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As the United Kingdom prepares for local elections across 136 English councils on May 7, Keir Starmer faces what may be the biggest test of his premiership since he took office in July 2024. With more than half of the 5,000 contested seats currently held by his Labour Party, the vote is widely framed as a public referendum on Starmer’s leadership — one that could leave his political career hanging in the balance.

Starmer enters the election cycle facing a perfect storm of headwinds: a stagnating national economy exacerbated by fallout from the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, plummeting Labour poll numbers, and personal approval ratings that hit historic lows for a sitting prime minister. The right-wing populist party Reform UK, led by veteran campaigner Nigel Farage, has led national opinion polls for more than a year and is positioning the May elections as a breakthrough opportunity to seize control of local authorities. Recent polling projections suggest Reform could capture as many as 17 councils and claim up to 1,500 council seats, in what would be a landmark upset for the insurgent right.

But the threats to Labour do not end on the right of the political spectrum. The party is facing a coordinated, multi-pronged challenge from the left that experts say could split its traditional base and deliver key seats to anti-establishment opponents.

The Green Party, led by Zack Polanski since mid-2024, has surged in popularity, drawing overwhelming support from young voters across the UK. The party proved its growing electoral strength in a shocking February by-election victory in Greater Manchester’s Gorton and Denton constituency, where Green candidate Hannah Spencer flipped a seat long held by Labour, overturning a previous Labour majority of more than 13,000 votes and outpacing Reform to claim the win.

Alongside the Greens, the new left-wing political movement Your Party has emerged as a major contender, built from the Independent Alliance of five independent MPs who entered parliament following the 2024 general election. The bloc was formed after four pro-Gaza, anti-establishment Muslim independent candidates unseated sitting Labour MPs in what was widely labeled a political earthquake, alongside former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who won re-election as an independent after splitting with Starmer’s leadership over policy disagreements. After a period of internal infighting that marked its launch late last year, Your Party stabilized following Corbyn’s election as its parliamentary leader in February 2025.

Contrary to Labour’s initial hopes that the Greens and Your Party would split the anti-Labour left vote, the two groups have launched a coordinated electoral offensive across England. Your Party has adopted a targeted strategy focused on endorsing community-backed independent candidates, rather than running a full slate of its own politicians, to maximize the impact of the left-wing challenge.

“All across the country, there will be community independent groups offering an alternative to the despair of Labour and the division of Reform,” Corbyn said in a recent campaign statement. “We are proud to support those candidates and groups standing up for redistribution, inclusion and peace.”

This wave of anti-establishment left politics builds on a trend that first emerged in the 2024 local elections, when Labour lost roughly a third of its vote share in areas with large Muslim populations, with many voters shifting to independent candidates running on pro-ceasefire platforms in Gaza or to Green candidates who adopted similar positions. That momentum carried into the July 2024 general election, producing the parliamentary upset that paved the way for Your Party’s launch.

The ongoing US military campaign against Iran, and the UK government’s decision to allow American forces to use UK military bases to strike Iranian missile sites, has become a major flashpoint for voter anger, particularly among left-leaning and Muslim communities who have long criticized Labour’s support for British and American foreign policy in the Middle East. Your Party confirmed this week that local council divestment from entities linked to Israel will be a core campaign plank, alongside addressing longstanding underfunding of local authorities and advocating for increased public investment and insourcing of public services.

Your Party announced Thursday it is backing roughly 250 candidates across England, most running as endorsed independents or as members of local community-aligned parties. One of its top targets is the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, currently controlled by Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire Party. A former Labour politician, Rahman was first elected mayor in 2010, but was removed from office in 2015 after being found guilty of electoral fraud and banned from running for office for six years. He reclaimed the mayoralty and council control for Aspire in the 2022 local elections.

With a population that is 39% Muslim — the highest share in the UK — alongside some of the country’s highest poverty rates, Tower Hamlets has become a showcase for left-wing alternative governance. Your Party has labeled the borough a “beacon council,” pointing to Aspire’s policy wins: expanding free school meals to all primary and secondary students, restoring the Education Maintenance Allowance cut by the previous Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, and reinstating the Winter Fuel Payment that was eliminated by Starmer’s Labour government.

