Washington’s military campaign against Tehran failed to destroy nuclear infrastructure while consuming half of key missile stockpiles. Prolonging the conflict threatens energy markets and global deterrence, making a rapid diplomatic off-ramp the most effective path forward.
Military strategists in Washington now face a stark calculation as depleted missile stockpiles and rising energy prices shatter initial assumptions of victory. While policymakers debate whether to escalate or negotiate, learning how to Lose the Iran War without sacrificing regional stability has become a central strategic imperative. Accepting tactical setbacks to preserve long-term deterrence may allow the United States to absorb defeat on manageable terms rather than driving the nation into a prolonged, resource-draining stalemate.
Lose the Iran War Realities
Critics of the Trump administration rightly argue that the decision to go to war with Iran was a mistake. The primary stated objectives of the conflict—preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and eliminating its ability to project power outside its borders—have not been achieved. Little additional damage has been done to Iran’s nuclear program in this round of fighting, and Tehran retains 70 percent of its prewar missile capability.
What has been achieved, such as degrading Tehran’s manned air force and navy, is vastly outweighed by Iran’s newfound leverage over global energy markets and the depletion of Washington’s supply of advanced military munitions. The question now becomes what the optimal path forward is. Should the United States escalate to “finish the job,” as President Donald Trump recently suggested, or back down to limit the damage?
Leaders are often tempted to double down on a failing conflict because losing a war is painful. At the strategic level, there is widespread concern that backing down will undermine Washington’s future credibility and embolden adversaries such as China and Russia. At the political level, admitting defeat often dents a president’s approval rating.
President Joe Biden discovered this the hard way after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan triggered the collapse of the US-backed government. At the psychological level, humans are subject to the sunk-cost fallacy. Having already invested blood and treasure into a conflict—such as the 18 US servicemembers who tragically lost their lives in the fight against Iran—there is a natural tendency to prolong a failing war to honor those sacrifices.
For any of these reasons, Trump could decide to escalate the conflict rather than accept a suboptimal diplomatic agreement that entails significant concessions to Iran. However, this would be a mistake. The longer a doomed conflict drags on, the more lives, weapons, and political will it consumes. Rather than enhancing credibility and deterrence, continuing to fight can actually erode both. The United States did not emerge from the long and costly wars in Vietnam and Iraq with enhanced credibility.
It left war-weary, more cautious about using force, and less willing to bear future costs. An escalation against Iran, such as a major ground operation, might likewise produce the kind of war-weariness that would make Beijing and Moscow question Washington’s appetite for future costly interventions. It would also further drain America’s scarce military resources, undermining deterrence. Backing down preserves both Washington’s capability to act and its resolve to act in the future.
Navigating a Strategy to Lose the Iran War
Why US Escalation with Iran Won’t Work President Trump is fond of reminding everyone that “the United States has, by far, the strongest and most powerful military in the world.” He also admonished Ukraine by saying, “You don’t go into a war [against someone] that’s 15 times your size [like Russia].” These statements betray a belief that the strong defeat the weak. History, however, demonstrates the opposite often occurs.
To beat an adversary with greater military capabilities, the weak must have something their adversaries do not have—greater resolve. By being more willing to endure high costs over a long period, the weak can outlast the strong. The reason weaker actors won the Revolutionary War, the Vietnam War, and the Afghanistan War was not that they directly defeated their stronger adversaries on the battlefield, as the Allies did in World War II. Instead, they won by imposing costs on them for long enough that the stronger power decided to give up rather than continue the fight.
The key reason that continuing or escalating the air campaign against Iran is unlikely to work is that the balance of resolve favors the Islamic Republic. For the Iranian government, the stakes are high and implicate their power, wealth, and even lives.
For Washington, the stakes are real but limited. Iran’s regional activities before the war were malign, but imposed only small economic and security costs on Americans. Tehran’s nuclear program poses a serious potential threat, but can be dealt with via other means, including negotiation or nuclear deterrence.
The Iranian government will likely be willing to endure the costs of war far longer than the United States. Public support for the Iran War is historically low compared to prior conflicts, and Americans are not willing to pay a few extra dollars per gallon at the pump to prosecute it. A large-scale ground invasion might be able to achieve regime change given the Iranian regime’s broad unpopularity. Yet, there is little evidence that the American people and members of Congress would be willing to bear the high costs of such an escalation.
Despite notable tactical successes, the United States is the strategic loser of the conflict. Better to recognize that reality sooner rather than later.
What It Means to Lose the Iran War
The Virtues of Quick Defeats Leaders are often reluctant to end a war, even when it is clearly past its expiration date. The Johnson and Nixon administrations dragged out the Vietnam War unnecessarily, the Soviets stayed in Afghanistan far too long, and President Vladimir Putin may be making the same mistake in Ukraine. A wise statesman, by contrast, would realize that the speed of defeat matters. There are significant advantages to losing fast.
The first benefit of losing a war quickly is that it saves lives and preserves financial resources. In the years after Richard Nixon promised to pursue “peace with honor” in Vietnam, over 21,000 additional American soldiers were killed, and far larger numbers of Vietnamese people died. In the end, these sacrifices changed nothing. Saigon still fell to communism in 1975. Ending the war in 1969, when Nixon was elected, rather than in 1973 would have saved these lives and still led to the same substantive outcome.
