McChrystal’s Warning

In a 2021 CNN documentary reflecting on the protracted war in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of U.S. forces in that conflict, offered a sobering assessment of American power in the 21st century. “From 9/11 on,” he said, ” we sort of showed the world how long the dog leash is, and people learned that there were limits to our ability to do things, and we learned that ourselves.” This sentiment of constrained hegemony must have resonated with General Caine, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had privately expressed caution about achieving a swift victory in Iran.

Yet, the decision to attack was made. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, beginning with a massive wave of airstrikes against military and government sites across Iran. Around 500 military aircrafts were deployed, striking thousands of military targets in western and central Iran and using over 1,200 bombs in the first 24 hours. In the first day of the operation, America succeeded in killing 12 high-ranking leaders in Iran, including the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. But the largest air strike since the 1991 Gulf War failed to induce the regime change that America hoped for, even as Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to ‘take to the streets.’

Two months into a conflict envisioned as a triumphant display of military might, America has instead ignited a rapidly metastasizing global crisis. Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for a fifth of the world’s oil consumption. The war has already claimed thousands of lives, including at least a dozen U.S. service members and approximately  hundreds wounded. This was certainly not the outcome the Trump administration had hoped for. America started this war to forestall its inevitable decline, yet, far from reasserting American dominance, the war has illuminated the very limits to its ability that General McChrystal warned about.

The Road to Disaster

If the U.S objective in Iran is regime change, then it had already lost a golden opportunity. In late December 2025 and January 2026, the largest anti-government protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution erupted. Fueled by the collapse of the rial and soaring inflation, a currency crisis that Washington had deliberately engineered through a targeted dollar shortage, millions of Iranians took to the streets. Notably, the protests originated not in the universities, the epicenter of the 2022 feminist-led demonstrations, but in the bazaars, the traditional heart of Iranian society. Shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, where the 1979 Revolution began, were among the first to protest. As the government failed to appease popular demand, the demonstrations soon morphed into explicit calls for regime change. An American intervention at that juncture, even one of limited scale, could have galvanized the unrest and potentially ignited a full-blown revolt. With ground support, Washington could have escalated its air campaign, imposing a ‘no-fly zone’ akin to the 2011 NATO operation in Libya. The prospect of American intervention might even have convinced elements within the Iranian military to stand down or defect, decisively helping the protest movement.

However, the United States relented, ostensibly due to Israeli concerns about the readiness of its air defense systems against Iranian retaliation. This hesitation proved fatal. Sensing no imminent foreign intervention, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) launched a crackdown of unprecedented ferocity. On January 8, 2026, the government severed all internet access, and a violent suppression led by the IRGC and Basij militia soon allowed the government to regain control, eliminating any potential ground support for a subsequent American attack. Moreover, the blood feud incurred during the protests, in which more than 7,000 demonstrators were killed, rendered any peaceful compromise impossible. For the IRGC, which had conducted the killings of protesters motivated by legitimate economic concerns, its only remaining source of legitimacy lay in implacable defiance of the West. Therefore, any arrangement similar to the Venezuelan model, such as a deal where key military figures cooperate with an external power to force a political transition, would remove their last source of legitimacy and be tantamount to suicide.

This explains why, when the United States and Israel launched their attack and decapitated key IRGC leaders, lower-echelon commanders, rather than exercising restraint, instead launched all-out attacks. Between February 28, the first day of hostility, and March 8, the day the new Supreme Leader was elected, the IRGC fired over 1,200 ballistic missiles and 2,000 drones, not only against Israel but also against U.S. military installations across the Gulf. Their incentive for such drastic escalation is not hard to fathom: since compromising with America now would mean certain death, the better choice was to die fighting against the greatest military power in the world. Even in defeat, the defiance would render them the greatest heroes of resisting foreign aggression in two centuries of modern Iranian history.

The same logic also likely influenced the decision of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. At 86 and beset by illness, Khamenei may have concluded that the twilight of his rule was being defined by the genuine and widespread dissatisfaction of his people. If he died peacefully in hiding or exile, he would be remembered as Iran’s Assad, an irresponsible leader that left his country in tatters. In this context, martyrdom at the hands of the “Great Satan” offered a path to redemption, preserving his legacy and safeguarding the interests of his family and followers. Thus, Khamenei may have orchestrated his own demise by exposing himself to attack. The manner of his death also matters: it came as Oman’s Foreign Minister was announcing a diplomatic “breakthrough,” with Iran having agreed to zero enriched uranium stockpiles and full IAEA verification, issues which America and Israel repeatedly cited as the justification for military action. By allowing himself to be assassinated even as he agreed to Western demands, Khamenei ensured his demise would serve to unite a fractured Iranian populace against an enemy that was indisputably duplicitous and malicious.

