The US and Israel can’t “win” against Iran — but that may not be the point

From the standpoint of the US/Israel, the closest thing to victory might be collapsing Iran into ethnic balkanisation and a failed state — to destroy Iran a a nation — with catastrophic consequences

Trump and Hegseth keep repeating that the US and Israel are winning the war against Iran. As evidence of this, they point to massive air strikes that Iran has proved largely defenceless against, and which have decimated its navy and air force.

But this is a dangerous illusion. The reality is that destroying Iran’s navy and air force — or carpet-bombing Tehran, for that matter — is militarily straightforward but strategically meaningless. The US can indeed cause a lot of destruction and carnage in Iran — and indeed it already is, including by targeting civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospital, oil depots and desalinisation plants, i.e., reserving Iran the Gaza treatment — but beyond that the Trump administration has no achievable definition of victory, let alone a coherent strategy for getting there.

The stated objectives — dismantling Iran’s ballistic missile programme, ending nuclear enrichment and cutting support for the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas — are unachievable through military force alone. If the regime survives, it will simply rebuild. The only path to permanently solving those three “problems”, from the US-Israeli perspective, is regime change. That means not just replacing the government, but replacing it with one that is completely subservient to the US and Israel — a puppet regime. It would effectively mean transforming Iran into a US-Israeli colony.

However, even putting aside the absurdity of the US claiming the right to decide who runs Iran, nobody has explained how to achieve that. The emptiness of the administration’s thinking was exposed by Trump himself, who acknowledged in a press briefing that most of the opposition figures identified as potential replacement leaders were already dead — killed in some cases by American and Israeli strikes. He spoke of exhausting a first wave of replacements, then a second, and expressed uncertainty about the third.

As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute explained in the New York Times, it is virtually impossible to imagine a credible leader who would ever accept the 180-degree shift in Iran’s orientation demanded by the US and Israel — not to mention be able sell it to the Iranian public. But more fundamentally, the reality is that the Republic is proving much more resilient than Trump anticipated. As Parsi noted, as the massive US-Israeli shock-and-awe bombing campaign continues to cause civilian deaths and widespread destruction, “nationalist sentiments on the ground are growing stronger”.

The historical record doesn’t bode well for the US and Israel: air power alone almost never produces regime change. Germany and Japan in World War II endured devastating bombing campaigns, with hundreds of thousands killed, and neither regime collapsed until ground forces arrived. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, which cost Iran up to half a million lives, offers a further caution: Iranians regarded that conflict as existential, just as they regard this one.

Hegseth’s claim that Iranian missile launches had dropped 80% from their opening-day peak is equally misleading. The most rational thing for Iran to do would be to conserve missiles for a protracted war, not expend them up front. Video footage showing missiles firing directly from concealed positions beneath the desert floor underscores the point: there is no visible infrastructure and therefore no way to target them.

More fundamentally, Iran has time on its side: by targeting energy infrastructure in the Gulf states — and more crucially, blocking the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of all globally traded petroleum products and liquefied natural gas (LNG) passes — Iran has already caused a huge spike in energy prices. If the war continues even just for a few weeks, it “will bring down the economies of the world”, as Saad al-Kaabi, Qatar’s energy minister, told the Financial Times.

With decapitation having failed and air power unlikely to reach the goal, the US will probably be tempted to turn to covert and proxy options — arming Kurdish and Azerbaijani minorities to foment internal insurrection. Trump has already reportedly contacted Kurdish leaders inside Iran. But Iran’s Kurds represent roughly 10% of the population, its Azerbaijanis perhaps 16-18%, both concentrated in the northwest. Neither is positioned to march on Tehran, and Turkey — deeply opposed to any Kurdish independence movement — would be up in arms (quite literally) at the attempt. Most damningly, US and Israeli strikes have reportedly struck Kurdish areas even as officials planned to arm them. The broader pattern points to improvised escalation in search of a strategy that doesn’t exist.

There is, of course, the possibility that chaos itself the “strategy”: collapsing Iran into ethnic balkanisation and a failed state, by fuelling ethnic tensions and secessionist movements, and leaving Iran deeply divided and marred by civil war and sectarian violence — leading effectively to the Syrianisation of Iran. This certainly appears to be Israel’s goal. Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, candidly summarised the Israeli government’s position: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future… [or] the stability of Iran”. It goes without saying that the regional, and indeed, global consequences of this would be catastrophic.

On a broader scale, the war must be understood in the context of American overextension across four simultaneous theatres: Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan. The US has spent the post-Cold War era running down its industrial base and can no longer regenerate precision munitions at the pace sustained conflict demands. Indeed, the US has already been forced to begin relocating parts of its THAAD missile defence systems from South Korea to the Middle East. Trump’s claim that the US can fight this war “forever” without running out of ammunition is simply delusional.

Then there is the wider geopolitical dimension. China and Russia were already supporting Iran before the war and will continue to do so, and indeed will probably intensify their support. They both have a deep-seated interested in seeing Iran prevail, which is why, the longer the war drags on, the higher the chances are of this spiralling into all-out global war.

Ultimately, almost two weeks into the war, the fundamental problem is unchanged: not only did the US and Israel start an illegal and criminal war that has already brought much death and destruction to Iran and to the wider Middle Eastern region — but it looks like they did so with the idea that causing widespread death and destruction would in itself deliver results, or even worse with death and destruction as a strategic goal in itself.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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