Table of Contents
Michael Rainsborough
Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.
Do you know the first rule of good strategic analysis? When a war begins: shut up.
Wars are theatres of chaos, noise, confusion and premature certainty. The temptation to declare victory, defeat or historical turning point within the first few hours or days is not analysis. It is posturing. Yet the modern media cycle, with its appetite for endless commentary and instant verdicts, cannot tolerate silence. The result is a steady stream of confident assertions, most of which will age badly.
The current conflict between the alliance of the United States and Israel and Iran has followed this pattern almost perfectly. Within days, it was announced that America was winning; America was losing; Iran is winning; Iran had been neutralised; Iran remained undeterred; Trump doesn’t have clear plan; he does have a clear plan; this was the start of a forever war; it wasn’t a forever war; the war is a catastrophe for the US; the war is a triumph for the US; that the war would soon be over; the war is over.
Obviously, these claims cannot be true simultaneously. Most of them will turn out not to be true at all.
Resisting the customary rush to instant judgement and adopting a more analytical frame of mind, what can we, discerning sceptics that we are, sensibly say six weeks into the war? Which claims survive contact with reality, and which are, for now, better treated as conjecture?
A pre-emptive war that was years in the making
The first thing we can say with certainty is that at the most basic level, this is a pre-emptive war – one launched to disrupt or forestall a perceived threat before it can fully materialise.
The Iranian regime has, since 1979, maintained a condition of sustained hostility towards both the United States and Israel. That hostility has not been rhetorical. It has taken the form of proxy warfare, missile development, regional destabilisation and, critically, the steady progression of a nuclear programme that, if completed, would place the regime in a far more secure strategic position.
This is not conjecture. Iran’s network of proxies – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen – has been used repeatedly to project force without triggering full-scale retaliation. Its missile arsenal, numbering in the thousands before the war, has been a central pillar of its deterrent strategy. The attainment of an independent nuclear capability, subject to intermittent agreements and violations, has remained the long-term strategic prize for Tehran.
From the perspective of Israel, the logic for action has been straightforward for years: strike before the shield is complete.
From the American perspective, the calculation is more complex, but not incomprehensible. A nuclear-armed Iran would not simply be another difficult state. It would be a regime insulated from coercion, much like North Korea, with the capacity to escalate under a nuclear umbrella. Iran could act more assertively through its regional proxies, raise the risks to US forces and partners in the Gulf and complicate any effort to contain its influence without courting a far wider confrontation.
Seen in this light, the present war is less a sudden rupture than the latest phase of a much longer contest. In a manner of speaking, the war did not begin in February 2026. It began from the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and has been conducted in various forms ever since.
Decapitation without collapse
So, what in strategic terms has actually been achieved so far?
On a tactical, military reading, the United States and Israel have been highly effective.
Within the first phase of operations, large portions of Iran’s air defence systems were destroyed. Key Revolutionary Guard facilities were struck. Missile launch sites and storage depots were targeted systematically. Satellite-enabled targeting and electronic warfare degraded Iran’s ability to coordinate a response. Air superiority was established rapidly.
These impressive results are not unusual. When the United States conducts concentrated air campaigns against regional powers, whether in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Serbia in 1999 or Libya in 2011, the initial military phase tends to be ruthlessly successful at suppressing the defences of adversaries.
But this raises the more important point: destruction is not the same as control.
Iran has not collapsed, yet. Its political system has been damaged but remains intact. Its leadership, though ravaged by targeted assassination, is not entirely dismantled. Its internal security apparatus continues to function in some fashion. And, crucially, it retains the capacity to strike back, albeit in a much reduced and more fragmented way.
For several weeks, Iran has been able to sustain a level of missile and drone attacks across the region, including against Israel – enough to show that ‘degradation’ is not the same as elimination of its capabilities. Notably, Iran has countered by striking energy infrastructure in the Gulf. Airspace in the region has been disrupted. Insurance costs for shipping have surged. The war has already had measurable economic effects.
This is the central feature of the conflict so far: a high level of military success for the US and Israel combined with limited political transformation.
