Let’s assume, for now, that the Iran war is actually over — that the “memorandum of understanding” will be honored, that Israel will cease its attacks on Lebanon, and that Iran will relinquish military control over the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps this is an unsafe bet. But if it is over, what kind of war was it?
The conflict began as a relatively familiar exercise of American and Israeli air power, more expansive and directed at a much more serious adversary but not so different from the remote attacks that have been uncomfortably common in recent U.S. military history. Between President Trump’s second inauguration and the opening salvos of Operation Epic Fury in late February, the United States executed military strikes against seven countries, including its “Twelve-Day War” attacks on Iran in June of 2025 but not its dozens of unlawful and mostly unexplained strikes against boats in the Caribbean, which have killed more than 200 people. Between Sept. 11, 2001, and the beginning of the war in Iran, the United States conducted bombing campaigns against 10 countries and at least 20 of what the Brennan Center for Justice calls “secret wars.” If Americans remember these at all, it is typically as quick-strike actions, short bursts of American hegemony. But in Libya, for instance, the United States flew more than 5,000 sorties, including more than a thousand bombing flights, in 2011, then in 2015 launched another air campaign in the country, targeting ISIL, which lasted four years. We have been bombing Yemen almost every year for nearly two decades.
Most of these bombing campaigns produced ambiguous outcomes that might have humbled a more reflective military. The Iran conflict ended with a much more decisive verdict, handing the United States a genuine defeat and strategic setback, resolving for now in a term sheet full of concessions that the president never would have made before the conflict began and which even the most voluble Iran hawks are quite openly decrying as a pathetic giveaway.
In between, we saw what looked like a very new kind of war. One of its novel features was the centrality of cheap drones, and the way they have completely upended great-power advantage.
But another was the way that actual hot war quickly became a new kind of hybrid conflict dominated by economic pressure and punctuated only occasionally by actual attacks. Even in the recent past, sanctions and trade war were tools used earlier in the escalation game, before military forces were deployed, and typically in the name of avoiding out-and-out fighting. In Iran, escalation worked in a different way, with conflict evolving out of the military sphere and into what seemed like the more consequential game of economic hostage-taking.
Here are six additional things this war taught us.
First, the oil and gas markets proved much more resilient than almost anybody predicted.
As recently as a month ago, the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, was calling the war “the largest energy crisis in history.”
But watching the oil markets, you couldn’t really see the fuss. The price went up, but only as much as it did in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For many weeks, oil analysts warned of a massive disconnect between the price of oil futures and the actual shortfall imposed by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — and promised that soon enough, the reckoning would come, the price would explode, and economic disarray would follow.
The war did disrupt the oil and gas markets, and the turmoil isn’t over yet. Across Asia there were punishing real-world consequences: fuel shortages, slowed factory operations, shortened workweeks.
But this wasn’t the 1970s oil crisis, in the end, let alone a bigger one. To some significant degree, this was the result of what analysts call “demand destruction” — cuts to consumption out of concern over price or supply. This was particularly substantial in China, which dropped oil imports via tanker by about half, stabilizing the world’s markets and also demonstrating what the Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas noted was its own weapon-like power over the oil markets. But it also demonstrated the remarkable flexibility of the world’s energy systems, in which strategic reserves served their purpose and huge recent investments in renewables have provided an additional buffer against fossil fuel shortages. And it also suggests that all those dumb-seeming traders, counting on the return to normal and the ability of the market to absorb short-term turmoil, were onto something.
The green transition kicked into higher gear.
As when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the earliest predictions forecast a return to coal in the name of energy security. As in that case, too, the predictions proved too pessimistic: The fossil fuel rebound was small to nonexistent, and the most striking spikes in the energy world were the ones marking exports of Chinese solar panels and electric vehicles. Anyone with open eyes saw the new risks of fossil fuel dependency — the need for constant imports, the dependency on foreign actors for fuel and the way that the jaggedness of contemporary geopolitics had produced three energy shocks in six years. (If you look further back, it marks perhaps the 14th oil shock in 60 years.) Across 60 countries, 200 emergency energy-saving policies were rapidly enacted, after a few years in which there had been little new climate policy anywhere in the world. What might have seemed at the outset like a war between petrostates turned into an obvious spur to the rollout of energy alternatives worldwide. Before the war, the term “energy security” tended to mean the need for fossil fuel; after, it seems to describe a growing awareness that renewable resources may be much safer and more reliable sources of power.
