global geopolitics

Iran has built a strategy designed to lose battles while winning time, and the United States has built a war it cannot win, cannot end and cannot afford, because the costs of continuing are political while the costs of stopping are strategic.

Editorial Analysis | November 2026

The war that began on 28 February 2026 has entered its ninth month, and the condition that now prevails is neither victory nor defeat but a stalemate that punishes both parties in different currencies. Iran has absorbed the loss of its senior commanders, the destruction of its nuclear facilities and the degradation of its proxy network, and it has continued to function because its military architecture was designed to survive precisely these losses. The United States has demonstrated that it can strike any target in Iran at will, and it has also demonstrated that the ability to strike any target does not translate into the ability to produce a political outcome. The war has become a contest between two asymmetries, one of military power and the other of political tolerance, and the second asymmetry is the one that determines the outcome.

Iran’s doctrine is the product of a specific historical education, and that education began with the eight-year war against Iraq in the 1980s. The trauma of that conflict, in which Iraqi missiles struck Iranian cities and the international community largely acquiesced, entrenched ballistic missiles as the central pillar of Iranian deterrence and taught Tehran that survival required the capacity to impose costs on adversaries with superior conventional power. The doctrine evolved through the Lebanese experience of the 1980s and the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and it was codified in 2005 when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps restructured its command architecture into thirty-one separate commands capable of operating independently if the central command were destroyed. The Iranian foreign minister described the doctrine in a single sentence at the start of the current war, saying that bombings in the capital have no impact on the ability to conduct war and that the decentralised mosaic defence enables Iran to decide when and how the war will end.

The operational logic of the mosaic defence is to convert the adversary’s superiority into a liability by dispersing the targets that superiority is designed to destroy. A military that can eliminate a single command centre in a single strike is confronted with thirty-one command centres that can each launch operations independently, and the cost of destroying all of them exceeds the political and material resources that any democracy can sustain over an extended period. The doctrine is reinforced by a strategy of asymmetric escalation in which Iran absorbs initial losses in order to preserve the capacity to escalate later, when the air defences of Israel, the United States and the Gulf states are depleted and when the political tolerance of the adversary’s population has been exhausted. The Iranian calculation is that the United States will reach its political limit before Iran reaches its material limit, and the evidence of the past eight months suggests that the calculation is correct.

The Strait of Hormuz is the most consequential instrument in the Iranian repertoire, and it is consequential precisely because it is a weapon that harms everyone. Around twenty million barrels of oil and a substantial proportion of global liquefied natural gas pass through the strait every day, and the disruption of that traffic has raised shipping costs and global energy prices in a manner that feeds directly into the inflation that has made the war unpopular in the United States. Iran has threatened to close the strait, has disrupted shipping, and has considered allowing limited tanker traffic only if transactions are conducted in Chinese yuan, which would simultaneously punish the dollar system and reward the currency of its most important customer. The strategy is not designed to win a naval battle against the United States Navy, because Iran cannot win such a battle, but to demonstrate to the Gulf states and to the global economy that Iranian insecurity is their insecurity, and that the cost of attacking Iran is borne by every consumer of energy in the world.

The Iranian strategy has a diplomatic dimension that is often overlooked, and that dimension is the construction of a regional security framework that excludes the United States. The Iranian security chief met the Russian president in Moscow on 5 November and delivered a message from the supreme leader that was conveyed in person within three days of a telephone call, which is a pace that signals urgency rather than routine consultation. The Russian president offered to help end the war and endorsed regional security arrangements without foreign interference, and the Iranian side briefed him on a four-country meeting in Tehran that had produced agreement to continue talks. The Iranian president met the Qatari emir and the Russian president in late October, and the Iranian foreign minister has stated that seven conditions must be met before Tehran considers negotiations with Washington. The diplomatic track is not an alternative to the military track but a complement to it, because every demonstration of diplomatic support raises the political cost to Washington of refusing to negotiate.

