The Iran Disaster, Revisited

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

I don’t know Mike Nelson, but I can tell that he enjoys a challenge.

 

Before he began contributing to The Dispatch, Nelson served in the Army Special Forces. Go figure that his latest piece for our publication would dial the degree of difficulty all the way up by trying to imagine a nondisastrous outcome to the war in Iran.

 

He’s not optimistic. Step one, he argues, is for the president to learn from the criticism he’s been taking, face reality, and accept that his “current approach makes him look foolish and weak.” But that would be “out of character” for Donald Trump, Nelson allows, putting it very mildly indeed.

 

It won’t surprise you to learn that I share his pessimism. His piece got me thinking about whether any argument remains that this conflict was a good idea for America. How has it made the United States stronger? In what way has it meaningfully improved our position in the world, either by weakening our enemies or increasing our deterrent leverage over them?

 

I can think of four possibilities.

 

One: The spectacular success of the decapitation strikes on Iran’s leadership at the start of the war will force Bond villains everywhere to think twice about tangling with America. Xi Jinping might be persuaded that his military can defeat ours, but that will be a cold comfort if he has reason to believe he won’t survive the conflict himself.

 

Two: We’ve done real damage to Iran’s conventional military capabilities. Navy, air force, missiles, launchers—Iranian assets have taken a beating, limiting the regime’s ability to make mischief in the region. There’s always some deterrent value in knocking down a bad guy.

 

Three: Iran’s attacks on American Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE might draw those nations closer to Israel. A Middle East in which Jews and Sunnis unite to contain the Khomeinist menace might be a more stable Middle East long-term, which is good for the United States.

 

Four: A deal to end the war will likely include a complete freeze on uranium enrichment by Iran lasting well into the next decade. In April Axios reported that the two sides have been haggling over the time frame, with Iran proposing a five-year suspension and the U.S. countering with a 20-year demand. Three sources told the outlet they’re confident that a compromise will be reached of “at least 12 years,” with one guesstimating 15 as more likely.

 

That’s my best stab at optimism. How do each of those arguments hold up to scrutiny?

 

Benefits?

 

Only U.S. intelligence knows how feasible a decapitation strike on someone like Xi Jinping might be, but we can make a few safe assumptions.

 

First, China’s defenses are considerably more sophisticated than Iran’s were, especially after Israeli attacks degraded the latter. Second, America probably hasn’t penetrated the Chinese government to the phenomenal degree that Israeli intelligence penetrated Iran’s, making targeting more difficult. And third, after seeing Ali Khamenei liquidated on day one and Nicolás Maduro snatched from his bed, enemy leaders will take extreme precautions going forward to protect themselves when a fight with the U.S. is brewing. The leaders of Cuba’s regime are surely much harder to locate right now than they’ve ever been.

 

That’s the way war works. You learn from major tactical mistakes made in other conflicts and you adapt. Unless you’re the United States.

 

Meanwhile, America has done less damage to Iran’s capabilities than the president would have us believe. Leaks over the past week suggest that 70 percent or so of Iran’s pre-war missile stockpile remains intact and 70 percent of its missile launchers are still in the field. “Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday. We’ve made a lot of things go “boom,” it seems, just not the things we were most hoping to destroy.

 

America’s naval blockade of the strait has also been less effective than hoped due to the regime’s tolerance for pain and its resilience in keeping its oil flowing. The blockade was supposed to strangle Iran’s economy in a matter of weeks, but the latest estimate is that the country can hang on for three to four months before serious hardship sets in. (One U.S. official told the Washington Post that it can endure for much longer than that.) Nor have the Iranians been forced—yet—to shut down wells due to lack of storage capacity, which could permanently damage their oil infrastructure. “It’s nowhere near as dire as some have claimed,” one source told the Post of Iran’s predicament.

 

Enemies like China already understood before the war that the United States would bring fearsome power to bear in a conflict. What they’re learning now is how ineffective that power can be in achieving core strategic goals—although I suppose that too was understood after Vietnam, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq. If you doubt that “doing massive damage” and “being effective” are two different things, ask yourself whether you’re more impressed with Russia’s military capabilities now than you were before seeing them in action in Ukraine.

 

Sunni states drawing closer to Israel in common cause against Iran is a nice thought, and certainly one possible future. Conceivably, in fact, the worse the war goes for the United States, the more likely that future may be. If Iran comes through this with something like a “victory,” it will be more hubristic and menacing than it was before. What choice will its regional enemies have after Uncle Sam tried and failed to slay the beast but to band together in mutual defense?

 

There’s another possible future, though, one that Robert Kagan recently described in The Atlantic. Kagan is a longtime right-wing hawk, exactly the sort of person whom you’d expect to be enthusiastic about taking on Iran. Nope: The United States has been “checkmated” in this conflict, he observed, and that will have bad consequences for the Jewish state.

