President Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe monitor a military operation at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in January 2026. Trump and Hegseth have been the two driving forces behind US operations in Iran, and will set the future direction of the campaign. (The White House/Molly Riley)

If America Wants to Win the War in Iran, It Must Acknowledge the Type of War It Is Fighting 

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President Donald Trump broadly has two paths forward in Iran: cutting America’s losses and leaving, or candidly explaining to the American people why a prolonged war is necessary. 

The likelihood of another round of US attacks on Iran, and President Donald Trump’s comments about “annihilating” the country, raise a fundamental question about the Iran war: is this a war of annihilation or exhaustion? Writing over a century ago, the Prussian military historian Hans Delbrück distinguished between these two types of wars. It is unclear if the Trump administration understands this distinction, or if it is unwilling to tell the American public that this is a war of exhaustion. 

Annihilation strategies, or strategies of military defeat, seek to destroy a state’s military capacity to resist. They rely primarily on violence and almost always require a serious commitment of ground forces to a conflict. By contrast, wars of exhaustion seek to wear down an enemy’s will to resist through multiple methods, including violence but also economic and political means. They are struggles over who fatigues first—and are as much psychological and........

© The National Interest