“In twenty years, Iran will be one of the five great powers of the world,” Mohammad Reza Pahlavi told Oriana Fallaci in 1973. Two years later, the man most backed by Washington across the region fled Tehran in his pajamas, not because an foreign army toppled him, but because his own people did. The history of the relationship between the United States and Iran is studded with a recurrent certainty: the American conviction that it understands Iran better than Iran understands itself.
“The question is whether anyone in Washington has had the honesty to look into the Baghdad and Kabul mirror before aiming for the pocket.”
That certainty failed in 1979, when Washington bet everything on a shah who turned out to be a hollow shell. The Middle East is not a chessboard where every move follows a predictable logic; it resembles more a billiards carom, where each strike sends balls off in directions no one anticipated. The question is not whether the United States can strike Iran. The question is whether anyone in Washington has had the honesty to look into the Baghdad-Kabul mirror before taking aim at the pocket.
This article performs the exercise of reigning in the euphoria of the operation and enumerating all that can go wrong. Bismarck, who built the modern German state precisely because he never confused audacity with imprudence, stated it with a clarity that has not aged: “A preventive war seems as imprudent as committing suicide out of fear of death.”
The Electoral Calculus of the Midterms
The war arrives at the worst possible moment in Donald Trump’s domestic political cycle. The midterms of 2026 are held with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives that, in many districts, rests on margins of three or four points. The historical pattern of presidents at war during these elections points toward losing seats. The difference here is that there is no external crisis to rally around. Sixty‑nine percent of Americans disapproved of the attacks from day one.
“Every family of every service member deployed to the Gulf becomes electoral ammunition for the Democrats in November.”
The most conspicuous political damage may not come from broad disapproval. It comes from forcing swinging senators and representatives in battleground districts to vote on authorizations for war powers, with the operation already underway, no clear victory in sight, and a concurrent call for supplemental funds. Every news cycle without a clear victory narrative, every rise in gasoline prices, and every family of a service member deployed to the Gulf becomes electoral ammunition for the Democrats in November. Trump has opened a front where the rally ’round the flag’ effect could work against him.
Gulf States as Hostages
There is a dimension of the conflict that deserves particular attention: the structural water vulnerability of the Gulf’s own allies. Kuwait relies about 90% on desalination plants for its drinking water. Oman, about 86%. Saudi Arabia, around 70%. The United Arab Emirates, roughly 42%. These facilities (monstrous industrial complexes scattered along the Gulf coasts) treat seawater and convert it into the potable water that sustains tens of millions in regions where groundwater is virtually non-existent.
A conventional missile against a desalination plant is not merely an attack on an energy infrastructure; it is an attack on the immediate survival of civilian populations. It is estimated that destroying Jubail, which supplies Riyadh with 90% of its water, would make it impossible to keep the capital operational in less than a week. There are no stored water reserves, no alternative aquifers, no functioning distribution network without these facilities. The model for attack has precedents: the Iran‑backed Houthis already targeted Saudi Arabia’s Al‑Shuqaiq desalination plant in 2022, proving these facilities lie within Iran’s target perimeter. In the current war, the debris of an intercepted drone triggered a fire at the West Doha power and desalination plant in Kuwait.
“The United States has built its entire regional security architecture on allies who were dragged into a war they did not ask for and whose exit nobody has designed yet.”
Moreover, the Gulf’s allies did not choose this war. Before the first bombardment, several of these regimes pressed Washington for restraint. Riyadh knew that any military confrontation would drag its civil infrastructure, its economic model, and its internal stability. The former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Michael Ratney, puts it as Riyadh not being surprised so much as confirmed in its worst fears, and its greatest fear now is not Iran but not knowing what comes next. The United States has built its regional security architecture on allies dragged into a war they did not ask for and whose exit nobody has designed yet.
Moreover, Saudi Arabia is not the same strategic partner it was a decade ago. It has built a national transformation project, Vision 2030, moving a growing slice of its economy toward non‑oil sectors (tourism, entertainment, finance, manufacturing) by attracting foreign investment on an unprecedented scale. NEOM, AlUla, the megaprojects of PIF… all that model rests on the premise of sustained regional stability.
Iranian strikes on Saudi facilities have sparked a loss of credibility among international investors whose capital will take years to recover, regardless of when the conflict ends. Additionally, Saudi Arabia does not share the Israeli or American objectives in this war; it does not want a possible failed state of 92 million people generating massive migration, radicalization, and institutional chaos in its neighborhood for decades to come. This ambivalence makes Riyadh an ally who could break with coalition discipline if the war drags on and could force the U.S. to manage frictions among its own partners.
