From Failed Deterrence to a New Calculus of War

The Persian version of this essay was first published on Radio Zamaneh.

Why Did U.S. and Israeli Military Superiority Fail to Deliver the Political Outcome They Sought?

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran failed to deliver the political outcome the attackers had sought. Iran, meanwhile, changed the dynamics of the conflict by turning the Strait of Hormuz into a source of leverage. Now, with the possibility of an attack on Pickaxe Mountain being raised, the central question is whether escalating military strikes can bring an end to a war whose objectives and strategic calculations have changed in the course of the fighting.

The war against Iran began with a fundamental assumption: that the overwhelming military superiority of the United States and Israel could quickly crush Iran’s defenses and force the Islamic Republic to accept the attackers’ political terms. That assumption rested on a genuine military imbalance. Iran could not match the United States and Israel in air power, military technology, or the ability to conduct large-scale operations. What the war revealed, however, was the gulf between the capacity to inflict military destruction and the power to impose a political outcome.

The Islamic Republic’s deterrence strategy failed to prevent the war. Yet the United States and Israel were equally unable to translate their military superiority into Iran’s swift capitulation. The conflict thus reached a point where its course could no longer be explained simply by comparing the military capabilities of the opposing sides.

The central paradox of the war lies here: one side failed to prevent an attack but succeeded in denying its adversaries a quick victory, while the other, despite possessing the power to launch and escalate military operations, could not dictate the terms on which the war would end.

The Failure of Deterrence: A Strategic Calculation Unravels

For decades, the Islamic Republic sought to compensate for its weakness against the conventional military power of the United States and Israel through a combination of missile capabilities, a regional network of allied nonstate actors, and the threat of a wider war. The logic was that any direct attack on Iran could expose the attackers’ interests across the region to retaliation, imposing costs that would extend far beyond those of a limited military operation.

Over time, Iran’s regional network also took on new functions. Groups with their own local origins and interests became part of the regional balance of power through security and military cooperation with Tehran. Particularly after Iran’s intervention in Syria, the idea gained ground that this network could serve not only as a deterrent but also as an instrument for expanding Iranian influence and reshaping the regional order.

Yet expanding such capabilities does not necessarily strengthen deterrence. Preventing a war and attempting to alter the regional balance of power are two different objectives. The latter strategy can provoke a competition in which the opposing side also takes action to change the status quo.

This does not mean that the outbreak of war can be attributed solely to the Islamic Republic’s choices. The decision to attack was a political and military choice made by the United States and Israel. Iran’s regional policies help explain part of the context in which the conflict developed, but they cannot substitute for an examination of the attackers’ objectives and responsibilities.

What ultimately failed was the calculation that Iran’s missile capabilities and the threat of regional escalation would be sufficient to deter an attack. The blows inflicted on Iran’s regional allies, the increasingly apparent limits of its military response, and Israel’s changing assessment of the balance of power all undermined the credibility of that threat. But the failure of deterrence did not mean that Iran had lost all its military capabilities. This distinction is crucial to understanding what happened next.

Why Military Superiority Failed to Deliver Political Victory

From the outset, the objectives of the United States and Israel went beyond inflicting military damage. Destroying Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities, disrupting its command structure, and forcing political concessions were all elements of a strategy built around the prospect of achieving a rapid outcome.

The attackers’ military superiority allowed them to inflict devastating blows. But a military operation achieves strategic success only when its consequences produce the intended political result. Destroying facilities and equipment, or eliminating military commanders, does not necessarily bring down a country’s political decision-making structure. Even severely degrading its military capabilities does not automatically force the government under attack to accept the attacker’s terms.

In Iran, the governing structure survived despite suffering heavy blows, and the country retained some capacity to respond militarily. This did not mean that American military superiority had been neutralized. It demonstrated that the ability to destroy and the ability to impose an outcome are fundamentally different things.

In asymmetric warfare, the weaker side does not necessarily have to defeat the attacking army to frustrate its objectives. Preserving its political and military organization, retaining some capacity to retaliate, and preventing the enemy from achieving its expected results within the anticipated timeframe may be enough to undermine the attacker’s strategy.

Survival alone, however, is not victory. If continued resistance merely produces greater losses without changing the attacker’s calculations, it will not necessarily improve the defender’s strategic position. Iran began to change the dynamics of the war when it turned its remaining military capabilities into a means of increasing the costs of the conflict and extending them beyond the battlefield.

