Brahma Chellaney, OPEN magazine

US President Donald Trump returned to office last year vowing to end “stupid wars.” Instead, he has delivered one of the most strategically self-defeating wars in modern American history. His war against Iran has not only failed but backfired on every front.

It has weakened American power, strengthened the very clerical regime it sought to crush and handed geostrategic advantages to US challenger China, all while eroding America’s international credibility and standing.

The Iran war has fundamentally altered global perceptions of American power. While the US and Israel succeeded in decapitating Iran’s leadership and degrading its military capabilities, the price was strategic overextension that has left the US looking diminished in the eyes of adversaries and, increasingly, among partners and non-aligned states.

At its core, the war exposed an uncomfortable reality: tactical success does not guarantee strategic victory. The US and Israel retain overwhelming military superiority, yet the conflict revealed clear limits on how that power can be converted into durable strategic outcomes when faced with sustained asymmetric resistance.

Unable to compete conventionally, Iran turned to low-cost but disruptive tools: drones, missiles, naval mines and proxy attacks across the region. By persistently threatening shipping and energy flows, Tehran demonstrated how disruption, rather than dominance, can shape the battlefield. Most consequentially, it leveraged its geographic advantage over the Strait of Hormuz, effectively choking one of the world’s most critical energy arteries.

In doing so, Iran ensured that even a tactically successful campaign against it imposed significant strategic costs on the US and its allies—destabilizing global energy markets, straining alliances and laying bare the limits of American coercive power.

Those alliance strains were not incidental. The war opened visible rifts between the US and its Western and regional partners over how to deal with Tehran, raising broader questions about Washington’s strategic judgment and reliability.

At the same time, the war diverted American military resources, political focus and logistical capacity away from the Indo-Pacific, undercutting Washington’s ability to sustain support for Ukraine and maintain credible deterrence against China, particularly in the Taiwan Strait.

As Joe Kent, who resigned as the top US counterterrorism official in protest against Trump’s Iran war, has put it, “Like all of our previous interventions in the Middle East, we are worse off after the war (not that this is over) than we were before. Wars in the Middle East are a series of lose-lose scenarios for us, the sooner we learn that, the better off we’ll be.”

Ultimately, the war underscored a deeper constraint: even overwhelming power cannot compel favourable outcomes against an adversary willing and able to impose retaliatory costs. What emerged was a display of raw power without resolution, dominance without control and escalation without a credible endgame.

Gamble Fails

The central illusion behind the war was never about capability. As the world’s foremost military power, the US could always devastate Iran from the air. That was never in doubt. The real question was whether unrelenting bombing raids could compel surrender from a state ideologically conditioned, strategically prepared for asymmetric conflict and historically accustomed to absorbing punishment.

Just eight months earlier, Iran had withstood devastating Israeli airstrikes on a wide range of targets as well as the U.S. destruction of its nuclear facilities with bunker-busting bombs.

Yet, Trump bet that joint US and Israeli force, layered on top of suffocating sanctions, would finally break Iran’s will. That bet has failed spectacularly. The US-Israeli war only hardened Iran’s resolve, showcasing its remarkable resilience in the face of ruthless attacks.

This was not a war of necessity. It was a war of choice, launched without any provocation, yet dressed up as deterrence. What began as “maximum pressure”—economic strangulation, covert operations and targeted killings—mutated into open conflict once the US and Israel abandoned the shadows for direct, sustained airstrikes.

Two grave miscalculations defined the campaign. The Trump administration badly underestimated Iran’s capacity to absorb devastating strikes and retaliate asymmetrically across a wide geography. At the same time, it grossly overestimated America’s ability to control escalation and insulate the global economy from blowback.

As the war continued without any sign of weakening Iran’s determination to fight back, Trump’s frustration and even desperation became increasingly apparent. This was apparent not just from Trump’s incendiary language but from his public threats to commit war crimes—from returning Iran to the Stone Age and destroying a “whole civilization.”

International humanitarian law is unequivocal. The Geneva Conventions, reinforced by Additional Protocol I, explicitly prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of civilian populations.

Yet, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked international law by targeting civilian infrastructure—from health and educational institutions to railway network and bridges—in an apparent effort to “break the will” of the civilian population in supporting the regime in Tehran. Even a desalination plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island was bombed on March 7, which led to a tit-for-tat exchange targeting water facilities.