The strait that still shapes the world
If there is a single point on the map that matters more than any other, it is the Strait of Hormuz.
Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes through it. Any sustained disruption to shipping in the strait sends immediate shockwaves through global markets.
Iran’s strategy has long relied, in part, on its ability to control access to the Strait of Hormuz. Thus, it does not need to prevail in a conventional war: it need only raise the cost of conflict to a level that becomes politically uncomfortable for its adversaries.
Early in the war, Iran signalled its willingness to threaten shipping transiting the strait. Some routes were temporarily suspended. Energy markets reacted badly, sending oil prices higher, threatening fuel shortages in some countries, and even a world recession.
However, here too the picture is more complex than the initial alarm suggested.
Europe remains vulnerable to fluctuations in the global oil market, but the United States is far less strategically vulnerable. Increased domestic energy production, diversification of supply and re-routing through alternative channels have mitigated the impact. Gulf states, far from breaking ranks, have continued largely to align with Washington and Tel Aviv, adjusting export routes where possible.
In other words, the ‘Hormuz lever’ still exists, but it has not produced the decisive leverage Iran might have hoped for.
Winning is not a military category
The question “Who is winning?” is asked constantly, and almost always answered badly.
Winning in war is not a matter of battlefield statistics. It is a function of objectives.
If the objective is to destroy Iran’s military capabilities, then the United States and Israel are winning.
If the objective is to overthrow the Iranian regime, then they are not… yet.
If the objective is to compel Iran into a more accommodating political posture, the answer remains unclear.
This is where much of the commentary goes wrong. It treats ‘winning’ as a visible condition rather than a defined endpoint which can also be subject to revision as a war progresses.
Strategy, at its most basic, requires a clear understanding of what success looks like. Without that, military action becomes open-ended. Goals expand, shift or dissolve altogether. Wars drift on.
The danger for the US is not military defeat. It is indefinite continuation without resolution. That is the potential quandary the US and Israel face, though at this point it is far from the “forever war” some critics rather hyperbolically claim it to be.
The ‘forever wars’ were defined by two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, not by a conflict barely six weeks old.
Regime change from the air – a familiar fantasy
Early rhetoric emanating from Washington suggested that regime change in Tehran was a possibility. President Trump himself claimed that regime change was even completed in the first stages of the war. This is a familiar idea, but an unreliable one.
Modern, precision directed air power can destroy infrastructure. It can kill leaders. It can degrade capabilities. What it cannot reliably do is disassemble a deeply embedded political system across a country of nearly 90 million people with complex internal structures.
Talk of ‘regime change’ turns on what one actually means by this phrase. Does it imply the overthrow of an existing order or its replacement with a more amenable ruling arrangement?
Regardless of how one answers that question, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that wholesale regime displacement from the air is rarely, if ever, achievable.
In Iraq, regime change required a full-scale ground invasion. In Libya, air power removed the leadership but left a fractured state. In Afghanistan, early air operations in 2001 helped remove the Taliban from power but didn’t spare the West years of grinding insurgency and ultimate political defeat.
Sir Keir Starmer’s remark, used as part of justification to keep the United Kingdom out of the war, that there can be no “regime change from the sky” is, for once, a statement that aligns with historical experience.
The more plausible objective, however, is not transformation but coercion: to weaken Iran sufficiently that it is forced to negotiate from a position of disadvantage.
That is a far more limited, and more achievable, goal.
Iran’s strategy: endure, extend, exploit
The Iranian regime’s position is weaker than it was before the war. But it is not without options.
Its strategy is unlikely to centre on decisive victory. Instead, it rests on three familiar principles:
- Endurance: survive the initial shock and maintain internal control
- Extension: widen the conflict indirectly through proxies and regional disruption
- Exploitation: increase economic and political costs for the United States and its allies
This is not a novel approach. It is, in many respects, the same logic that underpinned insurgent strategies in both Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The aim is not to defeat the opponent outright. It is to make continuation unattractive.
So far, Iran has had limited success in this regard. But the strategy does not require immediate results. It requires time.
