Now that the tenuous ceasefire between the United States and Iran has broken down and mutual strikes have resumed, Washington seems to be spiraling back into a conflict that most analysts, and the public, regard as a fateful blunder.
Some commentators have interpreted the Iran war as a turning point in U.S. foreign policy, marking the end of its military primacy. To some extent, this diagnosis actually overstates the ultimate significance of the Iran war, while understating its continuity with the United States’ failed conflicts over many decades and the lessons we should draw from them generally.
The Iran war should instead be seen as simply the latest demonstration that the United States’ attempts to coerce other—even vastly weaker—states through military force are remarkably ineffective. We must slay the oddly persistent myth that military power, in itself, offers abundant leverage to alter the behavior of other states if the U.S. is going to avoid similar blunders in the future.
A core misconception of the purpose and limits of military power appears to plague American policymakers, commentators, and indeed, some section of the public. It is too often assumed that the threat or use of military power translates easily into the U.S. getting what it wants—regardless of what it wants. This includes the United States’ frequent demand that other states, viewed as adversaries, surrender their ability to deter external threats—generally from us—or even abandon their own form of government. While often framed as an attempt to “restore deterrence,” these threats are in fact intended to prevent another state from deterring us—i.e., to compel them to accept subordination.
Since unilaterally abrogating the Obama-era Iran deal in 2018, the United States pursued a “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran, demanding not only that it abandon its nuclear program but also its foreign proxies in the region. The failure to achieve these demands culminated with the June 2025 bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites and the most recent months-long war.
The United States escalated its demands at the outset of the war, calling for regime change and the destruction of Iran’s missile and naval capabilities. When these demands failed, Washington turned to demanding the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had only closed in response to being attacked. Iran’s unwillingness to comply produced a series of threats from President Trump to “end Iran’s civilization,” which unsurprisingly went unenforced.
It has become clear that nearly a decade of attempts to coerce Iran into submission have produced a worse result than the diplomacy that produced the 2015 Iran deal. The U.S. has come out weaker, and Iran, while battered, has exercised a new degree of leverage.
This should not have been surprising, however. Coercive strategies have a poor historical track record of success. This is largely due to an asymmetry of interests, where the U.S. has little at stake and is therefore only willing to commit so much—usually in the form of airpower, without a large commitment of ground troops. Meanwhile, given the United States’ maximalist demands, its adversary is faced with an existential threat and is therefore willing to suffer a great deal of punishment before capitulating.
Attempts to compel another state through limited use of force or economic sanctions have a well-documented tendency to inflame nationalism and produce a “rally-around-the-flag” effect, as the target population unifies to resist foreign pressure. Moreover, developments in military technology, such as the availability of drones, have made it easier and cheaper to defend against more powerful attackers, bolstering deterrence while undermining compellence.
When compellence fails, Washington has frequently opted to pursue regime change rather than cut a deal. This is even worse than compellence, not only because forcing regime change upon a foreign country frequently fails to produce a better outcome than the status quo antebellum, but because it requires the United States to invest even more in troops and resources while the interests at stake remain minor. Meanwhile, the unpredictable consequences of regime change make it difficult to limit war aims, such that costs tend to rise over time beyond initial expectations as new problems—and therefore, new missions—proliferate.
The United States’ coercive attempts also suffer because there is a track record of Washington not easing pressure once its demands have been met. The United States focuses almost exclusively on how credible its threats are, without devoting equal attention to the credibility of its assurances to back off if complied with, an implicit requirement in any incentive structure relying on coercion. If the United States demands regime change, Iran has little reason to comply with lower-level demands.
Likewise, when the United States has already broken previous agreements with Iran to ease sanctions in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, Tehran has understandably little reason to trust similar assurances in the future.
Not only does coercion repeatedly fail to achieve better results than diplomacy in the present, it actively undermines the United States’ diplomatic credibility in the future and therefore its ability to correct course. The United States record in pursuing coercion against weaker states over more than a half century is a nearly unbroken series of failures, the paradoxical result of the United States’ inherent power and security, and therefore the lack of interests it has at stake when intervening far from home. Recognizing the high threshold required for the use of force to be effective and adopting a more limited set of strategic priorities would help Washington avoid dumb wars like Iran and the unnecessarily protracted tensions that gave rise to it.
Christopher McCallion is a Fellow at Defense Priorities.