“In Tower Hamlets, we’ve shown how socialist, redistributive policies can transform lives and provide the hopeful, ambitious alternative needed to take on the far right — something Labour has utterly failed to do,” Rahman said.

East London has emerged as the central battleground for the left-wing challenge. In nearby Redbridge, the local Redbridge Independents group, endorsed by Your Party, is aiming to seize council control. Noor Jahan Begum, a recently elected Redbridge councillor who now serves as Your Party’s spokesperson, said the movement is “taking the fight to Labour in their heartlands.”

“In Redbridge and across the country, people are telling us that they feel let down and abandoned by Labour, outraged by their complicity in genocide and fed up of the status quo,” Begum said. “We are offering something different: a politics rooted in and accountable to our communities, a politics that campaigns for the social transformation people are crying out for.”

The challenge has already sparked pushback from senior Labour figures: last week, local MP and Health Secretary Wes Streeting drew criticism for a campaign letter to Redbridge voters that urged residents to vote Labour to stop the borough from “becoming a rotten Borough like Tower Hamlets.” Vaseem Ahmed, leader of the Redbridge Independents, called the comment an unfair attack on a diverse group of local residents campaigning for change.

In neighboring Newham, another East London Labour stronghold, the local Newham Independents Party has already won multiple recent council by-elections and is mounting a serious challenge to Labour’s majority. Further south in Lewisham, southeast London, former Labour councillor Liam Shrivastava is running as the Green mayoral candidate, with polls predicting no party will win an overall council majority. National projections suggest the Greens could capture up to nine councils overall, including long-time Labour strongholds Hackney and Lambeth in London.

The challenge extends far beyond the capital. In Birmingham, Britain’s second city, where 22% of the population is Muslim and all 101 council seats are up for election, polling shows a coalition of independents and Greens has a strong chance of stripping Labour of its majority. In Newcastle upon Tyne, where Labour currently runs a minority administration and 78 seats are contested, former Labour mayor Jamie Driscoll — now running as a Green candidate — said Greens and independent candidates are on track to take joint control of the council.

Rahman argued that the cross-party alliance between Your Party, local community groups, the Greens, and progressive independents presents a historic opportunity to replace Labour-led councils across the country with administrations accountable directly to local communities. Corbyn framed the upcoming elections as the opening of a broader movement against established political orthodoxy.

“These elections are the beginning of the fightback against austerity, privatisation and fear,” Corbyn said. “People in power underestimate the power of people at their peril — and arrogance in office always comes back to bite you in the end.”

A major political storm has erupted in UK politics after the immediate family of Green Party leader Zack Polanski, the only Jewish leader of a major British political party, lodged a formal complaint with the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) over persistent intrusion by reporters at their private residences.

IPSO has confirmed it received the complaint from a legal representative acting for Polanski’s close family members — his mother, father, brother, and sister. In the formal submission, the family issued a clear request that all media outlets cease in-person visits to their homes, as well as unsolicited outreach via phone and email, as they have no intention of speaking to reporters on the story. The complaint directs all future press inquiries to the Green Party’s official press office, per the family’s wishes.

In its notification to all regulated UK media outlets, IPSO explicitly reminded editors of two key clauses from the industry’s Editors’ Code: Clause 2 covering privacy and Clause 3 covering harassment. The guidance warned that continued targeting of the Polanski family could put outlets in breach of these binding industry rules.

The complaint comes in the wake of a controversial article published by the Daily Mail, written by veteran journalist Nicole Lampert. The piece claimed Polanski faced internal rebellion from his own family, who reportedly feared they would be forced to leave the UK if Polanski ever became prime minister, citing unsubstantiated claims of widespread antisemitism within the Green Party.

Lampert claimed to have interviewed three members of Polanski’s extended family for the story, and printed an anonymous quote repeating the baseless conspiracy theory that the Green Party is evolving into “the future Islamic party of Britain” with no place for Jewish residents. Polanski has pushed back hard on the story, noting that his entire immediate family refused all contact with Lampert, forcing her to seek out anonymous, unaffiliated distant relatives to fabricate the narrative.

