America’s strategy keeps running into the same old problem: in Washington, ideologized regimes are still too often interpreted through the lens of market logic, costs, and benefits.

For Israel and Ukraine, this is no longer an academic debate. It is a matter of survival.

The West’s problem is not a lack of power, but a false model of the enemy

The United States is once again facing a problem that Washington likes to underestimate, only to spend months trying to catch up once a crisis is already underway. American political culture is too market-driven, too “business-minded” in its internal logic. It assumes that almost any adversary will eventually start calculating the cost of conflict, weighing losses, growing nervous over sanctions, fearing budget distortions, and, in the end, looking for compromise.

For a market democracy, that seems natural.

For an ideologized despotism, not at all.

This is not a random mistake or the failure of a single administration. It is an old American habit: to mirror alien regimes through itself. To look at eastern despotisms through its own experience, its own model of rationality, its own belief that markets, money, elite comfort, and public frustration will sooner or later force power to retreat.

Yet in practice, U.S. political decisions are still too often assembled according to the same old script. First sanctions. Then a signal. Then pressure. Then a window for talks. Then the expectation that the adversary will respond like a rational actor of the Western type.

Iran makes this especially clear right now. Washington repeatedly acts as if, after sharp pressure, Tehran must eventually start thinking in the logic of a deal. But Tehran is under no obligation to think that way.

The most dangerous self-deception here is that in the United States, and in the West more broadly, too many people still view such regimes as badly functioning versions of their own world. The assumption goes like this: they also have elites, money, interests, budgets, consumers, technological chains. So if you hit the economy hard enough, the political system will eventually crack.

But in totalitarian and rigidly ideologized systems, the spine is different. The main role there is not played by the market. Not by business. Not by society. Not even by oligarchs, no matter how much money they have. The foundation of such a system is the state-party and security apparatus that controls the media, communications, fear, repression, and even the very definition of what is normal. As long as that apparatus holds, the system can absorb losses that look unbearable to an outside Western observer.

Iran is close to a textbook case. Even after the killing of Ali Khamenei and a number of other key figures, the Iranian system did not collapse. The leadership quickly reconfigured itself: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took on a more central role, and the lines of succession remained intact. In other words, even after a heavy decapitation strike, the regime showed not disintegration, but adaptation.

Even more telling was the regime’s internal response. While Washington continues talking about negotiations and the possibility of de-escalation, Iran is going through a large wave of repression. That is the essence of such systems: under outside pressure, they do not necessarily become softer. Very often, they become harsher at home.

Israel understands this logic better than many in the West simply because it has lived with it for decades. Here it has long been understood that for an adversary built on ideology, a cult of sacrifice, the sacralization of conflict, and fear of appearing weak, the concept of “too costly” does not work the same way it does in Western political theory. For such regimes, the survival of power and symbolic prestige may matter more than the population’s well-being.

Why a mistaken reading of sanctions leads to a mistaken reading of war

This leads to the next problem. In Ukraine and in Europe, and in the United States as well, people far too often linger over the official figures from the Russian finance ministry, the central bank, sectoral losses, deficits, spending cuts, and signs of overheating. All of that matters. All of it genuinely damages the regime’s capabilities. But it too often produces a false emotional conclusion: if the system is in pain, then it must be close to the edge.

That is a dangerous illusion.

Sanctions can weaken a system. They can limit it technologically. They can degrade the quality of war, pressure the budget, and slow the pace of recovery. But they do not replace an understanding of the nature of the regime itself. If an analyst sees only the budget deficit and falling revenues but fails to see the apparatus that sustains fear, media control, repression, and mobilization, then that analyst is seeing only half the picture.

For Ukraine, this is not theory but historical memory. Unlike many Western experts, Ukrainians have not entirely lost the memory of the Soviet administrative-command system. The memory of the KGB, of dissidents, of a state that hid catastrophes, rewrote reality, and kept society in submission is still alive. That is exactly why it is especially dangerous for Ukraine to repeat the American mistake and believe that Eurasian-style regimes can be measured by ordinary market logic.

In russia, that system did not merely return. It reproduced itself in an updated form — with a Stalinist instinct, but now combined with digital technologies, total video surveillance, modern propaganda, and much faster control over information. In that sense, the war truly has to be planned not as a matter of months, but as a matter of years — and not only in the military sense, but in the intellectual sense as well.

Israel and Ukraine need not faith in a “quick break,” but a cold, long strategy

Against the backdrop of war with Iran and simultaneous tension with China, the American model is once again revealing its internal weakness. While Washington still hopes to sort challenges into separate folders, the regimes confronting the United States are increasingly acting as parts of one broad anti-Western environment.

For NAnews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency, the main conclusion here is simple. America’s mistake is not that it is weak. Its mistake is that it too often wants to see a manageable, predictable, economically rational response where an entirely different logic is operating: the logic of the apparatus, ideology, historical revenge, and the ability to put society into a mode of long endurance.

That means Israel and Ukraine cannot build their own forecasts on somebody else’s hope. They cannot replace analysis of a regime with satisfaction over the enemy’s next budget failure. They cannot mistake economic pain for automatic political breakdown.

Such systems do not break merely when things become expensive for them. They break when the apparatus of coercion, control, and governance itself begins to fall apart. And that is always harder. Longer. More dangerous.

That is exactly why the conversation about war today has to be honest: what lies ahead is not a quick finale or a neat market of negotiations, but a long, hard, and nerve-racking confrontation with regimes that are not going to become more like the West simply because that would make them easier for the West to understand.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)