The most dangerous moment for a dominant power comes when it considers continuing a war necessary to vindicate the decision to begin it. At that point, every inadequate outcome can become an argument for a larger attack. Past costs raise the demand for victory, even as the conditions for achieving it grow more difficult. America is approaching such a point in its confrontation with Iran: a war intended to demonstrate its capacity to exercise power has become a test of that power’s credibility.
The Atlantic’s report of 22 October offers a clear account of this calculation. Drawing on conversations with officials and people familiar with the discussions, it describes a belief in US President Donald Trump’s circle that economic pressure has brought Iran to the brink and that another round of strikes could make regime change possible. The same report stresses that no final decision to resume attacks has been taken. What has returned is the expectation that one additional application of pressure will deliver a decisive result.
That expectation is a new expression of an old error: the assumption that an enemy’s vulnerability guarantees that its behaviour can be managed. Iran can suffer damage without accepting the political outcome its attacker seeks. The distance between these two possibilities is where military action becomes a hegemonic gamble.
Understanding this gamble requires attention to the function of a “manageable enemy”. In this calculation, the presence of a familiar adversary helps organise alliances, justify a military presence and establish the need for protection. Such an enemy’s value to the dominant power depends on the expectation that the scale of the threat, the costs of confrontation and the terms on which it ends can be controlled. In this picture, Iran is important enough for a confrontation with it to carry regional significance, yet is imagined to be sufficiently vulnerable that it cannot alter the rules of engagement.
The account of protection and obedience offered by Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and political theorist, helps clarify this relationship. In his analysis, the protecting power plays a role in determining the enemy and shaping political allegiance. Extending this argument to America’s regional order suggests that a claim to security leadership rests on the expectation that the leader can provide protection and contain danger. “Manageable enemy” is this essay’s own formulation; what it draws from Schmitt is the relationship between the promise of protection and political authority.
The difficulty begins when confronting the enemy makes the promised security more costly. Allies that rely on American protection also become exposed to the consequences of American policy. If military operations produce prolonged insecurity, economic disruption and the prospect of retaliation, the capacity to destroy remains intact, but the claim to control the crisis’s outcome comes into question. Hegemonic authority erodes in the gap between the two.
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The experience of Iraq should have made Washington more alert to this gap. The fall of Saddam Hussein’s government did not resolve the problem of establishing a stable order favourable to the United States. In Iran’s case, even the conversion of military strikes into political collapse has encountered serious obstacles. Institutional plurality, sources of national attachment and experience of governing under pressure make it difficult to move automatically from eliminating individuals to disabling the system. A government can grow weaker while retaining the capacity to make decisions and resist.
The 12-day war of June 2025 and the US-Israeli campaign that began on 28 February, 2026 exposed this problem on different scales. Iran’s losses have been real. Yet the outcome those losses were supposed to produce – acceptance of a future determined by Washington and Tel Aviv – remains contested. The continuation of negotiations, threats and pressure itself demonstrates that military superiority has yet to produce the intended political conclusion.
A Reuters report of 27 August records the distance between the initial expectation and the resulting situation. Trump had spoken of a campaign lasting four to five weeks, yet six months later the United States was caught between increasing the pressure and finding a face-saving exit. That distance matters for understanding the next decision, because a protracted war can change what ending it means to the power that began it.
This is where the hegemonic gamble takes shape. Once a president ties his credibility to forcing Iran to retreat, an agreement that recognises Iran’s continuing freedom of action may appear to him as an admission of failure. Concern for personal credibility then becomes entangled with concern for the credibility of American threats and the confidence of allies. A specific conflict comes to bear the burden of vindicating a much broader claim to power.
This does not mean that ending the war would automatically bring down American hegemony. The danger lies in how the war’s end is interpreted. If Washington regards Tehran’s overt submission as the only acceptable outcome, it narrows its own access to exits that could preserve American power and resources. Under these conditions, a third round of major strikes can be presented as an opportunity to repair the credibility damaged by the first two.
The promise is similar each time: this will be the final application of pressure. Yet if the expected political response fails to materialise, further pressure is demanded to justify what came before. Even a desire to concentrate on larger rivals will not necessarily interrupt this cycle. A leader who has defined withdrawal from a conflict as defeat may deepen his commitment in an attempt to escape it.