Notably, Lampert — a former Daily Mail showbusiness editor — is already one of four reporters facing formal investigation over the newspaper’s alleged use of private investigators to obtain stories. As recently as early March, she appeared in court to deny charges related to her role in the hacking of private voicemails between actors Sadie Frost and Jude Law.

In a defiant response to the story, Polanski highlighted newly released polling data from the Verian Group that placed the Green Party in second place nationally, outperforming both the Labour and Conservative parties and trailing front-runner Reform UK by just five percentage points. He argued the unflinching attack on his family was directly tied to the Greens’ rising electoral momentum.

“This is why Daily Mail journalists are going after my family now. The right-wing propaganda machine will not work on the Green Party. We’re ready to end Rip Off Britain, end the cost of living crisis and make hope normal again,” Polanski wrote on social media.

Polanski doubled down on his criticism of Lampert and the Daily Mail, labeling the reporter’s conduct “parasitic” and reiterating the tabloid’s well-documented historical support for fascist movements in 1930s Europe. He also shared a link to an Independent investigation into Lampert’s ongoing court case, which outlines allegations the journalist hired private investigators who committed unlawful acts to acquire information for stories.

Lampert, who has stated she is also Jewish, hit back by claiming Polanski’s use of the word “parasitic” amounted to trafficking in antisemitic tropes against Jewish people. The accusation has drawn widespread pushback from political commentators, who have highlighted the obvious hypocrisy of leveling an antisemitism claim against a sitting Jewish party leader responding to tabloid intrusion of his private family life.

Many observers have drawn clear parallels between the current attack on Polanski and the coordinated campaign against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ahead of the 2019 UK general election, when right-wing media outlets repeatedly levied unsubstantiated antisemitism claims against Corbyn to undermine his leadership. Recent reporting in journalist Paul Holden’s new book *The Fraud* has confirmed that Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and his lobby group Labour Together planted fabricated “antisemitism crisis” stories in national media to discredit Corbyn and seize control of the Labour party.

In a public statement posted to both Instagram and X on March 28, 2026, Polanski rejected all accusations of antisemitism against himself and the Green Party, noting his status as the only Jewish leader of a major UK political party, which is currently the third largest in the country by representation.

“The Daily Mail have been & always will be my enemy – they historically supported fascists & continue to do so. I’ll take no lectures from them on Antisemitism,” Polanski wrote. The post was accompanied by a famous archival photograph of Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail’s founding owner, meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1937. The Daily Mail remains controlled by the Rothermere family to this day, and is registered in the offshore tax haven of Bermuda.

The centuries-old continuous presence of Christian communities across Israel and Palestine is facing an unprecedented existential threat, driven by a growing pattern of intimidation and violence targeting the minority group, a leading Jerusalem-based interfaith research institution has warned in a major new report.

The Rossing Center, an organization dedicated to advancing constructive Jewish-Christian relations, has documented a steady escalation of targeted aggression against Christian communities in occupied East Jerusalem — including the historic Old City — and wider Israel, labeling the trend as sustained and expanding in its latest analysis. The report confirms that Christians are targeted explicitly for their religious identity, while Palestinian Christians face additional persecution as a marginalized national minority.

The document places direct blame for the recent surge in open anti-Christian animosity on the far-right national government led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The report notes that a renewed emphasis on exclusive Jewish identity has found its most extreme expression in right-wing ultranationalism, a force that has become increasingly dominant in mainstream Israeli society. This ideological shift, the authors add, has been amplified by the collective national trauma following the October 7, 2023 attacks, embedding extremist attitudes more deeply within governing circles.

While the report avoids naming National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir explicitly, its findings are widely understood as a direct rebuke of his leadership, which carries formal responsibility for policing across Israel and occupied Palestinian territories including Jerusalem’s Old City. In late 2023, after a wave of documented incidents where Jewish extremists spat on Christian worshippers and holy sites, Ben Gvir defended the behavior as an “old Jewish tradition” and argued it did not qualify as criminal conduct. Earlier this year, he pushed through a sweeping expansion of firearms access that now makes more than 300,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem eligible to carry concealed weapons, according to local Israeli outlet *Times of Israel*. Private conversations with Christian leaders held with Middle East Eye reveal widespread fear in the community that a potential future premiership for Ben Gvir would be catastrophic for Christianity’s place in the Holy Land.