The World Health Organization expressed “grave concern” over what it describes as a pattern of attacks on health infrastructure. At least 20 health institutions were confirmed as targeted or damaged, including the historic biomedical and vaccine research centre, Pasteur Institute of Iran, Shahid Mutahhari Hospital and Psychiatric Hospital, all in Tehran. Strikes also hit plants producing specialized medications for multiple sclerosis and cancer.

The bombing of premier institutions like the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the Iran University of Science and Technology, also in Tehran, and the Isfahan University of Technology appeared to be aimed at impeding the country’s scientific progress and R&D capacity.

Despite operating under heavy Western sanctions—and with its scientists often excluded from international collaborations—Iran has remained a scientific powerhouse, consistently punching above its weight in publication density and in high-tech niches such as nanotechnology, advanced physics and medical research. In terms of scientific output, Iran has often ranked first in the Islamic world. It is especially prominent in nanotechnology, where it frequently ranks among the top countries globally by volume.

Ultimately, despite Washington escalating US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s civilian and economic infrastructure, it was Trump who blinked first.

The White House effectively ghostwrote Pakistan’s public appeal for cessation of hostilities so that Trump’s climbdown would look less like a retreat and more like theatre. By leaning on his “favourite field marshal”—Pakistan’s de facto ruler—and the latter’s handpicked prime minister to “beg” for peace, Trump recast his ceasefire as magnanimity and statesmanship. In substance, it reflected a familiar reality, one that has earned him the acronym TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

America Emerges Weaker

Trump’s ceasefire took effect without regime change, without meaningful Iranian concessions and without enduring strategic gain for either of the two parties that initiated the conflict. Instead, the war entrenched Iran’s most hardline factions who gained ascendancy after serial targeted assassinations. The leadership that emerged from the US-Israeli decapitation strikes is more defiant and more uncompromising—politically strengthened by the very pressure meant to break it.

In effect, Trump rescued the theocratic Iranian regime from its own internal fragilities after launching a war to topple it. More significantly, instead of strengthening the US, the war weakened it.

Nowhere is this reversal more visible than in the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war, this critical artery of global energy flowed freely. After launching the war, Trump demanded “unconditional” freedom of navigation as a condition for de-escalation.

What is emerging instead is something very different: regulated passage under tacit Iranian oversight. Commercial shipping now moves through arrangements that implicitly acknowledge Tehran’s gatekeeping role.

Iran is determined to position itself to extract leverage—through inspections, coordination mechanisms and potentially transit fees—echoing Egypt’s stewardship of the Suez Canal.

A chokepoint once kept open by deterrence has been transformed into an instrument of Iranian leverage, thanks to Trump’s war. That shift will outlast Trump, haunting global shipping and leading energy importers like India, Japan and South Korea.

More broadly, the war demolished a longstanding assumption in American strategy: that the US can wage large-scale wars without suffering significant and sustained retaliation.

For more than seven decades after the Korean War (1950-53), the American way of war relied on an effective targeting logic: strike adversaries that lack the capacity to impose serious costs on America’s homeland or its forward military bases. From Vietnam to Iraq, the US suffered casualties and reputational damage, but not sustained, systematic retaliation against its critical regional infrastructure. Nor did its regional allies hosting American bases become targets of reprisal attacks.

The Iran war shattered that model.

Iran did not attempt to match US power symmetrically, platform for platform. It didn’t need to. It pursued disruption instead.

Over years of harsh US-led sanctions, Tehran invested in low-cost, high-impact systems that could be produced and launched in large numbers without a modern air force. Their purpose was not to win conventional battles but to impose costs in order to deny the US the ability to operate against Tehran freely and cheaply in Iran’s immediate neighbourhood

During the war, Iranian strikes rendered many of the 13 major US bases across the Persian Gulf region inoperable, inflicting significant damage despite advanced American air defences.

Swarms of inexpensive drones and missiles overwhelmed expensive interceptor systems, exposing the fundamental vulnerability of a US war model built on high-value, high-cost assets. Washington was forced to expend vastly more to defend against weapons that cost a fraction to build.

The asymmetry was not just tactical; it was economic. The US reportedly spent close to a billion dollars a day sustaining operations, depleting precision munitions and missile defence inventories at a pace that will take several years to fully rebuild. Iran, by contrast, relied on systems that were cheaper, scalable and easier to replenish.

This is the new logic of warfare: the advantage no longer lies solely with the technologically superior, but with the strategically adaptive.

It is a lesson that India, too, must learn, given its continued emphasis on imports of big-ticket weapon systems. India has consistently ranked among the world’s top importers of weapons, procuring $51.8 billion worth of arms from overseas in the period 2008-2025, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data.

