Attrition, Destabilisation and the Strategic Logic of Non-Termination
Diplomatic Briefing Paper — 16 August 2026
Purpose
Nearly six months after the opening of joint United States–Israeli operations against Iran, the central strategic question is no longer whether the Islamic Republic has been militarily weakened, because on every conventional indicator it has been, nor whether the United States and Israel possess the capacity to inflict additional destruction, because they clearly do. The problem is instead whether the destruction already imposed, and that which can still be imposed, is capable of producing a political termination corresponding to the military balance, or whether the conflict has entered a different phase in which continued instability may itself acquire strategic utility for some of the actors involved, even though none of them necessarily entered the war intending to create a permanently destabilised Middle East.
This distinction is important because wars are not always continued for the same purposes for which they were begun. The analogy with Vietnam is imperfect but useful precisely on this point: American policy did not begin from a desire to maintain permanent instability in Indochina, yet as the conflict evolved its continuation became progressively entangled with credibility, containment, relations with China and the Soviet Union, alliance management and the perceived systemic consequences of withdrawal. A limited war may therefore cease to be judged only against its original battlefield objectives and begin to be assessed according to the wider distribution of costs it imposes upon allies, adversaries and third powers.
Iran may now be approaching such a condition.
The question is no longer simply whether Washington can force Tehran to concede, but whether the continuation of a bounded war may be considered strategically tolerable, or even partially advantageous, provided that the costs imposed on Iran and on other competitors remain greater than the direct fiscal, military and political burden borne by the United States. That hypothesis cannot presently be demonstrated as an intentional American grand strategy, and it would be analytically unsound to present it as such; it can, however, be tested as an increasingly relevant explanation of why the absence of a decisive political settlement does not necessarily imply that all of the major actors perceive non-termination as failure.
The military balance and the failure of political conversion
Iran entered the war on 28 February 2026 with approximately 610,000 active personnel in the baseline used in this study, including roughly 420,000 in the Artesh and 190,000 in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, together with a much larger potential Basij mobilisation pool. Its conventional weakness relative to the combined capabilities of the United States and Israel was evident before the first strike, particularly in air power, intelligence, precision targeting, integrated air defence suppression and maritime warfare, but the Iranian military system had not been designed principally to obtain symmetry in these areas. Its underlying logic was one of survival through redundancy, dispersion, hardened infrastructure, mobile strike systems, provincial command structures and the multiplication of retaliatory mechanisms whose aggregate effect was intended to make political victory considerably more difficult than military penetration.
The war has confirmed this distinction with unusual clarity. Iranian air defences, aviation, surface naval forces, missile-production installations and national-level command structures have suffered severe damage, yet the state has not ceased to function, the IRGC has not disintegrated, missile and drone operations have continued at lower intensity, and Tehran has preserved sufficient coercive capacity to affect maritime traffic, Gulf infrastructure and the strategic calculations of neighbouring states. United States intelligence assessments reported by Reuters on 27 March are particularly instructive because, despite considerably more expansive public claims regarding the destruction of Iranian missile capabilities, intelligence agencies were then able to confirm with confidence the destruction of only approximately one-third of the arsenal, while substantial portions of the remainder were assessed as damaged, buried, inaccessible or uncertain. The distinction between destroyed, temporarily suppressed and unlocated is not technical semantics; it determines whether military success translates into strategic elimination.
The decapitation campaign produced a similar outcome. The death of Ali Khamenei removed the dominant political figure of the Islamic Republic but did not create regime paralysis; Reuters reported in April that wartime authority had increasingly migrated toward the IRGC, the Supreme National Security Council and the security establishment surrounding Mojtaba Khamenei, producing a system that was less centred upon the personal authority of the old Supreme Leader but, if anything, more explicitly militarised. The war therefore weakened Iranian conventional power without dissolving the political architecture required to continue resistance.
That is the first strategic reality from which every subsequent trajectory must be derived: Iran is substantially weaker than it was in February, but weakness has not yet become political submission.
What the war has actually demonstrated about Iranian defense doctrine
It would nevertheless be incorrect to claim that the war has fully validated Iran’s mosaic-defence doctrine, because the territorial element of that doctrine remains essentially untested. There has been no occupation of Tehran, Isfahan, Bandar Abbas or the other major urban centres, no nationwide Basij mobilisation against foreign ground forces and no sustained attempt by an invading army to control Iranian territory. The pre-war concept of autonomous provincial resistance, urban strongpoints and decentralised guerrilla warfare therefore remains a capability whose effectiveness is plausible but not empirically demonstrated.