Like Nixon in Vietnam, President Barack Obama doubled down and surged troops into Afghanistan. This cost hundreds of billions of dollars and led to more American soldiers and Afghan people dying. Kabul still fell to the Taliban in 2021. In Ukraine, the Russian government likewise continues to endure staggering casualties—up to 30,000 per month—in service of an offensive that has clearly stalled.
Admitting defeat and cutting their losses earlier rather than later could have saved Washington and Moscow these additional costs. The second benefit of losing faster rather than slower is that it preserves military capabilities for future conflicts. Ancient Athens’ disastrous military expedition to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War drained its supply of ships and soldiers, contributing to its ultimate loss to Sparta. Athens missed multiple opportunities to cut its losses and preserve military power for the larger fight against Sparta.
The United States has already expended huge percentages—up to half—of its advanced munitions like Patriot interceptors and Tomahawk missiles in just the first few months of war. The years it will likely take to replenish this stockpile will undermine deterrence in the short and medium term. America cannot deter rivals in Asia and Europe with weapons it no longer has to use itself or provide to allies. Indeed, Washington paused a $14 billion arms sale to Taipei to ensure it has enough munitions if the Iran War continues. Continuing and escalating the conflict against Iran would only worsen the problem.
Third and finally, getting out more rapidly can preserve both a country’s willingness to act in the future and its credibility in the eyes of adversaries. By clearly backing down, countries might take some hit to their credibility in the short term. Adversaries could interpret withdrawal as a negative sign of their resolve. However, this decline will often be outweighed by the benefits to credibility of maintaining military capabilities and, crucially, avoiding war-weariness.
After the long and costly Vietnam and Iraq Wars, a “syndrome” or pathology developed in the American psyche that held Washington should avoid getting involved in new foreign wars. This belief sapped America’s credibility and hampered deterrence.
Lessons from How to Lose the Iran War
The Vietnam War illustrates the dangers of persisting in a conflict too long. From the perspective of the conventional wisdom, the decision to fight for almost 10 years at tremendous cost for a place of little direct strategic significance should have been an incredibly strong signal of American resolve. However, on the eve of the Gulf War, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein believed the United States was intensely casualty-averse and would be willing to bear few casualties to achieve its objectives.
Far from the 58,000 Americans that were sacrificed in Vietnam, Saddam told his advisors in private conversations that Washington would not even bear a fifth or a tenth of that number to liberate Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia. Saddam appeared to believe that the Vietnam War had eroded the US willingness to bear costs. General Wafiq Al-Samarrai, Iraq’s head of military intelligence during the Gulf War, said, “[Saddam] thought that America’s involvement in Vietnam had badly damaged its willingness to use military power.”
In accordance with this view, in an address to the American public on September 26, 1990, Saddam promised that going to war with Iraq would be like “repeating the Vietnam experience, only this time…more violent and more casualties.” Vietnam did not convince adversaries of American toughness—it made them doubt America would pay that price again.
If the mistake in Vietnam was staying too long, the virtue of America’s 1980s intervention in Lebanon was that it was short. Though much derided, President Ronald Reagan’s decision to withdraw US forces from Lebanon following the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing that killed 17 Americans was the correct decision.
The outcome of the Lebanese Civil War was not a vital US interest. Washington’s strategy to support the Lebanese government also became untenable after the collapse of the national army in 1984. Backing down may have moderately harmed America’s reputation, but the costs to credibility—to say nothing of lives and military resources—may very well have been higher if Reagan escalated and was drawn deeper into a complex and bloody internal conflict that lasted six more years.
Survey research I conducted on 100 UK parliamentarians provides additional evidence that there are strategic benefits to backing down. Respondents were divided into two groups. The first group read about a situation where a hypothetical country backed down from a prior conflict. The second group read about a hypothetical country that stood firm in a prior conflict, but displayed the same signs of war-weariness or “syndromes” that emerged after the Vietnam and Iraq Wars.
Subjects were then asked to estimate the likelihood that this country would stand firm or back down in a current dispute with London. The country that backed down in a prior dispute was actually viewed as more resolved by the parliamentarians. This experiment indicates that admitting defeat quickly, as in Lebanon, can sometimes enhance credibility compared to standing firm over an extended period, as in Vietnam.
If America Must Lose the Iran War
Toward a Realistic Peace with Iran By taking the United States to war against Iran, Trump fell victim to what Lawrence Freedman described as the “short-war fallacy: the conviction that military and technological advantages would allow a state to defeat an enemy with the speed, direction, and ruthlessness of an initial attack.”
Freedman is correct that this was a grave miscalculation and the decision to enter the war was ill-conceived. Worse still would be compounding the mistake by doubling down on a bad war rather than nipping it in the bud. To cut American losses, Trump will, unfortunately, need to make some painful concessions to Iran. This likely includes allowing Tehran to continue uranium enrichment at low levels (monitored by the IAEA) just like the Obama-era nuclear deal, and accepting that Iran will continue to produce missiles, associate with terrorist groups like Hezbollah, and maintain some degree of control over the Strait of Hormuz.
The now-defunct memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran was lambasted by critics as “an American surrender,” with Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, arguing it “smacks of appeasement.” However, it reflected a new geopolitical reality: Iran’s enhanced bargaining position. It is now up to Trump to have the political courage to accept this reality and follow through on the promise he made in his second inaugural address in 2025: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also the wars that we end.”