Foreign & Public Diplomacy

With the announcement of a framework deal to end the war in Iran, the conventional wisdom taking hold is that the United States and Israel lost.

From this perspective, the tactical and operational successes that the U.S. and Israeli militaries achieved masked a deeper strategic defeat, with neither securing the political objectives cited to justify the war in the first place. The Iranian regime survived and emerged more hard-line, and it discovered a new, powerful negotiating chip in closing the Strait of Hormuz. The United States once again became embroiled in a costly Middle East conflict that damaged its credibility with partners, weakened deterrence with adversaries, and reduced readiness in the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, Israel’s efforts to advance normalization with Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states appear to have been further set back, and Israel has failed to eliminate the Iranian threat in the postwar regional order.

With the announcement of a framework deal to end the war in Iran, the conventional wisdom taking hold is that the United States and Israel lost.

From this perspective, the tactical and operational successes that the U.S. and Israeli militaries achieved masked a deeper strategic defeat, with neither securing the political objectives cited to justify the war in the first place. The Iranian regime survived and emerged more hard-line, and it discovered a new, powerful negotiating chip in closing the Strait of Hormuz. The United States once again became embroiled in a costly Middle East conflict that damaged its credibility with partners, weakened deterrence with adversaries, and reduced readiness in the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, Israel’s efforts to advance normalization with Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states appear to have been further set back, and Israel has failed to eliminate the Iranian threat in the postwar regional order.

But focusing on U.S. and Israeli losses misses the fact that almost everyone involved lost. Ultimately, the war has left every major actor further from their preferred strategic end state. The war did not produce a clear victor or a more stable regional order. Instead, it accelerated fragmentation, deepened insecurity, and imposed costs on every key........

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