For decades, the Washington foreign policy establishment—the ‘Blob’—has operated under a dangerous, persistent delusion: that American military might is a magic wand capable of reshaping the Middle East without consequence. But that comfortable belief is now clashing with physical reality on the ground in the Middle East.
The Iranian regime’s ‘asymmetric’ retaliatory doctrine was no secret. They never needed a blue-water navy to win or even an air force to match America’s. Instead, if the U.S. chose a war with Iran—something the leaders in Tehran had envisioned was possible for decades—Iranian strategy would primarily need to do two things: survive as a political entity and maintain a sustained rate of fire of its missile and drone inventories.
That’s it.
America, on the other hand, would have a much higher threshold: once the U.S. launched a war of choice, the requirements became winning a military victory. President Donald Trump at various times set objectives such as regime change, the destruction of the Iranian Navy, the destruction of the Iranian Air Force, the dismantling of their nuclear enrichment capacity, the decimation of Iranian long range missile program, and decoupling of Iran’s so-called ‘Axis of Resistance,’ or regional proxies, from Tehran’s control.
And the US sought to do all that on the cheap, without a ground force.
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