What has been demonstrated is the organisational principle beneath mosaic defence: disruption at the centre does not automatically produce paralysis at the periphery. Distributed command, underground storage, hardened communications, mobile launch systems and provincial security structures have enabled Iran to continue operating despite leadership losses and repeated attacks upon central military infrastructure. In this narrower but strategically important sense, the Iranian system has behaved substantially as its designers intended.
This also explains why the absence of a terrestrial campaign should not be read as an incomplete coalition strategy. Iran’s population approaches 90 million, its territory is approximately 1.65 million square kilometres, its major cities provide considerable depth for urban defence, its geography favours dispersal and concealment, and its internal security institutions have spent decades preparing simultaneously for domestic unrest and external attack. Historical American counterinsurgency literature generally discussed force requirements relative to population rather than territory and frequently referred to ratios in the region of 20–25 security personnel per 1,000 inhabitants as historical observations rather than universal requirements. Applied mechanically to Iran such figures would produce absurdly large force requirements, which is precisely why they should not be treated as predictive formulas, but they illustrate the scale of the problem: an occupation capable of controlling the country would require a military and political commitment radically disproportionate to the objectives that either Israel or the United States has so far been prepared to pursue.
The coalition has consequently chosen the rational alternative: destruction without occupation, maritime pressure without territorial responsibility, and economic coercion without assuming the costs of governing the defeated state.
Hormuz and the transformation of geography into coercive capital
The Strait of Hormuz has become the most important mechanism through which Iran has transformed residual military capacity into international political leverage. Before the war, approximately 130–140 vessels per day normally passed through the Strait according to shipping data cited by Reuters; by mid-August tracked traffic had fallen to a fraction of that level, with eight vessels reported on 12 August and nine commodity vessels on 13 August. The significance of these figures lies not in Iran’s ability to defeat the United States Navy, which it cannot do in conventional terms, but in its ability to ensure that physical American naval superiority does not automatically restore commercial normality.
Commercial shipping reacts not only to control of the sea but to uncertainty, insurance, the probability of mining, missile attack, drone strikes and the political risk that a transit corridor may suddenly become unusable. Iran therefore needs only to sustain enough uncertainty to increase the economic price of navigation, and in this respect a residual capability may generate effects disproportionate to the number of missiles, mines or small craft actually available.
Washington has answered with a reciprocal mechanism of denial. On 13 August, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated that the naval blockade of Iranian ports could be maintained indefinitely through rotational deployments, while Tehran has linked the reopening of Hormuz to American concessions, including termination of hostilities and the release of frozen Iranian assets. The conflict has consequently evolved into a coercive equilibrium in which Iran restricts access to a maritime artery essential to international energy markets while the United States restricts Iran’s own access to maritime trade and international finance.
Neither side wishes to remove its pressure instrument first because each assumes that unilateral de-escalation would weaken its bargaining position. The war may therefore continue even if neither side regards permanent high-intensity fighting as desirable.
The economic equation and the limits of attritional optimism
The economic balance presently favours the coalition in direct bilateral terms. The International Monetary Fund projects Iranian GDP to contract by 5.4 per cent in 2026 while average consumer-price inflation reaches approximately 68.9 per cent, figures which, when combined with infrastructure damage, disrupted exports, sanctions and the costs of military reconstruction, describe an economy undergoing severe wartime compression. Washington therefore has a rational basis for believing that time works against Tehran.
The difficulty is that economic deterioration does not produce political capitulation according to a mechanical relationship. The relevant Iranian variable is regime survival rather than aggregate welfare, and a political-security establishment that interprets missiles, nuclear latency and regional military networks as guarantees against future decapitation or externally imposed regime change may rationally tolerate an enormous decline in civilian welfare before accepting their permanent removal. The post-Khamenei shift toward the IRGC may actually increase that tolerance by giving greater influence to institutions whose political legitimacy and material interests are inseparable from continued confrontation.
The United States also pays a price for time. Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee in July that direct Pentagon expenditure on the war had reached approximately USD 37.5 billion; American casualties had reached 18 dead and more than 500 wounded, while the expenditure of high-end interceptors was creating a more consequential strategic constraint than the fiscal cost alone. Reuters reported on 7 August, citing CSIS estimates, that approximately 65 per cent of the pre-war U.S. Patriot interceptor inventory had been consumed between February and July, leaving fewer than approximately 850 under the assumptions used in that calculation.
