Middle East and North Africa

The Iran war is just over a month old, and the prevailing opinion among the commentariat is that it’s already a “quagmire,” if not a “catastrophe.” Critics have compared the conflict to the United States’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, its intervention in the Korean War, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, of course, the most traumatic U.S. foreign-policy debacle, Vietnam.

But the Iran war is not a debacle. It is a dilemma.

The Iran war is just over a month old, and the prevailing opinion among the commentariat is that it’s already a “quagmire,” if not a “catastrophe.” Critics have compared the conflict to the United States’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, its intervention in the Korean War, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, of course, the most traumatic U.S. foreign-policy debacle, Vietnam.

But the Iran war is not a debacle. It is a dilemma.

From an operational perspective, the war is going reasonably well: The United States and Israel are destroying much of what they aimed to hit at the outset. To the extent that the operation has struggled, it’s not because the United States lacks options. Rather, it’s because each pathway comes with trade-offs.

In his announcement of the attack on Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump stated four objectives for the war: To “destroy [Iran’s] missiles and raze their missile industry,” “annihilate [Iran’s] navy,” “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” and degrade Iran’s proxy network so it cannot destabilize the region. A month into the war, the United States and Israel have made significant progress toward three of those objectives.

Let’s start with missiles. Iran’s ballistic missile launches dropped by 90 percent within the first week of the campaign. On the first day of the war, Iran fired more than 400 missiles, but that was already the peak. The last several weeks have seen just 20 to 40 Iranian missile launches per day. To place those numbers in context, Iran went into the war with an estimated stockpile of 2,500 to 6,000 missiles. More than 1,500 have been spent, plus an unknown number destroyed in U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. Moreover, Israel claimed it has destroyed or disabled roughly 70 percent of Iran’s missile launchers, while the United States said that it has destroyed about two-thirds of Iran’s arms manufacturing capacity. On March 30, Israel announced that it had struck dozens of additional Iranian defense industry sites.

This degradation will likely have two important effects. Unless Iran can restore its manufacturing ability in the near........

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