When the Trump administration launched Operation Epic Fury back in late February, its expectation was that the fight against Iran would be quick and decisive. The precedent was Operation Midnight Hammer, the successful U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities the previous summer. That campaign was characterized by overwhelming force, devastating results and a significant setback for the Islamic Republic’s strategic capabilities.
Six months later, though, things look very different. Iran’s regime has proven a great deal more resilient than most people expected. In spite of sustained U.S. military pressure, it has survived (albeit in altered form) and tightened control at home.
It has also demonstrated that it still possesses meaningful tools with which to impose costs on its adversaries. The most significant of these has been the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s skillful weaponization of the waterway has succeeded in fundamentally changing the terms of the current confrontation.
At the start of the war, Washington’s objectives were expansive, and included dismantling Iran’s nuclear ambitions, degrading its missile capabilities and curbing Tehran’s support for its terror proxies across the Middle East. Today, however, the Trump administration’s immediate priority appears considerably narrower: simply ensuring the free flow of energy and commerce through one of the world’s most important maritime choke points. As of this writing, it’s far from clear that Washington and Tehran can even reach a durable accommodation over the Hormuz.
It’s less certain still that the United States will maintain the political attention, economic pressure and military posture necessary to fundamentally change Iranian behavior over the longer term. That, and the renewed tit-for-tat military strikes of recent days, means American policymakers need to start thinking differently about their Iran problem. For years, Washington’s Iran debate has tended to revolve around decisive outcomes—whether a nuclear agreement, a military strike, regime change or some new diplomatic bargain.
But what is now taking shape looks less like a crisis that can be definitively resolved and more like a sustained strategic competition that will need to be managed. This situation is not new. For more than four decades, the United States was locked in such a confrontation with another hostile ideological regime that sought to undermine American interests, expand its influence abroad and present its political system as an alternative to the liberal Western order.
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