Following the blatant violation of international law represented by the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Middle East has witnessed a sharp escalation in tensions in recent weeks, fuelling growing speculation about the possibility of the United States and Iran sliding into a direct confrontation.
However, understanding why Washington has so far refrained from military action against Iran requires a deeper reading than a simple comparison of power balances. The United States is not hesitating because it lacks military capability. On the contrary, it possesses overwhelming superiority. The source of hesitation lies in the fact that, in Iran’s case, the use of force does not automatically produce a quick resolution, while speed is the political currency Donald Trump values most.
A common Western perception holds that Iran is an exhausted and weak state, merely pretending to be cohesive. Yet this view rests on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that any war with Iran would be swift, containable, and conclude in a manner that serves American interests. This assumption carries a dangerously naive edge.
Iran has spent decades preparing for a very different kind of conflict, not in pursuit of a rapid victory, but to ensure that any confrontation with its adversaries becomes prolonged and costly. Its strategy is not built on regional domination or theatrical victories, but on endurance and imposing high costs. It does not seek a knockout blow. It seeks to lure opponents into wars of attrition that drain their resources, erode their political capital, and consume time itself, until even the strongest armies are worn down.
This is precisely what explains continued American hesitation, and why Trump behaves with particular caution. He is a gambler by temperament, but not a suicidal one. He takes risks when he believes the odds favour him and the return is fast and direct. Iran, however, presents a different scenario: high risks with limited gains, a near blocked road to a decisive outcome, and no guarantee of a clean and rapid victory.
The Simple Mathematics of Missile Defence
Modern war between technologically advanced powers is no longer primarily about weapons platforms, tactics, or military doctrine. It is about calculations. More precisely, it is about the exchange rate between offensive munitions and defensive interceptors, and the depth of the stockpiles behind each.
Many analysts focus on interception rates: how many Iranian missiles were downed, and how effective Israeli or American missile defence systems are. But the central issue is not day one performance. The real question is whether these defences can be sustained over time.
Ballistic missile defence interceptors are not only expensive. They are also slow to produce. Offensive missiles, particularly those manufactured in Iran, are relatively cheaper and easier to produce by almost every measure. In practice, launching a single interceptor does not guarantee a single kill. In reality, defenders often launch two interceptors per incoming threat as a precaution against failure. This equation alone reveals the scale of the dilemma facing the defender.
Iran understands this equation well. Its strategy is built on exhausting missile defence systems rather than defeating them quickly. Even if 80 or 90 per cent of missiles are intercepted, the remainder is enough to inflict economic damage, disrupt aviation, or undermine morale, generating domestic political pressure. Over time, the penetration rate rises as defensive resources erode.
The Iran Israel war in June 2025 offered a living example. Israeli Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors were heavily consumed, and the United States was forced to intervene as a backstop by deploying THAAD batteries and using large numbers of MIM 401 Talon interceptors, alongside SM 3 interceptors launched from US Navy destroyers. Tactically, the defences succeeded. Strategically, they imposed a cost the United States cannot afford to repeat.
Depth of arsenal is the most decisive factor in any conflict. Replenishing high end interceptor stockpiles takes years. Even under the most optimistic estimates, US THAAD stocks will not return to pre June 2025 levels until around 2027. This occurs at a time when competition with China in the western Pacific is intensifying, where these same systems are a core element of deterrence.
Every interceptor used in Israel is no longer available for another theatre. Every deployment of missile defence assets to the Middle East carries an opportunity cost. The United States no longer operates in a vacuum. It is balancing multi theatre competition with limited resources.
Iran, meanwhile, only needs to ensure that its offensive arsenal exceeds the size of the defensive stockpile oriented against it. In that balance, Tehran holds a clear advantage.
Iran’s Integrated Domestic System
Iranian capabilities are often underestimated because they are examined in isolation. Iranian systems are designed to function within an interconnected framework, a system of systems, where each component plays a specific role within a carefully shaped geographic and military environment. Iran’s ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and attack drones are designed to operate within Iran’s own environment and meet its strategic needs. These systems are not built to operate alone, but to saturate and exhaust enemy defences through continuous pressure that does not relent, allowing pressure to rise gradually as more munitions penetrate, ultimately shaping the conditions for a settlement.
