The conflict with Iran is over. Or maybe it isn’t.

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As soon as it began, there was breathless talk of when it would end: days, weeks, perhaps months. Almost no one said it might last years.

Perhaps the 12-day conflict last June created an unrealistic expectation of a short war. But the twenty-first century contains enough ominous lessons to make us more realistic.

Democratic leaders always frame their wars as quick events to have the best chance of generating support. A limited intervention with clear goals for a great purpose is easier to sell than an open-ended war with a crippling cost in blood and treasure.

In response, the decision-making process has developed a built-in bias towards short conflict.

In Western democracies, wars start with a meeting. Leaders sit around a table with military and intelligence chiefs to discuss whether to fire missiles and deploy military assets and personnel. Objectives and risks are assessed. In the end, the President or Prime Minister has to make a decision.

Whatever the reason to intervene - defending an ally, preventing a humanitarian catastrophe, toppling a criminal regime, supporting one side in a civil war - the analysis is seen through the prism of the present day and likely outcomes in the very near future. No one in the room is asked to predict the cost and impact of action or inaction over a five to twenty-year timeframe.

Political leaders don’t ask for long-term projections, and military officers are not best suited to provide them. The uncertainty is too great. But that does not make them less necessary. These decisions need more than military and intelligence input. They need economists to model the long-term costs.

After the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of 9/11, the US invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty and invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, who were sheltering Al Qaeda leaders. It looked like a quick win. The first combat phase ended after two months when the last Taliban stronghold in Kandahar fell. The war was over. Except it wasn’t.

The Taliban was never defeated and never gave up. In August 2021, it conquered Kabul after a shambolic evacuation by NATO forces. That two-month war became a 20-year conflict and cost the US an estimated $2.3 trillion and the UK an estimated £20 billion. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled their country seeking refuge.

No serious long-term projection of that scale shaped the decision. If someone had warned President Bush of a twenty-year war costing trillions, would he have acted differently?

Now consider a conflict where there was no US intervention. In 2014, the US set a red line that if Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, he would face severe consequences. The UK was also poised to intervene. Instead, desperate to avoid the mistake of the 2003 Iraq invasion, both President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron stepped back from the brink because of domestic political opposition. The debate focused on the legality of intervention and whether opposition Islamist groups should be supported.

I was in the UK National Security Council meetings at the time. The focus was on the immediate present; there was no deep thinking or assessment of the long-term costs of action and inaction. More than half a million Syrians died and 13 million people were displaced. The resulting refugee crisis caused geopolitical earthquakes across Europe whose aftershocks are still being felt.

The decision to end a conflict can also suffer from over-optimistic short-termism. When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza in 2005, he thought he was handing control to the Palestinian Authority. This decision was deeply contested within Israel and beset by the complexities of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the search for peace. Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and launched a bloody coup against Fatah in June 2007, the party that had long dominated the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas took control of Gaza, and 16 years later, the long war with Israel culminated in the 7 October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza.

Would a long-term assessment of Hamas control over Gaza have persuaded Sharon to keep Israeli forces there instead? He knew withdrawal was a gamble. What was missing was a clear assessment of how costly that gamble could become.

The current ceasefire could hold. Or the war could last another 20 years. The attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure and the effective chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz show how quickly the impact of conflict can spiral into a global economic crisis.

Democratic leaders need better advice before they make these decisions, and they need to be ready to listen to it. To avoid the next 20-year war, they need to step outside the military and intelligence bubble and face the longer-term consequences: economic damage, political instability and mass displacement. The myth of the quick conflict persists because it is politically convenient. But it can lead to strategic disaster.

James Sorene is a commentator and writer.

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