 

"Israel will find itself more isolated than ever, as Iran grows richer, rearms, and preserves its options to go nuclear in the future,” he predicted. “It may even find itself unable to go after Iran’s proxies: In a world where Iran wields influence over the energy supply of so many nations, Israel could face enormous international pressure not to provoke Tehran in Lebanon, Gaza, or anywhere else." If Sunni powers are forced to choose between good relations with a U.S.-Israeli alliance that can’t protect them and good relations with a radicalized Iranian regime that can and might do them severe damage, which should they choose?

 

As for the prospect of Iran freezing uranium enrichment for 15 years: Did we really need to go through all this to get that?

 

The price of getting the regime to back off on nukes for a while, according to Axios, is the U.S. “agreeing to lift its sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian funds.” How many billions is up for negotiation, but the possibility of an astounding $20 billion payout has been floated. That’s another reason to feel underwhelmed by how much damage the war has done to Iran’s military arsenal: When this is over, we’re essentially going to end up paying them to rebuild it.

 

A cash-for-freeze trade would unmistakably resemble the deal that Barack Obama signed with Iran in 2015. The United States released $1.7 billion to the regime at the time in exchange for the Iranians’ promise to enrich uranium to no higher than 3.67 percent purity until 2030. Trump tore up that agreement during his first term, causing Iran to go on a spree of stockpiling uranium in which it accumulated nearly 11 tons in the years since. Now here we are, back at the same negotiating table, offering them a lot more money to give up a lot more radioactive material.

 

We could have bribed them into dialing back their nuclear program at any time before the war, without firing a shot. Why didn’t we? “There’s no dispute that it worked,” Obama said this week of the 2015 deal, “and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.” Why did the White House risk a global oil crisis, with all the economic misery that entails, just to inevitably arrive at “JCPOA, Except Bigger!”?

 

Costs.

 

So the alleged benefits of this war are dubious. The costs, on the other hand, are real.

 

Start with wealth. If you total up the consequences of higher inflation due to rising oil prices, slower economic growth, bearishness on Wall Street over a possible recession, and future outlays to replenish U.S. military stockpiles, you’re looking at a figure in the trillions.

 

Diplomatically? This has been one of the worst fiascos in the history of the United States.

 

Whatever was left of NATO is functionally gone. Europe resents the White House for having stuck them with soaring energy costs and an economic slowdown over a conflict they didn’t want and weren’t consulted on. The White House, including erstwhile hawk Marco Rubio, resents Europeans for denying the U.S. access to some of their military bases (although it’s not clear how that access would have affected the war) and is keen to scapegoat them for somehow not bailing Trump out of the mess he’s made in the strait. This marriage can’t be saved.

 

Sunni powers have also learned a hard lesson about the risks of allying with America, particularly when Iran broke the ceasefire earlier this month by firing at the UAE. After Trump declined to retaliate, one regional expert told the Wall Street Journal, “From the perspective of the Gulf states, it looks like the U.S. is not prioritizing their security and basically threw the Gulf states under the bus.” The same report claims that Iranian leaders have begun to say of their Sunni frenemies, “those who wrap themselves in America are naked.”

 

U.S. allies across the world have surely begun to wonder. A shining lesson of the Iran war is that the president has no stomach for lengthy conflict, grasping for excuses to avoid resuming hostilities despite Iranian provocations during the ceasefire. He “believed that the U.S. military was unstoppable” and that Iran would “be another Venezuela,” The Atlantic alleged of Trump’s pre-war thinking, and when he discovered otherwise he grew “bored” with the matter and began looking for a way out.

 

If your nation’s security depends on Donald Trump’s commitment to your defense, you’re in grave danger. And if your regime finds itself in conflict with him, you can probably survive simply by outlasting his unrealistic expectations for your demise.

 

America’s war has also helped China in numerous ways, not surprisingly.

 

For starters, we’ve burned through a meaningful part of our missile stockpile to repel Iranian attacks—not always successfully, either—including a majority of high-tech THAAD interceptors designed to neutralize enemy missiles in flight. Some of those missiles were moved to the Middle East from the Far East, where they were initially based to contain China. U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea greeted that development “with dread.”

 

It will reportedly take “years” for defense contractors to replace the missiles we’ve lost in the current war, and their ability to do so will require easy access to rare-earth minerals. Guess which country the United States depends on for that. If the president sounded like more of a supplicant than usual in praising Xi during today’s visit to Beijing, there’s a reason.