This system includes ballistic missiles of multiple ranges, cruise missiles such as the various Paveh models, propeller driven strike drones such as the Shahed 136, and others.
From this perspective, dismissing Iranian drones as ineffective misses the point. Even drones that are shot down serve a function. They drain air defence munitions, force constant combat air patrols, and accumulate operating costs. Even tactical failure becomes an attritional gain.
Ansar Allah
Yemen occupies a special place in Iran’s regional strategic outlook. From a purely military standpoint, Yemen is far too distant from Israel to be an ideal platform for decisive strikes. This has led some observers to downplay the role of Ansar Allah as marginal or symbolic. That is a mistake.
The primary role of Ansar Allah is not to launch direct, decisive attacks against Israel, but to impose maritime coercion, economic disruption, and strategic harassment. The Bab al Mandab Strait is a narrow chokepoint through which an enormous volume of global trade passes.
Most of the anti ship munitions Iran has supplied to Ansar Allah are optimised for range rather than explosive payload. Their warheads are relatively small and often fired in limited numbers. The goal is not to sink warships, but to tie down naval assets that could otherwise be assigned elsewhere.
In practice, Yemen functions as a force in its own right. The mere presence of credible anti ship capabilities compels multiple naval vessels to escort commercial shipping. Warships are a scarce resource. Every destroyer sent to the Red Sea reduces the destroyers available for areas such as the Arabian Gulf or the Pacific. These threats also raise insurance premiums, increasing the cost of transit through the Red Sea. As a result, some shipping companies choose to avoid the region entirely, judging the risk to be high even with escort protection.
Endurance as a Deliberate Design
A common analytical error is to assume escalation is binary: either Iran launches a massive decisive strike or does nothing. In reality, the strike pattern Iran is likely to prefer in a long war would consist of limited daily launches of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, punctuated from time to time by larger salvos.
Ballistic missile defence systems are optimised for short, intense engagements, not for weeks of constant readiness. Human fatigue accumulates, and maintenance backlogs grow. Even if interception rates remain high, readiness erodes.
The same applies to both the Israeli and American air forces. Continuous air defence operations require combat air patrols that could otherwise be used for offensive missions. Every aircraft tied to protecting airspace is, in the overall calculus, one fewer aircraft available to strike Iran. Iran counts that as success.
Most importantly, Iran’s arsenal is deliberately diversified to sustain this tempo. Ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones complement each other. None decides the conflict alone, but together they create an environment in which defenders cannot catch their breath. The reality many underestimate is that wars are often decided by whoever can endure longer.
Cruise Missiles
Iranian cruise missiles did not play a prominent role during the Iran Israel war in June 2025. That does not mean they would not be influential in any future conflict involving the United States.
Cruise missiles matter because they address vulnerabilities ballistic missiles do not. They are cheaper alternatives to manned aircraft strikes, generally more accurate than most ballistic missiles, and they fly at low altitudes, reducing detection time and narrowing defensive reaction windows. This makes them particularly suitable for targeting infrastructure.
Iran’s cruise missile programme emerged from frustration with the limited accuracy of ballistic missiles and the constraints of air power. For certain targets such as oil facilities, ports, and hardened aircraft shelters, precision matters more than sheer destructive force.
Recent design modifications indicate maturation in guidance and launch concepts. Cruise missiles also complicate the distinction between civilian and military airspace use. Their use almost guarantees airspace closures, imposing immediate economic costs even when interceptions succeed.
The Maritime Dimension
The Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and Bab al Mandab are narrow environments in which ships floating on the surface are naturally disadvantaged compared to land based targeting systems.
In this context, Iran’s naval capabilities are often unfairly compared to China’s. But that comparison misses the point. Iran does not need DF 21D class systems to generate serious risks in the Gulf. It operates in far narrower waters, against slower and less manoeuvrable targets, and at distances where intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance constraints are easier to manage. Within this scope, even less advanced anti ship ballistic missiles and cruise missiles can carry strategic weight.
US aircraft carriers now operate hundreds of kilometres from contested coastlines. This reduces risk, but also means fewer sorties, longer flight times, greater reliance on aerial refuelling, and greater dependence on long range munitions. No ship needs to be sunk for these constraints to have strategic consequences.
