Iran and USA – The US shows signs of decline, Iran ascends

“The decline of a great power does not begin when it loses its weapons. It begins when its weapons can no longer deliver the political outcomes they were meant to guarantee.”

The relationship between the United States and Iran has for decades been one of the defining conflicts of West Asian geopolitics. It has involved diplomatic rupture, sanctions, covert operations, military confrontation and a continuing struggle over who determines the political future of the region. But the present confrontation raises a question that goes beyond the immediate war: is the balance between the two countries beginning to change?

The United States remains the world’s most powerful military state, with enormous technological capabilities, a vast defence budget and a global network of military bases and alliances.

Yet military power is not measured only by the number of aircraft, ships and missiles a country possesses. It must also be measured by its ability to sustain war, protect its forces, absorb costs and, above all, translate military superiority into political outcomes. It is here that the American position is becoming increasingly uncertain.

Iran has followed a very different path. Its strategy has been one of strategic patience, resilience and asymmetric resistance. It has endured decades of sanctions, developed missile and drone capabilities, cultivated regional relationships and learned to impose costs on a militarily superior adversary without attempting to reproduce the entire American military machine. Iran does not need to become militarily stronger than the United States. It needs to make American military superiority increasingly expensive, increasingly vulnerable and increasingly incapable of delivering a decisive result.

That distinction is crucial.

Warnings from within the American military and strategic establishment about the sustainability of the conflict point towards a problem that Washington cannot solve simply by deploying more force. A prolonged war consumes missiles, aircraft, ships, personnel and readiness. Every American military asset tied down in West Asia is an asset that cannot be used elsewhere. Every interceptor fired against an incoming missile or drone has a financial and logistical cost. Every ship protecting American interests in the Gulf requires fuel, maintenance, personnel and supporting infrastructure. And every additional commitment narrows the strategic flexibility available to Washington as it simultaneously seeks to confront Russia, China and other perceived challenges.

The United States therefore faces the classic problem of an overstretched imperial power. It can still strike almost anywhere. What is becoming more questionable is whether it can indefinitely sustain the political, economic and military consequences of doing so.

This is why the description of America as a “paper tiger” needs to be understood carefully. It does not mean that American military power is imaginary. It plainly is not. Washington still possesses the world’s most sophisticated armed forces and is likely to remain central to any military counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific. But the term points to the growing gap between the appearance of overwhelming power and the ability to use that power successfully across several theatres simultaneously.

The latest escalation makes this contradiction visible. Iran has responded to American attacks on its oil tankers with attacks around the Strait of Hormuz and ballistic-missile strikes against a US military facility in Jordan. Reuters reports that Iran claimed attacks on ten ships near the Strait after the United States sank five Iranian oil tankers, in the largest wave of attacks on shipping since the six-month-old war began. Iran also fired missiles towards a US military base in Jordan; Jordan said it intercepted most of them.

The significance lies not simply in whether every missile reached its intended target. The strategic impact is that American forces and the enormous network supporting them can no longer assume complete immunity from sophisticated missile and drone attacks. The United States has had to devote increasing resources to defending bases, ships and supply routes across a huge geographical area. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz has become a major point of vulnerability for the global economy. Brent crude has risen above $100 a barrel as shipping disruptions intensifies.

This is where asymmetric warfare becomes strategically important.

Iran does not have to destroy an American carrier fleet to impose a cost on Washington. It can challenge shipping, threaten military installations, disrupt energy flows and force the United States to spend vastly more defending itself than Iran needs to spend creating the threat.

The arithmetic of such warfare can gradually turn conventional superiority into strategic vulnerability.

The American response has included economic sanctions, attacks on Iranian oil tankers and attempts to control the movement of Iranian petroleum. But this too carries consequences. The United States has now moved towards destroying Iranian tankers as retaliation for attacks on its warships. Iran has responded by targeting shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz. The result is a cycle in which military pressure produces economic disruption, and economic disruption produces further military escalation.

The United States has historically used another form of power when military victory becomes uncertain: the ability to redefine the battlefield itself.