The importance of this expenditure is not merely that a Patriot interceptor costs far more than a Shahed-type drone or many of the missiles it may be required to engage, but that the interceptor consumed over the Gulf is unavailable in another theatre. The relevant cost is therefore not simply monetary; it is the opportunity cost imposed upon Ukraine, the defence of U.S. bases elsewhere and the stockpiles Washington would prefer to preserve for a possible Indo-Pacific confrontation.
The attritional equation consequently contains two clocks. Iran is losing economic and military capacity while the coalition is losing munitions, money, political patience and, potentially, cohesion. Victory depends upon which clock reaches its critical point first.
China and the possibility that instability acquires strategic value
It is at this point that the conflict ceases to be explicable solely through the U.S.–Iran bilateral relationship.
China is the world’s largest crude-oil importer and remains structurally dependent upon maritime energy flows originating in the Gulf and passing through chokepoints over which it exercises limited military control. Reuters reported that Chinese crude imports fell sharply during the disruption associated with the Iran war, with June volumes reaching approximately 7.12 million barrels per day, close to their lowest level in a decade, compared with levels around 12 million barrels per day before the crisis. Beijing possesses large strategic petroleum reserves, diversified suppliers and increasing imports from Russia, but none of these eliminates the structural vulnerability exposed by a prolonged Hormuz disruption.
This vulnerability has several consequences for China simultaneously: it raises the cost of energy security, requires larger strategic inventories, reduces flexibility in refinery operations, increases dependence upon politically sensitive suppliers, forces Beijing to devote diplomatic and potentially military attention to the Middle East and demonstrates that the physical security of a substantial part of Chinese trade continues to depend upon maritime spaces in which the United States possesses overwhelming power-projection capabilities.
That result has strategic value for Washington whether or not it was an original objective of the war. The United States is itself one of the world’s largest hydrocarbon producers and is considerably less dependent upon imported Gulf energy than China. Higher international energy prices remain politically damaging to American consumers and can contribute to inflation, but they simultaneously transfer income toward domestic American producers, while for China the terms-of-trade effect is much more unambiguously negative. The economic incidence of prolonged Gulf instability is therefore asymmetric.
This introduces a possibility that should not be dismissed merely because direct documentary evidence of intent is absent: once a war is underway, Washington may calculate its continuation not solely against the objective of compelling Iran to surrender, but against the wider systemic value generated by forcing China to absorb the consequences of instability in a region central to its energy security.
The Vietnam analogy becomes useful here, not because Washington secretly sought endless war in Southeast Asia, but because the strategic meaning of Vietnam eventually extended far beyond the immediate contest between North and South Vietnam. Alliance credibility, relations with China and the Soviet Union, containment and the reputational effects of withdrawal increasingly influenced calculations about continuation. Limited war became embedded within the architecture of great-power competition. The Iranian conflict may be undergoing a comparable enlargement of purpose.
Russia: the principal contradiction
The same argument cannot, however, be extended mechanically to Russia.
A prolonged Middle Eastern energy crisis presently offers Moscow several important advantages. Higher oil prices increase the value of Russian exports; disruptions affecting Gulf supplies improve the relative attractiveness of Russian crude; India imported approximately 2.47 million barrels per day of Russian oil in July according to Reuters, giving Russia a record share of Indian imports; and every Patriot interceptor or other scarce American munition expended in the Gulf represents equipment unavailable for Ukraine.
The conflict also diverts Western political attention from the European theatre and complicates the effort to maintain simultaneous military commitments in Europe and the Middle East.
It would therefore be analytically weak to describe continued Iranian instability as an American strategy designed to damage a homogeneous Sino-Russian bloc. The immediate effects are different. China suffers a substantial energy-security tax; Russia receives an important hydrocarbon windfall and benefits from diversion of Western military resources. This does not necessarily eliminate the strategic value of continued pressure on China, because Washington may judge the two externalities differently, but it greatly weakens any hypothesis according to which the conflict is deliberately maintained in order to exhaust both Beijing and Moscow simultaneously.
Coalition divergence and the disappearance of a single definition of victory
The term “anti-Iran coalition” increasingly conceals more than it explains. Israel, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman do not have identical definitions of an acceptable end-state, and the divergence among them has widened as the war has continued.
Israel’s strategic threshold is the highest because its problem does not end with the cessation of present Iranian attacks. A settlement that reopens Hormuz, restores commercial navigation and imposes nuclear restrictions might satisfy Washington while remaining unacceptable to Jerusalem if Iran retains the ability to reconstruct missile production, air defences, nuclear infrastructure and proxy networks. Israel therefore possesses a structural incentive for what may be described as preventive recurrence: even if high-intensity war ends, sufficiently rapid Iranian reconstitution can itself generate the rationale for another cycle of strikes.