The Use It or Lose It Dilemma
Israeli assassinations of senior figures, often targeted in their homes and sometimes alongside family members, have introduced a new psychological dynamic. Iranian leaders are no longer weighing regime survival in the abstract, but their personal survival.
This creates a use it or lose it mindset, where restraint becomes less rational as escalation begins. Capabilities previously kept in reserve become harder to justify withholding. Evidence of this shift appears in the unprecedented announcement by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council that Iran reserves the right to conduct pre emptive strikes based on objective indicators of threat.
Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi, Chief of Staff of Iran’s armed forces, also stated that following the recent 12 day conflict, Iran reviewed its military doctrine, shifting from a purely defensive posture to an offensive one, and threatening an overwhelming response to any aggression.
The Davidson Window
The United States no longer operates in a world where it is the only major military player. As noted earlier, every interceptor fired in the Middle East carries an opportunity cost in the western Pacific.
The depletion of THAAD and SM 3 stockpiles in 2025 will not be remedied before 2027, overlapping with what is known as the Davidson window regarding China and Taiwan. Iran understands this, Israel understands it, and Trump certainly understands it. This is why symbolic measures appear more attractive than full scale war.
The Axis of Resistance After 7 October
Any serious analysis of Iran’s current position must begin with an uncomfortable admission: the strategy pursued by Iran and Hezbollah for nearly two decades failed after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. That strategy, often described as neither war nor peace, was not foolish. On the contrary, it succeeded for a long time. It relied on threatening regional escalation to deter Israel, while avoiding the cost of full war.
For years, Israel refrained from striking many high value Iranian and Hezbollah targets, not due to intelligence or capability gaps, but because it did not want to risk a war that could devastate its economy and society. Hezbollah’s arsenal functioned as a sword of Damocles, while Iran strengthened this deterrence balance.
It was not Hezbollah’s actions that broke this balance. Rather, Hamas’s unexpected success on 7 October and the psychological shock that followed did so. Israel entered a posture of full war mobilisation in Gaza, bearing costs that would previously have been politically unacceptable. As the Gaza war extended, the marginal cost of expanding the conflict northward gradually declined.
Iran and Hezbollah misread this shift. Their response, limited calibrated attacks intended to show solidarity without igniting war, was strategically incoherent. They sought to manage escalation in an environment where Israel was no longer interested in calibration. The neither war nor peace model became a trap.
Israel escalated without restraint. The strike on the Iranian consular complex in Syria in April 2024 was a stark warning signal. The assassination of Fouad Shukr in Beirut on 30 July 2024 followed, then the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran the next day, marking a more dramatic turning point. By September, attacks using pagers and portable communications devices against Hezbollah tore apart what remained of the old rules.
Hezbollah and Iran were then paralysed, not by lack of capability, but by being caught between two fears: fear of full war, and fear of appearing incapable. Israel recognised this paralysis and exploited it. The failure of deterrence did not stem from the absurdity of Iran’s strategy, but from political and psychological shifts unleashed by waves of large scale violence that surpassed that deterrence equation.
The importance of this failure lies in how it reshaped escalation dynamics across the region. The old balance is gone, and actors now operate in a far less stable environment, where miscalculation is more likely and restraint is harder.
Forward Deployment in Iraq
One of the most under appreciated shifts since early 2024 is the growing importance of Jordan in American military planning against Iran. Iran’s strike capabilities, despite their shortcomings, have succeeded in keeping most Gulf Arab states in a posture of cautious neutrality. The threat Iran poses to oil and gas infrastructure, desalination plants, aviation, and the broader economic system is real enough to shape political behaviour.
Jordanian air bases are, in practical terms, roughly as distant from Iran as Israeli bases are. Iran’s shorter range munitions cannot be used against Jordan.
Accordingly, Jordan has become the only place in the region, alongside Israel itself, where the United States can openly deploy offensive forces with a relatively limited Iranian capacity for counter deterrence. US aircraft operating from Jordan can strike Iran while benefiting from distance and concentrated defences, and with a compact operational footprint that preserves scarce missile defence assets.
Iran may respond through its non state allies in Iraq, and is likely to do so. But this card cannot be played indefinitely. Iraq is not Yemen, and Iranian influence there is constrained by domestic politics and Iraqi sensitivity to becoming a battlefield again.