The Rossing Center recorded 155 verified incidents of anti-Christian harassment in 2025 alone, but the report emphasizes that this number represents only the small tip of a much larger iceberg, with countless unreported cases going uncounted. The majority of documented incidents involved physical assaults, with clergy — including monks, nuns, friars, and priests — disproportionately targeted due to their distinct religious vestments and visible Christian symbols. In high-risk areas such as Mount Zion and the Old City’s Armenian Quarter, clergy reported that harassment has become so daily and routine that stepping outside their places of residence virtually guarantees verbal or physical abuse.

One of the report’s most concerning findings is the near-total lack of legal accountability for these attacks. The think tank has supported dozens of victims in filing formal police complaints, but the vast majority of these cases have been closed without action; only a tiny fraction have resulted in indictments, a rate wildly disproportionate to the scale of the violence. The report also notes a critical institutional gap: there is no designated police liaison to work with and address concerns from the Christian community across the country. This systemic failure has reinforced a widespread perception among Christians that they are not seen as an integral part of the region’s social fabric, but rather as unwelcome outsiders in the land their community has inhabited for millennia.

Beyond attacks on people, the report documents 59 separate acts of vandalism targeting church property, including defacement with extremist graffiti, damage to religious statues, arson attacks, illegal garbage dumping on sacred grounds, and targeted spitting at holy sites. These attacks, the authors note, erode a sense of safety around sacred spaces and fuel growing anxiety over the steady collapse of public respect for Christian religious life in Israel’s public sphere. An additional 18 incidents involved the defacement of Christian-owned public signage. Cumulatively, the persistent aggression creates a humiliating, draining climate that pushes many Christians to conceal their religious identity in public and leaves community leaders uncertain about the long-term survival of their congregations.

In its concluding analysis, the report emphasizes that Christian communities have been continuously and proudly rooted in the Holy Land for more than 2,000 years. But growing pressure from multiple directions is now pushing younger generations to consider leaving the region entirely. A 2024 survey conducted by the center found that nearly half of all Christians under the age of 45 are actively considering relocating out of Israel and Palestine.

The report’s release coincides with a high-profile incident that underscored its findings: just days before publication, Israeli police blocked Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — the site Christian tradition holds as the place of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection — to lead the annual Palm Sunday Mass marking the start of Holy Week. Pizzaballa’s office confirmed that this was the first time in centuries that the patriarch had been blocked from leading the iconic service at the site.

Israeli security forces maintained a pervasive, overwhelming presence across the Old City throughout Holy Week, with an armed officer posted outside the locked doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to prevent worshippers from approaching. A permanent Israeli police security post, labeled the “Israeli Police Division of the Holy Sepulchre Church,” operates just outside the church’s outer courtyard, flying an Israeli flag directly outside one of Christianity’s most sacred sites. Multiple worshippers told Middle East Eye that armed Israeli police routinely enter the ancient church in intrusive patrols, even accessing the Tomb of Christ itself, and that Palestinian worshippers routinely feel intimidated by the armed presence inside sacred spaces. Middle East Eye requested comment from Israeli police on these claims, but received no response prior to publication.

The incident comes more than a year after the International Court of Justice issued a landmark 2024 ruling that Israel’s ongoing occupation of East Jerusalem is illegal under international law, and ordered the Israeli state to end its illegal security presence and occupation. The Israeli government has rejected the ruling outright, maintaining that all of Jerusalem is its undivided capital. Netanyahu has repeatedly framed Israel as the “guardian of Christianity” in the Middle East — a claim that stands in stark contrast to the dire picture of escalating anti-Christian persecution laid out in the Rossing Center’s report, released in Christianity’s holiest city during its most sacred week of the year.

London is stepping forward to organize a virtual international summit this Thursday, launching a diplomatic push to build a global coalition aimed at compelling Iran to reopen the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz. The initiative comes in the wake of former US President Donald Trump’s controversial declaration that Washington would not assist European allies in reopening the waterway, telling the UK and other nations they must handle the task independently to secure their own oil supplies.