The Iran war showed that in an era of asymmetric warfare, even a country that looks weak on paper can impose intolerable costs if it is determined, prepared and unconcerned about conventional victory. The US can still inflict immense devastation. What it can no longer do is dominate the escalation ladder or control the consequences.

The damage from Trump’s Iran adventure extends beyond the battlefield—into diplomacy, where credibility is everything.

Under Trump, US negotiations became instruments of deception rather than resolution. Talks were used as cover for military attack.

In June 2025, US-facilitated nuclear talks in Oman coincided with—and arguably covered for—Israel’s devastating aerial assaults on Iran, catching Tehran by complete surprise. And on February 28, 2026, just as renewed American negotiations with Tehran were reportedly making significant progress, with Oman acting as the key mediator, the US and Israel launched joint strikes aimed at “bombing Iran into submission.”

This pattern of using talks as camouflage for military action has not gone unnoticed abroad.

From Russia and China to the Global South, American diplomacy is now viewed with deep scepticism, if not outright suspicion. The perception has taken hold that negotiations are not pathways to resolving differences or disputes, but preludes to pressure—or worse, attack.

The record of bad-faith negotiations has led many in Moscow, as the Washington Post reported, to question the sincerity of the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts on the Ukraine conflict, with Russian officials now viewing US diplomacy through the lens of “dual-track” manipulation—offering talks while enabling or orchestrating escalation.

When a superpower treats diplomacy as strategic deception, it corrodes its own practical leverage. Once trust is broken, it is extraordinarily difficult to restore it. Why should adversaries place faith in US-led talks if the negotiating table doubles as a targeting mechanism?

At the same time, the Iran war exposed the erosion of US alliances.

Lacking a clear legal basis and broad international backing, the war left Washington geopolitically isolated. NATO allies distanced themselves. Key partners in Asia withheld support. Even states traditionally aligned with the US expressed unease.

Trump’s public berating of allies, especially those in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, only deepened the divide. Meanwhile, Gulf Arab states have been left to absorb both physical damage and reputational costs, having served as staging grounds and targets in a war that their own populations viewed as a disaster.

The net effect is a US more isolated, less trusted and more resented—not only in the Middle East but across much of the world. This could reduce Washington’s ability to build coalitions even when its cause is just.

Enduring Costs

The most economically disruptive war in decades has saddled the world with significant and enduring costs. It will take several years to fully repair the damage to energy infrastructure in the Gulf sheikhdoms and Iran.

If there is a clear geopolitical beneficiary of this debacle, it is China. Beijing did not need to act. It simply needed to wait.

With the US deeply entangled in Middle Eastern conflict yet again, China has gained space for its expansionism in the Indo-Pacific. While the US expended resources on a war with no clear gains, China conserved its strength while stepping up coercive pressure on Taiwan.

Following the Iran war, China’s push to pivot its energy imports away from vulnerable sea lanes toward overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, reducing reliance on chokepoints like Hormuz, has gained new urgency and validation.

Trump did not intend to advance China’s strategic position. But in practice, that is precisely what he has done, including helping expand yuan-denominated energy trade.

Even more troubling are the war’s implications for international norms. Strikes on water installations, universities, research institutions, health infrastructure and other civilian facilities have raised serious legal and ethical questions. Such targets fall under protected civilian categories in international humanitarian law.

When a superpower disregards the rules it helped craft in the past, it weakens the entire international system those rules sustain.

Finally, the war may have reshaped Iran’s long-term strategic calculus in the most dangerous way possible. A country that has endured repeated large-scale attacks is unlikely to conclude that restraint ensures security. Quite the opposite.

The lesson it will draw is that, unlike nuclear-armed states, non-nuclear states are vulnerable to external aggression. That logic, reinforced by experience, strengthens the case within Iran for pursuing a nuclear deterrent.

If a state already proficient in asymmetric warfare acquires a nuclear shield, it will mean the emergence of another Pakistan. But unlike Iran, which Washington has long targeted, the US, along with China, aided Pakistan’s covert nuclear-weapons programme. Both the US and China have also shielded Pakistan’s export of terrorism to its neighbours.

The ultimate paradox of Trump’s war is that in attempting to weaken Iran, it may have made it more dangerous.

The war’s legacy will not be the battlefield gains it delivered to the US and its partner Israel, but the structural damage it inflicted—on alliances and partnerships, on global energy and economic interests, and on the credibility of American power itself.