The central illusion of any war that begins with missiles and airstrikes is the belief that technological superiority will somehow translate automatically into political victory. History has almost always exposed that logic as false. You can destroy depots, command centers, airfields, bridges, power grids, and oil infrastructure. Breaking a state as a political organism is far harder. Forcing a regime like Iran’s to fall through airpower alone is close to impossible.
That is the hard reality now confronting the United States and Israel in their war against Iran. Four weeks into the campaign, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: even with deep penetration into Iranian airspace, even with punishing strikes on military and energy targets, even with the elimination of part of the senior leadership, the structure of the Islamic Republic has not collapsed. If anything, it has revealed the defining trait of every ideologized, militarized system: an ability to rapidly regenerate its command structure and mobilize resources under external attack. Recent Western analysis points to the same conclusion. Iran’s current model of power did not splinter under bombardment; it shifted toward even tighter control by the security apparatus, above all the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The paradox is that the more intense the air campaign becomes, the weaker the original political objective starts to look if that objective is regime change. Air war can weaken, isolate, undermine, demoralize, and disorient. But it almost never substitutes for occupying territory, controlling administrative centers, dismantling the coercive apparatus, and physically pushing the ruling elite out of the machinery of government. Put simply, bombs can destroy infrastructure, but they do not create a new government.
That matters especially in Iran’s case. This is not a personalist dictatorship where the death of one leader automatically brings down the entire chain of command. Iran is a complex, multilayered, institutionally entrenched system in which ideology, intelligence services, Shiite influence networks, the Revolutionary Guards, the religious bureaucracy, and powerful economic clans are fused into a single mechanism. Even after the removal of key figures, that mechanism keeps functioning - new faces, same core. That is why the hope that a series of precision strikes could trigger the regime’s instant disintegration is not strategy. It is self-delusion.
American military history offers painfully clear lessons here. In Vietnam, massive bombing did not force North Vietnam to capitulate and did not produce a political break in Washington’s favor. In 1991, the destruction of the Iraqi army in Kuwait did not bring down Saddam Hussein. In fact, when Washington effectively encouraged Iraqis to rise up and then failed to back them in any meaningful way, the regime was able to drown the revolt in blood. In 2003, Saddam was toppled only because the air campaign was followed by a full-scale ground invasion and occupation. But even that “victory” produced years of destabilization, staggering human losses, and strategic exhaustion for the United States itself. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the wars launched by the United States after September 11 inflicted enormous civilian casualties and displaced millions, with Iraq standing as one of the most devastating episodes of that era.
That is exactly why the idea of “regime change from the air” looks even less realistic in Iran than it did in Iraq. Iran is several times larger than Iraq, vastly more difficult in terms of terrain, deeper in strategic depth, more densely mobilized ideologically at home, and more resilient in the structure of its security state. Even if one accepts estimates placing the Revolutionary Guards at roughly 200,000 personnel, the problem is not just the number. The problem is that this is not merely a military force. It is the regime’s skeleton - embedded in the economy, covert operations, internal repression, and external proxy networks. You cannot destroy a system like that from a distance.
That leads to the central strategic dead end. If the air campaign does not bring the regime down, then Washington and Tel Aviv are left with only three scenarios, and each is worse than the last.
The first is endless escalation. That means further destruction of Iran’s energy system, logistics, military industry, and urban infrastructure in the hope that, eventually, the system will crack. But that path all but guarantees a drawn-out war of attrition with no assurance of political success. Worse, every new wave of strikes expands Tehran’s room for retaliation - from missile attacks and sabotage to strikes on oil and gas infrastructure across the region.
The second is a bet on internal revolt. That too looks deeply doubtful. When a country comes under external attack, even a regime hated by part of the population gets the chance to recast itself as the sole defender of national sovereignty. In political sociology, this is the rally-around-the-flag effect. In the language of the Middle East, it means that outside bombing almost always helps the regime brand the opposition as collaborators of the enemy. In Iran, that dynamic is especially dangerous: public anger may exist, but under a rain of missiles it does not automatically turn into revolution. More often, it turns into fear, мобилизация, and harsher repression.
