The American Conservative: The Iran War and the Future of American Empire

No matter how the war ends, the costs of the latest U.S. military adventure in the Middle East will be steep and the geopolitical consequences irreversible. The next generation of U.S. leaders will face a stark reality. The United States, which for decades has made decisions based on what policymakers thought America should do, will be forced to consider what the United States can do, The American Conservative stresses.

The change will have major implications for the United States, but also for U.S. allies who have come to depend on American security guarantees and for the international community that relies on the United States for provision of global security goods, like freedom of navigation.

Most up-to-date assessments suggest that at least 16 U.S. military installations across eight countries—most of the U.S. military positions in the region—suffered severe damage. For many of these sites, the damage incurred was so extensive as to render the facility effectively unusable for military operations. The cost of reconstituting these bases and hardening infrastructure across the region against renewed conflict will be high, but the total is difficult to estimate since the U.S. government is still limiting access to open-source satellite data in the region. Iranian missile and drone strikes also successfully targeted dozens of U.S. sensors and radars across the Middle East, including those underlying U.S. regional air defense and early warning networks. Forty-two military aircraft, including an E-3 AWACS, four F-15s, and seven air tankers, were also damaged or destroyed. Replacing these assets will require tens of billions in additional spending.

The constraints on U.S. military power created by these shortages will be consequential and enduring. In congressional testimony, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth admitted that it would take years to replenish the missiles expended in Iran. During this time, American strategic flexibility will be limited. For example, leading experts now assess that the U.S. military arsenal is not sufficient to support a defense of Taiwan, long considered the highest priority contingency for American military planners. To put this more bluntly, if China were to attack Taiwan tomorrow, the United States might be forced to watch on the sidelines. The same is probably true of a major conflict in Europe.

The U.S. failure in Iran is unprecedented in its effect on American geopolitical standing, but the military mistakes made in Iran are themselves not unique for the United States. Like previous ill-fated U.S. military campaigns, the Iran War began with unclear, broad goals that could never have been achieved using military force alone. Also as in previous wars, the stakes for the United States were considerably lower than they were for the adversary, a fact that set the United States up for failure from the start. For Iran, the stakes of the current conflict are existential and willingness to endure pain seemingly infinite, while for the United States, the interests at stake are limited at best. Iran was never close to having a nuclear weapon, and, despite its aggressive rhetoric, Tehran posed no real threat to U.S. national security. Finally, American political and military leaders once again made the error of believing their goals in Iran could be accomplished quickly, and then failed to develop a strategy or theory of victory for an extended campaign.

Forty days of fighting plus six weeks of blockade have not only drained stockpiles but revealed systemic weaknesses in the American way of war and clear limits on American military power. For the first time in decades, the U.S. military looks beatable — and is.

The United States has been unable to reopen the Strait of Hormuz using military force, though some might contend that it could if it were willing to accept the high escalation risks and costs of such a maneuver. And the sieve-like nature of the U.S. counter-blockade should raise a red flag for those who argue that the United States could cut off access to the Strait of Malacca or impose embargos on Chinese ports in case of a war in Asia. Finally, U.S. ground forces have largely failed to counter Iran’s drone threat and are unable to match it with capabilities of their own. Together with observations from the war in Ukraine, U.S. Army leaders have already acknowledged that they will have to radically change how they think about maneuver warfare as they plan for future contingencies, including those to support NATO allies in a ground war in Europe.

The key takeaway is that U.S. military power simply doesn’t reach as far or have the staying power that it used to. Just as seriously, the war in Iran suggests that the insolvency of the current U.S. military position is systemic and strategic, not simply a question of lack of funds or insufficient magazine depth. A $1.5 trillion defense budget or investment in the defense industrial base cannot solve these problems. Instead, the United States will be forced to reevaluate and reduce its global commitments in a way that it has not in the past.

 The war has revealed the fragility of U.S. military power and the clear limits on what it can accomplish in the modern era. Instead of maintaining the fiction that after the war U.S. foreign policy can return to normal, policymakers should face reality: The period of U.S. military dominance — and of American empire — is over. The resulting future will be less comfortable for the United States, but its changes are overdue and its challenges manageable. With the right moves today, American retrenchment can leave the United States, and the world, better off.

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