More than six months into the war that the US and Israel launched against Iran, the central lesson is one that Washington keeps refusing to learn: overwhelming military superiority is not the same thing as strategic success. Modern states prove remarkably resilient under bombardment, and regimes rarely collapse just because their air defenses do.
The war’s architects bet on rapid decapitation and quick Iranian capitulation; six months into a campaign no one predicted would last this long, the Iranian state is still standing, its institutions are still functioning, and its position in the region has, if anything, improved.
Why Iran Did Not Collapse Under US-Israeli Bombardment
Victory and defeat in war depend on whether military force achieves the political purpose for which it was deployed. Measured against that standard, the American-Israeli campaign has failed to produce strategic convergence.
As I argued during the opening fortnight of the war, the US-Israeli coalition suffered from an inherent "strategic schizophrenia." Benjamin Netanyahu approached the campaign through an existential lens aimed at the total eradication of Iran’s institutional capacity. At the same time, Trump pursued a theatrical demonstration of power designed to force a rapid capitulation. This mismatch produced operational incoherence.
The material expenditure was extraordinary from the outset. The coalition unleashed approximately 900 bombardments in the war’s first 12 hours alone, burning through an estimated $11 billion in munitions over the first six days, settling into an expenditure rate of roughly $1 billion per day thereafter.
The collapse of the initial operational model has precipitated an awkward rhetorical retreat in Washington. The administration has systematically abandoned its initial projection of a "four-to-five-week" campaign, with Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visibly shifting the conflict’s official parameters. By asserting that major combat operations effectively concluded in April, the administration has sought to recast the ongoing attrition as something short of war.
At the core of this strategic miscalculation lay a fundamentally flawed assumption about regime collapse. Coalition planners assumed that decapitating the regime’s top political and military leaders would inevitably trigger systemic disintegration. Instead, the state’s institutional architecture demonstrated immediate resilience: the Supreme National Security Council rapidly absorbed the operational shock. At the same time, the constitutional selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader on 8 March ensured formal command continuity and blunted the decapitation strategy.
What Is Limiting Further Escalation in the Iran War?
Can this attritional confrontation expand into a wider, multi-front war across the Middle East? While the risks of miscalculation remain high, four structural factors define and limit the scope of military escalation.
First, the asymmetric electoral calendars of the coalition leaderships. Both capitals are tied to tight election timetables, but the two calendars do not pull in the same direction. In Washington, the calendar works as a hard ceiling. Facing the November 3 midterms with his approval rating at a historic low of 32 percent amid rising gasoline prices, President Donald Trump is under heavy pressure to cap the conflict, and the White House has formally sought to avoid any increase in military action until the vote has passed.
In Tel Aviv, the same logic runs the other way. Netanyahu has threatened disproportionate strikes to satisfy his far-right coalition partners before the October 27 Knesset elections, hoping to project an image of total victory despite his weak position at home. The debate inside Israel now openly includes options with no precedent: delaying the vote for security reasons, or opening a new military round on one of the region’s fronts days before it. Having replaced the leadership of the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the army command with loyal appointees, Netanyahu faces few institutional brakes on such a decision. The result is still a ceiling, not a launchpad. Israeli escalation depends on American munitions, intelligence, and political cover, and none of these will be extended before November 3. For Trump, the election date is a constraint; for Netanyahu, it is closer to a window, but one he cannot open alone.
Second, the depletion of Western strategic munitions and Israel’s lack of strategic depth. Unilateral military expansion faces severe operational ceilings. Despite Israeli defense planners openly envisioning an open-ended campaign of cyclical, annual wars against Iran to eradicate its reconstituted nuclear and missile capabilities systematically, this doctrine is sharply checked by acute physical constraints. The prolonged conflict has generated a critical depletion of U.S. munitions stockpiles, with Army precision-strike missile stocks largely spent and Patriot interceptors falling from about 2,300 to roughly 800, according to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). This supply bottleneck directly erodes the credibility of American extended deterrence, forcing Washington to restrain Tel Aviv. Simultaneously, the March 2026 Iranian missile strikes against Haifa’s petrochemical hub and power plants demonstrated that Israel’s narrow coastal corridor cannot absorb sustained salvos against its critical infrastructure.
Third, regional insulation and critical infrastructure red lines. The expansion of Iranian targeting toward regional life-support systems has paradoxically reinforced escalation caps. In response to American operations, Iranian drones have deliberately targeted vital power and water desalination plants in Kuwait, which supply 90 percent of the country’s drinking water, while launching retaliatory strikes across facilities in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Rather than drawing the Gulf monarchies into a unified offensive front, these strikes have spurred Arab states to insulate their territories from the conflict. To keep the chaos off their soil, regional capitals have increasingly restricted the offensive use of bases on their soil, thereby denying the United States the geographic staging ground necessary for a sustained ground invasion or a massive regional air campaign.
Fourth, Iran’s own economy sets a ceiling nobody in Tehran can wish away. Bravado is cheap and staying power is not; the IRGC can keep adding ships to its blacklist, but a state with 128 percent food inflation and an exhausted population cannot also fight a forever war it cannot afford. Closing Hormuz for good would only speed the reckoning; it would push Gulf producers further around it and cost Tehran its last reliable customer, Beijing. Iran can rattle the strait; it cannot afford to shut it. That also limits how far Iran can go, not a reason to escalate further.
Why the US-Iran Agreement Over the Strait of Hormuz Collapsed
The collapse of the Pakistan-brokered memorandum of 17 June offers a case study in diplomatic failure. Designed as a temporary sixty-day mechanism to halt active hostilities and freeze naval escalation, the agreement disintegrated well before its August 17 expiration.