The third scenario is a ground operation. But that is both the least likely and the most dangerous. Even now, the United States is expanding its military presence in the region. Reuters has reported that additional Marines - around 2,500 troops, along with amphibious assets - have been moved into the crisis zone, while the Associated Press has reported additional forces on amphibious ships, with the overall American footprint in the region estimated at more than 50,000 personnel. But moving Marines into place does not in itself signal readiness for invasion. It points more to the creation of a reserve force for limited operations, base defense, evacuations, control of sea lanes, or a show of force. A full-scale occupation war against Iran would require resources and political will comparable not to Iraq in 2003, but to something far larger and far riskier.
And that is where the real danger lies: a war that cannot be won quickly begins to operate by the logic of escalation inertia. First comes a strike on a military target. Then on the energy sector. Then the adversary hits regional infrastructure in response. Then comes the question of protecting maritime routes. Then third countries, allies, oil monarchies, and international coalitions start getting pulled in. What was sold yesterday as a “limited operation” now threatens to metastasize into a multilayered regional crisis with global economic consequences.
All you have to do is look at the Strait of Hormuz. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day passed through it in 2024 - about one-fifth of global liquid-fuels consumption. In February 2026, the International Energy Agency framed its importance even more starkly: around 20 million barrels a day, roughly a quarter of global seaborne oil trade, and nearly a fifth of global LNG trade. Reuters and other outlets have already reported that the current war has caused severe disruptions to traffic through Hormuz, and Bahrain has even submitted a draft U.N. Security Council resolution calling for the protection of shipping by “all necessary means.” This is no longer a local war. It is a direct strike at one of the main arteries of the global economy.
And the fallout is no longer measured only in battlefield updates, but in prices, supply chains, inflation, and market panic. On March 23–24, Reuters reported that amid the war and the threat of further escalation, Brent surged above $110 a barrel and WTI moved close to $100 - only to tumble more than 10 percent in a single day on nothing more than U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks about a pause and the possibility of diplomacy. That kind of volatility speaks for itself. The market is not reacting to any real stabilization, but to every jittery political signal. Goldman Sachs has already raised its average Brent forecast for 2026 to $85 a barrel and, in a stress scenario, said prices could spike to $135. The meaning is plain: even if this war never turns into a full-scale invasion, it has already become a source of long-term risk premium for the entire global economy.
The International Energy Agency paints an even darker picture. By its current estimates, the world has already lost 11 million barrels of oil a day, while disruptions in the gas market have reached 140 billion cubic meters. The agency has already taken part in an unprecedented release of 400 million barrels from the strategic reserves of member countries, and Japan confirmed just this week that it is launching additional stock releases, including both government-held and jointly managed reserves. In other words, the war against Iran has already broken out of the military sphere and struck at globalization’s most sensitive nerve: energy predictability.
But even that does not capture the full scope of the problem. When an air war drags on, it almost always strengthens the radicals on both sides of the front. In Iran, it empowers those who have long argued that any compromise with the West amounts to strategic suicide. In Israel and the United States, it intensifies pressure from advocates of even harsher measures. The result is that the space for diplomacy does not widen; it contracts. The regime that was supposed to be weakened may emerge from the war more militarized, more sealed off, and more repressive than it was before. That is the central paradox of a force-based campaign with no clear political endgame: it does not solve the problem, it mutates it into something even more dangerous.
That is why any talk of “victory” in a war like this demands intellectual honesty. What, exactly, counts as victory? Destroying part of the nuclear infrastructure? Weakening the missile program? Temporarily reducing Iran’s export capacity? All of that is possible. But if the stated - or implied - goal is regime change, then absent a massive ground operation, it looks unattainable. And if such an operation is out of reach, then air war becomes what it so often does: an expensive, destructive, and increasingly uncontrollable political process.
The United States and Israel are now confronting not only Iran, but the deeper limit of their own strategy. That limit is the inability to substitute technology for politics. Aircraft, missiles, drones, cyberoperations, and long-range strikes can tear apart the fabric of a state. What they cannot do, on their own, is create a new legitimacy to replace it. And where no new legitimacy exists, the result is either chaos, or a harsher regime, or an endless war of attrition.
That is where this conflict is heading. Not toward a quick resolution, not toward a surgical victory, and not toward any dramatic finale, but toward the far more dangerous scenario of a prolonged positional standoff in which every new strike does not bring a solution closer, but widens the scale of the catastrophe. That is the real conclusion here: U.S. and Israeli airpower may be formidable, but its political omnipotence is a myth. And the longer that myth continues to shape strategy, the more costly the collision with reality will be for the world.