The death of Khamenei may have also frustrated the American objective of degrading the IRGC so that the Iranian regular military (the Artesh) could become the dominant faction and marginalize the clerics, leaving Iran’s civilian government to make a deal. This plan might have worked if Khamenei had continued to seclude himself in underground bunkers while the Iranian people suffered from external bombing. However, Khamenei’s martyrdom allowed him to join the ranks of Mohammed Mossadegh, another modern Iranian leader who was the victim of Western Imperialism. This meant any elements within the Iranian Armed Forces with wavering loyalty would likely be dissuaded from cooperating with America, as any factions that sought to subvert Khamenei’s anti-Western cause would be regarded as traitors and would lack the popular support to partake in a coup. On March 8, Iran’s Assembly of Experts elected Mojtaba, the son of Khamenei, as the new supreme leader—a choice previously thought impossible given Shia Islam’s opposition to hereditary succession. Upon taking office, Mojtaba doubled down on his father’s policy and rallied the Iranian nation on a thirst for vengeance. With Iran’s preexisting constitutional order holding, America’s plan for a four-day operation has devolved into an ugly war of attrition.

The Israeli Calculation

In retrospect, Israel’s opposition to American intervention in late January is directly responsible for this quagmire. What is more intriguing is Israel’s justification. The threat of Iranian missile strikes, while significant, was arguably a worthy price for the once-in-a-generation opportunity to conduct regime change in Iran. Given that Israel has repeatedly proclaimed that Iran posed an existential danger to its survival for decades, its opposition to the U.S. military operation in January is even more inexplicable. However, that would be to ignore a fundamental dynamic in the Middle East. Tel Aviv’s action was not a sign of strategic miscalculation but rather the deliberate execution of its long-term security doctrine. Despite the seemingly inseparable bonds between America and Israel, there is an irreconcilable divergence of interests between Washington and its closest Middle Eastern ally.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, America’s primary goal has been to contain Iran’s exportation of its revolutionary ideology. In the long run, the U.S. hoped to repeat its success in the Cold War by encouraging internal Iranian revolts or alterations of policy to accommodate American interests. This much-vaunted ‘reengineering’ of Iran is also part of America’s grand strategy of securing the Middle East under its control by coercing the Muslim states to recognize Israel’s sovereignty. This vision was first articulated by Henry Kissinger in the 1970s and began with the ‘shuttle diplomacy’ that saw the recognition of Israel by Egypt. Today, Donald Trump wanted to finish this vision via the Abraham Accords, which sought further normalization of relations between Israel and the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

Iran stands as the greatest obstacle to this process. Its Axis of Resistance, consisting of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and militias in Iraq, views any recognition of Israel by Islamic nations as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, the crisis in Gaza has all but halted the Abraham Accords as the Arab populations in the GCC grew increasingly angry about Israel’s conduct in the war. Therefore, if Iran is culled and the Axis of Resistance dismantled, America can then proceed to fulfill its goal of creating an integrated regional bloc, economically interconnected and militarily aligned with Washington. Most importantly, this would also complete the vision laid out by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, which identified Iran as one of the six critical geostrategic pivots necessary for American hegemony over the Eurasian continent. With the other five (Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and South Korea) already under U.S. influence, Iran’s inclusion would reinforce America’s primacy in the 21st century.

Israel, however, views this potential future with profound trepidation. For decades, Israel has sought to prevent a return to the precarious years between its 1948 founding and the 1967 Six-Day War, when the West consistently prioritized its relationships with the Arab oil producers over the security of the nascent Jewish state. Consequently, Israel has concluded that its value to the United States or any other superpowers lies in being the militarily strongest nation in an unstable region. Thus, Tel Aviv’s preferred outcome is not a stable Middle East, but the escalation of existing hostility and chaos that would leave Israel as the only viable partner.

This strategic calculation explains Israel’s desire for the January protests to be crushed. A successful, internally-driven revolution, even one that brought a pro-Western government to power, would not serve Israeli interests. This is because any domestic driven uprising could have led to a coherent new Iran. While the new government might struggle to deliver for the people, it would have certainly stabilized the region as it ends rivalries and reestablishes economic relations with the GCC countries. This also meant that in this stabilized Persian Gulf, Israel’s value to America would be diminished as the greatest security threat to U.S. regional interests was neutralized.

Therefore, what Israel wanted is an unsuccessful domestic uprising, followed by a devastating foreign-imposed war, which creates the perfect conditions for the chaos that serves its interests. Should Iran be defeated in the war, Israel plans to do what Imperial Japan did in 1932, when it installed the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as the ruler of a puppet state in Manchukuo, giving the occupation a veneer of legitimacy while ensuring the territory remained completely subservient to foreign interests. This explains why Israel wanted Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince of the former Shah overthrown in 1979, someone whom Trump dismissed as merely ‘a very nice person’, to be in charge. Installed by foreign arms and ruling over a country he has not been in for decades, such an arrangement would destine Iran for a civil war. Iran is a nation of 90 million people and various ethnicities, any internal conflicts would have ramifications far larger than those in Iraq and Syria, and would almost certainly spread to Gulf countries, which also host enormous Shiite populations that could be engulfed in another violent sectarian conflict. With the region engulfed in war, Israel could bring itself decades of guaranteed external support and gained the operation freedom to target its next set of enemies, namely Turkey and Pakistan.

