The United States made a mistake. This war in Iran shouldn’t be happening now - the US should have launched it a decade ago.

Just to clarify, I’m not American, nor Persian, and I’m definitely not a warmonger. Every war is a tragedy because of civilian casualties and suffering. Yet, we live in the real world, where war is just the continuation of politics by other means, as Clausewitz said.

Many pundits consider this war to be futile from the US perspective and criticize Trump for starting it. Their main argument is the Middle East’s irrelevance to US national interests, given America’s energy independence.

I disagree.

Yes, the US doesn’t need a military presence in the Middle East for its own needs. But it absolutely can’t afford its main global competitor (China) to get a foothold there. Chinese control of the flow of oil, gas, and other commodities from the Persian Gulf would be catastrophic for the US position as a major global power. Europe would be basically forced to come under the Chinese sphere of influence, as well as other Southeast Asian countries dependent on energy and fertilizer imports from the Gulf.

If the US wanted to leave the Middle East, it should have been done as part of a coordinated US descent from the global stage, similar to the British military withdrawal East of Suez post-1968. Similar to the UK, the US would become irrelevant on the Eurasian continent and in Africa. United States political leadership is not ready for such a move, so it doesn’t have any choice but to face any potential challengers to its position across the world.

Origins of the conflict

The seed of the current crisis was planted by Obama’s abandonment of the dominant US role in the Middle East and by using the JCPOA to craft a strategic balance between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Like every Obama policy, it ended up as a disaster. It didn’t take into account Iran’s ambition to develop its proxy network - Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, PMF in Iraq, and later also Hamas in Gaza. It also didn’t factor in another major regional player (Israel) deciding to confront these Iranian proxies head-on.

The tensions culminated on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas launched its cross-border raids into southern Israel. Hezbollah in the north joined the attacks the next day using rockets, ATGMs, and drones. Finally, the Houthis in Yemen started launching ballistic missiles at Israel later in October. This coordination among proxies was just another proof that Iran was behind these attacks and backed them with weapons, logistics, and intelligence.

It made perfect sense to exploit Israel’s vulnerability and it was a tactical victory for Iran. However, especially the Hamas raids from Gaza were more successful than everyone expected, and their brutality caused widespread shock among Israelis. And this is where Iran miscalculated. It underestimated Israel’s resolve and intelligence advantage. Israel changed the rules of the game, escalated, and destroyed both Hamas and Hezbollah and their ability to exist as organized fighting forces. In the end, this was a strategic defeat for Iran.

Without its proxies and the deterrence they provided, both sides started climbing the escalation ladder, leading to the 12-day war in 2025, which concluded with US B-2 bombers striking Iranian nuclear facilities. That didn’t lead to any change in Iran’s strategic doctrine, making the resumption of the war in 2026 inevitable.

The US mistake

The perfect time window for attacking Iran was between 2015 and 2016, and the US missed it.

The arguments are listed below:

1. Democratisation of precision strike

The US and its allies had the advantage of using precision-strike munitions on a large scale for decades. Cheap one-way drones changed that. However, Iran probably started deploying one-way strike drones like Shaheds only as late as 2019 or 2020. These drones are causing the most pain especially to Gulf countries, as their air defense systems were not designed against swarms of cheap drones. In 2015 and 2016, this would have been a non-issue, saving these countries and US military installations there from the worst.

Yes, Iran also had a large stockpile of short and medium-range ballistic missiles. However, the precision of these missiles evolved dramatically over the years and nobody knows the exact details. The precision of the Iranian ballistic missile strike against Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq after Qasem Soleimani’s assassination in 2020 caused a bit of surprise. What’s quite certain is that the most advanced optical/thermal terminal guidance was added only during the 2020s, together with the introduction of a new generation of ballistic missiles like Khorramshahr-4 or Fattah-1, which turned out to be the most lethal when used against Israeli targets (although in very limited numbers). Nevertheless, Iranian precision-guidance capabilities in 2015-2016 were surely less advanced than a decade later.

