Three Ways to Lose a War
Trump found all three of them in Iran
President Donald Trump’s war on Iran has transformed the Persian Gulf’s balance of power—and not to the advantage of the United States. Iran will emerge from it as the region’s dominant state and the others—American allies, all—will be forced to adjust to a dramatic change that none of them had anticipated. The war will also go down as one of the biggest defeats the United States has suffered—certainly in the Middle East—and as a blunder that could have been avoided. Nothing necessitated an attack on Iran. What’s more, Tehran has turned out to be a more formidable adversary than Trump imagined. It has struck an array of American bases at will and disrupted global markets by targeting the Persian Gulf monarchies’ energy infrastructure and export routes.
Trump got himself into this bind by making three assumptions that have proved to be flat-out wrong. Let’s take them in turn.
The president’s first error was to assume that America’s vast military superiority over Iran would ensure victory—and a quick one at that. His hubris led him to disregard examples that disproved his assumption. These included the American war in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the French war in Algeria, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Worse, he still seems unable to shed the belief that Iran will eventually be bludgeoned into submission. That hasn’t happened, and he has become increasingly frustratedand at one point hurled profanities at Iran’s leaders.
Trump seems unable to understand that war isn’t just a contest involving raw power but also a test of endurance—who can absorb pain longer. The Iranians have demonstrated that they can endure a great deal of punishment and that they will not drop their basic demands. One of these demands is that the prewar status quo in the Strait is a thing of the past and that Iran must have far more authority over the waterway than it did going in.
Nor has Iran made any concession on its nuclear program—one of Trump’s main objectives—and refuses to, except as part of a deal that includes its terms regarding the future of the Strait. Unsurprisingly, this has led many a commentator to conclude that Trump has lost the war. That’s not an unreasonable judgment. The two goals he has specified as critical to him—ensuring that the Strait remains open and that Iran doesn’t acquire the capacity to build nuclear weapons—remain elusive after more than five months of war against an opponent whose military machine he has claimed, more than once, to have demolished.
Trump has been reduced to ordering spurts of bombing punctuated by pauses, defending the latter on the grounds that Iran has had enough and is begging for a deal. He has repeated this narrative dozens of times by now—only for the Iranians to publicly deny his claims on each occasion. Almost nobody believes it any longer, including the majority of the American public, which has turned against the war. Americans would likely agree with the New York Timescolumnist David French who wrote recently that, “The only thing worse than President Trump starting an unconstitutional war is President Trump losing control of that war.”
That’s also the conclusion that Washington’s regional allies have begun to reach. The economic toll taken on them by Iran’s attacks is captured by a single statistic: the GDP of Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf’s economic powerhouse, shrank by 4.8% in the second quarter of this year compared with the same quarter in 2025.
Trump’s second blunder was to assume that he had a foolproof strategy—hammering Iran till it signed on his dotted lines—but that the adversary did not and would therefore be left to absorb punishment passively. To be fair, Trump is hardly the only leader to have made this mistake, but his miscalculation is no less serious for that.
As it happens, Iran not only had a counter-strategy. Like all good strategies, it was premised on the assumption that victory cannot be achieved simply by trying to outmuscle a vastly stronger foe—something Iran cannot do and will never be able to because the US has far more military might than it does. Moreover, the US can strike the Iranian homeland at will, but the American homeland is beyond the reach of Iranian missiles. As military specialists would put it, the American superiority in “vertical escalation” is a fact that Iran has had to accept.
But accepting a given reality need not entail passivity—something Iran has demonstrated. Tehran has figured out a way to counter the magnitude of American military strength. It has turned to what’s known as “horizontal escalation.” If the US has more planes and bombs and plenty of allies willing to serve as platforms for American missiles and warplanes, Iran has the means to expand the geographical scope of the war, take aim at Washington’s regional allies with drones and missiles, and ratchet up their economic pain.
Over time, Washington’s allies have realized that the United States cannot protect them. For one thing, the US has been running low on the interceptor missiles needed to defend its own troops, military facilities, and logistical hubs in the Persian Gulf region, especially because Iran has forced American commanders to expend Patriot interceptors that cost about $4 million each to shoot down drones worth only around $35,000 apiece.
For another, the battlefield is too vast to defend effectively against an adversary with the means to strike all points of it. Spanning around 93,000 square miles—roughly the area of the United Kingdom—the Persian Gulf is dotted with critically important targets. They include oil-loading ports, pipelines, LNG complexes (Ras Laffan: the world’s biggest), and military bases such as Al Udeid in Qatar, the largest US facility in the entire Middle East. This has created what military strategists call an adverse force-to-space ratio: too much ground to cover, too few military assets to cover it adequately—a problem made worse by Iran expanding its attacks to Jordan, home to Muwaffaq Salti airbase.
Against this background, it’s not surprising that, just before Trump was about to greenlight another round of bombing against Iran, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman called and urged him not to proceed. MBS wasn’t speaking just for his country; he had coordinated in advance with his fellow Persian Gulf monarchs. They all understand from past experience that the Iranian response to a new wave of US attacks is predictable. Besides, in an effort to pressure them, Tehran made no secret of its plans.
Iran will keep pressing its advantage in horizontal escalation, and one of the results has been that oil exports from the Persian Gulf have all but stopped. Very few commercial ships have been transiting the Strait since the war began in February, insurance rates for tankers have skyrocketed by as much as 1,900%for a one-way trip, and Iran’s Yemeni allies, the Houthis, have not only declared a blockade in Bab el-Mandeb (thereby cutting off Saudi Arabia’s bypass route), but have also fired on Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. Nor is the UAE’s option for skirting the Strait safe: Iran has hit Fujairah at least twice before (in March and May) and could well do so again in response to US bombing.
Trump’s third mistake has been to forget that wars aren’t decided at the front but also by what happens in the rear—in the societies of belligerents. Wars that become unpopular at home prove hard to sustain, especially in democracies. Vietnam is the classic case: the US didn’t lose for want of weaponry but because much of American society turned against the war and even took its opposition to the streets and campuses. Public opposition to what came to be known as the “forever wars”—which, ironically, Trump denounced in his first campaign for the White House—influenced President Joe Biden’s decision to wind up the war in Afghanistan, even at the cost of letting the Taliban march into Kabul.
To the extent that Trump was aware of what might be called the role of the rear, he assumed the effect would run one way—that Iranians would rebel against their rulers, precipitating regime change. To be sure, Iran’s economy has been dragged down by the war. The rial has plummeted, reaching a record low of 1.95 million to the dollar on July 20. The IMF projects a 68.9% inflation rate for this year and a contraction in real GDP of approximately 6.1%. Youth unemployment stands at 20%. Yet no mass revolts have occurred; nor do they seem likely.
Meanwhile, here at home, Trump’s approval rating for job performance has sunk to 34% and, as the November midterms approach, the war—especially the accompanying price increases—has become the GOP’s biggest liability. The Republicans may lose not just the House but also the Senate, something that had been considered all but impossible before the war.
These three strategic errors have created a dilemma for Trump that other wartime leaders have faced: continuing the fight doesn’t work, but quitting would amount to defeat, especially when the opponent, sensing its advantage, has less and less reason to offer a graceful way out. Trump, who sees himself as smarter than anyone else, believed this was a trap others fell into but one that he had the genius to avoid.