The memorandum of understanding that the United States signed with Iran is, on first reading, a capitulation masquerading as an agreement. It opens the prospect of an Iran flush with money from the release of its assets, oil revenues, and even development investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The deal might even allow Iran to monetize its geographic position at the Strait of Hormuz by levying fees or tolls. That it betrays Israel, an ally who fought alongside the United States for a month but is shut out from the negotiations and is not even mentioned in the document, is par for the course for this administration.
Possibly J. D. Vance, who has made clear his sympathies with the hard-right isolationists of MAGA, will pull off a final deal more palatable than this initial memorandum. Given the administration’s abysmal track record in negotiating with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, though, one may reasonably doubt it. One should also not assume that any kind of permanent deal will result from the present negotiations: The Iranians have overplayed their hand before, and may do so again, although it is a poor kind of statesmanship whose success depends on the folly of one’s enemies. At best, however, we will have an even worse version of the justly maligned Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by the Obama administration—an arrangement that gave the Iranians money in return for postponing their nuclear program by a few years, left their sponsorship of terror groups and proxies untouched, and allowed a poisonous regime to fester.
[Brynn Tannehill: America’s big mistake in Iran]
That does not mean, however, that the recently—perhaps temporarily—concluded war has not had profound consequences and revealed important truths.
The level of destruction inflicted on Iran by a month of American and Israeli air strikes still remains obscure in some respects. Clearly, the Iranian air-defense system was largely eliminated, as was its air force and regular navy. Its defense-industrial base seems to have been badly damaged—although the same can be said of only a fraction of its stock of missiles and drones. On the more important negative side, the regime has now experienced viscerally what it before knew only theoretically: the power of its hold on the Strait of Hormuz. It has demonstrated its reach throughout the region, and, to itself and to those inclined to align with it, its enduring strength vis-à-vis the United States.
Winston Churchill observed in his biography of the Duke of Marlborough that great battles create new moods and atmospheres, to which all must conform. The war was a demonstration of Iranian strength whose psychological consequences will be immense. The negotiations, conversely, look to be a no less potent demonstration of American weakness or stupidity. Calculations in Moscow, Beijing, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and elsewhere will now be different.
The war showed off American technical and tactical prowess, but numerous weaknesses as well. America’s shortage of advanced munitions was known, but is nonetheless stunning, with more than a quarter of its stocks of certain key weapons having been consumed on both offense and defense in a short war in a secondary theater. America’s strategic performance was nothing short of appalling—its alienation of allies to the point that they refused to provide even passive support to operations, its failure to protect Gulf States, its rough handling of an ally that had fought alongside it, its seeming lack of options to preclude or respond swiftly to Iranian operations in the strait were all signs of ineptitude and even incompetence. Barbaric bluster about ending Iranian civilization made matters worse.
For Israel, which views this war in terms of the larger conflict in which it has been engaged since October 7, 2023, the results are more mixed. It has shown itself a regional peer partner with the United States, and has acquired the experience and respect that come from fighting alongside the superpower’s armed forces. But the Netanyahu government has also presided over a shocking deterioration in Israel’s international position, the collapse of its support among Democrats and many Republicans in the United States, and a resumption of a war it thought it had won against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Depending on how bad the final deal with Iran may be, Israel may well find itself even more exposed to another missile war with an Islamic Republic seeking to avenge a number of humiliating defeats at Israel’s hands, and which has become more canny in its employment of those weapons.
The geopolitical consequences of this war will be immense. No one can go back to believing that oil supplies passing through the Strait of Hormuz are reliably secure. The Arab Gulf States will have to choose between straightforward appeasement of Iran and submission to many of its wishes—the choice apparently made by Qatar and possibly Oman—and a more mixed posture of bribes and armament such as that of the United Arab Emirates. Other parties are engaging as well, most notably Ukraine, which may find some of its biggest customers for both defensive and offensive weaponry and command-and-control systems in the Gulf.
For all militaries, the war confirms some of the great lessons of the Russia-Ukraine war: that it is much easier to deny access to or use of key terrain than to seize it; that there is an urgent need to shift to cheaper, mass-produced precision munitions for both offensive and defensive use; that numbers matter; that air supremacy—the kind of control the Allies exerted over Normandy beaches in 1944, for example—is a thing of the past, having been subverted by ballistic and cruise missiles as well as drones; that swift, smashing victories are usually chimeras of the political imagination; and, unfortunately, that indifference to the suffering of one’s own population and a readiness to inflict misery on an opponent’s civilians pay strategic dividends.
[Arash Azizi: Iran got a great deal that it could still squander]
Most of all, this war has demonstrated profound American weaknesses. The damage will not be undone when the Trump administration is gone, two and a half long years from now, because it is the American way of war itself that this conflict has called into question.
That way of war was a strategic and operational style relying on relatively small, extremely advanced forces that did not have mobilizational depth behind them—not people, not munitions, not platforms. It was predicated on having enough time to build up to confront an enemy, as was the case in both the Gulf and Iraq wars. It rested on secure bases near the enemy, which would suffer only attacks that could be easily parried. It assumed that the initiative would rest with the U.S., and that allies would play along, despite whatever doubts they might have. It underinvested in both active defenses (e.g. surface-to-air missiles) and passive defenses (e.g. hardened aircraft shelters). It reflected not only the errors of an unusually feckless administration, but the accumulation of poor decisions and inadequate or misdirected investments by the Pentagon and Congress, civilian and military leaders alike. It was caused only partly by the distractions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but resulted even more from decades of loose thinking and self-serving assumptions about the changing character of war.
Much of the problem was simple arrogance. Hubris, according to Greek myth, is punished by the goddess Nemesis. Unfortunately, not just the guilty parties will feel her lash. And the worst of it is that America’s political and military leaders may not yet realize that that is what is happening, nor just how far-reaching her punishments may be.
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