The Fate of America

Caught between the conflicting objectives of its closest ally, the United States now finds itself mired in a war without a clear purpose or a viable path to victory. The conflict has devolved into a grim choice between two equally unpalatable historical precedents: a humiliating and precipitous withdrawal, reminiscent of the 1956 Suez Crisis for Britain and France that doomed their global credibility, or a protracted and costly quagmire, echoing the American experience in Vietnam and Afghanistan. For Iran, victory is simply survival. Such a task would be easy if the war remained aerial. In the four years of war in Ukraine, Russia fired more than 11,000 missiles against the country, and yet it managed to endure. NATO’s seemingly successful bombing operation against Serbia in 1999 only materialized in regime change two years later, after Serbia conceded to Western demands. But Iran, having been attacked for the fourth time since 2024, would be committed to avoiding such an outcome at all costs. It is therefore clear that for Iranians of all stripe that this is their ‘final battle’, the conflict which will either establish the regional position of the Islamic Republic or the last stand against an overwhelming enemy.

Lacking conventional military capabilities, Iran does not stand a chance against America and Israel in an open battle. Since the first day of the war, Iranian missile launches have declined by around 90%, indicating that its missile forces are almost wiped out by America. Iran’s strength lies in its asymmetrical capabilities, using its shorter range weapons to export chaos throughout the region, targeting not only U.S. military assets but also oil facilities and desalination plants vital for water supplies in the region. On March 11, Iran announced it could attack the headquarters of U.S. tech companies in the Gulf. Together, these measures aim to impose a heavy economic cost on the United States in order to make the war against Iran utterly unpopular among the public. And the economic calculus of the war also favors Iran. The low-flying, easily operated Shahed drones that Iran deployed with devastating effectiveness cost $20,000 U.S. dollars, while the missile interceptors deployed in America’s Patriot system cost $4 million. Two weeks into the war, Iran has already depleted 20% of the stockpiled U.S. Patriot ammunition. In addition, Iranian strikes destroyed three THAAD radar systems in Jordan—forcing the U.S. to redeploy its assets from Asia, and two Upgraded Early Warning Radars in Qatar and Bahrain, representing an estimated $2.7 billion in high-value equipment destroyed in the first week alone. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the cost of U.S. operations is estimated at between $890 million and $1 billion per day. With national debt already exceeding 100% of GDP, it would be hard to foresee America sustaining this war for years like in Iraq.

Paradoxically, for the U.S. and Israel, this Iranian strategy only serves as further justification for doubling down. This is because backing down at this moment would grant Iran a victory, which would be used to justify a concerted push in nuclear enrichment that could see Iran becoming a nuclear power like North Korea. But then, any war against Iran would be impossible, an outcome that is unacceptable by Israel. A dangerous spiral of escalation therefore awaits, one that could compel the United States to abandon its initial goal of a limited, surgical conflict and commit ground troops to impose an unconditional surrender, the same tragic logic that led America deeper and deeper into the jungles of Vietnam. Should the U.S. stop short of this, the war will likely grind to a halt as American munitions are depleted, leaving the Iranian government battered but intact. This would be the end of U.S. credibility, as it would have failed to defeat its opponents and protect its allies.

Even a miraculous negotiated end to the conflict that saw Iran abandon its nuclear program would not be the end of the story. Israel, relentless in its pursuit of regional chaos, would likely continue to provoke conflicts with Iran that will lure the United States back into the fray. Israel have likely concluded that the wars it has dragged America into fighting over the decades may be finally reaching a tipping point, and the changing public opinion in America, especially among the younger right-wing voters, would mean it may lose America for good after the 2030s. Thus, its overwhelming desire is to leverage the existing U.S. security assistance to achieve its own regional objectives before the potential American retrenchment. This means that the periodic war against Iran will not stop until either Israel achieves its strategic objective or the United States loses the capacity to impose such an outcome. But in either case, America will be the greatest loser.

The Vengeance of History

Is America destined for this fate? History offers a chillingly relevant answer. In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the historian Paul Kennedy argued that nations in relative economic decline often resort to military force to arrest their slide, a strategy that accelerates the economic wounds and results in disaster. Furthermore, declining powers are more susceptible to being drawn into conflicts by their junior partners. Kennedy cited the examples of Austria-Hungary, which became hyper-aggressive and diverted precious economic resources to maintain its military might as its economic relevance faded, and Germany, whose fear of a rising Russia propelled it into the First World War alongside its Austrian ally. Today, the United States appears to be shockingly exhibiting both of these syndromes simultaneously. Unable to resolve its deep-seated domestic problems, from deindustrialization to illegal immigration, America is increasingly reliant on its military might to project an image of strength and arrest its decline. Yet in doing so, it has exposed its structural vulnerability that Israel has skillfully exploited, drawing the United States into illusive conflicts that America believed to be the decisive battles reversing its decline. But Kennedy’s observation also carries a damning verdict: once a country is committed on a path to substitute economic with military power, it will probably double and triple down until the culmination of the martial focus brought its own reckoning, either in a devastating war or bankruptcy. From the Ottoman Empire to the Soviet Union, history has consistently validated this trajectory, and America is no exception.

Editor: Charriot Zhai