The Russian relationship is the most important external support that Iran possesses, and it has deepened rather than diminished as the war has proceeded. Russia supplied Iran with ninety launchers for the LMUR precision-guided missile system, the same weapon that Russian forces have used extensively in Ukraine, and the launchers are designed for Mi-28 attack helicopters that Iran already operates. Russia has also agreed to supply Su-35 fighter aircraft and more than three hundred air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, with deliveries scheduled to continue through 2027, and Iranian pilots have been training in Russia. The relationship is not a mutual defence pact and Russia has not committed itself to Iran’s defence in the manner of its treaty with North Korea, which is precisely the point, because Russia can support Iran without incurring the obligation to fight for it and can therefore preserve its freedom of manoeuvre while raising the cost to the United States of continuing the war.

The Russian position is also a signal to Washington that the improvement in American-Russian relations that the administration has sought over Ukraine will not come at Iran’s expense. The Russian president received the Iranian envoy at the Kremlin and offered to mediate, which positions Russia as an indispensable party to any settlement and as a partner whose interests must be respected in any regional arrangement. The American president explained his decision not to impose new sanctions on Russia by the desire not to disrupt negotiations over Ukraine, and the Russian reception of the Iranian envoy sent a clear message that Moscow will choose its partners independently and that its relationship with Tehran holds intrinsic value. The Russian calculation is that a mediated settlement that preserves Iran’s core interests while allowing the United States to claim a diplomatic victory would enhance Russian standing in the region and demonstrate that Russia is a constructive power rather than a spoiler.

China’s role is less visible than Russia’s but no less important, because China is the principal purchaser of Iranian oil and the principal source of the goods that Iran imports in return. Chinese purchases of Iranian crude have continued through barter arrangements that exchange oil for Chinese goods and that operate outside the dollar system, and ship-tracking data indicate that China has continued to receive roughly one point two million barrels per day from Iran during the war. The Chinese relationship does not provide Iran with military protection, and Chinese support for Iran has been described as symbolic solidarity rather than material alliance, but it provides Iran with the economic oxygen that allows it to sustain the war and to resist the sanctions that the United States has imposed. The Chinese calculation is that a prolonged American entanglement in the Middle East serves Chinese interests by diverting American attention and resources from the Indo-Pacific, and that Iran’s survival as an independent actor is preferable to an American client state on China’s western flank.

The military balance is more favourable to Iran than the raw correlation of forces would suggest, and the reason is that the United States has exhausted the munitions that its strategy requires. The Pentagon inspector general reported in September that the four-month campaign had caused strategic inventory shortfalls and exposed bottlenecks in the defence industrial base, and the campaign consumed approximately thirty-three point four billion dollars between February and June, of which twenty-two point three billion was expended on munitions alone. The United States has depleted almost eighty per cent of its interceptors for the THAAD system and approximately half of its Patriot missiles, and these are the weapons that would be required to defend against the missile and drone attacks that Iran would launch in a renewed campaign. The American capacity to sustain an intense aerial assault has been estimated at four to five days, or a week of lower-intensity strikes, which is a capacity that is sufficient to begin a war but not sufficient to win one.

The political balance is even less favourable to the United States, and the midterm elections of 3 November made that clear in a manner that no amount of rhetorical framing can obscure. The Democratic Party swept both chambers of Congress, and the Republican autopsy attributed the defeat primarily to the war and to the inflation that the war produced. The vice president stated publicly that the reason the party lost was the war, and the president himself acknowledged that the war contributed to the defeat while insisting that he would have done nothing differently. The polling evidence supports the vice president’s assessment, with approval of the president’s handling of the war falling to thirty-four per cent and overall approval falling to thirty-three per cent, and with a majority of Americans believing that the military action has gone too far. The president now faces a Democratic Congress, a party divided between non-interventionist and hawkish factions, and a public that has demonstrated that it will punish the continuation of a war that it did not support.

The military options that remain are therefore constrained by the political options that have been foreclosed, and the result is a condition in which the president has repeatedly ordered strike plans and repeatedly vetoed them. The Central Command has prepared options for a short and intense campaign lasting approximately three days, targeting Iran’s missile and drone arsenal, its energy facilities and its command posts, and the president has been briefed on these options at least five times and has declined to authorise them each time. The president has nevertheless continued to threaten that he may have to destroy what remains of Iran, and he has stated that American forces are locked and loaded, but the threats are not matched by a strategy that could produce the outcome that the threats are intended to produce. The contradiction is not a failure of resolve but a rational response to a situation in which every available military option carries political costs that exceed the political benefits that the option could deliver.