From the Battlefield to the Global Economy

The Strait of Hormuz was a potential vulnerability in the calculations surrounding the war from the beginning, but it gradually became one of the central sources of leverage in the conflict. Iran’s geographical position gives it capabilities whose consequences cannot easily be neutralized by American air and naval superiority. Iran cannot defeat the U.S. fleet, but it does not need to do so to disrupt energy shipments. By establishing a credible threat to commercial vessels, it was able to drive up insurance costs, halt some maritime traffic, and disrupt the transportation of energy supplies.

Under these circumstances, even limited attacks had consequences extending far beyond the immediate military damage. Shipping companies and insurers make decisions based on the likelihood of danger, not simply the number of vessels actually attacked. The ability to disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz thus carries the costs of war beyond the military sphere and into the global economy. Rising energy prices can affect production costs, transportation, inflation, and the political calculations of other governments.

The significance of this development lies in the shift in the arena where power is exercised. The United States holds the advantage in conventional military power, but the global economy remains vulnerable to disruptions along vital trade routes. Iran sought to move the conflict into an arena where geography and the ability to generate uncertainty could partly offset its military disadvantage.

This shift does not, of course, make up for the failure of deterrence before the war. Deterrence was supposed to prevent an attack from taking place. Iran’s leverage in Hormuz, by contrast, came into play after the war had begun, as a means of raising the costs of continuing it. The distinction is fundamental. In the first stage, Iran sought to prevent its adversaries from deciding to go to war. In the second, it sought to influence their decisions about whether to continue fighting and on what terms the war might end. This is a real form of power, but it has limits of its own.

The Power to Disrupt Is Not the Power to Control

The ability to disrupt shipping should not be confused with the ability to maintain lasting control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran may be able to make passage through particular routes difficult by issuing threats or carrying out limited attacks, compelling shipping companies to observe certain restrictions. But administering an international waterway, setting the rules of passage, collecting revenue, and guaranteeing safe navigation all require stable, enforceable arrangements.

There is a contradiction here. Disrupting trade can provide an effective source of leverage, but earning a sustained income from that same trade depends on keeping it flowing under conditions of relative security. An instrument used to strengthen a negotiating position cannot necessarily be turned into a system for economically administering a waterway without fundamentally changing its nature.

Nor does Iran’s geographical position in the Strait of Hormuz mean that it can exercise similar control over other regional trade routes. Each maritime passage has its own geographical, military, and political characteristics. Iran’s growing ability to impose costs on the global economy does not, in itself, amount to regional or global supremacy.

Yet influencing the terms of a war does not necessarily require such supremacy. The central question is whether Iran’s ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz can force the attackers to reconsider their objectives and demands.

At this point, the conflict enters a phase whose significance extends well beyond the strait itself.

When the War Becomes About Something Else

The United States and Israel did not go to war to take control of the Strait of Hormuz. Their original objectives concerned primarily Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities and changes in the Islamic Republic’s political behavior. But once Iran demonstrated that it could use Hormuz to raise the costs of the war, a new issue entered the conflict: who has the authority to set the rules governing passage through the waterway?

Disputes over shipping routes, the right to impose restrictions, the collection of transit fees, and guarantees of safe passage are no longer merely secondary consequences of the war. They may become subjects of negotiation in their own right, or even reasons for the confrontation to continue.

The significance of this change is that the attackers may find themselves confronting a problem that did not figure so prominently in their original calculations, even if they have already achieved a substantial portion of their military objectives. Iran, meanwhile, may be able to introduce new demands into negotiations despite the severe military damage it has suffered.

The original measures of victory and defeat have consequently become more complicated. For the United States, the question is no longer simply how much of Iran’s military capability has been destroyed. Washington must also determine how the war can be brought to an end without leaving global trade exposed to prolonged disruption.

For the Islamic Republic, survival is no longer enough either. It must find a way to translate its ability to impose costs into a political gain that can endure after military operations cease.

This is where the difficulty lies. Military power can destroy infrastructure without necessarily producing a political agreement. The ability to disrupt economic activity can likewise raise the costs of war without, by itself, establishing rules that both sides are prepared to accept.

Indeed, prolonging the confrontation may create new problems and make an agreement harder to reach. If either side makes the preservation of its position in Hormuz a condition for ending the war, what began as a source of leverage could become an obstacle to compromise.

Ending the war now requires more than a halt to military strikes. The parties must agree on conditions that will allow shipping to resume on a lasting basis and prevent the crisis from recurring.

