For nearly 15 months, Iran has been fighting an asymmetric war of aggression imposed on it by the United States. Given the enormous imbalance between the comprehensive power available to Washington and Tehran, decisively in favour of the former, many assume that the outcome of the confrontation is predetermined and that Iran ultimately has no option but to surrender and accept American demands.
A quick comparison appears to support that conclusion. The US military budget for 2026 stands at around $900 billion, while Iran’s is less than $10 billion. The gap is enormous.
Yet conflicts between states are not determined solely by the quantity of hard, soft and smart power available to each side. They are also shaped by numerous visible and invisible factors. That helps explain Iran’s ability to withstand an overwhelmingly unequal confrontation and raises the possibility that its eventual outcome may not reflect the raw disparity in power.
The Nuclear Programme Is Not the Origin of the Conflict
The United States claims that its confrontation with Iran stems from Tehran’s determination to manufacture a nuclear weapon. There are several reasons why this explanation does not hold.
First, Iran’s nuclear programme began under the Shah and with American assistance.
Second, the programme was effectively neglected during the first decade following the Iranian Revolution. The current system did not begin considering its revival until after the war with Iraq had ended.
Third, the Iranian-American conflict began immediately after the Islamic Revolution, driven in part by fears among Iran’s new leadership that Washington might attempt to overthrow the revolution in the same way it had helped destroy Mohammad Mossadegh’s movement earlier in the century.
A close examination of Iranian-American relations since the revolution shows that Washington was uncomfortable both with the political system that emerged from it and with the domestic and foreign policies pursued by the new leadership.
This helps explain the continuing American effort to weaken the Iranian system, compel it to change its policies or possibly overthrow it altogether.
It also explains why Iran developed a defensive strategy aimed at consolidating its domestic popular base while expanding its influence abroad.
Both sides therefore recognised, almost from the moment the revolution succeeded, that confrontation had become inevitable. Their task was no longer to avoid the conflict entirely, but to manage it in ways they believed would best serve their respective objectives.
Domestic, regional and international developments gradually intensified that confrontation until it eventually evolved into armed conflict and comprehensive confrontation.
From the Embassy Crisis to Proxy Confrontation
Only days after the Islamic Revolution succeeded, amid fears that American security agencies might conspire to restore the deposed Shah to power, Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held its personnel hostage for 444 days.
President Jimmy Carter attempted to recover them by force but failed, contributing to his defeat in the subsequent presidential election.
Successive US administrations then adopted a two-track approach towards Iran: avoiding circumstances that would require direct military confrontation, while pushing regional allies to perform some roles on Washington’s behalf.
This helps explain the American role in encouraging Iraq to launch war against Iran a year after the revolution, encouraging Arab Gulf states to provide Iraq with financial and military support, and seeking to prolong the war for as long as possible in the hope of weakening both countries.
Iran, notably, adopted a method of managing the confrontation that was not substantially different from Washington’s.
It too sought to avoid direct military collision while involving regional partners and allies.
This explains Iran’s intensive search for allies across the Arab world, particularly in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, and its continuing efforts to strengthen those relationships. Over time, this produced what became known as the “Axis of Resistance”, led by Iran itself.
Iran benefited from major developments that reshaped the Arab world, including Anwar Sadat’s signing of a separate peace treaty with “Israel” in 1979, Saddam Hussein’s invasion, occupation and annexation of Kuwait in 1990, and the Arab uprisings that began at the end of 2010.
The interactions produced by these events also helped create the conditions for the Madrid Peace Conference, the Oslo and Wadi Araba agreements, and later the Abraham Accords.
The Arab world increasingly appeared divided into two competing camps: official governments seeking closer alignment with the United States and normalisation with “Israel”, and non-state actors calling for resistance against Zionist-American projects of regional domination.
It was against this background that the Al-Aqsa Flood erupted, becoming a turning point that overturned calculations across the region.
Trump and Netanyahu Break the Old Rules
The strategy of avoiding direct military confrontation might have continued had two major factors not emerged.
The first was Donald Trump’s rise in American politics. The second was Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to exploit the aftermath of Al-Aqsa Flood to dismantle the Axis of Resistance as a prelude to establishing “Greater Israel”.
During Trump’s first term, Netanyahu successfully persuaded him to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement and impose maximum sanctions on Iran.
During Trump’s second term, which began 15 months after Al-Aqsa Flood, Netanyahu succeeded in convincing him to join “Israel” in two wars against Iran.
The first, an 11-day war, aimed to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme. The second, lasting 39 days, sought to ov
