War on Iran: The War That No One Won

 AND SO WE COME TO A POSSIBLE END OF THIS BLOODY, extraordinary, inconclusive war between Iran, Israel, and the US. It was launched in February with a surprise attack early in the morn­ing in Tehran, conducted by Israeli war planes that sent dozens of missiles into the Supreme Leader’s compound in the city, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and simultaneously eliminating at least a dozen of the radical clerical regime’s senior officials. Since then, we have seen day-after-day of intensive US and Israeli airstrikes and an unprecedented asymmetric Iranian response that plunged a swathe of the Gulf into conflict. The extent of this war is greater than any other in the Middle East since 1945, stretching from Cyprus and Azerbaijan to Oman and even, with one audacious if ineffective Iranian retaliatory attack, Diego Garcia.

Now that the conflict has come to a possibly temporary halt— and we have to say up front that the chances of it restarting or at least flaring intermittently over the coming months are extreme­ly high given the thin and fragile basis of this current ceasefire— we can think about its name. Is this the Third Gulf War? Is it the US-Iran-Israel War? Is it the War for the Strait of Hormuz, a name that would adequately capture the strategic centre of gravity of the conflict? Perhaps even at this early date, we can suggest one: The War That No One Won.

There are currently many who would contest that title. One is Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, who has spoken of his country’s decisive victory. Unsurprisingly, his effective coun­terparts among Iranian officials are making the same claim in equally categorical vocabulary. They can’t both be right.

That said, both Hegseth and senior officials of the Islamic Rev­olutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) can make some claim to have achieved something in these weeks of violence, albeit at enormous expense. Let us start with the US. We should ignore the supposed aims laid out by Presi­dent Donald Trump and others at the beginning of the conflict. Trump went to war on a whim, as he does with everything. He was probably convinced by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, that there was an unprecedented opportunity to eliminate the very seniormost leadership of the Iranian regime that could not be missed. This would be very much in line with Trump’s in­stinctive shoot-from-the-hip-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences approach to geopolitics. Whether Netanyahu genuinely believed that an uprising that would bring regime change to Iran would follow is a moot point. There is no evidence that Netanyahu was advised of this by the Israeli intelligence services, but then he may just have been personally convinced that this would occur and managed to persuade Trump too. The reality is that we will most certainly never know.

So, when Hegseth and others claim decisive victory, what can they claim? Well, they did kill Khamenei and brought a new guard to power. This is a regime change of sorts. A genera­tion that learnt its military trade and formulated its worldview in the crucible of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s has been replaced by one that had its formative years in the pressure cooker of the war on terror of the Noughts. There has been massive destruc­tion of missile launchers, air defences, very significant casualties among important, if often replaceable, individuals. The Iranian nuclear programme has undoubtedly been significantly set back. There is much focus on the main sites associated with the much-denied but evident Iranian effort to create a nuclear weapon, but less on ancillary parts of the programme which have suffered massively in recent weeks. This is also the case for Iran’s missile production, which has been very badly damaged with factories, plants, processing units that are all essential for manufacturing the components and delivering essential material being badly hit in successive waves of attack. Iran’s navy has been sunk, which is a minor achievement given its very minor capabilities, but still something that the Americans could point to.

As for the proxies which the US demanded Iran should cease to support before the conflict, the Houthis decided not to enter the war in any significant way, limiting their involvement to a couple of ballistic missiles lobbed almost nonchalantly towards Israel. This may signify that Iran did not ask the Yemen-based movement to become involved, keeping them as a last card to be played if they needed to shut the Red Sea as well as the Strait of Hormuz. It may equally indicate that the Houthis were very re­luctant to get involved in the conflict, in which case this evidence of already well-proven autonomy fur­ther underlines the complexities of the relationship between Tehran and the various militias it uses to project power around the region.

Of course, Hezbollah did get in­volved in the conflict but had been unable to make any real strategic im­pact in favour of Iran and merely pro­voked, once again, a massive and in­discriminate Israeli response. Hamas are not in a position to help anyone right now and are consolidating their power in Gaza, which again is of lim­ited use to Tehran. Those militia in Iraq that the Iranians have relied on to project power there also displayed a certain reticence but did become involved in marginal ways, again without much effect.

