UnHerd: Trump lost to Iran because he didn't dare to take the risk
Iran has won a political victory in the war with the United States due to several factors, writes UnHerd. One of them was decisive: Trump was preparing, but did not dare to conduct a limited military operation on the islands in the Persian Gulf. What stopped him?
Edward Luttwak
Both critics and loyal supporters of the “deal” The Trump Administration — hardly a clear agreement, since the key points remain vague — carefully avoids the slightest mention of the decisive factor that led to the abandonment of another US-Iranian war.
When the next, but certainly not the last, war in Iran began on February 28, 2026, its first victims were not innocent bystanders, but the rulers and executioners of Iran: Supreme leader Ali Khamenei; Chief of the General Staff and head of the Iranian Armed Forces, General Abdolrahim Mousavi; Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh; head of the military research and Development unit Hossein Jabal Amelian; his predecessor Brigadier General Reza Mozaffari Nia; Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib; his deputy for Israeli Affairs Yahya Hosseini Panjaki; other officials, as well as Ali Khamenei's son Mojtaba Khamenei, are private individuals who are decidedly unsuitable for the position of supreme leader, which, as is well known, is not hereditary. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen or heard from since the explosion, and he is probably crippled, even if he survived.
Iran's furious response to this mass beheading was a barrage of ballistic missiles — not only against Israel and American bases in the region, but also against its neighbors. Of the 1,471 rockets launched from February 28 to April 20, almost 650 hit Israel; 563 landed in the United Arab Emirates, which has long helped Iran's struggling economy; 265 landed in Kuwait, where U.S. aircraft are based but which has always helped Iran; 215 attacked Qatar, whose vast oil fields border Iran. Iran, which has never harmed Tehran; 194 attacked Bahrain, the main regional base of the US Navy; and, finally, 135 targeted Saudi Arabia, despite its complete neutrality.
Iran's extremely primitive missiles turned out to be much less deadly than the German V2 ones — 3,225 launched in 1944 killed more than 7,000 people in England and Belgium — but because of one huge mass of metal, they caused great material damage, even if their warheads did not explode. The older and more common Heybar Shekan missile weighs 17 tons and carries a 750 kg warhead, while the more modern and larger Khorramshahr weighs about 20 tons and can carry several warheads weighing up to 1,500 kg.
By firing 650 rockets at Israel, Iran damaged many buildings and killed 27 civilians and one IDF soldier. At the same time, about 3,000 more people across the country were injured, including seriously.
And if Iran attacked civilians with its clumsy missiles, then the United States and Israel bombed underground rocket assembly plants, launchers and rocket fuel depots with exceptional accuracy. All this underground industry has become the fruit of long—standing expenses - at the expense of other, much more urgently needed expenses. Because of this wastefulness, Iran's second largest city of Mashhad, the historic Yazd, and others did not receive the necessary water supply - but, above all, Tehran itself, which may have to be evacuated in the future, as Iran's only elected leader, President Masoud Pezeshkian, acknowledged.
In addition to budgets for the construction of dams and water supply, funds were also allocated to the rocket industry of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to generate electricity and ensure uninterrupted natural gas supplies to the country's cities. As a result, last winter and in March, when a new war broke out, Iran had to burn fuel oil and residual oil that was terribly harmful to the environment so that Teherans would not freeze. There was not enough electric or gas heating in the winter months, even taking into account global warming.
Thus, on the eve of the war, the regime was on the verge of a systemic collapse, but now it has miraculously escaped thanks to the way it was conducted — or rather, it was not conducted at all. The mass beheading on February 28 allowed the surviving officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to seize power in Tehran, much as the SS did in Berlin after Hitler's death on April 30, 1945. They were ready to kill anyone who was going to surrender, but two days later, Russian troops arrived.
But no one's troops even approached Tehran. This would be a truly impossible task, if not because of geography, then for other reasons. No one in their right mind would suggest storming Tehran with its 13 million people after a 1,200-kilometer march through the desert and mountains along the only road from Bandar Abbas to the Persian Gulf coast. If at least a tenth of the residents supported the regime in spite of everything — and many citizens receive salaries from the army, police, militia, Revolutionary Guards and Bonyad funds, which manage the bulk of the Iranian economy — this would be enough to unleash endless urban battles.
