There is a particular kind of strategic trap that American presidents have wandered into before: a war launched with limited goals that quickly becomes defined by the one objective it cannot achieve. In Vietnam, it was a government in Hanoi that refused to break. In Iraq, it was an insurgency that refused to end. In the current conflict with Iran, the unachievable objective is regime change, and Washington is beginning to understand, perhaps too late, that without it, everything else it achieves will be temporary.

The United States entered this war with overwhelming air superiority and dramatic early results. Khamenei is dead. Iran’s nuclear program has been set back years. By conventional metrics, a stunning success. And yet the war has not ended. US bases from Iraq to Qatar remain under attack. Oil prices have surged past $130 a barrel. Washington is quietly running out of interceptor missiles  — each costing upwards of $4 million — while Beijing watches the Pacific and does the math. The first $3.7 billion in unbudgeted costs arrived in the war’s opening hundred hours. For an administration that came to power promising fiscal discipline and a pivot away from Middle Eastern entanglements, the ledger is becoming politically toxic.

A War That Serves Everyone Except Its Largest Belligerent

To understand why disengagement is so difficult, it helps to map the incentive structure clearly. And it does not favor the United States.

Iran, despite absorbing catastrophic losses, has strong reasons to keep fighting. The Islamic Republic calculates that accepting a ceasefire now means accepting terms drafted by its enemies. For a regime whose core ideology is resistance, surrender is existential in a way that attrition is not. More importantly, Iran’s asymmetric strategy is working: every week the war continues, American interceptor stockpiles shrink, oil markets tighten, and the window for a Chinese or UN-brokered framework — one that leaves the regime intact — opens wider. The long-term cost trajectory favors Tehran: US expenditures compound globally, straining readiness vis-à-vis China and Russia, while Iran’s costs, though severe, do not cascade into other theaters.

There is a domestic calculus too, running counter to Western assumptions. The Iranian opposition, fractured between secular liberals, monarchists, MEK sympathizers, and reformists, has not coalesced into a coherent challenge. If anything, the war has triggered a rally-around-the-flag effect the regime actively exploits. Figures like Reza Pahlavi have publicly backed US military action, deepening diaspora divisions and handing Tehran a propaganda gift: the specter of foreign-backed restoration. An opposition that cannot agree on whether the war is an opportunity or a catastrophe is not one capable of seizing a moment.

Finally — perhaps the most underappreciated element of Iranian thinking — Tehran is not simply trying to survive this war. It is trying to win the next one. By making the cost so staggeringly high in treasure, political capital, and global positioning, Iran aims to establish deterrence in reverse: ensuring no American administration for a generation has the appetite to strike again. Attrition is not a failure mode for Iran. It is the strategy.

Israel’s calculus is almost the mirror image of Washington’s. Iran has long been Israel’s principal adversary, architect of Hezbollah, patron of Hamas, the state that has pledged Israel’s destruction in speeches and funded it in practice. With American firepower engaged and Iran’s military architecture under sustained assault, Israel is watching its primary threat degrade in real time, at someone else’s expense. It has no Taiwan to worry about, no NATO burden-sharing debates to manage. The regional chessboard is the only board it plays on, and right now it is winning. Israeli casualties have been limited; the primary targets of Iranian retaliation have been American bases and Gulf infrastructure.

This asymmetry produces a remarkable situation: the United States, the largest and most powerful party to the conflict, is the one with the greatest incentive to stop, while both of its nominal partners, one an adversary and one an ally, prefer continuation.

The Divergence Washington Won’t Say Out Loud

What makes this conflict structurally distinct from previous American Middle Eastern wars is not just that the US wants to exit, it is that its strategic position actively deteriorates the longer the war runs, while Iran’s and Israel’s do not.

For the United States, the costs compound globally. Every interceptor fired over a Gulf base is one not stockpiled for a Taiwan contingency. Every month of elevated oil prices exports inflation into allied economies, eroding the coalition cohesion that underpins American grand strategy. Every week US forces are bogged down in Middle Eastern attrition is a week Beijing recalibrates what Washington can realistically deter. The Pentagon’s planners understand this arithmetic. The question is whether the political system can absorb the conclusions it produces.

For Iran, the trajectory runs the other way. The regime’s coercive apparatus remains intact. Economic pain, real as it is, falls unevenly, punishing the urban middle class most likely to oppose the regime while insulating the Revolutionary Guard networks that sustain it. Internationally, Global South sympathy has begun to shift as energy costs hit developing economies and the optics of a superpower bombing a country it cannot subdue become harder to defend in multilateral forums. For Israel, the picture is similarly durable: each month of war leaves Iran’s regional architecture further degraded, Hezbollah’s resupply lines disrupted, and the IRGC’s strike capacity diminished, all without a soldier on Iranian soil.

What emerges is a picture of extraordinary strangeness: Iran and Israel, enemies in virtually every other context, share a common interest in the continuation of this war. Their interests are not coordinated, but they are aligned. And that alignment, more than any missile or lobbying effort, is the trap holding the United States in place.

A bilateral US-Iran ceasefire, in isolation, does not end American exposure. Iran’s logic for targeting US bases is tied not only to what the US is doing militarily, but to what American weapons in Israeli hands continue to do. Pull the Air Force out and Iran still watches F-35s — fueled and armed through American supply chains — striking Iranian targets nightly. Washington loses influence over the war’s tempo while retaining full responsibility for its continuation in Tehran’s eyes. The exit road from Washington runs through Jerusalem.

The Nixon administration faced a version of this in Vietnam — a war it could not win but could not leave without abandoning an ally whose fall would be televised. Vietnamization shifted the burden gradually while maintaining cover to call the retreat a handoff. The analogy is imperfect — Israel is militarily capable and domestically unified in ways South Vietnam never was — but the structural logic holds: you cannot disengage from a war your ally is still fighting without either abandoning them or compelling them to stop.

How the United States Gets Out

No single diplomatic move produces an exit. The realistic path requires three things in sequence. First, back-channel contact, through Oman, Qatar, or Chinese intermediaries, to establish Iran’s minimum acceptable terms. Beijing has genuine leverage: it is Tehran’s largest trading partner, the economy most damaged by oil disruption, and it brokered the 2023 Saudi-Iran normalization when Washington could not. Trump’s transactional instincts make him, paradoxically, well-suited to accept Chinese facilitation if it delivers a result he can package as a win.

Second, private coercive pressure on Israel. The US has one real lever, weapons resupply and diplomatic cover in multilateral forums, and neither needs to be withdrawn publicly. The credible threat, communicated directly and without theater, is likely sufficient. Israel is militarily capable but internationally dependent, and it knows this.

Third, the public framing: objectives achieved, deterrence demonstrated, a negotiated framework accepted from strength. The substance is a ceasefire leaving the Iranian regime intact but diminished. The packaging is Trumpian victory. Both can be true simultaneously.

The hardest part is psychological, not diplomatic. It requires Washington to accept an Iran that is degraded but not destroyed. History will record that Khamenei is dead, the nuclear program set back a decade, the IRGC’s regional architecture dismantled. That is a substantial outcome. The trap is believing that stopping short of total victory is the same as losing — a belief that Iran and Israel, for entirely different reasons, are both quietly counting on.

The author’s analysis draws on open-source reporting including recent coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and Reuters, as well as historical analogies from US disengagement strategies in Vietnam and the 2003 Iraq War

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)