One of the most consistent realities of international relations is that brute military force rarely achieves the desired political outcomes. When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran on 28 February 2026, Washington promised a swift display of coercive dominance that would either force Tehran to surrender strategically or hasten the collapse of the regime. However, four months later, with the Middle East once again slipping into open warfare following the rapid collapse of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed on 17 June 2026, it was clear that this strategy had failed. On 8 July 2026, President Donald Trump stood alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Ankara and announced the memorandum’s termination. This came a day after Washington revoked Iran’s oil license and launched a new wave of strikes in response to attacks on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
In response, on 18 July, Iran emphasized the danger of slipping into a cycle of reciprocal escalation. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei asserted that the U.S.’s repeated violations of the memorandum had proven that the U.S. president’s signature was “utterly worthless and devoid of credibility.” He also warned Washington that the Iranian people and the resistance front would teach it “unforgettable lessons” if it continued to escalate the situation. This escalating rhetoric reflects a structural crisis of trust that renders the logic of coercive force incapable of imposing stability or achieving a political settlement.
Based on the above, U.S. decision-makers must learn five crucial lessons, if they are still capable of doing so.
Lesson One: Ambiguity Doomed the Islamabad MOU
The Islamabad MOU, signed on 17 June 2026 under Pakistani mediation, was not a comprehensive political settlement. Rather, it was merely a transitional framework designed to temporarily manage the crisis for 60 days and delay complex issues, as the full details of the MOU’s 14 provisions made clear.
The fundamental shortcoming lies in Article 5, which pertains to the Strait of Hormuz. The two parties had conflicting interpretations of this provision that proved to be irreconcilable. From Tehran’s perspective, safe passage meant that all commercial shipping traffic had to be arranged with the Iranian authorities, thus preserving their influence over the strait. Washington, by contrast, interpreted the text as granting ships the right to pass freely through Iranian or Omani waters without needing prior permission from Tehran. The 60-day window intended to produce a permanent agreement by mid-August thus collapsed within three weeks, after indirect talks in Qatar ended without progress.
This ambiguity did more than doom the memorandum; it exposed the fragility of the legal framework governing maritime transit. Elisabeth Braw argues that the principle of transit passage had functioned with remarkable stability for decades, but the ambiguity of Article 5 of the Islamabad MOU has undermined it. What started as an attempt to prevent escalation has instead turned the legal uncertainty surrounding the Strait of Hormuz into a source of strategic leverage.
Lesson Two: US Allies Act in Their Own Interests
When Washington launched its aggression in late February 2026, it implicitly assumed that its regional allies would bear the cost of the confrontation without significant objection, just as Israel had assumed that the United States would remain a partner and not merely a supporter. Neither assumption was correct, and both reveal a misunderstanding of what alliances actually mean in international politics.
On one hand, Washington was subjected to a strategic maneuver by Israel, as Benjamin Netanyahu sought to leverage U.S. military power as a vehicle for achieving a broader regional agenda aimed at reshaping the entire Middle East and completely eradicating the Iranian regime. Washington, however, entered the war with vague and undefined objectives. The U.S.-Israeli disagreement over the settlement was therefore not merely a temporary tactical difference, but a serious clash between the Trump administration’s goal of stabilizing energy prices ahead of the midterm congressional elections and Netanyahu’s desire to drag Washington into an open existential war.
On the other hand, the Gulf states also discovered the limits of their alliance with Washington. U.S. military bases on their territory exposed them to Iranian retaliation, turning military cooperation into a direct security risk.
Lesson Three: Force Cannot Defeat a System It Does Not Understand
The most dangerous fallacy Washington has fallen into is confusing tactical superiority with strategic victory. The U.S. and Israeli strikes succeeded in breaking through Iran’s air defenses, assassinating high-ranking military and scientific leaders, and even assassinating the Supreme Leader himself.
Yet destroying an opponent’s material capabilities rarely translates automatically into a shift in its political will or the collapse of its institutions. We witnessed the same dilemma in Iraq after 2003 and in Afghanistan: overwhelming firepower can destroy the physical assets of a state, but it cannot create an alternative political legitimacy, nor guarantee that whatever emerges from the chaos will be better than the regime it sought to overthrow. Despite these recent lessons, Washington has once again succumbed to the illusion of a decisive strike that will impose a political settlement simply through sufficient military force.