The United States does not know how to win a modern war.
It wasn’t just Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the Pentagon who expected this conflict to be a military cakewalk. Even those who worried about the risks of a war of choice in the Middle East, at the outset of conflict, tended to emphasize the risk of domestic political chaos inside Iran. Few warned that the American military would be fought to a standstill. And yet that is, basically, what happened: U.S. forces inflicted considerable damage to the Iranian military, nuclear program and civilian infrastructure, but suffered what officials judged to be unacceptable losses, too, with U.S. forces evacuating local bases out of fear of drone and missile attacks. That a new class of cheap drones could so scare the world’s most fearsome military, and so freeze the flow of one of the world’s most critical commercial waterways, was a further sign that superpowers no longer commanded an unbreachable natural advantage (and an ironic turn, given all of Hegseth’s talk about the need to unleash America’s natural “warfighting” capacity). Perhaps the United States will now learn this lesson, committing itself to a new kind of military-industrial production. But it did not learn it in time to win this war.
But America remains capable of committing obvious war crimes — and then acting as though nothing happened.
The first-day attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab remains arguably the most memorable event of the entire war, with more than 175 killed in an apparent double-tap strike in which a second missile was dispatched once families and rescue workers had arrived to attend to all the killed and wounded children. The Pentagon has half-acknowledged that it was responsible, but there has been no real public reckoning with how such a strike occurred or who was responsible — including, perhaps, some targeting system run by artificial intelligence. I suspect that the attack was not the result of autonomous targeting, but I do worry that this is a foretaste of how we will handle warfare in the age of A.I. more generally — focusing less on adjudicating responsibility than we might have in earlier eras, and instead accepting some large amount of collateral damage as an inevitable consequence of the fog of war, which, we tell ourselves, has been made foggier still by machine intelligence.
We’re not yet in a post-American world, but American standing is definitely in decline.
As soon as America’s military adventure stalled out into a kind of stalemate, with Iranians striking bases around the region and celebrating with Lego-style videos on TikTok, you heard a chorus of declarations that the war marked the end of American power.
That was always an overstatement. No other country in the world could’ve prosecuted a war of choice like this without far more international blowback, which suggests not just that the United States remains an intimidating hegemon but that it is still in many ways the arbiter of the liberal international order it has done so much lately to undermine. No other country could have held its allies in anything close to alignment over such an unprovoked attack, particularly one that then pinched the entire global economy. No one else could’ve jawboned the rest of the world into managing its strategic fuel reserves to protect against the shock of a needless American war.
That said, as even an Iran hawk like John Podhoretz openly acknowledges, the war is inarguably a humbling for America. Some of this was tactical error — the belief that surgical strikes could achieve strategic aims perhaps as expansive as regime change. But some of it is about the diplomatic and military power of the United States, which seemed a lot more intimidating back in January than it does today. And though the rest of the world is surely happy that the conflict appears to be over, no one outside of D.C. is going to call the agreement a win for America.
The consequences for nuclear proliferation are pretty ambiguous — and pretty scary.
At the outset of the conflict, the lesson for lesser powers seemed obvious: that while the development of a nuclear weapon looked like a menace to the world’s policemen, a mature nuclear weapons program would function like a kind of guarantee of peace and even respect. In the early days of the war, France declared it would radically modernize and expand its nuclear arsenal; Poland suggested it might launch its own program. North Korea’s nuclear program seems to have bought it leverage in recent years.
But as the conflict dragged on, and economic warfare took center stage, the nuclear implications changed, too. In April, the former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, now the deputy chairman of the country’s security council, declared that “Iran has tested its nuclear weapons. It is called the Strait of Hormuz. Its potential is inexhaustible.”
The comparison was hyperbolic but also illuminating: Here was a cheap weapon that could actually be deployed, not just threatened, and had proved remarkably effective, even against a great power. Not every country is quite as well positioned geographically as Iran to take advantage of the new rules of war, and in the end the closure of the strait didn’t actually strangle the global economy as many had predicted — or, presumably, Iran had hoped. But it did allow Iran to win, on balance. And it taught the rest of the world, perhaps, that you might get relatively close to true autonomy not only from nuclear warheads but also from an abundance of cheap drones. Perhaps you might even get the United States to pay a relatively generous bill of reparations.
Correction: The June 10 edition of this newsletter misstated the party affiliation of Rick Caruso in the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral primary. Mr. Caruso ran as a Democrat, not a Republican.
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