- Military
- History
- Revitalizing History
One figure haunts the Iran war debate like a ghost. On May 5, on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, Barack Obama contrasted his diplomatic approach to Iran with Donald Trump’s reliance on military pressure. His nuclear deal, he argued, prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon without war. “We pulled it off without firing a missile,” he said. “We got 97% of their enriched uranium out... There’s no dispute that it worked...and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.”
Obama was not simply protecting his record. He was defending the model that still governs Democratic thinking about Iran. Former Obama officials, many of whom returned under Joe Biden, now argue across television, radio, and podcasts that diplomacy remains the superior framework and that Trump’s reliance on military power is reckless. Much of the media echoes them. So do MAGA rebels led by Tucker Carlson. The debate over the war’s lessons therefore remains trapped in assumptions from 2015, assumptions that went stale long before the first shot was fired.
Over the last decade, the nature of warfare has changed. Clausewitz teaches that war is always governed by politics, but it also has its own “grammar”: the internal logic created by weapons, tactics, operations, logistics, and the dynamics of combat.
Every era of great-power competition develops a distinctive grammar. The Napoleonic age spoke through mass citizen armies, artillery, cavalry, and nationalist mobilization. The world wars demanded industrial production, attrition, and total war, erasing the line between battlefield and home front. The Cold War introduced nuclear escalation ladders, proxy conflicts, and the management of violence under the shadow of annihilation.
Today’s contest between the American-led alliance system and China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea has produced another grammar: precision missile strikes, drone swarms, real-time intelligence, cyber operations, and attacks on civilian infrastructure far from the battlefield itself.
The Iran war is nothing if not a dramatic exposition of the new grammar. When Obama launched the JCPOA, the defining features of today’s military competition were barely visible, even to Pentagon planners. The war’s first and most important lesson is that “overmatch” is reshaping the military balance. The term describes Iran’s ability, using cheap drones and precision-guided missiles launched in large numbers, to impose disproportionate operational and economic costs on the United States and its allies. Even the most sophisticated American and Israeli air and missile defenses strain under saturation attacks.
Over the last decade, overwhelming American conventional dominance has given way to a contested asymmetric standoff with Iran and its backers, China and Russia—the kind now unfolding dramatically in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Obama approach not only failed to anticipate this shift in the military balance; it accelerated it. By granting massive sanctions relief in exchange for temporary and reversible nuclear restrictions, the JCPOA strengthened all three legs of the Iranian threat tripod: missiles and drones; regional proxies; and the nuclear program itself. While Washington fixated on uranium stockpiles and centrifuge counts, Tehran used the windfall to expand the conventional shield protecting its nuclear sites and to expand Iran’s regional influence.
The war’s second lesson, therefore, is that a return to the Obama framework is dangerously unsuited to the current threat. Iran’s missile and drone arsenals have grown dramatically in quantity, precision, and survivability while steadily moving underground into hardened and dispersed sites. These systems now threaten simultaneously Israel, the Gulf states, and every major American installation in the region.
More dangerously still, they place Iran’s nuclear program behind an increasingly effective conventional shield, raising the prospective cost of future military action to potentially prohibitive levels.
The Obama approach therefore rests on outdated assumptions: that Iranian nuclear advances would be visible and slow, that the United States and Israel would retain both the time and the ability to act militarily, and that the program would remain vulnerable to air attack at acceptable cost. Today’s war has decisively vitiated those assumptions.
The third lesson of the war is that, contrary to what the Obama-Biden team is saying, this was not a war of choice; it was a war of necessity. Iran was racing toward what Secretary of State Marco Rubio called a “zone of immunity,” a threshold at which its massive, hardened arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones would shield its nuclear program behind an impenetrable wall. Once crossed, any attempt by the United States or Israel to disrupt nuclear weaponization militarily would inflict catastrophic costs on them and the Gulf allies. The Trump-Netanyahu campaign was a timely strike to prevent Iran from reaching that point of no return while a military option still existed at acceptable cost.
The fourth lesson is that the new military balance favors persistent offensive action. Cheap missiles and drones allow Tehran to impose disproportionate costs on vastly more expensive defensive systems, while hardened underground facilities steadily erode the effectiveness of passive defense alone.