 

China has also seized opportunities to fill strategic vacuums created by America’s misadventure. Since the war began, it has sold weapons to U.S. allies in the Gulf to help them pick up our slack in repelling Iranian missiles, per the Washington Post. And it’s “reached out to Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, and other countries to help them manage their energy needs and is offering access to Chinese-produced green energy technology as a longer-term solution.” They see an empire in decline, and they’re taking advantage.

 

As for Israel, it’s a cinch that the war will further weaken the fragile relationship between our two countries. American opinion had turned against the Jewish state over Gaza before the first bombs fell in Iran; perceptions that Trump was somehow maneuvered into a new and unpopular Middle Eastern misadventure by Jerusalem will feed resentment that Israel wields too much influence over U.S. foreign policy. Benjamin Netanyahu has already begun preparing for the inevitable rupture, assuring 60 Minutes recently that he thinks ending American military aid to Israel is a fine idea.

 

And pity the poor Iranian people, who will probably pay the steepest price of anyone.

 

The war began with Trump vowing, sincerely or not, that all he wanted in the end was freedom for Iranians. Not only was that mission not accomplished, postwar Iran might plausibly be more oppressive than the pre-war version. A wounded regime led by Ali Khamenei’s fanatic son and Revolutionary Guard hardliners will move quickly and ruthlessly to suppress nascent uprisings. It will treat its survival amid a U.S.-Israeli onslaught as divine validation of the Khomeinist project. And it will resolve to take all necessary measures to ensure that it never again finds itself in a position as vulnerable as the one it’s in now.

 

There’s one more cost from the war that the United States will need to bear.

 

That’s the civic cost, a subject I considered in a newsletter titled “The Iran Disaster” nine days before the conflict began. “Never has America fought a war this substantial without some form of buy-in from Congress and the general public,” I wrote. “In no real way is a country that functions like that a republic. It’s Caesarism, the total unmooring of executive accountability from law in matters of life and death.”

 

And so it is. We are adrift strategically in an unauthorized conflict that threatens the global economy, with no end in sight, having long ago blown past the 60-day deadline that the War Powers Act (supposedly) allows for unilateral presidential action, yet Congress remains quiescent. Republican quislings in the House and Senate have let an autocrat seize power from the legislature to wield military power without any meaningful limit whatsoever.

 

It’s one of the most consequential constitutional perversions in American history. How’s that as an epitaph for the war?

 

Optimism.

 

There are two ways in which this conflict might come to be seen as fortuitous for America. Call this optimism if you like, although both scenarios are dark enough that the word seems inapt.

 

One is that it causes a broad, durable, long-overdue backlash to Trump and Trumpism. That was my thesis in the February piece, in fact: By backburnering the cost of living yet again and moving forward with a war that voters clearly didn’t want, the president “could incinerate much of what’s left of his political capital.” Three months later, he’s at 38.5 percent approval and is telling reporters that he won’t let Americans’ financial pain push him into a bad deal with Iran.

 

The prime directive of postliberalism is to hurt Them, never Us. His base, the “Us,” is now hurting like everyone else. The aftershocks of that could be so ruinous economically that the president ends up losing the political capital he needs to justify further authoritarian power grabs. Does that count as optimism?

 

If not, try this: Maybe a comparatively minor disaster in Iran will inadvertently spare us from what would have been a major one against China.

 

Perhaps you’re confident that a plainly declining United States still has the smarts, will, industrial capability, and leadership to win a potentially long war against the Chinese in their own backyard. If so, that makes one of us. A confrontation over Taiwan increasingly feels like a calamity in the making for America; with Trump at the helm, my best guess at the outcome would be a hasty U.S. retreat after initial fighting proved far costlier than the White House expected.

 

Now, thanks to Iran, we have a ready excuse to avoid all that: We’re spent. We’ve depleted much of our missile arsenal, we’ve created war-related hardships for the American people, and we’ve reminded everyone—again—that the U.S. military, as impressive as it is, seldom achieves the too-ambitious strategic goals of its civilian commanders. All three of those things point straight at contriving some excuse to get out of China’s way in the Far East.

 

I think the president would relish doing so. His preoccupation with countries like Venezuela and Cuba in America’s near-abroad and distaste for defending Europe against Russia suggest that he’d rather focus on his “sphere of influence” and leave China to its own.

 

Abandoning Taiwan would mean the end of the United States’ reign as global hegemon. It would elevate China to the status of peer hyperpower, forcing countries across the planet to make their peace with Beijing. But at least it would spare many thousands of American service members from having to die in yet another operation that probably won’t accomplish what it set out to do.

 

Strategic defeat in Iran will quell any appetite for a worse strategic defeat in the Far East. National decline may at last force upon us a foreign policy of “restraint.” Call it “America First” if you like.