If this is the worst that the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ can manage, then it isn’t much and the US can take heart from this. To those who say that the Iranians were merely keeping their powder dry and these militias could be significantly employed in any future conflict, the obvious question is: What would Tehran be keeping them for? A massive all-out US and Israeli assault on Iran, obviously perceived as an existential threat, would seem to be exactly the moment they would be deployed in full.

Finally, there are the vaunted asymmetric capabilities of Iran, which similarly proved a damp squib. There were some efforts at cyber warfare, which seemed to have had limited effect, although we do not actually have much in the way of detail, and some long-range terrorist activities. But these latter amounted merely to some ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity which served all communities in London being burned and a few easily defused amateurish bombs outside US embassies in Western Europe.

Was it worth the US spending billions a day on proving this? Was it worth burning incalculable amounts of political capital with many allies around the region and beyond, particularly in Western Europe? Certainly not, though some will argue that a consolidation of relationships with less historical allies, such as some of the petro-monarchies in the Gulf, will partially compensate for this.

None of these nuances will be discussed in the Oval Office in the days and weeks to come, of course. But we will hear much of the massive and decisive victory won by America through force of arms. Trump’s rhetoric will be amplified by the MAGAphone with great effect. One claim that his supporters will make may be fair. Trump did demonstrate that he was prepared to deploy mas­sive military force to fight, to kill, to threaten, even in the face of significant popular domestic dissatisfaction. This will be a warning to potential adversaries. It has also been clear that the US military is an extraordinarily effective machine. Yes, it was not facing the most potent of opponents, but its technological prowess is nonetheless beyond doubt. The last five weeks have seen an air campaign of the sort that has never been waged before, and this will give many pause. Yes, this war appears to be the latest in a long series of tacti­cal victories that cannot be converted into political strategic wins but who wants to be on the receiving end of even a tactical defeat?

AS FOR TEHRAN, the Iranians too can claim a partial vic­tory. It is a truism that the weaker party in such a conflict needs only to survive to win. Many have been quoting rather overused supposed aphorisms, such as “You have the clocks but we have the time”, or “We only need to be lucky once.”

You have to be lucky all the time to represent Iran’s perspec­tive. But these, and the idea that a guerrilla’s victory is simply to be standing at the end of a conflict, owe more to a quasi-Orientalist vision of Iran as some kind of abode of romantic turbaned fighters more reminiscent of 19th-century representations of the Middle East than a 21st-century reality.

Iran is a country with a population of 93 million people, vast oil and gas reserves, a military and a quasi-military that together consist of hundreds of thousands of people. It has a coherent and resilient state system that is capable of extreme and effec­tive repression of dissent. And, almost certainly, a nuclear weapons programme.

That means Iran has little in common with any kind of irregular unconventional fighter force. Yes, Iran has used asymmetric tactics, losing off relatively unsophisticated drones and ballistic missiles in response to the high-tech assault. But this does not make it some kind of latter-day Viet Cong or a similar adversary for the US—even if this is how some of the more deluded among its supporters around the world might like to see it.

The main weapon that has proved important for Iran is not one that is asymmetric at all. Yes, the attacks on the Gulf States have been impres­sive in one sense. They have certainly been shock­ing, even if the destruction has been very limited. The brutal calculus of stockpiles of interceptor missiles against projectiles fired has been both horrifying and gripping. And the schadenfreude of watching pampered, privileged influencers in Dubai panicking as their supposed safe tax haven came under attack was perhaps satisfying. But the reality is that the weapon that Iran deployed to greatest effect was not asymmetric. It was pure hardball geopolitics. That weapon was the closure of the Strait of Hormuz which in normal times carries a fifth of the world’s fuel and gas supplies.

This meant Iran could leverage the global economy against the US attack. The force-multiplier effect of every strike in the Strait of Hormuz that targeted shipping was immense. A single missile fired in the direction of a single ship resonated through a series of echo-chambers around the globe as stock markets fell, oil prices rose, finance ministers panicked, and consumers filled their tanks. None of this appeared to have been calculated by the White House in one of the most astonishing failures of planning seen in recent decades by any US administration, and the list of such omissions is already long.