Iran, meanwhile, does not remain the static target it was at the beginning of the confrontation. The experience of attack changes its perception of threats and the ways it preserves the functions of government. Replacing commanders, sustaining decision-making and drawing on different means of imposing costs are elements of an adaptive capacity that assessments based solely on the number of targets destroyed tend to overlook.
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Adaptation to war, however, should not be confused with immunity from it. Organisational survival can coexist with social exhaustion, damaged infrastructure and dwindling resources. Experience teaches both sides, and the attacker can also change its methods. The argument about the difficulty of an American political victory must therefore remain grounded in the problem of converting destruction into compliance. No past experience guarantees the failure of the next round of strikes.
For Tehran, this presents a more difficult problem. The ability to endure a war does not necessarily prevent the next one from beginning. Iran may be able to deny its enemy an easy victory while still facing repeated cycles of attack, reconstruction and renewed threats. Each instance of survival imposes a further cost on society and leaves the question of future security unresolved.
Viewed in this light, a condition of neither war nor peace can gradually become intolerable. If a ceasefire is accompanied by continued economic pressure and the enduring possibility of attack, reconstruction remains vulnerable to renewed interruption. The state plans for the future, but the viability of those plans depends on its enemy’s next decision. Under these conditions, the problem of deterrence extends beyond absorbing the costs of one war to preventing its recurrence.
This is where the continuation of America’s gamble could alter Iran’s nuclear calculations. If Iranian decision-makers conclude that their existing instruments raise the costs of war without preventing its recurrence, the argument advanced by advocates of nuclear weapons gains strength. They can contend that escaping the cycle of attacks requires a different form of deterrence.
Signs of this debate are already visible. An excerpt from a Financial Times report, reproduced by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on 20 October, describes growing calls among some hardline politicians, parliamentarians and analysts to abandon opposition to nuclear weapons and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The report indicates a shift within part of the political debate; it does not establish that the government has taken an official decision.
If a third round of strikes also fails to produce a dependable political settlement, that argument could become stronger. For advocates of a change in nuclear policy, the latest experience would provide further evidence that a temporary halt to bombing does not secure the future. In that case, acquiring a weapon could be proposed as a means of preventing a fourth round, although there would be no guarantee that it would achieve that objective.
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A considerable distance separates this calculation from its realisation. A stronger incentive, a political decision, practical capability and a reliable deterrent are distinct stages. A Reuters report of 7 October emphasises the severe damage to facilities and the uncertainty surrounding the state of the nuclear programme. That uncertainty prevents us from treating the path to a weapon as straightforward or inevitable. An attempt to follow that path could itself increase the risk of further attacks.
Despite these limitations, the contradiction within the policy of pressure remains: operations justified as a means of preventing the weaponisation of Iran’s nuclear programme may increase the political influence of those advocating precisely that choice. Destroying capacity and strengthening incentives can happen simultaneously. Short-term military success does not, by itself, answer the long-term problem of non-proliferation.
Israel also has agency in this process. Its government may regard the rebuilding of Iran’s capabilities as a threat that must be contained again. But the United States must reckon with a wider set of consequences: the security of regional partners, economic costs and the ability to bring the conflict to an end. Treating these two sets of objectives as identical risks turning every stage of Iranian recovery into a fresh demand for American intervention.
A way out depends on changing the conditions that both sides use to justify the next round. Verifiable limits on the nuclear programme must be linked to a credible reduction in the risk of attack and a genuine opportunity for reconstruction. An agreement that offers Tehran only the promise of a pause will not weaken the argument of those advocating nuclear deterrence. Accepting that Iran has a viable economic and security future, by contrast, could change the basis of the calculation.
To preserve its power, America must be able to distinguish between ending an unsuccessful war and surrendering its global position. Insisting that only Iran’s submission can preserve American credibility is precisely what binds that credibility to an increasingly costly outcome.
The danger of a third round is that Washington returns to war to prove that its enemy can be managed, while Tehran concludes from the recurrence of war that it must permanently change the costs of attacking it. In that event, the gamble to preserve hegemony could strengthen the very nuclear incentive that the war was supposed to eliminate.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
