Misguided fury: America’s war on Iran could boomerang in a way it doesn’t seem to realize

The blitzkrieg delusion: Heady after the one-sided bombardments of Gaza and Tehran and kidnapping of a sitting head of state, US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have convinced themselves that similar tactics would crush Iran within hours. Three weeks into an ever-enlarging conflict, that figment has been brutally dispelled.

Consider what Iran represents as a theatre. At over 90 million people, its population exceeds the combined populations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan at the time of their respective US wars. Over 4 million of its citizens live across the West—a politically engaged diaspora now watching their homeland burn. Iran’s landmass is larger than all three of those killing grounds combined. A nation of that size, with thousands of years of civilizational memory, cannot be pummelled into submission.

The American war machine has been weakening through a decade of West Asian entanglements and a grinding proxy war in Ukraine. Structurally, it has an Achilles heel that weapons cannot compensate for: a decaying democracy’s intolerance for body bags and economic pain. Every increase in war casualties or inflation erodes Trump’s domestic support even within his base.

Pandora’s Box: Killing Ali Khamenei has not decapitated the Iranian state. It has decentralized it, creating something more dangerous than a unified enemy. A headless movement cannot be negotiated with, deterred or made to submit. What replaces centralized authority is not chaos, but something more implacable: a ‘nothing left to lose’ resolve. A person who loses his entire family in a single day does not calculate the odds of success as he plots vengeance.

The US and Israel are creating entire nations of such men and women. Their targeted killing of a nation’s leader, its nuclear scientists and its commanders without any due process has opened a door that cannot be shut. If the world’s most powerful military can eliminate a sovereign nation’s entire leadership and slaughter civilians, on what moral or legal basis can it object when a weaker adversary reaches for the only instruments available to it?

Terrorism: If US and Israeli forces can kill schoolgirls in Iran and scientists in Zurich, by what principle would CEOs of US firms be off-limits to Iranian forces? This is not an argument to target civilians, but a warning that the choice of legitimate targets is not unilateral.

Rules are not a constraint on war but the architecture of peace: The UN Charter’s prohibition on external regime change action, the Geneva Conventions’ protections for civilians and the norm against assassinating heads of state were not designed to constrain military power, but to make peace possible. Without those rules, there is only escalation until one side is annihilated or both are exhausted.

The US has indicated that those rules are for adversaries, not for it. It launched a war for regime change, killed a sitting head of state and normalized civilian infrastructure as targets. So if these rules don’t apply to the US, why would China feel constrained in Taiwan or Russia in the Baltics? Why would a middle power grant the international order its allegiance or not pursue nuclear weapons as an insurance policy?

The US spent eight decades as architect and enforcer of the post-war international order. What is being dismantled in Iran is not merely a hostile regime. It is that framework itself.

Iran is in it for the long haul: Tehran understands something that advocates of this campaign don’t seem to. A nation that survived eight years of war with Iraq, fought against chemical weapons and endured harsh sanctions does not break easily. A civilization spanning three millennia does not measure time in news cycles or US election schedules.

A dispersal of power that appears to have followed Khamenei’s killing will not weaken Iran’s resistance; it will fragment it into cells and individuals whose motivations might plausibly be personal more than political. An insurgency with no command structure to negotiate with, disrupt or destroy could prove more perilous.

History offers a consistent verdict on superpowers trying to bludgeon proud nations into submission. Think of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Mistaking firepower for ‘the will to fight’ imposes very high costs.

The price of arbitrary action: Every war has been premised on the assumption that it will end. That premise requires rules—not as a concession to the enemy, but as a precondition for settlement. Total arbitrariness produces not victory but a permanent state of violence, radicalizing populations and foreclosing every exit.

The great irony is that the nation that will suffer the most from the death of a rules-based order is the one that has killed it. America’s power rested on the voluntary deference of allies that believed the rules applied to everyone, including Washington. That credibility is now spent.

Resources have always been fought for. But the most precious resource any great power possesses is not oil, territory or nuclear capability. It is the trust of the world that it seeks to lead. That resource cannot be seized by force. And once lost, it cannot be recovered by bombing anyone.

The author is former CEO of the National Intelligence Grid, distinguished fellow at Observer Research Foundation and author of ‘Everyman’s War’.