The Price of Strategic Incoherence in Iran

Contrary to the Trump administration’s callous public relations campaign early in the onslaught against Iran, war is not a movie or a video game. Starting a war is a decision to kill real people, destroy property, and divert limited resources from other priorities. For such moral and material costs to be acceptable, they have to be for a good purpose. No purpose will be good enough, however, unless it is accompanied by a strategy that can achieve that purpose at an acceptable price. Strategy simply means a plan by which military power will produce the desired political result. The war against Iran does not have this.

A common risk in war is goal displacement, when the tactical requirements of complex combat operations achieve immediate military objectives without serving the higher strategic and political purpose. Too often, naive political leaders assume that devastating the enemy militarily necessarily equals strategic success. Purpose and strategy in Iranneed to be aligned if there is to be any justification for the current war.

For the sake of argument, hold in abeyance the crucial political and moral question of whether starting the current war was legitimate. Even legitimate wars must be waged soundly, and this requires aligning means and ends. The pressing question is whether the administration has done so or whether its war-making is as incoherent, whimsical, and counterproductive as its critics believe.

The ostensible purpose of initiating the war was to eliminate the violent threat to U.S. interests posed by the Islamic Republic. The Trump administration has been criticized for strategic confusion because it declared varied objectives that would serve this purpose: eliminate Tehran’s option to develop nuclear weapons, wipe out its missile and naval forces, and overthrow the regime. An apologist for the administration, however, might argue that these are all complementary objectives, not alternatives, and that the strategy is to attempt all of the above, with a range of aims from maximum to minimum. The maximum outcome would be to solve the Iran problem more or less completely via regime change. If that did not pan out, the minimum objective would be to manage it by crippling Iran for a while and periodically reviving the war to tamp down whatever threats regenerated. This fallback option of intermittently renewing war is known as “mowing the lawn.”

The maximum aim of U.S.-engineered regime change appears implausible. The American attack did not just fail to produce a liberal popular uprising ousting the ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guards. If anything, the assault did the reverse, producing an Iranian government even more zealously hostile than the one that was decapitated. So then what about the minimum aim? Again, leave aside the big moral and economic costs. Smashing up Iran will not sufficiently reduce its ability—or its incentive, too often ignored by analysts—to damage U.S. interests. Instead, it merely displaces that purpose by exaggerating the benefits of a temporary tactical success while energizing Iran’s determination to fight back.

The immediate achievement of the war’s purpose at an acceptable cost is dubious. Ignore the question of whether killing thousands of civilians and at least 13 American service members and upending global energy supplies is a price worth paying. Although sweeping bombardments have dramatically weakened Iran’s capabilities, how much weakening is enough to eliminate—rather than motivate—Iranian nuclear, missile, and terrorist threats? In principle, a verifiable deal could do this if Iran found the terms advantageous enough. But if the administration seeks such a deal, then killing its negotiating partners and reducing U.S. bargaining credibility by welching on an earlier deal and launching two surprise attacks amid ongoing talks, as U.S. President Donald Trump has done, would not be the natural approach. Without a deal, a brute-force alternative would require an invasion and occupation of Iran to ensure that Tehran could not preserve and conceal components for uranium enrichment and weapons development or rebuild its conventional forces. Such an invasion and occupation is technically infeasible; Iran is several times bigger and more populous than Iraq. And regardless, no one, not even Trump,wants to repeat the mistake of invading Iraq. One potential alternative is occasionally mowing the lawn; another is a negotiated settlement. The former option is unworkable and the latter improbable, leaving the United States with few options in an escalating war and a bitter rival burning for revenge.

HIGH RISK, NO REWARD

The benefit of periodically returning to war would be to blunt Iran’s military recovery and nuclear reconstitution. Without massive on-the-ground inspections, the question on each occasion would remain how effective the blunting was. In June 2025, Trump declared the Iranian nuclear program to have been “obliterated,” only to decide less than a year later that it had to be struck again. It will hardly be a surprise if the same ineffectiveness of preventive war will have to be faced when the dust settles after the current one. Keeping the Iranian threat subdued is an open-ended strategy. Iran’s incentives to keep some nuclear option open compete with U.S. and Israeli incentives to close it. Iran presumably sees its incentives as existential, especially given the war’s stated ambition for regime change and the targeted killings of Iran’s leaders. Which side’s incentives to indefinitely bear the costs of recurrent war are greater?