Iran has also demonstrated a greater willingness than the United States or its allies to target civilian infrastructure. Throughout the war it struck airports, hotels, desalination plants, and other soft targets across the Gulf. Washington and its partners remain reluctant to conduct comparable attacks, both because they seek to limit civilian suffering and because legal and political constraints shape Western military behavior. This asymmetry favors Tehran. Iran’s saturation attacks against civilian and economic targets can generate strategic pressure long before they achieve decisive military effects.
Deterrence in this environment cannot rest primarily on diplomacy or missile defense. It requires sustained pressure on Iran’s leadership and military infrastructure: launchers, production facilities, command nodes, proxy networks, financial channels, and, if necessary, senior decision-makers themselves. Without continuous cost imposition, temporary restraint will simply allow the threat to harden further underground.
The fifth lesson is that Iran’s asymmetric strike advantage is not an isolated national capability. It is a coalition asset jointly cultivated by China, Russia, and North Korea, all of which increasingly view the globe as a single strategic theater. Beijing and Moscow invested heavily in Tehran’s missile, drone, and proxy network because it ties down American forces, threatens critical energy chokepoints, and generates valuable operational data about U.S. and Israeli military behavior.
China has a particular interest in cultivating these capabilities for use in a future conflict over Taiwan. Beijing has kept the Iranian regime and its proxy network afloat through massive purchases of sanctioned oil while supplying critical dual-use technologies and materials for missile production, navigation, targeting, and guidance systems. Russian cooperation deepened after the invasion of Ukraine, with Moscow and Tehran exchanging drone production expertise, intelligence, and air-defense technology.
The result is a resilient low-cost strike complex capable of overwhelming sophisticated defenses while threatening the flow of energy through the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab.
Obama and Biden officials still describe the Iran war as a distraction from the China challenge. In reality, it was part of the same global contest. Weakening Iran degraded a forward operating arm of the anti-Western coalition and reduced Beijing’s ability to threaten critical maritime chokepoints during a future Indo-Pacific crisis.
The sixth lesson is that the so-called “energy transition” is, at least for now, a strategic illusion. Many former Obama and Biden officials, along with European policymakers, speak as though oil geopolitics belongs to a fading past even while roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and major volumes of LNG continue to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
The war exposed the illusion. America’s principal Indo-Pacific allies remain deeply dependent on Middle Eastern energy. Japan derives the overwhelming majority of its oil from the Gulf, while South Korea and Taiwan face similar exposure. In a Taiwan crisis, China could use Iranian or proxy capabilities to disrupt those flows and impose severe economic pressure on American allies without directly attacking them.
Beijing understands this vulnerability clearly. China has built strategic petroleum reserves, diversified supply routes through Russia and Central Asia, expanded coal production, and accelerated renewable capacity without assuming that hydrocarbons are disappearing anytime soon. Much of the West, by contrast, treated energy security as a secondary concern while underestimating the strategic leverage that Iran and the Strait of Hormuz still provide to the anti-Western coalition.
The seventh and final lesson is that Israel has emerged as what President Trump rightly called the “model ally” for the 21st century. In 2017, Barack Obama told Israeli television that the United States would keep Israel “in a position of strength” so that it could “defend itself by itself” and therefore afford to “take some risks for peace.” That statement belonged to a different strategic era.
In the 2026 war, Israel carried out sustained offensive operations against Iran on a scale unmatched by any American ally in recent decades. It supplied intelligence, operational access, targeting capabilities, and combat power while the United States provided the heavy enablers needed to overcome Iran’s missile and drone advantage. Israel did not behave like a dependent client. It fought as a capable military partner willing to absorb risk, sustain operations under fire, and impose costs on a common adversary.
The new grammar of war favors allies that can fight, not merely host bases or issue communiqués. In an era when many American allies contribute little offensive capacity, Israel stands out as one of the few partners able and willing to conduct sustained military operations against a coalition-backed adversary. The war demonstrated that proactive alliances built around capable states are now the foundation of deterrence itself.
