Washington’s Iran gamble is already backfiring

There is something deeply revealing about the way Washington has been speaking about this war. The language has been triumphant, the tone self-congratulatory, and the assessments divorced from reality. Oil refineries bombed, missile launchers taken out, the Iranian navy declared finished and yet, nearly two weeks in, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil is trading at nearly $120 a barrel, and the regime in Tehran has not only survived but appears to be consolidating around the crisis.

This was never going to be the quick, clean victory that was advertised. The core problem is simple: the US went to war against a country it did not fully understand.

The thinking in Washington went something like this: hit Iran hard enough, destroy enough of its infrastructure, and moderates will emerge from the rubble ready to cut a deal. Iran would pivot away from Russia and China, oil would flow freely again, and the region would reshape itself in the US’ favour. Some policymakers argued that sustained military pressure was the only remaining lever to prevent long-term nuclear escalation. But the execution so far has revealed a fundamental misreading of what Iran actually is.

Iran is a civilisational state with institutional depth, a security apparatus that shows no signs of internal fracture, and a population that, whatever its feelings about the clerical regime, does not want to see the country dismembered by foreign powers. Persians are roughly half the population, but the Baluch, the Azeris, the Kurds, and every major ethnic group harbours a fierce attachment to Iranian statehood. When you bomb a nation, you don’t fracture it. Often, you fuse it.

The choice of the new supreme leader signals the direction of travel. This is not a regime scrambling for an exit but one that has decided to dig in.

Consider what the US’ war has actually accomplished against its three stated objectives. Iran’s nuclear programme was largely dismantled in last year’s conflict, and that remains the one genuine strategic achievement. But the ballistic missile and drone programme has been damaged, not destroyed, and according to regional military analysts, Iran still retains significant capacity. The network of proxies, including forces in Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen, will not collapse because of airstrikes on Tehran. These are organisations with their own roots, their own grievances, and their own local logic entirely separate from decisions made in Iranian ministries.

Iran could not win a conventional fight against the US’ airpower. Nobody expected it to. What it needed instead was to make the war economically unbearable, and towards that objective it has made more progress than Washington is comfortable admitting. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of globally traded oil passes, was a calculated message: this is what the world economy looks like when Iran decides to create a problem. Stock markets will feel it. Fuel prices will feel it. And voters in the US, historically sensitive to the price of fuel at the pump, will feel it most strongly. That is the strategy Iran chose, and it is one where US military superiority is largely irrelevant.

The Gulf states present another complication that Washington seems to have underestimated. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar worked carefully to signal neutrality before the conflict began. They made it clear that US bases on their territory would not be used to attack Iran. But those have been utilised anyway. Yet none of these states ostensibly want a regime change in Iran. What they want is containment, because they understand better than most what a collapsed Iranian state actually means: a nation of 92 million people descending into civil war, with refugee flows and spillover instability across an already fragile region. A failed Iranian state would be catastrophic in ways that a hostile Iranian state is not.

The human cost on the Iranian side is severe. Nearly 1,500 civilians have been killed, and the infrastructure damage will require reconstruction measured in many billions of dollars. The Iranian people are paying an enormous price for a regime most of them did not choose. And yet, the war has given that regime exactly what authoritarian governments prize most in moments of crisis: a foreign enemy, a nationalist cause, and a reason for the opposition to stay quiet.

There will be an off-ramp eventually. The triumphalist language from Washington has already begun softening at the edges. What was once framed as regime change may quietly become “Iran has no nuclear weapons,” which is a condition that was arguably the case before any of this began. Victories will be declared and the complexity will be smoothed over in the telling.

But the underlying reality will remain. The regime survived. It hardened. And the lesson every adversary is drawing from this is straightforward: make the war economically painful enough, hold your institutional ground, and wait the US out. That is not a story the United States should want to keep telling.

Md Kawsar Uddin is associate professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages, at the International University of Business Agriculture and Technology (IUBAT).

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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