Foreign Affairs - Iran and the Forever War Trap - In Trying to Avoid a Quagmire, America Found a Dead End - Lawrence D. Freedman - May 27, 2026

 Foreign  Affairs

Iran and the Forever War Trap

In Trying to Avoid a Quagmire, America Found a Dead End

Lawrence D. Freedman

May 27, 2026

A U.S. Tomahawk missile at an undisclosed location, March 2026

U.S. Navy Photo

LAWRENCE D. FREEDMAN is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of On Strategists and Strategy: Collected Essays 2014–2024 and a co-author of the Substack Comment Is Freed.

For years, U.S. President Donald Trump berated his predecessors for plunging the country into “forever wars” in the Middle East. His war on Iran may not last forever, but he is now finding it very hard to extricate the United States from a conflict that he has good reason to regret.

Over the weekend, Trump insisted that a deal to end the war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz was “largely negotiated” and nearly done. Iranian officials also suggested that they were close to agreeing to a memorandum of understanding with the United States that would stop fighting on all fronts and lift a U.S. naval blockade. The terms of this new agreement, however, were unclear and it seemed that the two sides remained far apart on important issues, likely including Iran’s willingness to make immediate concessions about its nuclear program. That uncertainty has now turned into doubt. On May 25, U.S. forces struck targets in the south of Iran, spurring Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to promise retaliation, with future negotiations and the ostensible cease-fire now in the balance.

Trump’s war on Iran has raised the haunting specters of interventions past. During congressional hearings in late April, U.S. Democratic Representative John Garamendi called the war a “quagmire” and a “political and economic disaster at every level.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded aggressively, mocking the idea that a two-month ⁠mission was a quagmire, before going on to accuse Garamendi of being defeatist and “handing propaganda to our enemies.”

Perhaps quagmire was not the best metaphor. It is so often associated with the Vietnam War, in which U.S. troops were bogged down for years. Iran is also not going to resemble one of the “forever wars” that followed the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan, in 2001, and Iraq, in 2003. Indeed, precisely because American leaders now fear such quagmires, they are reluctant to send significant ground forces into situations in which they may get stuck.

Instead, in the current Iran conflict, the United States is relying on missiles, airpower, and weapons systems enhanced by artificial intelligence. Fighting in this way, however, means that the application of military power can only ever be coercive, pressuring the enemy in the hope that it eventually complies with U.S. demands. The United States cannot simply take what it wants, as it did when it marched on Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein’s government. The Trump administration’s frustration today is that the Iranian regime is still refusing to comply—as further evidenced by the latest round of negotiations—and it is not obvious how Tehran can be compelled to give in. Hegseth’s bluster could not hide the fact that the core objectives of Operation Epic Fury—notably, effecting regime change and eradicating Iran’s nuclear program—had not been achieved. And with Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the overall situation was worse than it had been before the start of the operation.

Trump’s gambit may not turn out to be a long war, but it has already failed as a short war. Operation Epic Fury did not produce the sort of victory claimed by its leaders. In this respect, it shares some of the features of the wars I discussed in an essay in Foreign Affairs last year, in which I warned against 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. Great powers, I noted, “tend to assume that their significant military superiority will quickly overwhelm opponents.”

From the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to the bludgeoning U.S.-Israeli campaign on Iran this year, this strategy assumes that moving fast with tremendous force will incapacitate adversaries and achieve swift success on the battlefield. Artificial intelligence makes this possibility even more beguiling, as AI promises to allow even faster decision-making and execution in warfare. But as Russia discovered in Ukraine, wars do not often end so easily. The conflict with Iran shows that Washington has fallen prey to the short-war fallacy, focusing inordinately on the power of its means while losing sight of how to achieve its ends.

DEAD END

At a press conference on April 8, as a cease-fire took effect, Hegseth claimed that “Iran begged for this cease-fire” and that “Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield.” But that was palpably not the case. Iran has acted not as if it has been defeated but as if it has used the war to strengthen its position. As things stand nearly two months later, the operation has failed to achieve its stated political objectives, and it is not even clear how the resumption of military operations, which U.S. officials had threatened on several occasions in recent weeks before launching strikes on May 25, would improve matters.

Instead of the Iranian regime collapsing, it has been reinforced as the hard-liners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have used the war to tighten their hold over the country. The Strait of Hormuz, the vital sea corridor through which so much of the world’s oil passes, is now functionally closed. The only thing stopping Iran from taking full advantage of the strait is an American counter-blockade of ships using Iranian ports, all of which has added to the strain on the global economy. Leaving aside the awkward fact that Trump had claimed that the strikes against Iranian enrichment plants in June 2025 had “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear program, he now claims that the economic pain caused by this war is a price worth paying to deny Iran a nuclear weapon. Whether or not the American people agree, Trump’s problem is that he is in no better position to achieve this objective than he was before the war, when serious discussions regarding limits on Iran’s enrichment capacity were apparently underway.

To be sure, Iran is not in a great position itself. Just because the regime has shown resilience should not lead to inflated perceptions of its leverage. The country’s economy is a complete mess, the public’s basic needs can barely be met, and the regime is able to hold on to power only through cruel repression. The emergency of war has helped the regime consolidate its hold on the country, but it has had to absorb many blows and it remains unpopular. Its days may be numbered, even if its ultimate collapse takes years, not months.