Two months have passed since the outbreak of open conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran, and the battlefield dynamic has shifted dramatically from what initial projections predicted. While the US-Israeli bloc scored swift, high-profile gains in the opening weeks of hostilities, the unexpected resilience of Iran’s governing institutions and military has robbed the alliance of its early strategic initiative, leaving it reacting to developments rather than shaping the war’s outcome on its own terms.

Analysts point to a deep, foundational divide in the core strategic objectives of Washington and Tel Aviv as the primary root of this shifted momentum. This conflict, launched under the Trump administration, has already exposed a fundamental contradiction with decades of US policy in the Persian Gulf, rooted in the 1980 Carter Doctrine.

Unveiled by then-President Jimmy Carter in his 1980 State of the Union Address, the doctrine was crafted in response to two seismic regional shifts: the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Carter made clear that any foreign attempt to seize control of the Persian Gulf, a region central to global energy security, would be viewed as an attack on core US interests and repelled by any means necessary, including full military force.

To operationalize this doctrine, the US permanently stationed its Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, imposed sweeping economic sanctions on Iran and the Soviet Union, and steadily expanded its military footprint across the region. Since 2001 alone, the number of US military bases in the Gulf has grown exponentially, with roughly 50,000 American military personnel currently deployed across the region. Even with this overwhelming military dominance, every US administration for decades acknowledged that a full-scale war to overthrow the Iranian government would backfire. A direct conflict, policymakers recognized, would risk triggering the exact outcome the Carter Doctrine was designed to prevent: Iran could block access to the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical chokepoint for global oil shipments, effectively ceding control of the Persian Gulf’s energy supply chains to hostile forces. For generations, Washington thus accepted a tentative status quo with Tehran.

For Israel, however, the strategic calculus of conflict with Iran could not be more different. Iran is the leading state backer of the so-called Axis of Resistance, a loosely aligned coalition of anti-Western and anti-Israeli groups including Syria, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. The coalition’s core stated goals are to oppose US regional hegemony, end Israeli statehood, and support Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories. While the coalition has never possessed the military capacity to deliver on its most ambitious goals, Iran has long provided financing, training, and arms to Hamas and Hezbollah to carry out resistance operations against Israel.

For decades, Washington successfully pressured Israel to avoid large-scale sustained military action against Axis of Resistance members, a compromise that preserved the Persian Gulf status quo and kept global energy supplies flowing. That arrangement collapsed entirely after the October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which removed US restrictions on Israeli military escalation. In response to the attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched its long-standing “mowing the grass” strategy – a doctrine that calls for degrading an adversary’s capabilities by eliminating frontline leadership, destroying military, political, and economic infrastructure, and establishing a new deterrence balance.

Israel first applied this strategy against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, advancing into southern Lebanese territory to establish a new buffer zone that would strip Hezbollah of its historic strongholds along the Israeli border. The campaign has come at a devastating humanitarian cost: hundreds of Lebanese civilians have been killed, and widespread systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure has been documented. Israel has now extended this same destruction-focused strategy to Iran itself, carrying out a campaign of targeted assassinations of senior political and military leaders and striking infrastructure across the country, including civilian sites.

Beyond the military dimension, the conflict has delivered major immediate political benefits for Netanyahu, who faces national elections scheduled for October 27. The 2023 Hamas attacks were a major political blow to the prime minister, who had built his decades-long political brand as Israel’s unshakable security guarantor. Now, on the campaign trail, Netanyahu can point to gains against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran to rebuild his credibility. A victory at the polls would not only allow him to retain the prime ministership – it would also put him in a position to secure a pardon from President Isaac Herzog and end his years-long ongoing corruption trial. For Netanyahu, the incentives to continue the conflict are clear, but the short-term political gains carry steep long-term costs.

First, public support for Netanyahu’s government remains contingent on delivering on his maximalist goals: the total destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the collapse of Iran’s current ruling regime. Early 2025 polling shows that support for Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party plummeted immediately when news of a potential ceasefire with Hamas broke. If the Trump administration moves forward with a ceasefire agreement that Iran demands includes a cessation of hostilities against Hezbollah, Netanyahu could see his polling lead evaporate overnight.