Two Theaters, One Army
The American military enters this conflict already logistically stretched. It has only eleven operating aircraft carriers, with several undergoing maintenance at the same time. With the Gulf as the primary theater, coverage in the Pacific is reduced to a minimum. Precision munitions stocks, already near rock bottom from sustained support to Ukraine, have industrial production cycles of eighteen months to two years. Technological superiority is a necessary condition, but not sufficient to win, especially in a protracted conflict when stores run dry faster than factories can replenish them.
“This could be the best window of opportunity to strike Taiwan, precisely because the Gulf’s wear and tear tightens the margin of American response in the Pacific.”
Operationally, this means that every carrier deployed off Iran’s coast is a carrier missing in the Taiwan Strait; every round expended on Natanz is round not available if the PLA chooses to cross. China, economically wounded by the conflict’s energy disruptions, nevertheless holds strategic oil reserves ample enough to absorb that cost in the short term. Washington does not enjoy the same margin. While the United States bleeds capability in the Middle East, Beijing watches, computes, and waits. This could be the best window of opportunity to strike Taiwan, precisely because Gulf wear and tear compresses the margin of American response in the Pacific. Trump may be winning a war while losing another.
That tension between theaters of operations also touches NATO. European allies, who rebuilt their arsenals focusing on Russia, are now forced to choose between Ukraine and the Gulf without real capacity to sustain both fronts. The war in Iran is not only weakening the United States; it fractures the alliance’s strategic coherence.
The Day-After Trap
Without going into domino effects, there is a real possibility that this war could fail to achieve its operational objectives. Iran has spent nearly fifty years building its military architecture around the single premise of surviving the American attack it has always anticipated. It also had a dry run in June 2025 that allowed it to identify American and Israeli attack capabilities and gave them eight months to address vulnerabilities.
“The human cost of a ground invasion would be of a magnitude that no American president could sustain politically for more than a few weeks.”
The United States dominates Iranian airspace, but what if bombardments are not enough? Here geography becomes Iran’s best ally. It is the seventeenth-largest country in the world, with a land area comparable to Western Europe, dominated by mountain ranges like the Zagros and the Alborz that carve natural defensive corridors where any ground advance becomes near impossible. To seize land does not merely mean bombing it from the air; it means occupying it, controlling it, and sustaining it, which requires infantry, exposed armored columns, and supply lines crossing a terrain designed to explode them. Afghanistan had 38 million people; Iran has 92 million, with regular forces, the IRGC, and reserve militias that together number over a million trained to wage a war of attrition on their own soil. The human cost of a ground invasion would be a magnitude that no American president could politically endure for more than a few weeks.
Given these difficulties, both Washington and Tel Aviv appear to be betting that bombardments will spur an Iranian civil society weary of the regime to rise from within. The wager is not absurd; the protests of 2019, 2022, and 2026 showed a real fracture between broad sections of the population and the Islamic Republic. The problem is that a massive external strike with civilian casualties could trigger the opposite psychological effect: a rally around the aggressor outside. Iran is a nation with more than 2,500 years of continuous historical identity that has endured Mongol, Arab, and Russian invasions, absorbing the impact and reconstructing itself. Its internal fractures are real, but they are fractures that Iranians resolve among themselves, and an outside bombardment could not widen them, but weld them. The very citizenry that protests the regime in peacetime can become its strongest shield when missiles rain down on their neighborhoods. Washington may be, perhaps unknowingly, handing the regime a lifeline.
“Every image of an Iranian city bombed circulating on social networks in the Arab and Muslim world is fuel for a new generation of anti-Americanism.”
Even in the scenario where the United States achieves its objectives, the day after could be worse than the day before. An Iran that is institutionally destroyed is not a pacified Iran; it would be a power vacuum of nearly a hundred million people at the heart of the Middle East, a potential breeding ground for armed groups. Add to that the ideological recoil: every image of an Iranian city bombed circulating on social networks across the Arab and Muslim world fuels a fresh wave of anti-American sentiment, precisely as Fallujah and Abu Ghraib did, fueling a decade of global jihad.
And if all this unfolds? What happens if we enter the worst-case scenario? What if Trump has confused destroying a regime with solving a problem, just as Bush did in Baghdad?
The history of the Middle East is filled with powers that arrived convinced they understood the region better than the region understood itself. All left. If there is a single lesson that fifty years of American history in the Middle East has etched in memory, it is that the certainty of having won is often the first sign that one has begun to lose.
