The Lesson of the Iran War May Be Staying Power, Not Firepower

The imbalance reflects how the agreement came together. Its timing and shape seem to owe less to conditions on the ground than to a diminishing American appetite for a sustained confrontation. Among the sources of that waning resolve are mounting US political demands for resolution before the November midterm elections. Meanwhile America’s NATO and Asian allies are complaining of economic pain, and there’s quiet pressure from Gulf allies anxious for de-escalation on their shores. Arguably, Donald Trump’s wish to let the pomp and ceremony of the US’s 250th anniversary next month take center stage may have also played a part.

Iran wagered from the outset that the US and its allies lacked the endurance for a prolonged confrontation. As Gil Merom argued in his 2003 book How Democracies Lose Small Wars, open societies struggle to sustain the costs of protracted conflict. Unlike an authoritarian adversary, they’re constrained by a public unwilling to tolerate mounting monetary expense or casualties. The calculation predates this war but is now demonstrated with unusual clarity.

Lebanon is a potential point of failure in the US–Iran negotiations. Whether the arrangement survives events in Lebanon depends in part on how much pressure Trump can or will exert on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrain Israeli operations there. Netanyahu is under no such obligation: Israel was not a party to the understanding. Tehran can probably absorb low-intensity Israeli activity in Lebanon without abandoning the deal, but not an Israeli major assault or a sustained military presence there. Neither Washington nor Tehran fully controls the answers.

China is watching closely. It can only be alarmed by the military destruction that Iran has copped. And in its planning, it must consider renewed American willingness to use force. The more consequential lesson available to Chinese strategists, however, concerns endurance rather than capability. The conflict raises questions about the extent to which the US is willing to sustain the economic, political and military costs of a prolonged confrontation.

For Beijing, any crisis over Taiwan would likely be measured in not days or weeks but potentially months or years. Chinese planners will therefore be looking at both US military performance and the durability of American political resolve, alliance cohesion, economic resilience and public support over time.

For Australia, the consequences are less remote than the geography suggests. A Gulf in which maritime traffic and energy flows are subject to Iranian leverage, a regional deterrence balance that has shifted and the possibility of friction between Washington and Europe all bear on the strategic environment Canberra has to plan against. This conflict has shown that West Asia deserves a more sustained place in Australian strategic thinking than it currently holds. For too long, the region has drawn Canberra’s attention only when a crisis has forced it to, and then lost that attention once the immediate danger has passed. A more deliberate and continuous engagement would leave Australia far better prepared for whatever the next phase brings.

Justin Bassi is executive director and Adel Abdel Ghafar is a senior fellow at ASPI. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).