Second, international public support for Israel has fallen to historic lows in the years following the 2023 outbreak of hostilities. Recent polling shows that 65% of Democratic voters and 41% of independent voters in the US now sympathize with Palestinians, and even among Republican supporters, backing for Israel is at its lowest point since 2004. The trend is identical across Europe, where 2025 polling records historic low support for Israeli policy. This shift carries major material risks for Israel: the country relies on $3.8 billion in annual US military aid and unrestricted access to American weapons and munitions to sustain its military campaigns. Without this support, Israel would not be able to carry out offensive operations without major economic consequences, and would likely face a severe recession. Given President Trump’s well-documented history of unpredictable policy shifts, this support cannot be counted on as a given.

Third, Netanyahu and multiple senior members of his cabinet are currently under investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity stemming from Israeli military conduct in the Gaza campaign. While the Israeli government has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, an adverse ruling from the court would further erode international support and leave Israel more diplomatically isolated than ever.

Finally, even after two months of intense military pressure that has significantly weakened Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the mere survival of these groups against a far more militarily powerful alliance is already being framed as a political victory for their cause. Worse for Israel, the decimation of older leadership has cleared the way for younger, more hardline, more emboldened leaders to take control across the Axis of Resistance. That makes the eventual reemergence of a more militant, revenge-focused coalition far more likely.

The paradox of Netanyahu’s campaign is that instead of strengthening Israel’s long-term security, it has left the country facing a far more complex and dangerous security environment. With backing from traditional allies increasingly uncertain, Israel may end up far more vulnerable to future attacks than it was before the conflict began.

Nearly every strategic objective the United States laid out for its current conflict against Iran has failed to materialize, according to a leading scholar of protracted US military engagements. No popular uprising has unseated Iran’s ruling establishment, hardline leadership has merely reshuffled rather than fallen, Tehran’s missile and drone capabilities continue to strike targets across the Middle East, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent global energy prices soaring. Most notably, in direct contradiction of former US President Donald Trump’s demand for unconditional surrender, Iran has outright rejected a 15-point US-backed ceasefire proposal. What has caused such a sweeping deviation from Washington’s initial war plans?

In an analysis republished from *The Conversation*, Charles Walldorf, professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University, argues the core issue is what he terms the “trap of asymmetric resolve.” This dynamic unfolds when a militarily dominant power with limited stakes in a conflict enters war against a far smaller, weaker state whose entire governing system hangs in the balance. When the weaker side possesses near-unwavering commitment to victory, overcoming that determination becomes exponentially harder – and often nearly impossible – for the stronger power.

“For Iran, the Islamic Republic’s very existence is on the line, a stakes Washington can never match in this conflict,” Walldorf explains. “That existential threat gives Tehran overwhelming incentives to maintain resistance and deploy highly effective countermeasures to wear down US advances.”

This pattern of asymmetric conflict has repeated throughout military history, dating back to the sixth century B.C., when a massive invasion force led by Persian Emperor Darius I was halted by a much smaller, deeply determined Scythian army. The lopsided standoff ultimately ended in a humiliating retreat for the Persian Empire. In the modern era, the United States has repeatedly fallen victim to this same trap.

The Vietnam War stands as one of the clearest modern examples. Over eight years of brutal conflict, an estimated 1.1 million North Vietnamese fighters and civilians lost their lives, compared to 58,000 US troops. Despite this massive casualty disparity, North Vietnam’s unyielding commitment to unification ultimately overwhelmed US willingness to sustain the war. After years of costly fighting, the US withdrew, and North Vietnam secured full victory over South Vietnam in 1975.

A near identical dynamic played out decades later in Afghanistan. The US ousted the Taliban regime in 2001, installed a Western-aligned government, and built a 300,000-strong Afghan national military backed by unlimited US firepower. Over 20 years of conflict, roughly 84,000 Taliban fighters were killed, compared to just 2,400 US service members. Yet the Taliban’s relentless commitment to retaking power eventually outlasted US political will. The US signed a withdrawal deal in 2020, pulled all remaining troops out in 2021, and the Taliban retook full control of the country within weeks.

