The Iran War: The Eagle and the Lions

Epic Fury, Roaring Lion, True Promise

Like most people in the western hemisphere, I woke on February 28 to an overwhelming rush of footage, reports, and rumors from the Middle East. The United States and Israel had launched a surprise attack on Iran overnight (after the markets closed for the weekend), and were pummeling the Iranians with massed air strikes. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei - a longtime fixture in regional politics - was dead, according to soon to be confirmed Israeli reports. A few hours later, Iran began retaliating with missile strikes on targets all around the region, including Israel, American bases, and the Gulf States. We were off to the races.

In the weeks that have since elapsed, the emerging Iran War has been subject to analytic confusion that becomes nearly overwhelming. In some sense, this is baked into the conflict given the participants. Israel is, to put it mildly, a controversial state that occupies an inordinate amount of cognitive real estate in the United States. Depending on who you ask, Israel is either a prophetically heralded political avatar of God Almighty, which the United States is bound by sacred obligation to defend, or it is an overtly nefarious parasite which manipulates the American government through a mixture of campaign contributions, religious trickery, and blackmail.

All of this is bad enough on its own, and sure to confuse conversation about why and how the war is being fought. To make matters worse, however, the Trump Administration has been unusually bad about communicating either motives or explicit aims for the conflict. In the span of barely a week, rationales were furnished which ranged from a need to preempt an Iranian first strike, destroy Iran’s conventional missile capabilities, prevent Iranian nuclearization, secure Iranian natural resources, preempt Iranian retaliation after an Israeli first strike, and of course, regime change.

Broadly speaking, there has not been a great deal of clarity as to whether the objective is to destroy the Iranian state outright, or simply to de-fang it by demolishing its strike capabilities and industrial base. To make matters worse, many of the motives offered by the Trump administration have been directly contradicted by its own key members. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that America’s hand was forced by Israeli plans to attack Iran, Trump stated rather speciously that the opposite was true, and that he force Israel’s hand. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, told Congress that they had no evidence that Iran was planning a preemptive attack. Of course, the Iranian nuclear program is always a bugbear in DC, but immediate alarm over Iranian nuclearization would seem to contradict the confident claims that last year’s strikes on the Fordow enrichment plant set Iran’s program back by years. At the same time, the International Atomic Energy Agency claims that Iran has no structured nuclear weapons program at all, which would make sense given the late Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons.

Little wonder, then, that hardly anybody can agree on what is going on. The factual background of the war is blotchy, and it creates a geostrategic Rorschach test where people see what they want to see.

The most ardent evangelical Zionists in the United States (the Rafael Edward Cruz’s of the world) see a religiously charged crusade for Israel’s security. The less zealous see yet another flex of the Trump Administration’s muscular foreign policy, scratching off a longtime security concern. Israel-skeptics come in somewhere between American foreign policy capture by Israel (reasonable) and Trump being blackmailed by a vaguely defined Mossad-Epstein nexus (absurd). Many Trump voters, although skeptical of foreign wars, simply feel that the President has earned their trust; they are willing to hope for the best and will abandon their misgivings in the case of victory. The Resistance Commentariat at the New York Times and elsewhere gets another data point in their theory of the deranged, militant, quasi-Fascist Trump administration. Finally, the most ardent skeptics and haters of American Empire are practically gleeful over what they see as a hubristic American war machine finally putting its head squarely in the trap, beginning a war which they believe Iran is squarely winning.

I tend to approach these matters very differently, beginning with my assumption that Israel, the United States, and Iran are all mostly normal states that are predominantly interested in security and power-maximization. Israel, for example, is an odd state, characterized by what I have called an eschatological-garrison ideology, and it exerts an unusual amount of influence in American politics, but its powers are far more limited than either its greatest admirers or most ardent critics suppose. It is neither the apple of God’s eye nor the cursed root of all the ills that beset us. It is a state, interested primarily in its own security and maximizing its regional power relative to rivals. Similarly, Iran - although a unique clerical state - is a state nonetheless.

If you will indulge me this premise - that we are, ultimately, dealing with a trio of states that can be understood as such - I believe the chain of events falls into place very nicely, and we can follow it in sequence. Whether it will lead us to a place we want to be is another question entirely.

Bibi’s Shooting Spree

The longstanding antipathy between Iran and the Israeli-American bloc is a fixed property of regional affairs, and needs little introduction. The first question animating any discussion of the emerging Iran War ought not be why, precisely, but rather: why now?

