America’s war with Iran has entered a calmer phase: diplomatic posturing, on-and-off-again negotiations and endless wrangling of a settlement. This, of course, is far preferable to the annihilation of Iranian civilization that President Trump was threatening just a few weeks ago. But it raises the question of just what has spurred this turnabout.
The answer is rather straightforward. The American and Israeli bombing of Iran failed to provoke either a popular uprising against the regime in Tehran or its capitulation, however painfully slow Mr. Trump and his advisers have been to acknowledge that. Instead, Iran discovered its ability to shut down the vital passageway of the Strait of Hormuz and send the global economy into chaos.
There are now only two outcomes to the conflict: either the kind of wholesale destruction of Iran that Mr. Trump posited, or a settlement that will leave the government intact and empowered, and a blustering American president humiliated.
The first option is increasingly remote. By publicly threatening the commission of war crimes on an enormous scale, Mr. Trump has given both his domestic and foreign opponents time to marshal resistance. As for the latter and more likely outcome, this was predictable, if only the president and his administration had bothered to take note of a new feature of modern warfare, a feature that can be boiled down to a single word: drones.
The weaponized drone has utterly transformed today’s battlefield. It is the modern-day equivalent of the machine gun of World War I. Because of the drone, the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian military has been able to withstand the Russian Army of Vladimir Putin for the past four years, not only inflicting far greater casualties on the invaders than expected, but doing so at a cost of pennies to the dollar. As the Ukrainians have shown time and again, a $1,000 drone can destroy a roughly $4.5 million T-90 tank. While the Russians have recently made significant strides in drone warfare, this simple weapon has ensured that they’ve grievously paid for their war both on the battlefield and in the pocketbook.
Much of this same dynamic has played out in Iran for the past two months, although without the staggering cost in human lives. Certainly, American and Israeli warplanes can bomb Iran’s military infrastructure at will — and they have, tens of thousands of times — but no amount of bombing can remove the primary retaliatory weapon at its disposal.
On the contrary, Iran can continue to mass-produce drones at a fraction of the cost of the weapons being produced by the other side. What Mr. Trump calls his “excursion” in Iran has already cost the United States at least $25 billion, according to the Pentagon, and significantly depleted its stockpile of sophisticated missiles. That depletion is already causing shortages in other strategic arenas and could take years to replenish. All the while, with their cheap and plentiful drones — assembling a top-of-the-line Shahed-136 drone costs Iran an estimated $35,000 — Iran continues to dictate the terms in the Strait of Hormuz choke point.
But what about continuing the American naval blockade of the strait or launching a ground assault on Iran’s shores, as Trump has also periodically proposed? Granted, matters might get ugly, but surely this will lead to American victory and an end to the impasse, right? Wrong. Build out an ironclad blockade or put 50,000 American troops on Persian Gulf beachheads, and the Iranians will still retain the ability to fire a drone over their heads to hit an oil-laden tanker and paralyze the global economy anew.
The future security of the Persian Gulf now depends on the Trump administration cutting a deal with the regime in Tehran. Despite the president’s assertion that “We have all the cards,” almost the exact opposite is true. It is Mr. Trump, rather, who is increasingly motivated to cut a deal and stanch the growing pain to the U.S. economy — and his collapsing approval ratings — at home. As a result, Iran is likely to try to drag out negotiations and extract greater concessions from Mr. Trump in the process, knowing that time is on its side.
Those concessions might involve a lifting of the onerous “maximum pressure” sanctions that Mr. Trump imposed on Iran during his first term and restored early in his second, or reparations for the destruction that the American and Israeli bombing campaign has inflicted. While a chief point of contention will be the stores of enriched uranium that remain, any final settlement will almost certainly leave Iran as the de facto gatekeeper of the Persian Gulf — or, in other words, in a far stronger position than before Mr. Trump started this war.
The standoff in the Persian Gulf underscores both a lasting and frightening shift on the modern battlefield. While specific, critically important sites can undoubtedly be made drone-proof — the White House, for example — defensive shielding on a large scale is impossible, as Israel has now discovered with its much-vaunted and much-punctured Iron Dome.
Given the simplicity and cost of the weaponized drone, every one of the world’s geographically strategic choke points — the Panama and Suez Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar and the airspace over New York — is now vulnerable to attack by a hostile force that has the ability to build such a weapon and a willingness to suffer the consequences. Alarmist? Think of some of the apocalyptic regimes or murderous guerrilla groups of the recent past — the Baader-Meinhof Gang in West Germany, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or bin Laden’s Al Qaeda — and imagine what they might have done with a $2,000 weaponized drone.
When the American attack on Iran was launched in late February, the name chosen for the operation, Epic Fury, seemed an unusually apt description of the temperament of the man ordering it. In pondering where that military misadventure leaves both the United States and the future security of the world, a more fitting name might be Operation Colossal Blunder.
Scott Anderson is the author of “King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.”
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