“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” United States President Donald Trump told Iranians on February 28, 2026, after the U.S. and Israel assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and launched a war against the country. More than five months later, the war that Mr. Trump believed would be over in weeks, if not days, is far from over. The Islamic Republic has not only survived but has also consolidated its position, at home and in the region. Mr. Trump has alternated between strikes, ceasefires, talks, threats, ultimatums, renewed strikes, and U-turns in an attempt to shape the course and outcome of the conflict and the behaviour of the Iranian state, while seeking a face-saving exit. But with the war unresolved and his objectives unmet, Mr. Trump, confronting a resolute yet risk-tolerant Tehran, has found himself in a strategic cul-de-sac.

The U.S. and Israel launched the war with four principal objectives: destroy Iran’s nuclear programme; dismantle its missile capabilities and military industrial base; end Tehran’s support for its non-state quartet (Hamas, Houthis, Hezbollah and Hashad) and bring about a regime change. The first three objectives, however, were inseparable from the fourth. Without toppling the Islamic Republic, achieving any of the other goals appeared impossible even before the war began. This makes regime change or regime collapse the central strategic aim of the war on which all the others depended.

The President’s grave miscalculation

The challenge before Mr. Trump was to engineer regime change through an aerial campaign alone. He was unwilling to commit ground troops, and the U.S. lacked a credible local ally capable of leading an armed insurgency against Tehran. Mr. Trump initially seemed aware of the risks of attacking Iran. In June 2025, the U.S. joined Israel in striking Iran’s nuclear facilities but quickly stepped back. He then declared that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme and compelled Israel to accept a ceasefire. Determined to avoid a wider regional conflict, he sought to prevent the war from spiralling out of control.

But by February 2026, two developments, along with sustained pressure from Israel, appeared to have convinced him that Iran could be defeated in a short war. The first was the U.S. invasion of Venezuela in early January, which in Mr. Trump’s view was a resounding success. U.S. forces abducted President Nicolás Maduro, and withdrew without suffering casualties. Venezuelan Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, who assumed the acting presidency, quickly offered full cooperation with Washington. The second was the wave of violent protests and riots across Iran in January, which reinforced the belief in Washington and Tel Aviv that the government in Tehran had been fatally weakened. They believed that by bombing Iran and decapitating its leadership, the regime would either collapse or result in a new leadership willing to cooperate with Washington, much as they believed had happened in Venezuela. This proved to be a grave miscalculation.

The three pillars of Iran’s response

Iran’s response rested on three pillars — preserving the state; regionalising the war; and enhancing its economic cost through horizontal escalation. Tehran understood that because Mr. Trump’s other war aims were dependent on regime change, preserving the Islamic Republic would, by itself, deny Washington its broader objectives. Mr. Trump mistook Iran for a personality-driven authoritarian regime, which could crumble once the head was taken out. But the Iranian state is sustained by a deeply-entrenched institutional system and an ideology that fuses Shia notions of sacrifice with the ideals of political revolution. Under attack, the state — designed and built to withstand both internal and external shocks — consolidated, while millions rallied around the flag.

The second element was to turn the U.S. bases in the region, built to project American power and protect its allies, into vulnerable targets. Tehran shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which roughly 20% of the world’s seaborne crude oil passed before the war. It turned the Persian Gulf into a battlefield and kept American warships out of it. The Iranian view was that if it was not allowed to export crude, nobody in the Gulf would be able to do so through the Strait. Surprisingly, the U.S. had no contingency plan for the closure of the Strait. Once the waterway was shut, the dynamics of the war began to shift. It was at that point that Mr. Trump began to lose the strategic initiative.

After 40 days of bombing, Mr. Trump announced a ceasefire on April 8. Since then, he has been searching for a dignified exit from the conflict. On June 17, he signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Iran, under which Washington made significant concessions. Unable to present the MoU as a victory at home, however, Mr. Trump soon resumed military strikes, only to be met each time with Iranian retaliation. The ensuing cycle of escalation pushed Washington even farther from its original objectives, while Iran’s willingness to take risks continued to grow.

The war has inflicted immense damage to Iran’s military infrastructure and economy. Yet, Tehran, which has lived under U.S. sanctions for nearly five decades, seems willing to absorb the pain because it sees a strategic opportunity to reshape the regional balance of power at a time when the U.S. is confronting the limits of its own overreach.

As the war dragged on, Iran stepped out of the shadows of asymmetric warfare and increasingly shaped both the course and the pace of the conflict. When U.S. bombing resumed in July following the collapse of the MoU, Washington’s primary objective shifted to reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which had remained open until February 27. Four months into the war, Iran had forced the U.S. to set aside its original objectives — from regime change to the destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme — and instead contend with a new strategic problem created by Tehran itself. In July, while responding to U.S. strikes, Iran widened the conflict by intensifying attacks on Jordan and targeting Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, and the Persian Gulf monarchies. Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) struck Saudi oil facilities and imposed a naval blockade on the kingdom’s Red Sea ports. The conflict thus expanded horizontally in July, something which Mr. Trump was unprepared.

Trapped in escalation

Consider America’s major military campaigns in the 21st century. In Afghanistan, U.S. forces achieved an initial swift victory by toppling the Taliban and establishing a new political order. They began losing the war only after the Taliban began regrouping and started a sustained insurgency. In Iraq and Libya, Washington succeeded in bringing down the regimes, even though the interventions destroyed those states and societies. In each of those theatres, the U.S. at least achieved its immediate military objectives, before failing to manage the post-war order.

But in Iran, the U.S. lost the war in the first phase itself. The U.S. now faces a diminished presence in West Asia, while Iran, with Hormuz under its control, is reasserting itself as a Persian Gulf regional power. Mr. Trump is no longer talking about Iran’s missile programme, its foreign policy or the character of the Iranian state. Forget regime change; today, he is asking the Islamic Republic, the same regime he sought to topple, to make a deal with Washington.

Trapped in this Persian labyrinth, Mr. Trump has few good options. He can acknowledge defeat and exercise diplomatic patience to reach a deal with Tehran and extricate the U.S. from the conflict. For Washington, which has been the dominant power in the Persian Gulf at least since the 1956 Suez War, this would come at a significant strategic cost. Alternatively, Mr. Trump could turn his failed air campaign into a full-scale invasion, with more devastating strikes and the potential deployment of ground troops. But there is no guarantee that escalation would help him win the war. On the contrary, it could draw the U.S. deeper into the sands of Iran, where a military of roughly 6,00,000 soldiers would be waiting.

Published - August 07, 2026 12:16 am IST