To answer this, we need to remember the developments that precipitated the current war over the past few years, beginning with Hamas’s operation in Israel on October 7, 2023. In the years that have passed since then, Israel has gone on what I characterize as a geostrategic shooting spree against regional threats and rivals. These operations not only killed a slew of high value enemy personnel, but also trashed many of the hotbeds on Israel’s borders and put the Iranians squarely on the back foot.

For Americans in particular, who are not well versed with key middle eastern personnel and political factions, these events rather blur together. Taken as a whole, however, Israel’s recent successes are remarkable. Since late 2023, Israel has killed much of Hamas’s senior leadership, including Yahya Sinwar, Muhammad Sinwar, Marwan Issa, Saleh al-Arouri, and the head of the Hamas political office, Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Iran. They killed a variety of key Hezbollah personnel in Lebanon, including Hesbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, senior commanders like Fuad Shukr, and the head of the Central Council, Nabil Qaouk - all to say nothing of the damage done to the field command structure in the infamous pager bomb operation. Finally, the Israelis have killed many high ranking Iranian officers, including senior IRGC generals like Mohammad Bagheri, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Quds Commander Esmail Qaani, and IRGC head Hossein Salami, in air strikes on Iran last June.

Israel’s impressive decapitation run has coincided with the trashing of Gaza and the collapse of the Assad government in Syria. The latter was particularly significant, in that it not only took a key Iranian satellite off the board, but it hampered Iranian connectivity to proxies like Hezbollah, creating an inwardly turned Trashcanistan in between Iran and Lebanon.

This conversation can easily turn sour. The preoccupation with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the soaring death toll there is understandable, and the litany of Israeli headhunts conjures images of martyrdom, with Israel’s opponents rationalizing that Israel fell into some clever trap by killing men like Sinwar and Nasrallah.

That may, of course, be interesting to some. What is most important, however, is that Israel has successfully hollowed out enemy leadership and rocked Iran’s strategic position at relatively low cost to itself. Iranian reprisal strikes in the Twelve-Days War, although a source of kino, manifestly failed to reset deterrence for Iran. Israel’s shooting spree not only put Iran on the back foot by throwing its proxies into dissaray, but also suggested a model for how Iran itself might be brought to the brink.

So, why now? I think the answer is fairly simple: Iran appeared uniquely vulnerable in the wake of Israel’s shooting spree and the collapse of its position in Syria. Forced to choose between attempting a knockout blow on Iran now, with American weight behind it, and allowing the Iranian regime to reconstitute its strength, for the Israelis this was hardly a choice at all. The momentum of their recent successes carried them into this war.

Shooting Spree

For the United States, involvement was virtually preordained. Once the Israeli government communicated its commitment to act, the United States faced a choice between participation at the outset and ceding control of events by waiting for Iranian retaliation. This, again, is hardly a choice at all. It was clearly preferrable to retain control over tempo and deliver the most powerful possible first strike.

Cosmetically, this appears to validate the complaint that American foreign policy is largely captive to the Israelis, with the attendant despair that the mighty United States is little more than a client of Tel Aviv. It is true that Israel has unusual influence in American politics and tremendous levers to force American military action. If I may be allowed to play devil’s advocate, however, we might note that the dynamic at play here is not all that unusual. In fact, client states (Israel) often have enormous leverage over their larger, more powerful allies (the United States), because they can trigger security emergencies which compel their benefactor to act. British patriots in 1914 may have griped that the United Kingdom was being dragged into a war by commitments to Belgium, but this had little bearing on relative power dynamic between Brussels and London. Nor, for that matter, was Russia a plaything of the Serbian government, though it went to war for the sake of Serbia.

The idea that the United States might stay entirely neutral in a high intensity conflict between Iran and Israel was never reasonable, particularly given the high probability that Iran would retaliate against an Israeli attack by striking American basing in the region. Israel and the United States form, for better or worse, a tightly consolidated bloc in the Middle East, such that Israeli military action triggers American involvement. Given a firm enough commitment to act by the Israelis, it can even do so preemptively.

Given the successes they have had over the last two years, decapitating and defanging Iranian proxies, observing the collapse of the Syrian state, and striking Iran itself without successful deterrence reset by the Iranians, the Israelis clearly felt that they had an opportunity to severely damage, or even destroy the Iranian state by decapitating the regime, destroying much of its strike capabilities and industry, and degrading or destroying its air defenses. Israel clearly communicated its determination to act in what it viewed as an important window of opportunity, and Israeli action preemptively triggered American participation. Any understanding of the particular trigger for this war must begin, however, not with inane theories about red heifers, but with Bibi’s multi-year shooting spree, which both created the opportunity for the final degradation of the Iranian state, as well as the model by which this could be accomplished.