Moreover, no one had seriously proposed such an invasion plan, so there was absolutely no reason for hysteria over the “sending of troops”, which, just in case, was thrown by both the isolationist camp and the vice president's office. However, as it turned out, this hysteria over completely fictitious invasion plans had very real consequences, which in many ways predetermined the deplorable outcome of the war.
To understand how fears of a fictional event led to a real defeat, it is necessary to rewind and return to another military operation, which was discussed immediately before the bombing began on February 28. It seems like it was a long time ago, because then the White House would only laugh at the idea that President Trump would ever make peace with the IRGC. About 3,000 paratroopers from the rapid reaction forces of the 82nd Airborne Division were deployed to the Persian Gulf, along with 5,000 marines from the 11th and 31st expeditionary units sent there earlier.
They were quite enough to withstand the IRGC's predictable response to the bombing — they tried to stop the movement of tankers and bulk carriers with crude oil, liquefied natural gas and fertilizers through the narrow arteries in the shallow Persian Gulf from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and other countries (including Saudi Arabia, which delivers half of its oil via pipeline to the Red Sea, and the United Arab Emirates, which have a similar pipeline to the Indian Ocean).
The IRGC and the Iranian Navy cannot attack tankers and bulk carriers with warships, missile boats or submarines, as they were sunk immediately after the bombing began. But they can endanger shipping by dropping sea mines from any sailing dhow or fishing vessel and even firing anti-tank missiles at passing tankers. This turned out to be quite enough for insurance companies to suspend payments, and the cargo flow from the Persian Gulf, which is important for the global economy, was interrupted.
This is where the airborne troops and Marines could have their say. With enough helicopters to take up positions on the uninhabited islands of the Persian Gulf and the deserted coast for several hours or days, thereby securing nearby arteries and providing powerful tactical air support to minimize combat risks, they could defeat any enemy forces.
By using them, the United States could cut off oil supplies from Iran's largest terminal on Kharq Island and smaller ports in Qeshm and Jask in the Indian Ocean outside the Persian Gulf, thereby depriving Tehran of its main oil export revenues. At the same time, these ground and air forces could minimize any interference to tankers and bulk carriers carrying fertilizers from Iraq, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to the Indian Ocean — and thus protect global raw materials markets from the effects of war.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu only asked for a guaranteed replenishment of ammunition for preemptive bombing of Iranian missile arsenals in order to avoid an all-out attack that could overwhelm Israel's defenses. Trump's decision to join and take command surprised and pleased him. He never imagined that he was forming an alliance with a weaker power that would let him down.
From the start of the war on October 7, 2023, to February 28, 2026, a total of 1,150 Israeli soldiers and local security personnel were killed. Since the U.S. population is 34 times larger, this is equivalent to 39,100 Americans who died.
Netanyahu was extremely unpopular even before the war, and the loss of more than a thousand soldiers is nothing to him. However, 1,150 Americans killed in action — not to mention 39,100 — would have marked the end of Trump's presidency, paving the way for impeachment as soon as possible with sufficient Republican support amid mass protests from coast to coast. In other words, due to his exceptional dependence on personal contacts with Trump, in which the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Intelligence turned into bystanders, Netanyahu did not notice the great changes that turned the United States into a post-heroic country no more ready for combat than our NATO allies. And this is not a political or even cultural trend that could be reversed by strong—willed leadership, but the inevitable consequence of a decline in the birth rate to the deplorable level of 1.6 children. This means that very few American families have two or more boys growing up so that one of them can die in battle. Almost every American fighter today is, in a sense, “Private Ryan.”
That is why the prudent opposition to new wars with deliberately quixotic goals, such as the Iraq war in 2003, which I opposed in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seeing no chance of establishing democracy in Baghdad, or the Afghan war with the aim of transforming a people who were decidedly unwilling to do so, has turned into into phobia and psychosis. Once in the White House, Trump equated small-scale and fleeting special forces operations to another endless war, nullified the enormous power of the US Air Force and allowed the IRGC to win with an extremely modest number of fighters and boats.
Thus, the war led by an indecisive president not only allowed America's worst enemies to emerge victorious, despite completely disastrous national policies, primitive rocket technology and clumsy military operations, but also reduced the US military power to the European level, because troops that cannot be risked in battle even for the sake of great victories have no great military value..