The memorandum’s fundamental flaw lay in the fatal diplomatic trap of constructive ambiguity. To secure a signature, American and Iranian negotiators papered over irreconcilable interpretations of Article 5 regarding maritime transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Washington interpreted the clause as guaranteeing unimpeded, fee-free navigation under customary international maritime law. Tehran, conversely, interpreted the text as an implicit international recognition of its sovereign authority to regulate traffic, conduct mandatory security screenings, and levy transit fees through its newly established Persian Gulf Strait Authority.
This dispute was not merely legalistic; it was profoundly economic. Washington offered an unprecedented inducement: full sanctions relief, waivers covering petroleum exports, access to frozen overseas assets, and an international $300 billion post-war reconstruction framework. In exchange, Washington demanded that Iran forego nuclear weaponization and accept unhindered transit through Hormuz.
Yet Tehran walked away from this massive financial package. Why? Because Tehran estimated that a recognized fee regime in the strait could generate about $40 billion a year, revenue it has proposed sharing with its Gulf neighbors, but which would still give Iran a lasting source of income and control it did not have before the war. For Tehran’s clerical and military leadership, an internationally recognized toll on Hormuz represented a permanent, self-sustaining financial base and a conventional deterrent that effectively replaced a nuclear bomb. Faced with a choice between an American promise of conditional reconstruction funds and permanent sovereign control over the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, Tehran chose the chokepoint.
The Decision-Makers Behind the Iran War
To understand how the conflict is managed six months in, one must look closely at who holds power in the three capitals and the specific tools they use to pressure one another. The current phase is defined by a calculated system of pressure, operating just beneath the threshold of an all-out regional war.
In Tehran, the center of gravity has shifted decisively from civilian politicians to the military leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Following the assassination of key wartime commanders, Major General Ahmad Vahidi took direct command of the IRGC, emerging as the dominant operational authority in the country. Working closely with Mohsen Rezaei, the former Guard commander who now heads the National Security Council, Vahidi directs military strategy with the formal blessing of the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. While elected figures such as President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf remain visible to preserve national unity and project domestic legitimacy, they have been pushed out of core military decision-making. When President Pezeshkian attempted to adopt a softer diplomatic tone toward neighboring Arab states, the military command publicly overruled him, proving that hardline security priorities now dictate Iranian policy.
In Tel Aviv, authority is concentrated in Netanyahu himself, working through security services whose command layers he has rebuilt with loyal appointees. The opposition contests not the war but its management: it has read the unilateral American moves, the ceasefire and then the June memorandum, as evidence that Netanyahu lost control of the Iranian file. On the war itself, no real disagreement separates the two camps, which is why Israeli escalation answers to coalition arithmetic rather than to strategic review.
In Washington, crisis management has become equally centralized, but around a personalist executive circle rather than an institutional process. Donald Trump has largely bypassed the professional apparatus of the State Department, leaving Secretary of State Marco Rubio sidelined while relying on loyalists and special envoys to coordinate strategy.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has emerged as the principal architect of the current phase. In a 23 August op-ed in the Financial Times, he framed financial isolation as “an economic D-Day” and 'the single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary'. The following day, the Treasury Department announced Operation Economic Outcast, imposing sanctions on over sixty entities, vessels, and individuals in the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Switzerland. The department also threatened to impose secondary sanctions on any third party handling Iranian oil. Secretary Rubio's role has largely been limited to public messaging rather than operational decision-making. He has dismissed any return to the June memorandum, observing that “that ship, in many ways, has sailed”, and has described economic pressure as Washington's “primary vehicle”, while reserving the right to use force to defend US interests.
What Comes Next in the US-Israel-Iran War? Four Possible Scenarios
Looking ahead to the coming months, four trajectories are plausible.
1. Managed Attrition. The most likely course is a continuation of the present pattern: periodic strikes, no settlement, and financial siege as the primary instrument. Neither side gains enough to claim victory, and neither loses enough to accept terms. The indicators to watch are the pace of new Treasury designations, the size of Iran’s maritime blacklist, and whether Washington keeps describing the war as a post-combat operation. This scenario requires no decision from anyone; it is simply what happens if both capitals continue to act as they have.
2. Pre-Electoral Escalation. A brief but sharp round of exchanges before October 27 or November 3 is a real possibility, driven by Netanyahu’s need to project victory or by an Iranian strike on a Gulf facility that crosses a threshold. Such a round would be loud rather than transformative, because the same ceilings would reassert themselves within days: depleted stockpiles, restricted regional bases, and an American president who cannot absorb an oil price shock before the midterms. The likely outcome is a return to the baseline at a slightly higher level of violence.
3. Hormuz Settlement. After November 3, Trump regains room to trade, and Iran’s economy may no longer permit refusal. A revised agreement would have to do what the June memorandum avoided: address the transit question directly, whether through a regulated fee, an internationally supervised inspection regime, or a revenue formula tied to sanctions relief. The drivers are visible: food inflation around 128 percent, Chinese insistence on stable transit, and Gulf states seeking an exit from a war fought around their infrastructure. This is the only path that ends the conflict rather than pausing it, and it becomes more likely as winter approaches.
4. Escalation Spiral. The least likely and most costly scenario would be a mass-casualty incident or a successful strike on the new Supreme Leader, potentially pushing either side beyond the existing escalation ceilings. The conflict could then move beyond the current air-and-missile campaign, potentially opening the path to a ground invasion and expanding into a full-scale regional war that both sides have so far sought to avoid.
In short, Washington and Tel Aviv have all the hard power anyone could want, and it hasn’t bought them the outcome they went to war for, while Iran has absorbed that firepower without gaining the means to end the pressure on its economy. The decapitation strategy failed, the memorandum failed, and the financial offensive has yet to change a single Iranian decision. What remains is a conflict held in place by mutual incapacity rather than by mutual agreement.