Bombing a Vacuum

Given the decision by the Israeli-American bloc to act and act now, the shape of the military operation itself begins to emerge. Broadly speaking, we can separate the initial strikes on Iran into two broad categories - regime and military targets - with the twin objectives of defanging and decapitating the Iranian state. Though it may not be immediately obvious, these two goals are closely connected and nominally support each other.

Strike activity thus far has been heavily focused on degrading both Iranian air defense and their ability to sustain strike volume: an effort which entails not only striking launchers, but also storage and production of strike systems. While the first few days of strikes - which entailed expending thousands of munitions - achieved immediate success degrading Iranian strike volume, that progress has slowed as the Iranians have shifted to a more methodical husbanding of launch platforms. Degradation of Iranian air defense has also achieved air superiority - loosely defined as dominant advantage in the air and access to enemy air space - but Iran retains some intact defenses which deny air supremacy, generally defined by rendering the enemy incapable of interference with air forces in the operational area.

The key point that must be delineated, however, is whether Iranian strike capacity and air defense are being degraded in the context of operational or strategic goals. This may sound like pedantry, but I beg the reader to bear with me. What we are querying is whether Iran’s capabilities are being degraded permanently on a persistent trend or merely suppressed. The difference is substantial.

Iranian strike volume has clearly declined, though Iran continues to launch missiles and drones at a stable baseline rate. To some extent, however, this may be due both to Iranian decisions to conserve launchers and avoid over-exposing their assets, as well as “last leg logistics”, in which they find it difficult to move assets to launch sites under enemy air superiority. The effective suppression of Iranian strike capacity would be very useful in lessening the burden on Israeli-American air defense and allowing the strike campaign on Iran to continue. It would not, however, permanently neutralize Iranian deterrence and allow for untrammeled Israeli strikes on regime targets without fear of retaliation.

Put another way, the suppression of Iranian strike systems has operational ramifications in the near term, while massive attrition of their capabilities would mean the effective defanging of the state, the destruction of their basis for future deterrence, and long-term Israeli power to act with impunity. More to the point, the destruction of Iranian strike capabilities is a war aim in and of itself, particularly for Israel, while the suppression of strike activity is an operational expedient in the service of other goals.

At the same time, Iranian regime targets have been heavily targeted. Of course, the killing of Khamenei is the crown jewel from the Israeli perspective, but high ranking regime personnel have been more broadly targeted. Overnight on March 16-17, an airstrike killed Iran’s National Security Council head, Ali Larijani. Meanwhile, Ali Khamenei’s son and presumptive successor as Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is - depending on who you listen to - in a coma and missing a leg, disfigured, and gay.

Strikes on Iranian regime and military targets, on paper, form a mutually reinforcing feedback loop which is designed to induce a capacity spiral in the Iranian state. Degrading Iran’s air defense and strike capacity will allow Israeli-American strikes on regime targets with impunity. On paper, a completely defanged and defenseless Iran, with no capacity to launch retaliatory strikes and no functioning air defense, can be struck at will, and the state can be pushed to the brink with ongoing strikes on personnel. The other side of this coin, of course, is that decapitation strikes are designed to disorder Iranian command and control and degrade orderly battle management, so that military targets can be systematically hunted and attrited. At the risk of a reptilian analogy, a snake without fangs can be safely handled, and a snake that is restrained by its head can be safely defanged. This is the basic logic.

The Iran War: Second Christmas for Aviation Enthusiasts

This leads us to the rather scattered presentation of American war aims, in particular. The messaging here has been less than uniform, to say the least. Initially, President Trump expressed hopes that Iran would play out similar to Venezuela, where lightning decapitation led to a new leadership group within the existing state structure, albeit utterly pliant to American demands. This was followed be a sense of bewilderment that Iran’s leadership was now undefined and in flux, with the famous quip that the people identified as possible successors had been killed. This gave way to a half hearted call for an uprising, hoping perhaps that the Iranian people might do the job on their own. Now, Trump is expressing disappointment in Mojtaba Khamenei’s selection, and rather sanguinely suggested that the younger Khamenei could simply be killed as well.

These different paths seem contradictory, and many are frustrated that Washington will not give a firm answer on whether it seeks regime change in Iran. I would argue that this is in fact a signal of American indifference towards the outcome. To the White House, it does not particularly matter whether the existing state acquiesces to American demands (for now loosely defined as “unconditional surrender”), or whether the state collapses outright. In either case, internal disarray and a crippling loss of state capacity are expected to weaken Iran for a generation. It is not that the White House does not know whether it wants regime change or not; it simply does not care.

