The region enters a fragile pause — with diplomacy, deterrence and nuclear risk back at the center
At the start of the US and Israeli military campaign against Iran, we identified seven lessons from the new conflict. Sanctions, we noted, are often followed by force; pressure on Iran would be long-term; concessions to the attacking side wouldn’t work; the leadership of the targeted country would become one of the main targets; internal unrest would encourage external intervention; support from friendly states would matter, but wouldn’t solve the victim’s problems, and finally, the balance of power would remain the decisive factor in security affairs.
Force answered with force is a crude instrument, but it remains an effective way of halting escalation. Now that the conflict appears to have been paused, we can draw several further lessons, even while recognizing that this pause is likely to prove temporary.
The first lesson is that a major power can withdraw, which strictly speaking, isn’t new. Recent history offers many examples, as the United States ended its long military presence in Afghanistan and before that, the Soviet Union also withdrew from Afghanistan. Earlier still, the United States was forced out of Vietnam.
In the Persian Gulf crisis, the US and Israel inflicted serious damage on Iran, but they failed to crush their opponent. They also appear to have judged further escalation, especially a ground operation, too risky and the result was a retreat from the objective of destroying the enemy and a turn towards diplomacy.
This leads to the second lesson in that diplomacy works, and compromise remains possible.
The 20th century was marked by the terrible experience of wars ending in crushing defeats. The First World War destroyed at least four empires and the Second World War ended in the complete defeat of the Axis powers, whose sovereignty remains restricted to this day. The Cold War ended in political defeat and the collapse of the Soviet Union and more recent local military operations led to the disintegration or change of government in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Conflicts settled through diplomatic compromise, in the older style of the 18th and 19th centuries, have become rare but the confrontation with Iran brings that older diplomatic school back onto the agenda.
The underlying issues remain unresolved. But the parties have at least reached a temporary settlement through negotiation and specific concessions. They were compelled to treat one another as legitimate negotiating partners and willingly or not, they acknowledged each other as equals, despite the obvious disparity in their capabilities.
The third lesson is that tolerance for losses can determine the outcome because in war, the scale of losses matters and so does the willingness to accept them and the 20th century again gives us two extremes. In the world wars, casualties reached unimaginable proportions, while in many local conflicts, however, the very fact of casualties became a decisive factor in ending the war. This was especially true of the American experience in Vietnam.
After the Cold War, Western military operations were generally designed to keep casualties low. Russia’s losses in the North Caucasus after the collapse of the USSR were serious and were a factor in the ceasefire after the First Chechen War, but those lessons helped reduce losses in the Second Chechen War.
The Gulf crisis illustrates both models as the US and Israel were not prepared to accept the higher casualties that a ground operation might have required, at least not without confidence in success, whereas Iran, by contrast, showed that it was ready to absorb losses. Civilian casualties and the assassination of several dozen prominent political figures didn’t break its resolve.
The fourth lesson is that a margin of safety matters. The great powers entered the First World War with little understanding of the costs ahead while the Second World War began between mobilized military camps, largely prepared for war and regarding it as inevitable. The Cold War was a story of building strategic reserves, followed by the “open-door” effect of gradual détente. The Soviet economy was ready for world war, but in the atmosphere of easing tensions, much of that capacity became unnecessary.
After the Cold War, the military capabilities of yesterday’s adversaries were sharply reduced and even the United States, the greatest military power and winner of the Cold War, will need years to restore previous levels of production in equipment, ammunition, and other assets.
Iran has spent its entire history as an Islamic republic preparing for open military confrontation and its ability to hold out in the current conflict is largely the result of how its armed forces, security agencies, command system and economy are organized. In peacetime, such a system can look costly, unbalanced and cumbersome, but under extreme pressure, it has proved effective.
Israel, too, lives under a regime of constant military mobilization, though on different principles. Military-bloc states are returning to world politics and China is strengthening its resilience while Western countries are moving in the same direction. Russia and Ukraine have also been forced along this path, but Ukraine appears to have reached the peak of its militarization, while Russia still has room to grow.
The fifth lesson is that nuclear weapons both solve problems and fail to solve them. Fear of Iran becoming a nuclear power is one of the long-term reasons for its containment by the US and Israel. If Iran had already acquired nuclear weapons, as North Korea has, such a bold attack would hardly have been possible and one achievement of the campaign against Iran is that it has bought time by delaying Tehran’s progress towards nuclear-weapon status.
At the same time, neither the US nor Israel seriously considered using nuclear weapons to escalate further or defeat Iran. Both are technically capable of large-scale nuclear strikes or individual precision strikes with tactical warheads, but such a step would invite condemnation and might still fail to produce victory.
Iran would have a chance of maintaining stability and control even after several nuclear strikes and the destruction of individual cities or infrastructure and its resolve might even rise to a new and unpredictable level.
Nuclear weapons can cause enormous damage. But they don’t automatically destroy the target state, especially one that has spent decades preparing to resist attack and this creates uncertainty. In some conflicts, the political significance of nuclear weapons may be reduced, while at the same time, the temptation to use them simply to inflict damage may grow.
The sixth lesson is that information warfare is widespread, but its results are limited. Modern technology gives states enormous opportunities for propaganda and psychological pressure and the Persian Gulf conflict was clearly asymmetrical because the US has superior information capabilities, control over global media networks and technological leadership. This may have helped destabilize Iran before the war, but it didn’t prove decisive.
Images of strikes against Iran didn’t break its will to resist and Iran’s own information operations against its enemies were also limited. The conflict also produced a large amount of AI-generated disinformation, though the quality of such material hasn’t yet made it a universal weapon. So, information warfare matters greatly, including in Ukraine, but it still has limits.
The seventh lesson is that leaving a war is harder than entering one. Launching a military campaign is easy, but ending it is far more difficult, especially when the original objectives haven’t been achieved and this is the situation the US faced after its attempt to crush Iran with missiles and bombs failed.
Retreat and compromise carry a high price and they also bring domestic political risks. Negotiations may be attacked by the public or political opposition as weakness while any concession makes that risk greater.
The US has shown that it is prepared to step back if escalation becomes too costly. But the matter isn’t settled and at the next opportunity, the guns may start firing again.
The strategy for exiting a conflict has become an extremely difficult diplomatic and technical challenge. The US and Israel didn’t crush Iran, and they tried to leave the conflict at the right moment, but Iran held its ground while avoiding a devastating prolonged war.
How long this balance lasts remains to be seen.
This article was first published by Kommersant, and was translated and edited by the RT team.
