Submission statement: This essay describes the challenges that an Iranian regime will face even after the current war is over. It’s strategic architecture of fighting its wars on foreign soil had collapsed and the battlefield is now within Iran. It’s traditional methods of deterrence are gone and Washington has broken a decades long taboo against strikes on Iranian soil. The author compares the dynamics to Iraq after the first Gulf war, that even if the regime survives, it becomes increasingly hollowed out by internal and external crises while failing to enforce its own territorial sovereignty or re-establish a new stable equilibrium
>For four decades, Iran’s defining strategic achievement was ensuring that its wars were fought in the Arab world. The Islamic Republic cultivated an elaborate network of state and nonstate actors, from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen to a constellation of militias across Iraq and Syria, precisely to keep the battlefield away from Iranian soil. The logic was simple enough: project force forward to bleed adversaries and deter direct strikes on the homeland by making retaliation costly. That logic has all but collapsed, and despite a two-week ceasefire announced on Tuesday, the war is now inside Iran.
>The critical and lasting change for Iran is that the war broke a taboo in Washington that had stood for a quarter of a century. Successive American administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, ruled out direct strikes against Iran, calculating that the costs of escalation outweighed the benefits of degrading Tehran’s capabilities. Iran built its entire strategic posture on that predictability. The Islamic Republic could threaten and bleed adversaries and bankroll proxies across four countries because everyone understood there was a ceiling to what Washington would do about it.
>Even after the current cycle of escalations has subsided, the U.S. and Israel are likely to strike Iran whenever Tehran is assessed to be reconstituting threatening capabilities or directing hostile activity. With an Iranian surrender being out of the question, and even if Washington returns to old policies, Israel sees no scenario in which it voluntarily returns to the old prohibition against striking Iran directly.
>A bigger challenge for Iran is not surviving the current campaign, as it has so far, but contending with the fact that a pattern has been broken, and the old costs that deterred American and Israeli action no longer apply. Indeed, restoring the older pattern is precisely what the Iranian regime is trying to achieve with its current attacks. These give Iran an advantage in terms of raising the cost of war, but offer fleeting value in the long term. They may even be counterproductive in terms of restoring the status quo ante that existed before the weakening of Iran’s allies in the region and before the current open war. Until recently, the scenario of Iranian strikes targeting Gulf Arab states was a theoretical one. Every Iranian attack on Gulf Arab states hardens the resolve of Washington’s regional partners, making a return to the pre-2024 status quo not more but less likely, a fact currently clouded by continuing Gulf diplomatic statements and efforts to mediate an end to the war.
…
>Hard-liners in Tehran may draw the wrong lesson from surviving the current war, concluding that their resilience vindicates continued confrontation. An invasion is unlikely, and a regime collapse is not feasible. But the regime that emerges will be drastically different and will operate in a different regional environment. The new regime will be a far cry from the evolution toward pragmatism that many had hoped for, and from the hegemonic power that was uncontested five years ago.
>The analogy of postwar Iraq may seem imperfect at face value. Iran is larger, more populous and more ethnically complex, and it faces no imminent ground invasion designed for regime change. The Islamic Republic has demonstrated greater ideological resilience than Baathist Iraq. But the underlying logic remains that wars weaken embattled regimes in ways that only fully manifest over time, and immediate postwar survival can obscure deep vulnerabilities.
>The postwar period will likely be marked by a particular kind of persistent instability. The regime will find itself having to manage at least four simultaneous crises, but without the old tools: a security apparatus fraying or transforming at the top, an economy strangled from the outside, Israeli strikes becoming the new norm and a severely degraded proxy network.
>The Third Gulf War has no clear ending and may simply, like its predecessors, hollow out what it cannot topple.
!ping MIDDLE-EAST
-PrincessAzula- on
Is it not a little early to be writing post mortems on the war? The political environment is going to depend on what settlement is reached
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Submission statement: This essay describes the challenges that an Iranian regime will face even after the current war is over. It’s strategic architecture of fighting its wars on foreign soil had collapsed and the battlefield is now within Iran. It’s traditional methods of deterrence are gone and Washington has broken a decades long taboo against strikes on Iranian soil. The author compares the dynamics to Iraq after the first Gulf war, that even if the regime survives, it becomes increasingly hollowed out by internal and external crises while failing to enforce its own territorial sovereignty or re-establish a new stable equilibrium
>For four decades, Iran’s defining strategic achievement was ensuring that its wars were fought in the Arab world. The Islamic Republic cultivated an elaborate network of state and nonstate actors, from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen to a constellation of militias across Iraq and Syria, precisely to keep the battlefield away from Iranian soil. The logic was simple enough: project force forward to bleed adversaries and deter direct strikes on the homeland by making retaliation costly. That logic has all but collapsed, and despite a two-week ceasefire announced on Tuesday, the war is now inside Iran.
>The critical and lasting change for Iran is that the war broke a taboo in Washington that had stood for a quarter of a century. Successive American administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, ruled out direct strikes against Iran, calculating that the costs of escalation outweighed the benefits of degrading Tehran’s capabilities. Iran built its entire strategic posture on that predictability. The Islamic Republic could threaten and bleed adversaries and bankroll proxies across four countries because everyone understood there was a ceiling to what Washington would do about it.
>Even after the current cycle of escalations has subsided, the U.S. and Israel are likely to strike Iran whenever Tehran is assessed to be reconstituting threatening capabilities or directing hostile activity. With an Iranian surrender being out of the question, and even if Washington returns to old policies, Israel sees no scenario in which it voluntarily returns to the old prohibition against striking Iran directly.
>A bigger challenge for Iran is not surviving the current campaign, as it has so far, but contending with the fact that a pattern has been broken, and the old costs that deterred American and Israeli action no longer apply. Indeed, restoring the older pattern is precisely what the Iranian regime is trying to achieve with its current attacks. These give Iran an advantage in terms of raising the cost of war, but offer fleeting value in the long term. They may even be counterproductive in terms of restoring the status quo ante that existed before the weakening of Iran’s allies in the region and before the current open war. Until recently, the scenario of Iranian strikes targeting Gulf Arab states was a theoretical one. Every Iranian attack on Gulf Arab states hardens the resolve of Washington’s regional partners, making a return to the pre-2024 status quo not more but less likely, a fact currently clouded by continuing Gulf diplomatic statements and efforts to mediate an end to the war.
…
>Hard-liners in Tehran may draw the wrong lesson from surviving the current war, concluding that their resilience vindicates continued confrontation. An invasion is unlikely, and a regime collapse is not feasible. But the regime that emerges will be drastically different and will operate in a different regional environment. The new regime will be a far cry from the evolution toward pragmatism that many had hoped for, and from the hegemonic power that was uncontested five years ago.
>The analogy of postwar Iraq may seem imperfect at face value. Iran is larger, more populous and more ethnically complex, and it faces no imminent ground invasion designed for regime change. The Islamic Republic has demonstrated greater ideological resilience than Baathist Iraq. But the underlying logic remains that wars weaken embattled regimes in ways that only fully manifest over time, and immediate postwar survival can obscure deep vulnerabilities.
>The postwar period will likely be marked by a particular kind of persistent instability. The regime will find itself having to manage at least four simultaneous crises, but without the old tools: a security apparatus fraying or transforming at the top, an economy strangled from the outside, Israeli strikes becoming the new norm and a severely degraded proxy network.
>The Third Gulf War has no clear ending and may simply, like its predecessors, hollow out what it cannot topple.
!ping MIDDLE-EAST
Is it not a little early to be writing post mortems on the war? The political environment is going to depend on what settlement is reached