The American strategy, as such, seems to be little more than throwing bombs at a power vacuum, either until the state collapses, surrenders, or its capacity to retaliate and reconstitute itself are so shattered that the difference no longer carries a distinction. From the American perspective, this would seem to offer flexibility and free the United States from particular commitments to Iranian political factions, forms of governance, or personnel. One advantage, apparently is that it bypasses the “foreign policy blob” altogether. By avoiding a commitment to any particular political outcome in Iran, focusing instead on the material degradation of the state, Trump avoids firm commitments and retains nominal flexibility. Bomb the state until it either collapses or behaves, and in either case it will be crippled. In theory. On paper.

Tehran’s Marathon

Parsing the Iranian strategy is, strangely enough, somewhat easier. The Israeli-American plan is predicated on the twin attempts to defang and decapitate the Iranian regime, throwing bombs at a power vacuum until whatever emerges is harmless and pliant. Iran, on the other hand, is pursuing its own twin objectives of regime survival and resetting deterrence through asymmetric escalation. The United States wanted a sprint, where a few weeks (or perhaps as few as four days) of intense air strikes would put Iran belly up. Instead, Tehran is trying to turn the war into a marathon, betting that their regime has the cohesion to endure and outlast the Israeli-Americans as they progressively upend the gulf and inflict asymmetric economic costs by strangling the Strait of Hormuz.

The crux of the matter, and the first tell of the emerging Iranian strategy, was the massive barrage that they unleashed on targets all around the gulf in the opening days of the war. The horizontal escalation to include Arab countries hosting American assets was, according to President Trump, rather shocking, though it certainly should not have been. Much has been made of the rapid decline in Iranian strike volume after those first few days, and to be sure the Iranians have lost many of their launchers. I would argue, however, that this misinterprets the escalation play by Tehran.

The volume of launches by Iran in the opening 72 hours was always guaranteed to lead to high losses among the launch systems. The sheer number of assets that Iran put in the field in opening days created a large footprint with high visibility against an enemy with clear air superiority, but the loss of these TELs was a calculated gamble. This synergized with Iran’s preparations for disruption of command in the opening days - giving field commanders instructions to launch in accordance with pre-issued orders. The so-called “Mosaic Defense” has been overhyped at this point (as it seems that centralized command and control does still exist), but the broader point is fairly simple: Iran planned for disruption of command and accepted the loss of many launch systems by situating itself to hit as much as possible in the first 72 hours. The goal here was to explode out of the box, even if central command was disrupted and commanders were killed, escalating horizontally to involve not just Israel and American bases, but the Gulf states as well.

This has been followed by sustained, albeit lower volume, strikes designed to steadily exhaust and attrit air defenses around the gulf. Right now, it appears that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates will be the first to essentially exhaust their interceptor stocks, and with the United States facing a resource crunch of its own, a top off is not likely to come any time soon. The exhaustion of Gulf air defenses will soon open the door to successful Iranian strikes, at scale, on energy and port infrastructure.

Iranian MRBM TELs

This will synergize with the ongoing attempt to strangulate shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which is a problem that the United States and Israel have limited leverage to solve. The methods that Iran can use to bottle the strait are relatively cheap and very difficult to suppress, and include naval mines, explosive packed speedboats, and drones. Completely suppressing these defenses would require both combat engineering assets, which are lacking, and the projection of combat power directly into the Iranian littoral. Little wonder that the White House is now casting about for any possible ally - even China - to help with the heavy lift in the strait. So far, it is hard to find takers.

The goal of all this, from Tehran’s perspective is to transform the sprint into a marathon, where Iran is squeezing an economic artery by striking energy and port infrastructure in the gulf and throttling shipping traffic in the strait. In a sense, this is not too dissimilar from Ukraine’s approach to the war: inflict asymmetric costs to achieve a favorable peace agreement. Even the kit is mostly similar, with drone packages doing much of the work. The difference is that the gulf lacks Russia’s strategic depth, and Iran, unlike Ukraine, has a multi-trillion dollar economic lever within easy reach. This leads us to a farcical situation where the United States is accommodating the sale of Iranian and Russian oil simply to dampen the disruption to the market.

This creates a dilemma for the United States. President Trump has the option to declare victory and walk away, but Iran is poised to continue unilaterally obstructing the strait as long as it can, until it achieves a formal, negotiated peace.

