The War That Exposed the End of American Power

NB – This article was written late in the evening of the 22nd March 2026. It is already out of date (23rd March). By the time it is published, it may be further out of date. That is the cost of writing commentary for a blog with a tight schedule of publications. However, the overall point – that war is becoming too expensive and uncertain for any rational great power – seems even more true than it was yesterday. [AB]

When the United States and Israel launched their attack on Iran, they were not simply initiating another Middle Eastern conflict. They were attempting to reassert a global order that had, in fact, already begun to disappear. For more than three decades, American power had rested on a simple and deeply internalized assumption: if Washington chose to destroy a state, that state would collapse. This assumption was not irrational. Iraq collapsed. Libya collapsed. Syria fractured into competing enclaves. Serbia yielded under sustained bombardment. Even Afghanistan—after two decades of war—ultimately ended in a hurried American withdrawal that still left the original regime’s opponents back in power, but only after enormous destruction had been inflicted.

From these experiences emerged a dangerous doctrine, shared in different ways by policymakers in Washington and strategists in Tel Aviv. Overwhelming force, particularly when delivered from the air and coordinated with precision targeting of leadership and infrastructure, could produce decisive political outcomes. States were treated as brittle structures: remove the leadership, shatter the central institutions, and the entire system would give way. It was a theory of war built on the assumption that modern states were far more fragile than they appeared.

The war with Iran has exposed the limits of that theory. Iran was not constructed like Iraq, nor governed like Libya, nor organized like Syria. Its military and political leadership had spent decades studying precisely the pattern of destruction that the United States had imposed on other countries. They understood that centralized systems die quickly under modern conditions of warfare. They understood that reliance on a single command structure, or a handful of critical nodes, invites decapitation. And so they built something very different.

Iran’s strategy was not designed to defeat the United States in a conventional sense. It was designed to ensure that the United States could not achieve a decisive victory. This distinction is crucial, and it appears to have been largely misunderstood in Washington.

Instead of concentrating power, Iran dispersed it. Instead of relying on a rigid hierarchy, it cultivated redundancy. Command authority was distributed across regional structures capable of operating independently. Missile systems were hidden, mobile, and often buried. Drone warfare—cheap, scalable, and difficult to neutralize—was prioritized. Naval strategy focused not on competing with the U.S. Navy ship-for-ship, but on exploiting geography: narrow waterways, constrained shipping routes, and the vulnerability of global supply chains.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply must pass, was not an afterthought in Iranian planning. It was central. It represented the point at which military inferiority could be converted into strategic leverage. Iran did not need to dominate the seas. It only needed to disrupt them. This is what has now occurred.

The American and Israeli assumption had been that a rapid campaign—targeting leadership, infrastructure, and military assets—would cripple Iran’s ability to respond. Instead, Iran absorbed the initial blows and shifted the conflict onto terrain where its advantages were greatest. Tankers were threatened or struck. Insurance markets reacted immediately. Energy prices surged. Global economic anxiety followed.

What Washington discovered, too late, is that while it retains the ability to destroy targets, it no longer possesses the ability to control the consequences of that destruction. And in modern war, consequences are often more important than battlefield outcomes.

For Israel, the implications are even more severe. Israeli military doctrine has always depended on speed, decisiveness, and overwhelming superiority. The country’s small size and limited manpower make prolonged wars inherently dangerous. Its entire deterrent posture rests on the belief that any conflict will be short and conclusively resolved in its favor.

That belief has now been badly shaken. The Gaza war had already demonstrated that Israel could not easily convert military dominance into political success. The campaign inflicted enormous destruction, but it failed to eliminate resistance or secure lasting control. Instead, it damaged Israel’s international standing and intensified regional hostility. The war with Iran goes further still. It reveals that even with direct American involvement, Israel cannot reliably impose its will on a major regional power.

Missile defenses—long considered a cornerstone of Israeli security—are under strain. Economic vulnerabilities have become more visible. The assumption that escalation will always produce submission is no longer credible. For a state whose security depends heavily on deterrence, this is not a temporary setback. It is a structural shift. What has collapsed, in effect, is the old playbook of Western intervention. For decades, the sequence was familiar: identify a hostile state, apply overwhelming force, destroy its leadership and infrastructure, and assume that political order would disintegrate. This model worked often enough to become doctrine.

But it no longer works reliably. Iran has demonstrated that a sufficiently prepared state can absorb the initial phases of such an attack and continue functioning. Once that happens, the entire logic of intervention begins to unravel. If the target does not collapse, then the attacker is left facing a prolonged conflict with uncertain outcomes and rising costs.

This is where the deeper historical significance of the war begins to emerge. The failure of overwhelming force does not automatically produce peace. It could just as easily produce chaos. But it also creates the conditions for a different kind of stability—one based not on dominance, but on mutual vulnerability.

The technological changes of recent years have reinforced this shift. Drones, precision-guided munitions, cyber capabilities, and decentralized command structures have dramatically lowered the cost of effective resistance. A state no longer needs a vast conventional military to impose serious costs on a more powerful adversary. It needs resilience, adaptability, and the ability to exploit the weak points of a globalized system. This creates a new strategic environment in which even relatively weaker countries can no longer be easily subdued.

For the first time in generations, the world may be entering an era in which large-scale wars of choice—wars launched to reshape regions or demonstrate power—become significantly less viable. Not impossible, but far more dangerous and far less predictable. This is not because great powers have become more restrained in principle. It is because they have become less confident in their ability to achieve decisive outcomes. And that may prove to be a blessing. If the cost of war rises high enough, if the risks of escalation become sufficiently unpredictable, then even aggressive states may begin to exercise caution. The incentive structure shifts. Diplomacy, which once appeared weak, becomes rational. Coexistence, once dismissed as naïve, becomes necessary.

The decline of American global dominance, and the corresponding exposure of Israeli strategic limits, therefore carries a paradoxical implication. What appears at first glance to be instability may, over time, produce a more durable form of equilibrium. It will not be a world without conflict, but a world in which conflict is harder to initiate and far more difficult to control. Trump and Netanyahu launched this war in the expectation that it would demonstrate strength. Instead, it has revealed constraint. It has shown that even the most powerful states must now contend with limits they can neither ignore nor easily overcome.

History suggests that such moments are rare and often fleeting. Periods in which great powers hesitate are usually temporary. But when they do occur, they shape the international system in lasting ways. If this war marks the beginning of such a period, then its ultimate significance will not lie in territorial gains or military statistics. It will lie in the quiet recalibration of expectations—in the growing recognition that power can no longer guarantee outcomes.

And in that recognition lies the possibility, however fragile, of a more restrained and less violent world.