Pickaxe Mountain

Against this backdrop, the threat of an attack on the underground facilities at Pickaxe Mountain, near Natanz, has taken on renewed significance. The question is whether destroying the complex could help create the conditions for ending the war, or whether it would simply mark another stage in the application of military pressure.

Some analysts believe the threat should be understood as part of an American attempt to break the war’s deadlock. If earlier strikes have failed to compel Tehran to accept Washington’s terms, targeting one of Iran’s most important remaining nuclear facilities may be an attempt to change its calculations.

But this assumption faces several problems. The first is that publicly available information about the actual activities at Pickaxe Mountain is limited. The existence of underground facilities and continued construction work does not, by itself, establish that the complex has an operational uranium-enrichment capability. Even assessing the military significance of an attack therefore depends on information that is not publicly available.

The second problem concerns the difference between destroying nuclear facilities and ending a nuclear program. Military strikes can destroy equipment and infrastructure or delay a program’s development, but they do not necessarily eliminate the technical knowledge, the capacity to rebuild, or the political motivation to continue. Under some circumstances, further attacks might even strengthen Tehran’s determination to preserve its nuclear capabilities.

A potential strike could, however, serve another political purpose: producing an achievement that Washington could present as evidence that the war’s objectives had been met. In that case, destroying Pickaxe Mountain might provide a basis for declaring success and justifying an end to military operations, rather than bringing the nuclear confrontation itself to a genuine close.

Such a scenario, though, runs into a fundamental problem. The war is no longer being fought solely over nuclear facilities. The disruption of shipping through Hormuz, Iran’s remaining capacity to impose costs, and disputes over regional security arrangements have all acquired significance in their own right during the conflict.

Even a successful strike on Pickaxe Mountain would therefore not necessarily resolve these issues. It could instead provoke another Iranian military response and further complicate efforts to reach an agreement.

The paradox is that the United States might be able to bomb even the last remaining targets identified in its original war plan without gaining any greater ability to determine how the war ends.

Seen in this light, the importance of the threat against Pickaxe Mountain cannot be measured solely by the damage it might inflict on Iran’s nuclear program. The larger question is whether Washington still believes that increasing its destructive power can produce the political outcome that previous attacks have failed to achieve.

If so, the new threat is less a sign that the war is approaching its end than evidence that the same problem that altered its course remains unresolved: the gap between the ability to inflict military damage and the ability to impose a political outcome.

A War That Will Not End on Its Original Terms

The war against Iran has now exposed the contradictions within both sides’ strategies. The Islamic Republic, despite its missile capabilities and network of regional nonstate allies, failed to deter an attack. The United States and Israel, despite their superiority in intelligence and military power, failed to impose their desired political outcome quickly.

But these two failures are not equivalent. Iran’s failure of deterrence concerns the conditions that existed before the war began. The limits of the attackers’ ability to translate military power into political results became apparent only after the fighting started.

In the next phase, Iran used the Strait of Hormuz to shift some of the costs of the war onto the global economy, changing the calculations surrounding the continuation of the conflict. This created a new situation, but it has yet to guarantee Tehran the political outcome it seeks.

The decisive question is no longer simply which side can inflict greater destruction. It is which side can turn the costs of war into leverage sufficient to impose its terms for ending it. Raising those costs may compel an adversary to negotiate, but securing acceptance of new rules depends on a much broader set of political, economic, and military factors.

From this perspective, the Strait of Hormuz is neither definitive proof of an Iranian victory nor merely the last defensive instrument of a government under military attack. It is an arena in which the limits of American military superiority and the possibilities of Iran’s asymmetric power have become visible at the same time.

The war began as an attempt to change Iran’s behavior through military force. Its continuation has become entangled with a struggle over the rules governing the exercise of power in one of the world’s most important economic waterways.

This shift could play a decisive role in determining the terms on which the war ends. But until it becomes clear how the military and economic power of the opposing sides can be translated into workable political arrangements, survival, the infliction of damage, and even greater bargaining power cannot be treated as equivalent to strategic victory.

AI Transparency Use
This translation produced with the help of AI to make the process faster and more efficient. I use a local language model (Local LLM) that runs directly on my personal laptop, so the texts don’t need to be sent to external servers for processing. Every AI-assisted translation is reviewed and edited by a human before publication. This includes checking the accuracy of the translation, its faithfulness to the original text, and whether the meaning and language have been properly preserved. I use AI simply as a tool to save time. It doesn’t replace human knowledge, judgment, or responsibility. The final responsibility for everything published, including word choices, accuracy of meaning, and editorial decisions, remains with the human writer and editor.