Trump Has Lost Control of His War

Mr. Vaez is the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group.

When presidents go on television in wartime, they do not merely describe events. They try to impose meaning on them. On Wednesday night, President Trump presented the war with Iran as a stern but necessary undertaking that is nearing a favorable conclusion.

The threads of this victory narrative have been coming together since the United States launched Operation Epic Fury in late February. Elements of it are undoubtedly true: American and Israeli forces have been dominant from the air, able to penetrate the Islamic republic’s porous defenses almost at will. They have degraded not only Tehran’s military capabilities, but also the industrial base producing its missile and drone fleets. The attacks have also once more exposed Iran’s substantial intelligence vulnerabilities, allowing the targeting and killing of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among other senior military and political leaders, at the campaign’s outset.

But the central question in this war was never whether Iran could be hurt. It was whether pain would translate into submission. So far, it has not.

The notion of having achieved regime change is belied by the replacement of one Khamenei with another. Most of the senior political echelon remains intact, while power has gravitated toward more hard-line military figures. Weakening Iran’s military capacity has not stopped Tehran from being able to muster regular drone and missile salvos at Israel and Persian Gulf allies, including on Thursday, the day after Mr. Trump’s speech.

Perhaps most significantly, the Iranians have managed to subdue traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, responding in the one arena where weaker nations have often found leverage against stronger ones: not by matching force with force, but by changing the terms of the contest.

If Iran cannot prevail in a conventional military exchange, it can still prolong the conflict, widen its costs, disrupt the global economy and make the exercise of American and Israeli power more expensive than its architects anticipated. In the process, it has shown that a degraded military and a severely damaged state do not need a weapon of mass destruction to hold its adversaries hostage.

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