This was a vision of geopolitics as strategy which Iran adopted with great effect. It was not particularly sophisticated, but it had very useful consequences in the conflict. It will likely result in a continued hold on the Strait of Hormuz, either de facto or de jure, for Tehran in the coming years. This alone is a major achievement.

As for the rest, we will have to see what happens with the negotiations. These will start supposedly in Pakistan on Friday. Islamabad is certainly one of the few parties to have come out of this war looking good. The more usual mediators such as Qatar or Egypt or Turkey have all been marginalised, and this will no doubt pain the mandarins in New Delhi. It is Shehbaz Sharif and the people around him who have taken centrestage. As we know from previous instances, they are likely to be richly rewarded as a consequence by the incumbent of the White House. These negotiations are likely to be complex and long. The details may not matter if neither side believes it will have to stick to them.

A sting possibility—if the talks don’t break down entirely— is that we could end up with a situation rather like that in Gaza currently. In Gaza, there has been no progression to a planned Phase II of the agreement between Hamas and Israel that Trump brought into effect in October last year. This, in a sense, does not matter to the main protagonists, though it clearly matters to the 2.3 million Palestinians who are stuck in appalling conditions there and hope for some relief that the future phases, which in­volve reconstruction, were supposed to bring. Instead, in Gaza, you have a situation where Hamas are happy with the control they have managed to re-establish over the population and Israel is happy with the swathe of territory it has effectively acquired that is almost entirely denuded of any inhabitants.

We have an unstable stability in Gaza. It is deeply fragile, but at the moment a balance of interests among the most powerful players that works, albeit to the detriment of the weak. We could see something similar emerging between Iran and the US—ar­eas where both see advantage, such as some kind of deal over the Strait of Hormuz. So business deals that would help consolidate the Revolutionary Guards if sanctions were lifted in some way and agreements in other mutually beneficial areas will take precedence over anything that could guarantee local, regional or broader stability.

As we know from previous such dealings by Trump, the details are not important. The balance of power and threat of violence and transactional financial interest are what matter. This is unbridled free-market economics applied to diplomacy.

The other achievement of the Iranians is to thoroughly intimi­date their neighbours.

This will have a variety of consequences, but it is nonetheless an extension of Iran’s projection of power beyond its borders which is in line with its strategic doctrine of forward defence for many years—if the proxies have failed to perform their function, the ballistic missile programme and the willingness to use such arms against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bah­rain, Saudi Arabia and so on showed how vulnerable these sup­posed adversaries might be. Iran does not have just a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz but a knife pointed at the desalination and petrochemical hearts of all its neighbours.

THE LAST OF the three protagonists who have been most responsible for this conflict is Israel, or more specifi­cally Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces re-election this year. Netanyahu is an astonishing political tactician who has repeatedly bewildered his opponents by his ability to turn an apparently im­possible situation to his advantage. That has been most evident in recent years following his manifest failure to prevent the October 7, 2023 Hamas surprise raid into southern Israel. That was his coun­try’s greatest security failure since its foundation, even exceeding that of the 1973 war. That he is even considering the possibility of successfully forming another government after elections, which are likely in September and have to be held before November, is astonishing. The question is whether Netanyahu will come out of this conflict with enough to claim victory. The arithmetic is com­plicated and largely against him. At the moment, polls suggest his current coalition would not win a new term. But should he be able to convince enough Israelis that the achievement of bringing the US into a war against Iran counts as a victory in itself, irrespective of its apparent success or failure, he may well have a strong chance. Polls show that 65 per cent of Israelis identify as rightwing and about half of them count themselves as Netanyahu supporters. He needs to add another 10 per cent to have a viable electoral bloc. This does not seem be­yond the realms of possibility whatev­er the hopes of Israel’s fragmented and disorganised opposition.

This leaves us with a paradox. This will be a war that no one has won. The costs for all involved are tremendous, most obviously for the civilians, as is always the case in conflicts. But it is also the war that no one has lost. It is a messy conflict, one that was unnecessary and has catapulted the region into a new era. We will see in the days and weeks to come what that new era will look like as it begins to emerge from the flames and the smoke and dust of the conflict.