The Iran war of 2026 will continue, but it appears to be entering its final phase. Or at least, that’s what President Donald Trump hopes.
Claiming that the “hard part is done,” Trump made the case in a televised address on Wednesday night that America has “beaten and completely decimated Iran” and suggested that the conflict was “very close” to completion and would wrap up over the next two to three weeks.
“Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating, large-scale losses in a matter of weeks,” Trump said, noting the damage inflicted to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Navy, and missile program.
Trump said he would prefer to make a deal with Iran, and would launch attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure and energy facilities if it did not agree to one. But he appeared to suggest that the US would wrap up operations soon either way. Trump seemed to be asking Americans for patience, noting that the war was far shorter than previous conflicts like World War II and Vietnam.
There are a number of ways the situation could still change dramatically in the next few weeks, but if Trump is, in fact, starting the process of winding down the war, there are a few lessons we can already take from it.
The war may not really be ending
One military cliché has been getting a workout over the past month: In any war plan, the enemy gets a vote. That’s just as true in any withdrawal plan. Iran may not stop fighting just because the United States stops bombing. Given that its air defenses proved completely incapable of stopping the US and Israeli bombardment, Iran could look to raise the costs to the US and its allies to the point where they will be deterred from simply coming back and bombing Iran again in six months.
In particular, Iran may not be in a rush to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — the vital global energy chokepoint it has effectively shut down. Hormuz has emerged as Iran’s main point of leverage in this conflict, and leaders in Tehran will be reluctant to give it up. Over the weekend, Iran’s parliament passed a measure authorizing the collection of tolls from ships transiting the Strait, though it’s not clear how that would work in practice.
Trump suggested in his speech that he was unbothered by this, saying that the Strait would “just open up naturally” once the war ended, but also calling on countries that rely on it to show some “long delayed courage” and reopen it themselves.
A group of European countries is reportedly preparing a diplomatic push to do that, with military options possible as a last resort. Some Persian Gulf countries, notably the United Arab Emirates, are also reportedly pushing for a military coalition to open the Strait by force.
It’s also worth noting that US forces are still heading to the region. A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, consisting of about 2,200 Marines and three warships, is due to arrive in a few weeks to join another MEU as well as elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, who were deployed to the region last week. These forces, designed for rapid deployments to seize and hold territory, could be a form of negotiating leverage for the US as it winds down the conflict, or could give the president additional military options if he changes his mind.
Then there’s the “axis of resistance”: Iran’s regional proxies, badly weakened by Israel’s post–Oct. 7 offensive, seemed like a non-factor in the war’s early days. But lately they’ve made their presence felt. Yemen’s Houthis, who sat out most of the war’s first month, have begun firing missiles at Israel. Iraqi militias have been stepping up their attack on US interests, and appear to have kidnapped an American journalist. Hezbollah, fighting Israeli forces in Southern Lebanon, has shown it can still fire barrages of hundreds of rockets into Israel. These groups aren’t as powerful as they used to be, but they’re not eliminated, and they may not halt their attacks when the war ends.
If it is ending, nobody won
It’s important to remember that while Trump’s immediate justifications for this war have shifted over time, the one consistent case he has made is that, as he put it on Wednesday, I “would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” It’s notable that in his speech, Trump did not refer to Iran’s stockpile of 450 kilograms of enriched uranium. As long as that stockpile remains, the US cannot credibly claim to have eliminated Iran’s nuclear threat, though Trump did vow to launch new airstrikes if any new nuclear activity is detected.
If the war winds down in the coming weeks, Iran will doubtless claim victory on the grounds that it is still in power, despite the onslaught, and was able to fight back more effectively than many expected via its missile and drone attacks throughout the region and its closure of the Strait. But we shouldn’t overstate that case either.
In addition to dozens of senior leaders, including its most prominent figures like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and security chief Ali Larijani, Iran’s conventional armed forces, navy, and missile forces have sustained heavy damage. Its strikes across the Gulf have enraged the Gulf Arab nations with which it had reached a tentative detente in recent years. It’s unlikely to find many partners anxious to invest in its rebuilding effort.
Israeli airstrikes have also targeted the Basij militia, which led the efforts to crush anti-regime protests in Iran earlier this year. It’s hard to know yet what effect the war — which is estimated to have killed more than 1,500 civilians — has had on public opinion in Iran. But it seems likely that the regime’s opponents, whether on the streets of major cities or in ethnic minority regions, might soon want to test just how much it’s been weakened.
Trump is still allergic to big ground wars
The relative success of “Operation Midnight Hammer” last June — Israel and America’s so-called 12-day war on Iran that targeted its nuclear facilities — and, even more so, the US operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January appear to have increased the military confidence of a president who, until recently, was campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize. If Trump were running for office again, it would be hard for him to again campaign as the “pro-peace” candidate, but there do still appear to be some lines he’s reluctant to cross.
In recent weeks, there has been widespread reporting that the administration was considering risky operations to seize islands in and around the Strait of Hormuz to break Iran’s blockade or to deploy special forces to seize Iran’s uranium stockpile. Extracting 450 kilograms of radioactive material buried deep under rubble while taking heavy enemy fire always seemed like a tall order. The Hormuz operations may have been doable but would also raise the risk of American casualties — thirteen American servicemembers have been killed in the war, already — and prolong an already unpopular conflict. The escalations that Trump discussed in his speech involved bombing Iran “back to the stone age” — not sending in troops.
This may be the closest Trump has come to the sort of Mideast military quagmire that has bedeviled the US for the past 25 years, but despite his claims that the “doesn’t have the yips” when it comes to boots on the ground, he still seems intent on avoiding large-scale ground operations that would see a large number of Americans coming home in coffins.
Colin Powell’s famous “pottery barn rule” is no longer in effect: The US is fine just breaking things and moving on.