This is what may be called strategic camouflage. It is not merely physical concealment on a battlefield. It is the broader political and strategic practice of shifting the arena of confrontation when conventional superiority becomes less decisive. Economic sanctions, technological restrictions, financial controls, tariff barriers and pressure on allies can be used to weaken an adversary without confronting its military capabilities directly. The objective is to compensate for weaknesses that are more difficult to address through conventional warfare.

Washington’s sanctions regime against Iran is one example. Economic warfare allows the United States to exploit the extraordinary reach of the dollar-based financial system. Restrictions on banking, technology and trade can impose immense costs without requiring American soldiers to occupy another country. The same logic increasingly informs US competition with China through restrictions on advanced semiconductors and other strategic technologies.

But this form of power also has limits.

Sanctions do not necessarily produce political surrender. Iran has survived decades of them. More significantly, the sanctions regime is encouraging alternative economic relationships that reduce dependence upon the Western financial system.

Current reporting indicates that Iran has developed mechanisms to exchange oil for Chinese imports, allowing trade to continue despite American sanctions.

This is one of the most important developments of the changing international order. American economic power remains immense, but its effectiveness depends upon the willingness and ability of other countries to remain inside the structures over which Washington exercises control. As alternative economic relationships grow, the coercive power of sanctions can gradually diminish.

The same problem exists militarily.

Modern warfare has made the traditional assumptions behind military dominance increasingly uncertain. Satellites, drones, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare and precision missiles can expose and threaten installations that were once considered relatively secure. Large military bases, logistical chains and concentrations of expensive aircraft can become liabilities when an adversary possesses the technology to locate and strike them.

The United States has responded by investing heavily in signature-management technologies, electronic warfare and systems designed to confuse or deceive enemy sensors. Such technologies are useful. But they also reveal something important: the military establishment understands that its enormous conventional infrastructure contains vulnerabilities.

There is a deeper irony here. The United States has spent decades constructing a global military architecture designed to demonstrate permanent reach. Hundreds of bases, carrier groups, aircraft fleets, missile-defence systems and logistical networks have projected an image of American omnipresence. Yet that very global presence creates an enormous number of targets and an enormous financial burden.

A country defending its own territory has a fundamentally different strategic problem from a country defending military positions thousands of kilometres from home.

Iran enjoys the advantage of geography. The United States has to cross oceans. Iran does not.

The American problem is therefore not simply Iran. It is the multiplication of strategic commitments. Europe, the Indo-Pacific, Ukraine, the Middle East, the Red Sea and other theatres all demand attention. Washington cannot assume that it can maintain unlimited superiority everywhere simultaneously.

This is precisely why the language of decline needs to be used differently from the conventional meaning of the word. Decline does not necessarily begin with military defeat. A great power can decline while still possessing the world’s most advanced weapons. It begins when the cost of maintaining its global position becomes greater than the political, economic and military resources available to sustain it.

The United States has already experienced the consequences of strategic overextension in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars demonstrated that military superiority can destroy infrastructure, overthrow governments and occupy territory without necessarily producing the political order Washington originally intended. The lesson of those wars was not that America had ceased to be powerful. It was that power had become less capable of producing predictable political outcomes.

The current confrontation with Iran carries the same warning.

Washington can inflict enormous damage upon Iran. But destruction is not the same as victory. If Iran continues to resist, continues to launch missiles and drones, continues to threaten shipping and continues to impose economic and political costs, then the United States faces an increasingly difficult choice: escalate further or seek an exit.

Neither option is simple.

Escalation risks a wider regional war and still greater pressure on American military resources. Withdrawal, meanwhile, risks being interpreted as an admission that overwhelming American military power could not force Iran into submission.

This is why the question of how the war ends is more important than who wins individual battles.

Iran’s strength lies precisely in its ability to make the conflict about endurance rather than a single decisive military encounter.

Tehran does not need to defeat the United States in the conventional sense. It needs to survive long enough for the political and economic costs of the war to become more painful for Washington than continued confrontation is worth.

That calculation becomes more significant as the war begins to affect American domestic politics. President Donald Trump has said that he expects the war to end after the November midterm elections, while reports indicate that senior advisers have privately warned that the conflict could continue far longer.

The contradiction is revealing. If the United States possesses overwhelming power and Iran is supposedly incapable of sustaining resistance, why does the duration of the conflict depend upon an American election timetable? The answer is that wars are ultimately political. The capacity to fight is not the same as the capacity to sustain public support for fighting.