The problem for Trump is that the longer the impasse continues the more the American public (never mind the rest of the world) will feel the inflationary consequences of the closure of the strait. Trump wants to move on, but to do so he desperately needs some short-term concessions from Iran to justify his having launched this war. Tehran is not inclined to offer those concessions; after all, this fight is existential for them, not for the Americans. That means that negotiations between Washington and Tehran will be shaped less by the balance of military power and more by the extent to which the belligerents can withstand very different forms of economic pain. That calculation bodes ill for the United States.

The conflict with Iran will likely not be a forever war of the kind that so haunts U.S. policymakers, simply because it has yet to draw in significant numbers of American boots on the ground. But in assuming that its superior firepower and technological capabilities would engineer a swift victory (and avoid repeating quagmires of the past), Washington walked into a dead end. It has succumbed to the short-war fallacy and now finds itself in an invidious position of its own making.

A CATALOGUE OF DESTRUCTION

The design and execution of Epic Fury confirms the extent to which the Pentagon was convinced that sheer power would win the United States a quick victory. When describing the campaign, Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have repeatedly cited the number of targets that Americans have hit and the speed with which they have done it. Speaking on April 9, Caine enumerated the scope of American accomplishments: 13,000 targets struck, 80 percent of Iran’s air defenses destroyed, 450 ballistic missile storage facilities and 800 one-way attack drone storage facilities hit, and more than 2,000 “command-and-control nodes” destroyed.

At the same press conference, Hegseth spoke as if this catalogue of destruction described a triumph. And perhaps it would have if all that had been expected of the operation was the degrading of Iran’s military capabilities, as well as the removal of many layers of Iranian political leadership. But the Trump administration clearly wanted much more.

Iran had prepared for the U.S.-Israeli onslaught. The regime might have been surprised at the extent of the assassination strikes on Iranian leaders, but it had succession plans in place. It turned off the Internet, and its forces of repression were ready to deal with any Iranians tempted to take to the streets to stir an insurrection. Iranian military commanders received orders to fire against not only Israel but also the Gulf allies of the United States and to make the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous for commercial shipping.

Iran may not have destroyed as many targets as did the United States and Israel, but in terms of political purpose, the Iranian strategy worked as well as the American one. The regime continued to function, it was able to keep firing missiles, and it created an international economic crisis. Because the Americans did not want a quagmire—and so were never going to send in large numbers of ground troops to ensure the toppling of the regime—Iran’s response was enough to secure a military draw with two more powerful adversaries.

The Trump administration has struggled to grasp the political logic of a situation in which a battered Iran still saw no need, to use Trump’s words, to “cry uncle.” At least in the short term, Iran can negotiate on its own terms. Its main vulnerability lies in its chronic economic problems and its disaffected population.

TACTICAL BRILLIANCE, STRATEGIC FAILURE

Great military power tempts its wielders into believing that they can end conflicts easily and to their advantage, but that rarely happens. Russia’s so-called special military operation to subjugate Ukraine demonstrated this point ably. For the United States, there is a further lesson. Its military planning has become geared to disorienting enemies with high-tempo and complex operations, striking numerous targets with great rapidity. Artificial intelligence has supercharged this approach, allowing militaries to reduce the time between the detection of a target and that target’s elimination and to strike numerous targets simultaneously. But the emphasis on speed and destruction has obscured another important element in any military strategy: how to secure the desired political consequences of any action.

The Trump administration made the familiar error of underestimating an opponent. U.S. officials assumed that Iran would be unable to cope with the initial strikes. They did not think through what might happen if the regime did not fold immediately, nor did they fully consider the range of options Iran had at its disposal to cause problems for the United States and its allies.

To be sure, Iran’s response to the much more limited June 2025 strikes had been circumspect and cautious. The Pentagon made the mistake of thinking that the Iranian regime would be similarly timid even when its very existence was threatened. Generations of U.S. military planners have known that if backed into a corner, Iran would try to close the Strait of Hormuz. The president was nevertheless persuaded that the possible closure of the strait would not be a problem because the war would be over quickly.

In this way, American tactical brilliance could not deliver strategic success. On occasion, a swift operation can achieve all that is desired. The U.S. raid into Caracas to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in January, at least aligned the means with limited ends. But that is much more difficult to achieve when the objectives are more ambitious.

American military thinking has enshrined the notion that hitting hard and fast will invariably lead to an enemy’s defeat and capitulation. That conviction has only been reinforced by AI. But the evidence of recent wars urges caution. The reluctance to use ground forces, especially against a significant opponent, means that even a battered enemy can resist and will be able to find ways to retaliate. And if the initial attacks fail to deliver, the fallback options will be unsatisfactory. They may not lead to a forever war, but they will require negotiating a way out with the adversary, demanding awkward compromises and not letting the more powerful state dictate terms. The lesson of Ukraine and Iran is that any leader who is offered a plan for a quick and easy victory should first ask, “How can you be so sure?” and then, “What happens if you are wrong?”