Washington’s objective appears narrower. The evidence available by mid-August is more consistent with coercive continuation than with war for its own sake: maintain blockade, sanctions and the threat of renewed attack until Iran accepts conditions sufficient to produce an enforceable political settlement. The United States therefore has an identifiable off-ramp, even if Tehran presently rejects the terms attached to it.
The Gulf states increasingly occupy a third position. They want Iran weakened and deterred but are disproportionately exposed to the consequences of indefinite confrontation: desalination plants, ports, refineries, LNG infrastructure, commercial shipping and urban economies all lie within a geographic environment Iran can continue to threaten even after losing much of its conventional military power. Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia has consequently combined defensive arrangements with Turkey and Pakistan, limited military retaliation against Iranian-aligned groups and continued efforts to avoid absorption into the wider American–Iranian confrontation.
For Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, a permanently weakened Iran may be desirable, but a permanently destabilised Gulf is not. The coalition therefore possesses military superiority without political homogeneity, which is precisely why battlefield success has not yet generated a common definition of victory.
Possible trajectories of the war
The war can now develop along five principal trajectories, none of which should be treated as mutually exclusive in the short term because movement from one to another may occur rapidly following a successful negotiation, a major Iranian attack, an Israeli preventive strike or a sudden crisis in Hormuz.
Trajectory I — Negotiated coercive settlement
The first and still plausible outcome is an agreement in which Washington gradually relaxes maritime and financial pressure in exchange for the reopening of Hormuz, verifiable nuclear restrictions, constraints upon longer-range missile reconstruction and some form of limitation upon Iranian support to regional armed groups. Such a settlement would not represent Iranian surrender, because the regime would survive with significant residual capabilities, nor would it represent a complete coalition victory, because Israel would almost certainly remain concerned about future Iranian reconstruction.
This trajectory offers the lowest immediate economic cost to the Gulf states and China and would permit the United States to reduce munitions expenditure, but it contains a substantial risk of recurrence because the underlying disagreement over what Iran may legitimately rebuild would remain unresolved.
Probability (next six months): approximately 25 per cent.
Trajectory II — Managed attritional stalemate
The most probable near-term trajectory is neither peace nor renewed maximum-intensity war but continuation of the existing coercive equilibrium: American blockade, sanctions and selective strikes; Iranian pressure on Hormuz and regional infrastructure; periodic proxy activity; intermittent negotiations; and occasional tactical pauses without a final political settlement.
This configuration allows Washington to continue degrading Iran without accepting the costs of occupation, allows Israel to retain freedom of action against reconstruction, and allows Tehran to continue imposing external costs without attempting direct conventional confrontation with the United States. Its principal danger is that a state initially intended as temporary can become structurally stable because every actor possesses enough reason to avoid capitulation and enough reason to avoid uncontrolled escalation.
Probability (dominant condition through early 2027): approximately 35 per cent.
Trajectory III — Bounded regional destabilisation
A third trajectory is more consequential and deserves greater attention than it has so far received: the conflict persists at a level high enough to keep Hormuz, the Red Sea, Iraq, Lebanon and Gulf infrastructure under recurrent pressure, but below the threshold of direct large-scale regional war.
Such instability would be extremely costly for Gulf states and China, but it would not necessarily be strategically intolerable for Washington provided American casualties remained limited, military expenditure remained manageable and the conflict continued to weaken Iran while exposing China’s dependence upon Middle Eastern maritime energy flows.
In this scenario, destabilisation ceases to be merely an unintended consequence and becomes a strategically tolerable environment because it produces some externalities favourable to American power: Iran remains weakened; China absorbs energy-security costs; Gulf governments become more dependent upon American security guarantees; demand for U.S. defence systems rises; and American naval control over the maritime architecture of the region becomes more rather than less politically salient.
The benefits are offset by substantial costs: Russia gains from higher hydrocarbon prices, U.S. interceptor inventories decline, Europe suffers from expensive energy, Gulf partners may progressively distance themselves from Washington, and prolonged instability can create precisely the anti-American alignments it was intended to prevent.
The essential point is therefore not that Washington necessarily seeks destabilisation, but that bounded destabilisation may become strategically acceptable if its external benefits are judged to exceed its marginal cost.
Probability (effective strategic condition of the region): approximately 20 per cent.
