There is a distinctive hush that settles over policy circles and media airwaves after the first thunder of a new war fades. It is the quiet of think tank analyses being pulled from public view, of confident cable news predictions scrubbed from on-screen banners, of bold promises that “this conflict will be different” crashing headlong into the unyielding truth that, more often than not, it never is. Three months into the open war with Iran, that silence now rings louder than the steady thud of bombing raids across the region.
It is critical that we revisit the core promises made by the war’s champions before the first strike, because we owe it to ourselves to hold to account the assumptions that brought us to this moment. Proponents of the conflict laid out a clear, optimistic roadmap: the offensive would be surgically precise, they argued, and Iran’s already weakened regime would shatter under pressure. Years of crippling sanctions, the decimation of Hezbollah’s deterrent capabilities, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus had left Tehran isolated and fragile, they claimed, and it would fold quickly under concentrated military force.
Worse still, war backers insisted that the February 28 assassination of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei would spark political upheaval — if not an immediate democratic “Persian Spring”, then at minimum a cowed, compliant new leadership willing to bend to Western demands. They promised that American military resolve would keep the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, open for global shipping. Gulf Arab monarchies, despite public ambivalence, would quietly back the campaign, they claimed, and a single well-timed push would spark mass uprising on the Iranian street that would finish the job of regime change for Washington.
Today, every one of these core assumptions lies in ruins, undone by a single shared structural flaw: the dangerous conflation of a regime’s fragility with willingness to comply. These two traits are not interchangeable. A wounded nation is not a docile one. When a regime loses its founding, unifying charismatic leader, it does not automatically liberalize — as Iran’s new Interim Leadership Council has shown, it can instead harden its position, decentralize decision-making, and become far less predictable and open to negotiation than the old order ever was. War hawks mistakenly confused the absence of one single decision-maker with the total absence of cohesive decision-making, a mistake that has upended every subsequent military and political calculation.
The second catastrophic miscalculation was the theory that Iran would limit its retaliation to preserve its own survival. War planners argued that Tehran would calibrate its response to avoid total annihilation, absorbing heavy blows while only lashing out symbolically before returning to negotiations on terms favorable to Washington and Jerusalem.
This was always a baffling assumption to make about an adversary that spent 20 years building an entire strategic doctrine centered on proxies, long-range missiles, and maritime harassment specifically designed to make limited war impossible. This fact was included in every U.S. Central Command briefing for two decades, but when the time came to launch the offensive, planners insisted Iran would behave according to a Western definition of “rational” action, not the framework shaped by Tehran’s own ideological and strategic priorities.
The results are impossible to ignore. Iran has now launched strikes on American military bases across Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq. Yemen’s Houthi movement has closed the Bab el-Mandeb, another critical global shipping lane connecting the Mediterranean and Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz only operates intermittently, at Iran’s unilateral sufferance. This outcome was never a surprise; it was widely predicted by critics before the war ever began.
The third miscalculation centered on the supposed regional coalition backing the campaign. The war’s architects genuinely believed the Abraham Accords had created more than a temporary, transactional set of relationships between Israel and Gulf Arab states. They assumed that the Gulf’s quiet long-standing animosity toward Tehran would translate into open, active participation in an American-led war. It has not.
Saudi Arabia allowed the U.S. to use its airspace for strike operations, but within 48 hours, Riyadh was on the phone with Beijing seeking diplomatic mediation. Pakistan, bound by a long-standing defense pact with Saudi Arabia, has spent the past 10 weeks caught between competing interests, attempting to mediate a ceasefire it has no power to enforce while trying to protect irreconcilable strategic equities on both sides. Turkey has opted for strategic hedging, refusing to commit fully to either camp. Even the UAE, which intercepted Iranian missiles aimed at its territory, has simultaneously expanded trade corridors with Tehran’s key commercial partners. This is not a functioning coalition. It is a region scrambling desperately to avoid being dragged into a catastrophic conflict by its own American security guarantor.
The fourth miscalculation — and the one that will be hardest for war defenders to confront — is that no one ever clearly defined what “victory” would actually look like. Tracing the official justifications for the war reveals shifting goalposts that change by the week: first, it was to degrade Iran’s nuclear program; then to restore Western deterrence in the region; then to force regime change; now it is to reassert American global primacy. These are not just different objectives — they are often incompatible with one another. When a war’s stated purposes multiply as its human and economic costs mount, it is clear that its architects had no clear idea of what they wanted to achieve before they ordered the first strike.
This is not a minor quibble. It is the core failure of the entire enterprise. Carl von Clausewitz, the foundational theorist of modern war, wrote extensively about the danger of launching military campaigns without a clear, achievable political objective — and every word of his warning has proven correct here.
The fifth and final miscalculation concerned American public opinion. War supporters assured themselves and the public that the absence of a large-scale U.S. ground troop commitment would keep the conflict politically manageable at home. They are now learning what U.S. policymakers learned in 1965 in Vietnam, in 1991 and again in 2003 in Iraq: wars that begin with airstrikes never end with airstrikes. They end with returning troop coffins, crippling naval blockades, global energy price shocks, and a public that eventually begins to ask the fundamental question: who even authorized this war in the first place?
The ongoing naval blockade of Iran, the collapsed ceasefire talks in Islamabad, the growing risk of escalation across the Lebanese front: none of these outcomes were mentioned to the American public when they were sold this conflict. The current reality is nothing like the clean, quick war voters were promised.
This commentary takes no pleasure in being proven right by disaster. The realist foreign policy tradition does not celebrate vindication that comes at the cost of regional chaos and rising human suffering. It would far prefer to have been ignored quietly, proven correct only in an unread footnote of policy analysis.
Yet it has become a repeated pattern of Washington’s foreign policy establishment to mistake the absence of immediate cost for the total absence of cost. They confuse the quiet that precedes consequences for the absence of consequences entirely. Iran’s deliberate restraint in 2024 and 2025 was read in Washington as a sign of weakness. It should have been recognized for what it was: strategic patience.
In time, the war’s defenders will fall back on the same excuses they always produce after failed campaigns: the core plan was sound, only the execution was flawed; the Iranians refused to behave as they were supposed to; regional allies were unreliable; the White House held back from committing enough force; the American public lacked sufficient resolve. From these excuses, they will draw the same wrong lesson: that next time, the U.S. must be more committed, more unified, and more willing to do whatever it takes to win.
But these are the lessons you draw when you refuse to learn the actual, harder lesson that has been available to policymakers for generations: the Middle East is not a problem to be solved by outside military force. Iran is a sovereign nation with its own history, politics, and ideology, not just a target set for American bombs. The gap between what American military power can destroy and what it can build remains the central, unhealed flaw of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.
We were warned about these mistakes before the first strike. Today, those warnings are history. The only question that matters now is what we will do with the warnings that are still to come.