The latter is a particular important point, because Iran is living with the consequences of failing to establish deterrence. Its limited missile exchanges with Israel last year failed to accomplish this, and it is simply intolerable to the Iranian regime to move forward naively if it feels that Israel can act with impunity towards it. The Iranian state wants to survive, but it will not survive for long if it cannot demonstrate that it can both endure America’s haymaker and exact asymmetric costs in response. It wants to survive this conflict while also ensuring that Israel does not reinitiate hostilities in the near future. In Tehran’s ideal scenario, they will be in a position to dictate the terms of the peace. The United States and Israel believed they were defanging a viper, but the Iranians are trying to fight the strangulation war of the anaconda.

Conclusion: Punched in the Face

There are two famous quotes, from markedly different individuals, which endlessly prove their worth whenever a fresh war breaks out. The great Chief of Staff of the Prussian Field Army, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, once quipped that “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Moltke was famous for his intentionally loose operational orders, which were designed to give broad shape to operations while leaving implementation undefined, to allow subordinates to react to changing circumstances. Former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson put it somewhat more bluntly:

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

In war, everybody gets punched in the face.

What we’ve endeavored to sketch out here is two radically different conceptions of the Iran War. There is an Israeli-American conception of a high intensity air campaign which drops bombs on a vacuum until something tolerable spills out. On the other hand, there is an Iranian framework of endurance and economic costs. Ultimately, however, both of these approaches entail calculated gambles, and the pesky thing about gambling is that one sometimes loses.

It is entirely possible, for example, that Iran’s bet on the state’s ability to endure comes up bust. Iran has, to this point, showed a “next man up” mentality and a willingness to simply absorb losses. The state has not collapsed. To be sure, state collapse is much harder to induce than one might think, but it remains an open possibility that continued blows to regime infrastructure and personnel will lead to a death spiral of capability and command disfunction.

With that being said, the orthogonal nature of this war - an odd sort of race between an Israeli-American sprinter and an Iranian marathon runner - leads us to a forking road. The tempo of the war is shifting as the initial shock of the air strikes stabilizes. American carriers are withdrawing to refit. Much of the Israeli-American throw weight has been spent. Assets are being redeployed as it becomes clear that America was unprepared to sustain multiple theaters. The general picture is that of an Iran with substantially degraded capacities, but an intact state and remaining levers that are, for now, adequate to continue strangulation.

In the coming weeks and months, victory will be defined by two relatively straightforward factors: the survival of the Iranian state, and its ability to inflict asymmetric costs via the straits and strikes on gulf infrastructure. This leads us to a few broad outcome possibilities.

Option 1: Iranian Victory in the Straits

Iran maintains baseline strike capabilities and continues to constrain traffic through the strait of Hormuz. Half hearted and asset-constrained American attempts to open the strait fail, and Iran is able to sustain sufficient threats to shipping. Mounting economic costs and the White House’s inability to mobilize a coalition of European and Asian allies leads to a negotiated peace, where Iran is able to insist on terms by which the United States restrains future Israeli action against them. President Trump is likely to be able to portray this domestically as a victory - “I got a deal, they’re opening the straits, and we killed Khamenei” - but the Iranian regime survives intact and with the hope of reestablished deterrence.

Option 2: The Quagmire

Unwilling to cede the loss of control over the straits, the United States attempts littoral operations at scale to seize control of the straits. Lacking sufficient regional air defense or a reliable way to suppress drones, the United States is pulled by its own momentum into a limited ground operation, bringing both a new dimension and interminable length to the war. At present, this appears to be the most likely path.

Option 3: Trump Defeats Iran and the Foreign Policy Blob

It turns out, you can just bomb a state until it either collapses or behaves. A cash crunch leaves the IRGC unable to pay its personnel. Riots break out in Tehran and the security forces lose control. The ruling group collapses as one member after another dies in a heap of rubble. It’s not only Iran that is defeated, but the American foreign policy brain trust writ large: it turns out you don’t need nation building, or boots on the ground, or advisors, or NGOs, or development funds. You can just bomb a country until it works for you. Probably not. But maybe?

One thing is clear. Iran has, to this point, paid dearly for its inability to set meaningful deterrence. A vast array of conventional missiles and drones, a robust security state, and a web of sectarian proxies: all reasonably good assurances of the state’s safety, on paper, and yet here we are, with the war brought home to Tehran. In any world where the Iranian state survives, it will surely be eagerly seeking more meaningful and lasting levers of deterrence. A quick perusal of recent history reveals a long list of destroyed states and trashcanistans. North Korea is not on that list. Perhaps Iran will think smaller, rather than bigger, and look for safety in the infinitesimally small space inside a splitting atom.

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it