The Israeli dimension has shifted in a manner that further complicates the American position, because the Israeli prime minister who was the principal advocate of military pressure on Iran has lost his political mandate. The Israeli election of 27 October produced a Knesset in which the prime minister’s coalition won fifty-three seats and the opposition bloc led by the former military chief won forty-eight, with Arab-led parties winning a record nineteen seats. The Israeli president has selected the former military chief to attempt to form a government, and the incumbent prime minister faces the prospect of losing office after more than a decade in which he was the most consistent advocate of confronting Iran. The departure of the incumbent would not resolve the underlying tensions between Israel and Iran, but it would remove from the American policy process the actor whose preferences have been most consistently aligned with military escalation, and it would therefore reduce the pressure on Washington to continue a war that Washington cannot win.

The nuclear dimension is the ostensible reason for the war and the least resolvable element of the conflict, because the war has not produced the outcome that the war was intended to produce. The International Atomic Energy Agency has conducted no verification activity in Iran since 28 February, apart from a single inspection at Bushehr in June, and it remains unable to verify the location or status of more than two hundred kilograms of uranium enriched to sixty per cent. The agency assesses that Iran possesses approximately four hundred and forty kilograms of uranium enriched to sixty per cent, and the Iranian security chief stated in October that no enriched material would leave Iran. The American intelligence assessment is that the war has not set back Iran’s breakout timeline, which remains at approximately nine to twelve months, and the pre-war assessment was approximately three to six months. The war has therefore produced a situation in which Iran’s nuclear programme is less verifiable, more dispersed and no less capable than it was before the war began, and in which the stated objective of the war has not been achieved.

The Iranian negotiating position reflects the confidence that the military and political balance has given Tehran, and that position is not a position that a state adopts when it believes it is losing. The Iranians have demanded compensation for the damage caused by the war, guarantees against future aggression and recognition of Iran’s sovereign rights, and they have described these demands as the minimum necessary for any serious and durable arrangement. The Iranians have also stated that they will not deliver a surrender letter to Washington, and the American rejection of the Iranian terms has been interpreted in Tehran as evidence that Washington will accept nothing short of surrender. The Iranians have refused to discuss their nuclear programme until the end of any negotiation, while the Americans have insisted that the nuclear issue must be addressed first, and the sequencing dispute is a proxy for the deeper disagreement about which side has the stronger bargaining position.

The Russian mediation offer is therefore the most plausible route to a settlement, because Russia is the only actor that has relationships with both sides and that has an interest in a settlement that preserves Iranian independence while allowing the United States to claim a diplomatic success. The Russian president has offered to assist in ending the war, and the Russian calculation is that a settlement would enhance Russian prestige, demonstrate that Russia is indispensable to regional security and preserve the Iranian relationship that Russia values as a counterweight to American power. The American interest in such a settlement is substantial, because a negotiated end to the war would allow the president to claim that he achieved a diplomatic outcome that his critics said was impossible, and would remove the principal political liability that contributed to his party’s midterm defeat. The obstacle is not the absence of a mediator but the absence of a formula that both sides can accept, and the formula that is most likely to emerge is one in which Iran accepts enhanced verification and limits on enrichment in exchange for the lifting of sanctions and guarantees against attack.

A realist analysis must begin from the proposition that the war has demonstrated the limits of military power in the service of political objectives, and that those limits are structural rather than contingent. The United States possesses military capabilities that no other state can match, and it has used those capabilities to destroy a substantial portion of Iran’s military infrastructure, to eliminate its senior commanders and to degrade its nuclear facilities. The United States has nevertheless failed to achieve its stated objectives because the objectives require not the destruction of Iran’s capabilities but the transformation of Iran’s political behaviour, and military power can destroy capabilities but cannot transform behaviour in a state that has decided that survival is victory. The realist conclusion is that the United States is caught in a classic imperial trap, in which the pursuit of a peripheral objective has become a central test of credibility, and in which the cost of abandoning the objective appears to exceed the cost of continuing it even though the objective cannot be achieved.

