There is a particular kind of silence that follows a war’s opening salvos — the silence of think-tank papers being quietly archived, of cable-news predictions being scrubbed from the chyron, of confident assurances that “this time it will be different” colliding with the stubborn evidence that, in fact, it never is.
Twelve weeks into the Iran war, that silence is louder than the bombing.
Let’s review what the war’s supporters told us, because we owe ourselves the discipline of remembering.
We were told that the strikes would be surgical. We were told that a weakened Iran would prove brittle — that a regime battered by sanctions, decapitated of Hezbollah’s deterrent shield, and abandoned by a collapsed Assad in Damascus would fold under sufficient pressure.
We were told that the assassination of Ali Khamenei on February 28 would produce, if not a Persian spring, then at least a chastened Persian autumn.
We were told that the Strait of Hormuz could be kept open through American resolve. We were told that the Gulf monarchies, however ambivalent, would tacitly cheer. We were told that the Iranian street, given the right shove, would do the regime-changing for us.
Each of these assumptions, examined now, betrays the same structural flaw: the conflation of fragility with compliance. They are not the same thing. A wounded state is not a docile one.
A regime stripped of its founding charismatic figure does not necessarily liberalize — it may, as Iran’s Interim Leadership Council has demonstrated, harden, decentralize and become more difficult to negotiate with, not less. The hawks confused the absence of a single decision-maker with the absence of decision-making.
The second miscalculation was the theory of limited retaliation. Tehran, the argument ran, would calibrate its response to preserve regime survival. Iran would absorb the blows, lash out symbolically, and return to the table on terms more favorable to Washington and Jerusalem.
This was always a curious thing to believe about an adversary whose entire doctrine of strategic depth — the proxies, the missiles, the maritime harassment capacity — was built precisely to make limited war impossible.
We knew this. It was in every CENTCOM briefing for two decades. And yet when the moment arrived, planners assumed Tehran would behave like a rational actor inside a rationality defined in Washington rather than in Qom.
Iran has now struck American bases in Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq. The Houthis have closed the Bab el-Mandeb. The Strait of Hormuz functions intermittently, on Iranian sufferance. This was the predictable response. It was predicted.
The third miscalculation concerned the regional coalition. The architects of this war seem genuinely to have believed that the Abraham Accords had produced something more than a transactional arrangement — that the Gulf states’ quiet animosity toward Iran would translate into active alignment with an American war. It has not.
Riyadh allowed its airspace to be used and then, within forty-eight hours, was on the phone to Beijing. Pakistan, locked into its defense pact with the Saudis, has spent ten weeks performing a contortionist act, mediating ceasefires it cannot enforce while protecting equities it cannot reconcile. Turkey is hedging. The UAE intercepted Iranian missiles and simultaneously expanded its trade corridors with Tehran’s commercial partners.
This is not coalition warfare. This is a region trying not to be set on fire by its security guarantor.
The fourth miscalculation — and this is the one the war’s defenders will have the hardest time confronting — is the question of what victory was supposed to look like. Read the official justifications in sequence and you will notice that they shift:
- Degrade the nuclear program.
- Restore deterrence.
- Induce regime change.
- Reassert primacy.
These are not the same objective. They are not even compatible objectives. A war whose purposes multiply as its costs mount is a war whose architects did not know what they wanted before they began.
That is not a quibble. It is the central failure. Clausewitz had something to say about wars conducted without a clear political object, and none of it was flattering.
The fifth miscalculation concerned the American public. The supporters of the war assured themselves, and the rest of us, that the absence of large-scale ground commitments would keep this conflict politically manageable at home.
They are now discovering, as their predecessors discovered in 1965 and 1991 and 2003, that wars begun with airstrikes do not end with airstrikes — they end with body bags, blockades, fuel-price shocks and a citizenry that begins to ask, somewhat tardily, who exactly authorized this.
The naval blockade now in place, the failed Islamabad talks, the prospect of escalation through the Lebanese front: None of this was on the menu the country thought it was ordering.
I take no pleasure in any of this. The realist tradition does not enjoy being vindicated by catastrophe. It would have preferred to be ignored quietly and proven correct in some footnote no one read.
But it has been the recurring fate of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment to mistake the absence of immediate cost for the absence of cost altogether — to confuse the silence that precedes consequences with the absence of consequences. Iran’s restraint in 2024 and 2025 was read in Washington as weakness. It should have been read as patience.
The war’s defenders will, in time, produce the explanations they always produce. The plan was sound; the execution was flawed. The Iranians did not behave as they were supposed to. The allies were unreliable. The president pulled his punches. The American people lacked the resolve.
The lessons will be that next time we must be more committed, more unified, more willing to do what was, evidently, not done.
These are the lessons that get drawn when one is unwilling to learn the actual lesson, which is older and harder and was available the whole time: that the Middle East is not a problem to be solved by force from outside, that Iran is a country and not a target set, and that the gap between what American power can break and what it can build remains the central, unhealed fact of our post–Cold War foreign policy.
We were warned. The warnings are now history. What we do with the warnings still to come is the only question that matters.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