Clarity of means, ambiguity of ends
The more interesting question is not why Israel acted. That logic has been consistent for years. It has been itching to get at Iran, especially its nuclear programme, for decades.
The question is why the United States chose to support and expand the operation.
The answer, almost certainly, does not lie in improvised decision-making or impulsiveness. The US defence establishment has been hashing out war plans against Iran for years under both Republican and Democrat administrations.
The pattern of American military actions under Donald Trump has been relatively consistent: limited, high-impact strikes designed to achieve specific objectives without long-term entanglement.
The killing of Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the elite Quds force, in 2020 followed this logic. So did operations against ISIS leadership. So did targeted strikes in Syria.
The current war is larger in scale, but it still bears the hallmarks of that approach: precision over occupation, coercion over reconstruction.
There is, notably, no indication of a large-scale ground invasion. No mobilisation for nation-building. No attempt to remake Iran politically in the American image.
Thus far, then, the operation against Iran is very unlikely to be a replay of Iraq in 2003. It is something narrower, yet, in its own way, more ambiguous.
A demonstration of power without a settlement
If one strips away the rhetoric, what the United States has achieved is a demonstration of civilisational power.
It has shown that it can penetrate Iranian airspace, dismantle key elements of its military infrastructure and impose significant costs in a short period of time.
This matters. Demonstrations of capability shape the calculations of allies and adversaries alike.
But, at the same time, demonstrations of power are not settlements or conclusive victories.
The central question remains unresolved: what political outcome is being sought, and how will it be secured?
Military pressure can create opportunities. It does not, by itself, define how those opportunities are used.
The war that expands by accident
One of the persistent risks in conflicts of this kind is not deliberate escalation, but incremental expansion.
A limited operation invites retaliation. Retaliation invites response. Each step can be justified in isolation. Taken together, they can produce a war that no one initially intended.
There are already signs of this dynamic. Strikes beyond initial target sets. Speculation about limited ground incursions. Increased involvement of regional actors.
None of this constitutes a full-scale escalation. But it reflects a familiar pattern: the gradual widening of the scope of hostilities in the absence of a fixed endpoint.
This is how manageable conflicts become difficult ones.
Noise, narrative and the collapse of analysis
One of the more striking features of the war has been the quality of commentary surrounding it.
Analysis has often been filtered through domestic political divisions in the United States. When Trump threatened the Iranian regime with the remark that a “whole civilisation will die tonight”, his statement was condemned as reckless and destabilising, even genocidal. When he then very shortly after announced a ceasefire, many of the same critics pivoted without apparent strain, recasting restraint as weakness, as backing down, and wheeling out the now-familiar “TACO” – Trump Always Chickens Out – line.
This is not analysis. It is projection.
Proper strategic assessment requires a degree of detachment from immediate political preferences. Without that, events are interpreted not on their own terms but as extensions of existing political frames and arguments.
The result is commentary that generates heat but very little light: energetic, insistent and almost entirely without insight.
What can actually be said
Six weeks into the war, the following points can, therefore, be stated with some confidence:
• The United States and Israel have achieved significant military success
• Iran’s capabilities have been degraded but not eliminated
• The Iranian regime remains intact
• Regional disruption has occurred but has not fundamentally altered the balance
• The strategic objective of the war remains only partially defined
Everything beyond this is, to varying degrees, supposition.
And that is the problem.
Wars do not end when one side runs out of targets. They end when a political outcome is secured.
At present, the United States has demonstrated that it can strike Iran with considerable effect. It has yet to demonstrate what it intends to do with that advantage.
There is no clear endpoint. No defined settlement. No visible mechanism for converting military success into a durable political arrangement.
That does not mean such a plan does not exist. It may simply not have been articulated or that it has yet to materialise, a possibility that may only come after further combat. But until it is, for the US the war remains suspended in a well-known condition: tactically effective, strategically incomplete.
And wars in that condition have a habit of continuing, not because they are being lost, but because no one has decided what winning is meant to be.
Blowing things up is the easy part. Turning force into a political outcome is harder.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