This changing geometry helps explain Iran’s focus on forward deploying strike systems in Iraq. Lebanon is too close and exposed, Yemen is too far for many systems, and Iraq is close enough to Israel to matter and useful for threatening US forces.
Why Air Power Alone Cannot Decide the War
There remains a persistent belief that US air power can solve the Iran problem through precision strikes: destroying missile sites, paralysing production, decapitating leadership, and then withdrawing. This belief ignores reality.
Iran’s strike systems are dispersed, mobile, and increasingly hardened. Ballistic missile launchers are difficult to detect and even harder to destroy. Cruise missile and drone launch platforms are cheap, mobile, and easy to conceal, further complicating targeting.
Long range munitions are limited in number and extremely expensive, and their payloads are often insufficient to destroy hardened underground facilities. Against such targets, the preferred weapon is a type of heavy penetration bomb, which is not truly long range and requires aircraft to approach contested airspace.
Air power can impose costs, but it cannot end the war. This is the reality Trump faces and seeks to avoid.
Economic Warfare
Iran’s ability to affect Arab states is often underestimated because analysts focus exclusively on oil infrastructure. In reality, Iran does not need to destroy oil fields to trigger economic catastrophe. It only needs to close the airspace.
Civil aviation is the lifeline of Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi as global hubs. Closing airspace, even temporarily, would produce cascading effects such as rerouting flights, rising insurance, stranded travellers, and reputational damage. Tens of billions of dollars in the form of large, exposed aircraft sit in airports and could be targeted at any time.
This vulnerability explains Arab mediation efforts far better than slogans about regional harmony. These states are not neutral out of altruism, but rational actors seeking to avoid becoming collateral damage in a war they cannot control.
Closing civilian airspace is also among the clearest early warning indicators of approaching conflict. Unlike ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and attack drones cannot be safely separated from civilian aviation.
Trump
Donald Trump is particularly influenced by the hot hand fallacy, a cognitive bias that leads to believing a string of successes reflects inherent skill rather than favourable circumstances.
Hitler was a gambler who misread early successes as signs of inevitable destiny. The remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the defeat of France entrenched a false belief that he was unbeatable. Each gamble succeeded not because Germany could not be defeated, but because his opponents hesitated. These successes bred overconfidence. He eventually made a reckless gamble by underestimating the industrial power, population, and endurance of his enemies, and his sequence of victories ended in catastrophic failure.
Trump’s case is different, but the psychological pattern is familiar. He has repeatedly seen how hardline pressure extracted concessions. He believes pressure works because it worked before, and the danger lies in assuming it will always work.
Iran is not Venezuela, not Libya, and not Iraq in 2003. It is a large, cohesive state with substantial military capabilities, including the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, and institutions designed to endure hardship and external pressure. Its regional reach and a culture centred on resistance and survival mean it does not need to win quickly. It only needs to ensure its adversaries do not win.
Trump understands how a failed military gamble can destroy a presidency. He also knows that a long war in the Middle East would collapse his political narrative. For this reason, symbolic strikes that project power without open escalation are far more attractive than comprehensive war.
Conclusion
If the illusion of a rapid victory falls away, what remains is a long war of attrition with no true winner. From this perspective, diplomacy becomes the only realistic option. The Middle East is already facing a wide spectrum of crises, and any slide into war would be catastrophic for all.
Sun Tzu wrote: “If you surround an army, leave it an outlet.” This does not mean allowing the enemy to escape. As Du Mu explains in his commentary on The Art of War, the aim is to “make him believe there is a road to safety, and then prevent him from fighting with the courage of desperation”.
This logic applies here. Iran and the broader Axis of Resistance possess the means to ignite the region, and if they believe they have nothing left to lose, there is no sound reason to assume they would refrain from doing so. Iranian officials have hinted at this meaning. More importantly, 2026 is a pivotal year for Trump’s presidency, and it is difficult to imagine him risking his presidency in a long Middle Eastern war, with its inevitable economic consequences, something that runs against his platform and likely still does.
Trump is driven by the desire to win, and to win quickly. Victory may be possible, but it would come at an enormous cost, and expecting a swift, decisive end is unrealistic. For that reason, the most likely scenario is a symbolic strike that demonstrates strength without triggering an uncontrollable escalation. This could be paired with escalating economic and political pressure aimed at gradually exhausting and destabilising Iran, in a manner likened to “boiling the frog”.