The economic consequences are becoming increasingly difficult to conceal. Oil prices have risen above $100 a barrel, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been severely disrupted and the conflict is feeding directly into inflationary pressures. Reuters has also highlighted the extraordinary cost imbalance in modern warfare, including the problem of using extremely expensive defensive missiles against much cheaper drones.

This is where Iran’s ascent becomes visible.

Iran has not suddenly become a military superpower. Nor has the United States ceased to be the world’s strongest military state. The transformation is subtler and therefore more consequential. Iran has become increasingly capable of denying the United States the strategic freedom of action that Washington once took for granted.

That is a form of power.

For decades, American strategy was built upon the assumption that the United States could intervene almost anywhere, impose costs upon adversaries and ultimately determine the terms of settlement. That assumption is becoming harder to sustain. The emergence of China, the resilience of Russia, Iran’s endurance and the growth of alternative economic and political relationships across the Global South are contributing to a world in which American power remains enormous but is no longer uncontested.

The United States is therefore being forced towards burden-sharing, regional partnerships and a more selective definition of its vital interests. What is presented as strategic adaptation can also be understood as an acknowledgement of limits. Washington cannot police the entire world simultaneously.

The rhetoric of strength can sometimes conceal this reality. But strategy is ultimately revealed by what a country can sustain, not by what it claims it can do.

Iran understands this.

Its strategy has never required it to reproduce American power. Its objective has been to survive, resist and make domination costly. In doing so, it has demonstrated one of the fundamental truths of asymmetric warfare: the weaker power does not have to destroy the stronger power. It only has to prevent the stronger power from converting its superiority into victory.

That is increasingly what Iran is doing.

The balance is changing

The significance of the Iran–United States confrontation therefore cannot be measured simply by counting aircraft, missiles, ships or dollars spent on defence. The deeper question is whether overwhelming military superiority can still translate into political control. The evidence increasingly suggests that it cannot.

The United States remains enormously powerful, but its power is becoming more expensive to exercise, more difficult to sustain and less capable of producing the decisive outcomes that Washington has historically expected from the projection of military force.

Iran, by contrast, has learnt to fight a very different kind of war. It does not need to match the United States aircraft for aircraft or carrier for carrier. Its strength lies in endurance, geography, missile capability, regional relationships and the ability to impose costs on an adversary whose military presence depends upon vulnerable bases, supply lines and extraordinarily expensive defensive systems.

This does not mean that Iran is invulnerable. It faces severe economic pressures and the dangers inherent in prolonged war. Nor does it mean that the United States has suddenly ceased to be a great military power. Such claims would be as simplistic as the older assumption that American military power is unlimited.

But the central issue has changed.

It is no longer simply whether America can inflict enormous destruction upon Iran. It is whether America can sustain a prolonged conflict while simultaneously maintaining its ambitions elsewhere in the world.

That is where the notion of American decline becomes strategically important. Decline does not necessarily arrive with a dramatic military defeat. A great power can decline while still possessing the world’s most powerful weapons. It declines when the cost of maintaining its global system becomes greater than the political, economic and military resources available to sustain it; when adversaries become capable of denying its freedom of action; and when military superiority produces neither security nor a clear political settlement.

Iran’s ascent should therefore be understood in relative rather than absolute terms. Iran has not become stronger than the United States in conventional military power. It has become increasingly capable of making American military superiority less decisive in the environment in which that power is being used.

That is far more important than a simple comparison of defence budgets.

The world is moving away from the period in which Washington could assume that its military, economic and technological superiority would automatically determine the outcome of regional conflicts. China, Russia, Iran and other states are developing different forms of resistance to American power, while an increasingly multipolar international system is reducing the ability of any one power to dictate the terms of global politics.

The war with Iran is therefore a test not only of Iranian resilience but of the limits of American hegemony. If Washington can neither secure a decisive victory nor withdraw without accepting substantial strategic costs, then the conflict will expose precisely the vulnerability that American power has spent decades attempting to conceal.

The United States may remain a formidable power for many years. But formidable is not the same as invincible.

Iran’s significance lies in showing that distinction in practice.

America still has enormous power. Iran is demonstrating that America can no longer assume that enormous power is enough.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.