One of the main questions likely to perplex future historians of this war is why its planners did not anticipate and prepare for Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz — a scenario that has dominated US strategic thinking about the region for decades. (A Marine Corps veteran I spoke with recently recalled war-gaming an amphibious operation on Iran’s Qeshm Island in the 1980s.) Ensuring the free flow of energy from the Gulf is one of the main justifications for having a large military presence in this region in the first place.
It’s true that Iran was able to effectively close the Strait more easily than many expected, with just a handful of demonstrative strikes on tankers rather than a large deployment of mines. But that could have been anticipated when the Houthis did the exact same thing in the Red Sea in 2024.
There are some parallels to how this administration escalated trade tensions with China last year, seemingly not anticipating that Beijing would leverage its dominance over the global supply of rare earth minerals — a scenario also discussed ad nauseam in Washington for years.
For years, the US leveraged its control of chokepoints in the global economy — the use of the dollar in international financial transactions; the global tech industry’s reliance on semiconductors made by US allies — to punish its rivals. Over the past year, we’ve seen those rivals learn to play the same game.
Closing the Strait has resulted in global shortages in food, fertilizer, and other commodities — the reverberations of which could be felt for months after the fighting stops — and those worst-affected by it will be those living in the world’s poorest countries, who had nothing to do with this war.
American military power has limits
Much of this war has been a display of absolute tactical and technological dominance by the American military and its Israeli partners. They’ve been able to strike Iran seemingly at will, pulled off incredible intelligence coups in the targeting of senior leaders, and intercepted the vast majority of missiles and drones fired by Iran.
But we’ve seen the limits as well. In recent days, it’s been becoming clear that the Iranian strikes on US bases were more damaging than initially reported and that they’ve been having more success penetrating Israel’s air defenses as well. Whether that’s because Iran was learning how to evade those defenses (perhaps with Russian assistance) or because it has been saving its more sophisticated hardware for later in the war remains unclear.
The US and Gulf Countries were never really in danger of running out of vital interceptors, but their heavy use in this conflict, along with other sophisticated systems like Tomahawk missiles, has forced tough decisions about how to allocate them, and the reduced stockpile may be felt in future conflicts, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.
The fate of the USS Gerald Ford, which in recent months has had its deployment twice extended as it was diverted from the Middle East for operations in Venezuela, then sent back for the war in Iran, then finally docked in Croatia after its laundry room caught on fire and its toilets began malfunctioning, may serve as a cautionary tale.
We’ve learned once again that even the most powerful and best-funded military in the world faces military constraints when the president is launching new major military operations every few months.
Israel is on a permanent war footing
If not for Iran, Israel’s escalating war in Lebanon, which has killed more than 1,200 people and displaced more than a million, would have been the biggest story in the Middle East for the past month. Israeli leaders are discussing what sounds like a long-term occupation of parts of Southern Lebanon and are invoking Gaza as a model as they destroy buildings in the area.
As for Gaza itself, Israel appears to be fortifying its military presence within the enclave, aid has been severely restricted from entering the Strip, and talk of moving to a new phase of reconstruction feels like a distant memory.
Even as the Iran war was never popular in the United States, it was overwhelmingly so in Israel, despite much of the population spending the past month in and out of air raid shelters. Even if Trump forces the war to a close short of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultimate goal of regime change in Tehran, the Israeli expectation has always been that they would simply continue to degrade Iran’s capabilities as much as possible for as long as the US would allow. As for what remains, there’s always the next time — a regional expansion of the “mowing the grass” strategy that Israel has long employed in Gaza. “If we see them make a move, even a move forward, will hit them with missiles very hard again,” Trump said on Wednesday, suggesting that the US may again take part int he mowing.
The war may have done serious damage to Israel’s standing in the US — and not only among Democrats, who were already a lost cause from Netanyahu’s perspective, but among Republicans looking for someone other than Trump to blame for this war. But that’s a concern for another day: For now, Israel sees its regional enemies on the back foot and will look to continue to press its advantage.
If there has been a clear winner from this war, it is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has benefited from both an economic shot in the arm from high oil prices and from the further strain that the conflict has put on the transatlantic alliance. (The Financial Times reports that Trump had threatened to halt aid to Ukraine if European countries didn’t take part in an effort to reopen the Strait.) Trump is once again talking about pulling the US out of NATO, in light of the alliance’s reluctance to allow their bases to be used for military operations or to join a fight to reopen Hormuz. Given the skepticism Trump is voicing about the alliance’s all-important mutual defense obligation, it’s fair to ask if the alliance is effectively dead already. That’s a cause for concern in a world where interstate wars are starting to become more common again.
Not every country has access to something like the Strait of Hormuz, but other countries are likely to try to learn from Iran’s example of weaponizing chokepoints in the global economy to fight a more powerful adversary. Iran’s targeting of Amazon data centers may also portend a world in which tech firms are considered legitimate military targets.
Khamenei’s killing broke a precedent: There are very few modern examples of heads of state being deliberately killed in war. Given that new advances in precision targeting and drones have made “decapitation strikes” easier to carry out, this could make future wars a lot more dangerous for the leaders waging them.
Iran clearly has more incentive than ever to actually build a nuclear weapon — though whether it would actually be able to do this with much of its weapons program in shambles and its government penetrated by spies is another question. What’s more clear, though, is that the attack on Iran, the second launched by the US and Israel in the past year in the midst of ongoing nuclear negotiations, will convince many countries that it’s worth having a nuclear weapon and not trusting future efforts at nuclear diplomacy.
Iran itself may be weaker than it was a month ago — but its tolerance for risk and desperation are also higher. The damage inflicted on the regime in this war may have satisfied leaders in Washington and Jerusalem, but the world itself has likely gotten more dangerous.