To avoid strategic failure, US-Israel must escalate: close Strait to Iranian oil, attack energy infrastructure, and target civil systems. Escalation dominance—not limited war—is the only way to coerce Tehran. Trump must decide: containment or regime change. The price of indecision is tactical victory but strategic defeat. Only overwhelming force can win.
Despite a dazzling military onslaught, an Iranian regime that faces a threat to its very existence is demonstrating an entirely predictable willingness to stay the course at all costs. Its seemingly self-defeating strategy of attacking all of its Gulf neighbors — including the United Arab Emirates, with which it has had the closest commercial relationship, and even Oman, the heretofore mediator in Iran’s talks with the United States — has increased their animosity toward the Islamic Republic, a long-term loss. That nearly indiscriminate Iranian strategy has, however, had the even greater short-term advantage of disrupting the global oil and financial markets, thereby creating mounting domestic, regional, and international pressure on US President Donald Trump to end the war rapidly, before achieving American objectives.
As things stand now, the joint US-Israeli war risks ending in military victory but becoming a strategic failure. For Iran’s regime, merely surviving an armed conflict with the US constitutes victory. If it further succeeds in preserving its remaining nuclear capabilities, including the 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (sufficient for 10 bombs) still buried in the rubble of the June 2025 war, and at least some missile capabilities, which it will surely rebuild rapidly in the post-war period, this will be the icing on the cake.
Snatching strategic defeat from the jaws of tactical victory
For 30 years Israel dreamed of a scenario in which the US might go to war with Iran, with the minimal objective of removing the existential threat posed by its nuclear program, and ideally to topple the regime. Now that this scenario has emerged, a failure to achieve both of these objectives would be a significant strategic setback for the US and carry dire ramifications for Israel.
There are a number of options.
Doubling down on decimating Iran’s military capabilities
First, the US and Israel can stay on the current course and further degrade Iran’s military capabilities, an important strategic objective in its own right, but without regime change or even any realistic expectation of a significant modification in regime behavior. Time, however, has become a critical factor; and the aforementioned pressures to rapidly end the war without having fully achieved their objectives may soon become overwhelming.
Declaring victory and unilaterally stopping the war
Second, Trump can simply declare victory and end the war. This option is contingent on Iran’s willingness to adhere to a formal or informal cease-fire — not a foregone conclusion, but highly likely given the price Iran has paid so far and the costs of the alternatives. Moreover, Iran will surely also declare victory in this scenario and believe, not without some justification, that this is indeed the case.
Having set out far-reaching objectives, including at times regime change, this option would be politically problematic for Trump, but he can seek to spin events as needed and move on. For the US, this would mean a painful blow to its deterrence and international standing, but cutting its losses may be the preferable option. For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this would be even more difficult politically, particularly since a successful outcome may be his final opportunity to stave off looming electoral defeat. For Israel, should the war prove to be merely another in an ongoing series of rounds with Iran and its proxies, rather than the decisive one, the ramifications would be far worse. Although the US may conduct targeted attacks against Iran’s nuclear program in the future, should the latter move to weaponization, it is unlikely to go to war against Iran once again to achieve broader goals, chiefly regime change — or certainly not anytime soon.
Ramping up the pressure for talks through continued military strikes
Third, the US can continue military operations as a means of pressuring Iran to return to the negotiating table and achieving a new diplomatic agreement, one which imposes some restrictions on its nuclear program, but probably little more. To the extent that Iran may have been amenable to this in the days before and after the war first broke out, a questionable assumption, it is less likely to be so now, following the failure of the pre-war talks, and when it senses both a possible near-term failure of American resolve and an end to the war on its own terms. With the hardliners apparently still in control in Tehran, including opponents of the 2015 nuclear deal with the US, the prospects of a new deal, let alone one Trump can present as a better one, are questionable.
Escalation dominance: The best worst option
The three abovementioned options all lead to short-term military success but, ultimately, strategic failure. A fourth option does not guarantee strategic success but may at least increase its prospects. It is based on the unhappy assumption that limited wars rarely succeed and that if force is to be used, it must be overwhelming and designed to achieve escalation dominance and win, not to achieve compromise outcomes from the outset. Despite the US-Israeli onslaught, it is Iran that currently assumes it can stay the course and has achieved escalation dominance. It believes it has done so both by closing the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping — while its own oil exports continue unimpeded — and by attacking the Arab Gulf countries’ energy sectors and civil infrastructure, thereby creating domestic, regional, and international pressure on the US to end the war.
To achieve escalation dominance, whether to coerce Iran into accepting a more favorable diplomatic deal, dictate the terms of the cease-fire when Trump decides to declare the war over, or increase the prospects of achieving further military success, the US and Israel would have to up the ante and further escalate. No country stands to lose more from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz than Iran itself, whose economy is almost entirely dependent on oil exports shipped through this maritime chokepoint; if Hormuz is closed to international shipping, it must be closed to Iran’s as well, a readily attainable military objective.
A further means of achieving escalation dominance would be through phased attacks on Iran’s oil and natural gas infrastructure. This may have now begun with last week’s US strike on Kharg Island, from which virtually all of Iran’s oil is exported, but it appears to have focused just on the island’s military defenses, not the oil infrastructure, and to have been primarily a signaling operation. With the exception of an earlier Israeli strike on a storage depot used for Iranian domestic consumption, not oil exports, both the US and Israel had refrained from attacking Iran’s energy infrastructure, because of the risk that it would respond by closing the Strait and attacking the Gulf states’ oil infrastructure and beyond. Once Tehran had repeatedly violated this red line, further restraint became counter-productive. This option entails a willingness to tolerate further Iranian attacks against the Gulf states and spikes in oil prices, but this is a near certainty in any event, unless the US capitulates.
Still a further step up the escalatory ladder would be to begin attacks on Iran’s civil infrastructure, including power, communications, financial, and transportation systems, and potentially other sectors as well. The US and Israel have so far refrained from doing so, primarily out of concern that this might cause a rallying around the flag effect, turn the Iranian public against them, and hamper the prospects of regime change. Some such attacks might prove necessary, however, in a final play for escalation dominance, should the already ongoing effort to weaken the regime and create a possible opening for the people to take to the streets by steadily destroying the regime’s instruments of repression — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the paramilitary militia Organization for Mobilization of the Oppressed (Basij), Iranian police, and other capabilities — prove insufficient to the task. Actual regime targets (for example, the parliament building) and other pillars of the ruling establishment, such as its means of communicating with the public (TV, radio, internet), might also be attacked. A broad cyber campaign would be a part of this next phase as well.
Setting the objectives
Before any of this happens, Trump must decide what he truly seeks to achieve: just downgrading Iran’s capabilities and containing regime behavior, or actually effecting regime change. Different objectives entail different options and require varying degrees of American staying power. Netanyahu cannot afford to cross Trump and as much as he might wish to continue the war, both for substantive strategic and personal political reasons, will go along with whatever Trump decides.
US-Israeli military and strategic cooperation have never been so close, Israel’s standing in the US never so low. Given the war’s unpopularity in American public opinion, a further casualty of the conflict — and one that Israel can ill-afford — will be a significant hit to the bilateral relationship. This is amplified by the growing but unsubstantiated claims that it was Netanyahu who led Trump into the fight; there is no doubt that he has long hoped that the US would ultimately go to war with Iran, but in the weeks before the conflict broke out, it was Netanyahu who reportedly put the brakes on and pushed Trump to wait until both countries were better prepared. Indeed, Israel will have to weigh whether whatever gains were achieved vis-à-vis Iran were worth the price to its relationship with the US.