The bigger strategic mistake is that the U.S. approach treated Iran as a state in the abstract, rather than as a complex political system governed by intertwined institutions, elites, centers of power, and loyalties. Raymond Aron’s critique of “simplistic realism” is useful here: state behavior cannot be reduced to balances of power or abstract self-interest, but must be understood through the sociology of the political system, the elites who administer power, and the priorities that shape perceptions of threat, compromise, and survival.
The Iranian regime has demonstrated an institutional resilience that many decision-makers in Washington did not anticipate. Just one week after the Supreme Leader’s assassination, Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed as his successor, suggesting that succession mechanisms and delegated authority had been prepared in advance for such a catastrophic scenario. The war, therefore, did not dismantle the regime so much as reshape its internal balances. Mojtaba Khamenei’s succession opened a new phase of power redistribution among state institutions and intensified debate over the Revolutionary Guards’ political role. Divisions within the conservative camp have also sharpened: a pragmatic wing led by Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf views negotiations as a way to contain strategic pressure, while a harder-line current associated with Saeed Jalili sees any settlement with Washington as little more than a temporary truce. Reformists led by President Masoud Pezeshkian, meanwhile, continue to call for greater external openness, sanctions relief, and containment of the war’s economic costs. The strikes did not create a political vacuum; they triggered a realignment within the ruling elite and reshaped relations among Iran’s centers of power.
Lesson Four: Hormuz and the Strategic Coercion of a Great Power
The main paradox of the Hormuz crisis is not that Iran closed one of the world’s most important maritime straits, but that a great power like the United States found itself facing strategic coercion from an opponent far weaker than itself militarily.
Decision-makers in Washington would be mistaken to treat the Hormuz crisis as a limited regional conflict that ends with the end of the confrontation with Tehran. The events in the Gulf are no longer merely an isolated legal incident; they may evolve into an operational model to be studied and repeated, with their precise legal and operational details becoming something akin to a handbook for any regional actor facing a militarily superior opponent.
Strategically, this legal gap opened by Article 5 has evolved into a comprehensive “strategic doctrine” for Tehran. The strait has become a deterrent described as “more powerful than dozens of atomic bombs.” It compensates for the erosion of Iran’s regional proxy network, offers an alternative negotiating lever now that the nuclear file has lost value as a pressure card, and even serves to export the crisis globally by linking Iranian national security directly to the security of global energy supplies. More dangerously, this strategy has shifted from a temporary military tactic into permanent legal institutionalization at home, through the establishment of an official body to manage the strait and a draft parliamentary law granting the authority to inspect ships, confiscate their cargo, and collect mandatory fees.
In this context, Robert A. Pape argues in Foreign Affairs that the Hormuz crisis is not a regional exception but the embodiment of a “second revolution in precision warfare.” In this revolution, the weaker side no longer needs to defeat the U.S. Navy or physically close the strait; it only needs to cause strategic disruption and undermine the confidence of markets and shipping companies. The shock of uncertainty, rising insurance costs, and rerouted ships achieve political and economic results that surpass any traditional military victory.
Lesson Five: The Middle East Is One Security Complex
Decision-makers in Washington are making a strategic mistake when they assume that the confrontation with Iran can be contained within its geographical borders. The Middle East is not a set of separate security theaters; it is an interconnected regional security complex in which conflict effects spread rapidly through networks of alliances, proxies, cross-border identities, and economic interests. Any escalation in one theater therefore reshapes security calculations in the others.
In Syria, the new regime finds itself caught between the hammer of escalating U.S. pressure and the anvil of its own military fragility. Iran’s targeting of the U.S. presence on Syrian soil, as happened at the Al-Tanf base, could become a pretext that pushes Damascus toward opening a front against Hezbollah in Lebanon on Israel’s behalf, even as Israel continues to bomb Syria’s own military facilities.
Likewise, the U.S. supply of weapons to the Kurds to counter Iran reveals a failure to grasp the region’s geopolitical complexity, as any expanded Kurdish involvement carries long-term strategic implications for the Turkish-Iraqi balance of power. This has prompted Ankara, motivated by its own interests rather than support for Tehran, to seek to limit such involvement.
Conclusion: A Trap of America’s Own Making
The overall lesson is that what Americans face in West Asia is not a trap set for them by a cunning opponent, but a trap they have set for themselves. A superpower that subordinates its vital interests to the goals of a rebellious ally, wages a war with no clear vision of its end, and treats the Middle East as a collection of separate theaters rather than an interconnected security complex will not be defeated because it is weaker than its opponents. It will be defeated because, through its own miscalculations, it has become the chief architect of the strategic trap it has fallen into and cannot escape.
Translated by Mohamed El Sadat.
