying to take the island are substantial. First, it would require a major military land operation to take a well-fortified territory one-third the size of Manhattan. Although entirely doable, the operation would certainly imperil U.S. forces, who could suffer significant casualties. Second, fighting on Kharg could significantly damage Iran’s oil infrastructure, driving global prices even higher, an outcome the United States has been trying to avoid.

More important, it is unclear what taking the island would achieve strategically. The theory underlying such a gambit is that economic pressure would force Iran to change its behavior or accept U.S. terms. But the regime has shown a willingness to absorb severe economic pain, as it has demonstrated for years after being on the receiving end of U.S. sanctions. It is far more likely that Iran would respond by escalating attacks on regional energy infrastructure.

For the United States, the risks of escalation far outweigh possible gains.

Events in recent weeks offer a preview of this dynamic. After Israeli strikes on Iran’s South Pars gas field, Iran retaliated by targeting Qatar’s liquefied natural gas infrastructure, knocking out 17 percent of its production capacity for three to five years. An attack on Kharg might trigger an even more aggressive Iranian response of this kind.

Iran has also demonstrated an acute awareness of U.S. sensitivity to oil prices. The Trump administration’s own actions, which even include easing sanctions on Iranian oil to placate global markets, signals just how alarmed Trump is by the rise in oil prices precipitated by the war. Iran has a clear incentive to continue targeting energy markets.

Another version of the Kharg operation, but conducted without ground forces, could look much like what Trump threatened to do on March 22: target Iran’s power plants with the hope of compelling a change in Tehran’s behavior. In addition to needlessly hurting civilians and potentially violating the laws of war, such an action would not achieve what Washington hopes it does; rather than accede to Trump’s demands, Iran would more likely respond by targeting similar facilities in the Gulf states. 

If trying to decisively eliminate the Iranian nuclear program and cripple its oil production are not viable strategies, U.S. officials could consider another escalatory option: intensifying efforts to destabilize the regime from within by arming and supporting internal opposition groups. These groups could include Kurdish forces in northwestern Iran, Baluchi groups on the Pakistani border, and other dissident factions. The United States could also try to exploit divisions within the regime itself, perhaps finding a disgruntled general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to work with.

But this approach carries the risk of producing not regime change but fragmentation and civil war. The likely outcome is not a clean transition but a protracted multisided conflict similar to the chaos that has unfolded in Syria and Libya.

Other external actors would almost certainly intervene in a war-torn Iran. Turkey would not stand aside if Iranian Kurdish groups gained strength. Pakistan would have concerns about Baluchi militancy. Gulf states would back their own preferred actors. The result could be a flood of weapons and funding into Iran, creating a chaotic and highly unstable environment.

Israel might be happy to see a fractured and convulsed Iran. But for the United States, such an outcome would be a nightmare. Iran sits at the center of a region that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. A major internal collapse could create space for terrorist groups, disrupt regional trade, and generate instability that spills across borders.

THE CASE FOR A LIMITED EXIT

Three weeks into the war, the United States faces a stark choice: continue escalating in pursuit of ill-defined objectives or recalibrate and seek a way out. The most prudent course is the latter. Trump should declare that the U.S. military has substantially achieved the more limited set of military objectives—degrading Iran’s capabilities—and signal a willingness to halt further escalation. He should pair this message with assurances and public statements that the United States will rein in Israel and will support future attacks on Iran only if Tehran restarts its nuclear program or strikes regional partners.

Iran may reject such an offer initially. But over time, a U.S. posture oriented toward de-escalation could shift international pressure onto Tehran. Key global actors, including China, Europe, and Gulf states, all of whom have strong interests in stabilizing energy markets, would have incentives to push for an end to the conflict; they would apply greater pressure on Iran to de-escalate as well.

To be sure, none of this would constitute a clear victory. The United States would remain entangled in the region, managing a weakened but more aggressive Iran. Relations with Gulf partners strained by the economic and security fallout of a war they did not seek may never be the same. And the resources diverted to the Middle East to contain Iran in the aftermath of the war as well as the resources expended during the war would put the U.S. military more broadly on the back foot, particularly in the Indo-Pacific.

The task ahead is not to rescue an elusive victory but to limit the damage.

But the alternative—doubling down in search of a decisive outcome—risks a far worse result. American history offers repeated examples of wars entered with confidence and exited with difficulty. In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, U.S. leaders escalated in the hope of salvaging success, only to deepen their strategic predicament. Fear of failure and the sunk cost fallacy plunged the United States further into the mire.

The current conflict presents a similar temptation. But it also offers an opportunity to break the pattern. The Iran war was a choice—one made without a clear plan for what would follow. The consequences of that decision are now becoming apparent. The task ahead is not to rescue an elusive victory but to limit the damage to U.S. interests, to regional stability, and to the lives of civilians across the Middle East.

That will require accepting an uncomfortable truth. In wars such as this one, the most responsible course is not to press forward in search of a win but to recognize when the costs outweigh the gains—and to step back before a limited conflict becomes an engulfing quagmire.

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