Trajectory IV — Renewed high-intensity U.S.–Israeli campaign
A fourth trajectory would follow either the collapse of negotiations, a major Iranian attack causing substantial American or Gulf casualties, evidence of rapid nuclear reconstruction, or an Israeli judgement that Iranian reconstitution has crossed an unacceptable threshold.
The United States and Israel retain overwhelming capacity to resume large-scale attacks, and further destruction of missile facilities, nuclear infrastructure, air defences and industrial sites is entirely feasible. The difficulty is that the first six months of war have already demonstrated the limits of destruction without political conversion. A second major campaign could further reduce Iranian capability but might still leave enough residual infrastructure and organisational resilience to restart the same strategic cycle at a lower level of Iranian capacity and a higher level of regional instability.
Probability (next six months): approximately 15 per cent.
Trajectory V — Uncontrolled regional escalation
The least probable but most dangerous trajectory is the collapse of bounded coercion into an uncontrolled regional conflict involving sustained attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure, widespread closure of Hormuz, major Houthi operations in the Red Sea, intensified fighting involving Iraqi militias and Hezbollah, direct Israeli attacks deeper into the Iranian state and potentially retaliatory operations against American bases across the region.
Such escalation would rapidly transform the conflict from an Iranian war into a systemic energy and security crisis. China would suffer heavily from energy disruption, but so would Europe and much of Asia; global inflation would accelerate; Gulf political stability could deteriorate; Russian hydrocarbon revenues would rise sharply; American munitions consumption would become increasingly difficult to reconcile with commitments in Europe and the Indo-Pacific; and the possibility of accidental escalation involving other major powers would increase.
No principal actor appears to have an obvious interest in this outcome, which is precisely why its probability remains lower, but the number of independent military actors operating across several theatres means that intentional control cannot be assumed indefinitely.
Probability (next six months): approximately 5 per cent.
Strategic assessment
The distribution of probabilities should not obscure the larger conclusion. The most probable future is not decisive coalition victory or Iranian victory but some combination of attritional stalemate and bounded instability, together accounting in this assessment for approximately 55 per cent of the plausible six-month trajectories.
This matters because such an outcome changes the meaning of strategic success. If the sole American objective is understood as forcing Iran to accept a comprehensive political settlement, prolonged non-termination represents failure. If, however, the relevant objective expands to include continued degradation of Iranian capabilities, maintenance of American leverage over Gulf security, reinforcement of the strategic dependence of regional partners, exposure of China’s vulnerability to maritime energy disruption and the prevention of Iranian re-emergence as an unconstrained regional power, the assessment becomes more ambiguous.
Under those conditions, a war that cannot be decisively won may still generate strategic returns.
The comparison with Vietnam should therefore be used cautiously but not discarded. The relevant lesson is not that the United States prefers endless wars, nor that Vietnam was deliberately prolonged in order to bleed China and the Soviet Union; it is that once a limited conflict becomes integrated into a wider contest between major powers, the calculation of whether to continue fighting can become detached from the original battlefield objective. Credibility, alliance structures, adversary resource allocation and the systemic consequences of withdrawal begin to enter the equation.
Iran may now be moving into precisely that analytical space.
The central question is consequently no longer simply whether Iran can be defeated. It is whether ending the war now produces greater strategic value for the United States than allowing the conflict to persist at a controlled level.
That calculation must include Iran, but it must also include China, Russia, the Gulf states, Europe, energy markets, American ammunition inventories and the opportunity cost of military resources required elsewhere.
The equation is therefore no longer: cost of continuing the war versus value of defeating Iran.
It is: cost of continued operations and regional instability against continued Iranian degradation, pressure on Chinese energy security, preservation of American maritime leverage, greater Gulf dependence upon U.S. security guarantees and prevention of Iranian military reconstitution, minus Russian hydrocarbon gains, depletion of U.S. munitions, damage to European and Gulf economies, domestic American political costs and the danger that controlled instability becomes uncontrollable escalation.
Seen from this perspective, the apparent inability to terminate the conflict may contain two very different phenomena which should not be confused. One is genuine political failure: the inability of military superiority to produce agreement. The other is strategic adaptation: the possibility that the continuing conflict itself begins to produce advantages whose value changes the incentive to terminate it rapidly.
There is presently insufficient evidence to conclude that Washington has crossed from the first condition into the second as a deliberate policy. There is, however, sufficient evidence to consider the possibility seriously.
That is the principal strategic uncertainty of the next phase of the war.
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