Each mowing would depend on confident knowledge of the location and vulnerability of nuclear infrastructure, weapons production facilities, and other components of Iranian offensive capabilities. The stunning Israeli and U.S. intelligence coups that enabled the coordinated killing of dozens of Iranian leaders and scientists in both June 2025 and March 2026 might suggest that this is possible, but reliably thorough knowledge cannot be assumed in the future. At the same time, successfully eroding Iran’s capabilities spurs defense improvements and stokes nationalist desires for revenge. A combination of diminished but still existing capabilities and an inflamed impulse to use them is hardly a success for American strategy.

The war has degraded Iran’s capabilities but fueled its incentives for retaliation.

In the short term, U.S. operations encourage increased terrorism. An embittered Iranian regime, for example, could attempt to repay in kind the Israeli and American decimation of its top leadership in their opening attack by killing mid- to high-level U.S. government personnel at times and places of Iran’s choosing. Such retaliation would enrage Americans and probably provoke the United States to ratchet up to a more ferocious war. In the long term, episodic mowing would promote Iranian adaptation to the attacks by better concealment and deployment of offensive assets. Altogether, such cyclical escalation could eventually lead to something like Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

Mowing can prevent Iran from regenerating and developing sophisticated nuclear weapons, but it cannot assuredly prevent the preservation and concealment of the makings for a few crude weapons. Although inferior nuclear weapons would not be an attractive investment for Tehran under normal conditions, such weapons could have greater appeal for a desperate regime after it has been repeatedly humiliated and enraged by its enemies’ attacks.

ForIsrael, the limited benefits and high costs of periodic mowing might be worthwhile if Iran truly threatens the country’s survival. The stakes for the United States, however, are not so high. Focusing on Iran diverts Washington from potential threats of higher importance: the Russian conquest of Ukraine, the Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or North Korean adventurism. Trump’s jarring suspension of sanctions on Russia in order to increase oil supplies to the world market is the most immediate demonstration of this; continued U.S. distraction by Iran invites China to consider whether it has a window of opportunity against its renegade province; Pyongyang’s regime is not only as wild and crazy as Tehran’s but also already has nuclear weapons.

If the benefit of indefinite conflict with Iran is low, the cost should also be low. It is not. In just its first weeks, the war has cost many billions of dollars in direct expenditure, reduced support for Ukraine, put dangerous strains on inventories of the most advanced U.S. weapons, and shocked the global economy.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT

In principle, a negotiated deal could be a way out of indefinite war. “Negotiated” means a real deal with give as well as take, rather than the simple imposition of terms on a prostrate foe. Hope for a realistic deal is a long shot at best. There already was a deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2015, with which Iran was complying until Trump trashed it in 2017. Would a new one be so much better that it justifies all the destruction of the war? Would Trump’s abrogation of the deal negotiated by the Obama administration give Tehran any reason to rely on a new one? The United States has also twice attacked Iran by surprise—in June 2025 and February 2026—while negotiations were ongoing. The latter operation included the deliberate killing of Iran’s government leadership. These precedents provide Tehran no reason to take American diplomacy seriously.

Faced with the imperfect results of the war so far, Trump can simply declare victory and walk away, leaving the mowing option on the table. The costs in blood and treasure already inflicted and borne, however, exceed the benefits of the minimum strategy. The Iranian threat, whether real or exaggerated, has been reduced but not eliminated. It has been reduced in intensity, the weight of large-scale violence that Tehran can bring to bear, but has likely increased in probability—that is, by degrading Iran’s capabilities but fueling its incentives to actually use weaker but still dangerous forces for retaliation and revenge.

Launching a preventive war was a bad decision in the first place. It undercut whatever claims to American moral leadership in the world that had remained under Trump. It showed other countries that reliance on U.S. power in the face of American adventurism leaves them vulnerable to severe economic disruption. It yoked U.S. national interests to Israel’s, which differ in kind and degree. It left the Iranian people holding the bag when Trump’s promises that “help is on its way” proved hollow.

The Trump administration does not admit that it recognizes or cares about these costs. Putting these considerations aside, however, the war has not achieved the administration’s purpose at acceptable cost anyway. U.S. goals have been displaced. There is scant evidence that Trump even looked beyond his purpose to the question of strategy for achieving it against likely Iranian responses. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has regularly, breathlessly bragged about the crushing tactical power of the American military while ignoring the probable effects on Iran’s intentions and residual capabilities. Trump himself spoke flippantly about overthrowing the regime with no indication of having examined what strategy could bring it about. The huge human and economic costs of the war and a naive strategy for achieving either its maximum or minimum objectives leave the United States with the prospect of managing a postwar landscape that could be as problematic as the one before it.