This pattern is not unique to the US. The Soviet Union suffered an identical humiliating defeat in its 9-year Afghanistan occupation in the 1980s, despite suffering far fewer total casualties than the Afghan resistance. Post-World War II France likewise lost protracted asymmetric conflicts in Vietnam and Algeria, despite holding massive military advantages over independence fighters.

Today, that same asymmetry of resolve is playing out in the US-Iran war. Unlike the 12-day 2025 limited conflict that targeted only Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure, the current campaign has explicitly targeted the survival of Iran’s ruling government, with targeted assassinations of top leaders and open calls for popular uprising.

Tehran has followed through on pre-war warnings to retaliate across the region. Iran has launched strikes against Israeli targets, US military bases across the Middle East, and aligned Arab Gulf states, while drastically cutting commercial shipping access through the Strait of Hormuz – the world’s busiest energy chokepoint. Iran has taken far heavier losses than the US in the conflict: as of mid-March, more than 5,000 Iranian military personnel and 1,500 civilians have been killed, compared to 13 US service members. Even so, Tehran has refused to back down, declaring on March 10 that “We will determine when the war ends.”

This unyielding resistance has caught the Trump administration off guard. Before the war began, Trump openly questioned why Iran would not cave to US demands, and he has since acknowledged that regime change – a core opening war goal – is now a “very big hurdle.” This disconnect stems from misleading pre-war messaging to the American public: Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed in January that Iran was weaker than it had ever been, with no intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the US mainland, a crippled nuclear program, and fewer regional allies than at any point in modern history. A March 6 Marist poll reflected this narrative, with 55% of Americans saying they viewed Iran as a minor or nonexistent threat.

As Iran’s resilience has become impossible to ignore, US public opinion has turned sharply against the war. This shifting sentiment poses a unique challenge for democratic leaders, who face electoral consequences for maintaining unpopular conflicts. Today, the Iran war is among the least popular US conflicts since World War II, with consistent polling showing roughly 60% of Americans oppose continued military engagement. This mirrors the collapse of public support that drove past US withdrawals from asymmetric quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

While pre-war Iran faced widespread domestic protests that weakened public support for the government, a combination of a brutal government crackdown and a “rally around the flag” nationalist response to foreign invasion has muted domestic discontent, eliminating the domestic pressure for compromise that Washington faces.

Looking ahead, the Trump administration has attempted to manage the impact of asymmetric resolve by framing the operation as limited in scope and duration. To calm jittery financial markets and reassure war-weary voters, Trump has repeatedly promised a short conflict and delayed large-scale offensive strikes to make space for negotiations – claims that Iran has not corroborated.

Walldorf notes that history offers stronger powers two clear paths forward when facing a more determined weaker adversary. The first is to give in to the hubris of military power and escalate the conflict, a path that led to decades-long quagmires in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The second is to wind down hostilities, accept limited gains, and seek a negotiated end to the conflict.

Past leaders have overwhelmingly chosen escalation, convinced that a small increase in military force will tip the balance. President Barack Obama fell into this trap when he ordered a surge of 30,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan, incorrectly predicting the deployment would break the Taliban’s resistance. Despite public signals that he wants to exit the conflict, Trump could still take the same path: additional US troops are already deploying to the Persian Gulf, and B-52 bombers have begun flying combat sorties over Iranian territory for the first time in the current war.

History shows that escalating against a determined foe like Iran will come at massive cost to the United States. But the second path – de-escalation and negotiation – remains open to Trump. The president has already chosen this route twice before: he signed the 2020 deal with the Taliban to end the Afghanistan war rather than escalating, and he walked away from the 2025 Yemen air campaign when he realized defeating the Houthi movement would require a costly ground invasion.

Trump could choose the same exit strategy for Iran: declare that core US goals have been met, withdraw offensive forces, and enter sustained, good-faith negotiations to end the conflict. Any deal would require US concessions, such as restoring shipping access guarantees through the Strait of Hormuz or rolling back some crippling economic sanctions on Iran. While Trump may be reluctant to accept these compromises, polling shows a majority of American voters support this outcome. After decades of costly quagmires, Walldorf argues, few Americans are eager to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam and Afghanistan in the Middle East.