Game theory illuminates the structure of the trap, because the war is a repeated game in which each side’s optimal strategy depends on the other side’s willingness to continue, and in which the side with the lower political tolerance has the weaker position. Iran’s strategy is to impose costs that accumulate over time, in the form of American casualties, energy price inflation and regional instability, and to demonstrate that it can absorb those costs longer than the United States can absorb the political consequences of inflicting them. The American strategy is to impose costs that are decisive in a short period, in the form of the destruction of Iran’s military infrastructure and the decapitation of its leadership, and to force Iran to capitulate before the American political system forces the United States to stop. The game has reached an equilibrium in which neither side can improve its position by continuing and neither side can improve its position by stopping, and the equilibrium is stable because each side believes that the other will eventually relent.

The materialist analysis must take seriously the proposition that the war is a contest over the control of energy and the architecture of the global economy, and that the military dimension is a means rather than an end. The United States has sought to use the war to reassert control over the Persian Gulf and to demonstrate that American power can determine the terms on which energy is produced, transported and sold. Iran has sought to demonstrate that American power cannot determine those terms, and that the control of energy is a contested terrain in which a state that is willing to absorb costs can impose costs on the dominant power. The war has therefore become a contest over the material foundations of American primacy, and the outcome of that contest will be determined not by the number of targets destroyed but by the willingness of the American political system to bear the costs of continued confrontation.

The class analysis that the war requires is an analysis of the distribution of the costs and benefits of continuation, because the costs are borne by the populations of both countries while the benefits accrue to the actors whose interests the war serves. The war has raised energy prices and fuelled inflation, which has harmed working households in the United States and Europe while benefiting energy producers and financial institutions that trade energy commodities. The war has generated substantial profits for defence contractors while consuming munitions stocks that will have to be replenished at public expense. The war has diverted resources from domestic priorities while entrenching the position of the military-industrial and financial interests that benefit from continued conflict. The class that bears the costs of the war is the working class of both countries, and the class that benefits from the war is the class that owns the assets that the war makes more valuable, and the political system that is supposed to represent the former has been captured by the latter.

The multipolar dimension of the war is the dimension that the American strategy has failed to address, because the war has accelerated rather than arrested the emergence of a multipolar order. Russia has deepened its relationship with Iran, China has continued to purchase Iranian oil and to provide Iran with economic support, and the two powers have demonstrated that they will not allow Iran to be defeated in a manner that would eliminate an independent actor on their periphery. The war has therefore strengthened the alignment that the United States sought to weaken, and it has demonstrated that the unipolar order that the United States has sought to preserve is eroding in the very region where the United States has concentrated its military power. The multipolar order that is emerging is not a socialist order and it will not automatically produce outcomes that are favourable to the working class, but it is an order in which American primacy is contested and in which the costs of American primacy are more visible than they were before the war.

The trajectory that follows from this analysis is one in which the United States will eventually be compelled to accept a settlement that falls short of its stated objectives, and in which Iran will claim that it has achieved a victory by surviving. The settlement will probably take the form of a Russian-mediated agreement in which Iran accepts enhanced verification and limits on enrichment in exchange for the lifting of sanctions and guarantees against attack, and in which the United States claims that it has prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon while accepting that Iran retains a civilian nuclear programme and a substantial degree of regional influence. The settlement will not resolve the underlying tensions between the two countries, and it will not restore the unipolar order that the war was intended to preserve, but it will allow both sides to exit a conflict that neither can win and that both have reason to end.

The analytical conclusion that survives all of these considerations is that the war has exposed a contradiction at the heart of American power, which is the contradiction between military superiority and political fragility. The United States can destroy any target in Iran, and it cannot compel Iran to surrender, because the Iranian strategy is designed to ensure that the destruction of targets does not translate into the transformation of behaviour. The empire is bound not by Iranian strength but by its own inability to absorb the costs of a war that it chose, and the lesson of the war is that military superiority is not sufficient for political success in a world in which the weak can impose costs on the strong by refusing to accept that they have been defeated.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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