A month into the war with Iran, many Americans are wondering how it will end. As public support declines, President Trump himself is no doubt asking the same question.
The problem is not one of tactics or objectives, but of strategic clarity. Most analysis focuses on specific targets—enriched uranium, missile capabilities, regime change—but those things, by themselves, won’t win the day.
Victory in a modern war, especially in a democracy, is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. American presidents lose wars politically because they forget that.
What this war lacks is a clear story that resonates with the American people. That story must begin with a recognition that there are only two ways to win a war: either break the enemy’s capacity to fight, or break his will to fight. Every objective, every doctrine, every campaign fits into one of these two categories.
Consider a simple example: If someone wants to kill me, I can prevent him from achieving that goal by destroying his weapons, strengthening my defenses, or killing him first; or I can convince or coerce him to abandon that goal. In either case, I survive. But the strategies, and the victories they produce, are very different. The two approaches can overlap, but one must predominate. Confusing them is the surest path to defeat.
One of the greatest strategic problems facing the United States today is that successive administrations keep conflating these two kinds of victory. We declare grand ambitions that imply the breaking of will, but craft strategies that focus on breaking capacity. We know the result well: impressive military performance followed by political frustration.
This has been the pattern of American warfighting since 2001. Our military achieves its operational goals, but the adversary continues to fight. In the end, we return home believing we’ve lost.
In this war, President Trump has repeated the old pattern, implying goals of “unconditional surrender” and regime change but ordering stand-off airstrikes on infrastructure and personnel. Such tactics are effective at reducing capacity; but they won’t compel surrender.
It’s a distinctly American pathology. When it comes to war, we either avoid it entirely or seek total victory at the cost of a trillion dollars—“go big or go home.” We remember the definitive outcomes of World War II, the Cold War, and Desert Storm, believing that anything short of that is unsatisfactory.
We forget that most wars don’t end that way, and indeed don’t need to. Many wars are limited, inconclusive, and temporary in their results, yet achieve something real without resolving everything.
The Israeli experience is instructive in this regard. Lacking America’s decisive power, and accustomed to perpetual hatred from neighbors, Israelis have accepted periodic destruction of an enemy’s capacity—“mowing the grass,” as they say—as an acceptable outcome. They know conflict will break out again, but walk away content having earned a few years’ reprieve.
We, by contrast, enter wars expecting finality—expecting “peace.” When we instead find ambiguity, we interpret the war as a loss even though we’ve achieved substantial results.
The lesson of 21st-century warfare is not that American power is ineffective. It’s that military success and political victory are not the same thing. A country can achieve its objectives on the battlefield and still feel defeated at home. The upshot isn’t that America should avoid war, but that we should carefully define what kind of victory we seek and communicate that to the American people.
In the case of Iran, that means recognizing a painful reality: there was never a serious chance of breaking the regime’s will, short of a massive ground war and military occupation. Religious ideology is a powerful thing. But it is entirely possible to destroy, or at least massively degrade, the regime’s capacity to threaten Americans, Israelis, Arabs, and its own people.
That’s not total victory, but it’s real—and we can be proud of it. And if explained clearly to the public, it may be enough. For now.