2. China

The US needs to deter China in the Indo-Pacific. Unlike Iran, China has a top-tier military with advanced air defenses, air force, and range-projection capabilities. You need a lot of standoff munitions like the stealthy JASSM air-launched missiles or ship/submarine-launched Tomahawk TLAMs to hit Chinese targets in a hypothetical conflict. The problem is that the US has depleted most of its JASSM stockpile against Iran and also fired maybe up to a quarter of its Tomahawks. It’s even worse with air defense interceptors, as reportedly half of Patriot and THAAD missiles are gone. These are all estimates from questionable sources, but that’s not the point. The critical impact is not the substantial cost of these sophisticated missiles, but the inadequate production capacity. It will take years to replenish these stockpiles, and that makes the US and its Asian allies vulnerable.

Ten years ago, the Chinese military was nowhere near as threatening as it is today. It could not retake Taiwan back then. Today, the US needs a much higher level of deterrence, and its weakest point is low munitions stockpiles and insufficient industrial capacity to replenish them in wartime.

The 2015-2016 period provided a particularly good window of opportunity for the USA to sort out the Middle East, as China was undergoing a severe growth slowdown due to widespread real estate and infrastructure malinvestment (ghost cities) and financial crisis (unsustainable corporate and local government debt). In other words, China was vulnerable.

3. US reindustrialization

While the situation in China was dire in 2015-2016, the US was not unaffected either due to the globalized nature of the world. However, thanks to a strong consumer and a healthy financial sector, the US suffered only a mild industrial slowdown, while the rest of the economy was doing fine. Depleting missile stockpiles back then would have had positive long-term consequences, as the US would have been forced to start building out its military-industrial capacity much sooner. That would have come in handy years later during the Ukraine war and especially now when China has become a real threat to Taiwan. As a bonus, fiscal support for industrial rebuilding during the 2015-2016 period would have been well timed to take advantage of cratered commodity prices back then and shield US industry from Chinese debt spillover.

4. Hezbollah counterargument

The only real counterargument is how Israel would have handled a war with Iran in 2015-2016 before degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities and leadership first, like it did ahead of the current war. The rocket and missile fire might have caused more damage, but I’m sure Israel could have handled it. The big unknown were the cross-border tunnels, which were only largely destroyed between 2018 and 2019 during Operation Northern Shield. In any case, with sufficient logistical and munitions support from the US, Israel could have withstood pressure from both Hamas and Hezbollah back then.

To clarify my reasoning again, I’m not taking any sides here. I’m trying to stay as unbiased as I can. All I’m saying is that the time to solve the Iranian threat by force was ten years ago, not now. However, once Barack Obama instead became committed to crafting a “balance of power” in the Middle East to contain Iran, abandoning that strategy carried significant costs, as we’re witnessing right now. Yes, increasing pressure or even waging proxy wars (through Israel) are tools that could be deployed successfully, but an all-out war right now looks like a strategic mistake.

The consequences

The main strategic consequence for the US is decreased deterrence in Asia.

I don’t consider failure to achieve regime change in Iran a big deal. That would be incredibly hard to achieve under any circumstances. Moreover, the conflict isn’t over yet and the final outcome may turn out to be more in the US’s favor than it appears now. Personally, I considered any possibility for regime change to come only after the war concludes, so there still might be some surprises left. Although the solidified position of the IRGC doesn’t leave much hope.

Other than that, the impact of the war on the US would be limited. Higher inflation, political reshuffling in the midterms, and that’s about it. In the long term, the US might even benefit from instability in the Middle East as a reliable exporter of energy, chemicals, and agricultural products.

It’s Europe where the consequences will be felt the hardest - and not in a good way. Paradoxically, not because of the situation in the Middle East. This war was also a test by the US to see how Europe is aligned with its interests. Trump was looking for support among European politicians - logistical, political, maybe even military - and he found none. Quite the opposite: all European leaders condemned the war, including UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Spain even evicted US planes from its airbases.

This is incredibly bad for Europe. Even if European countries are correct about the strategic futility of the war, they simply can’t afford to alienate their main security guarantor. If these countries condemning the US combined their rhetoric with announcements of an immediate 20% cut in social spending and a defense spending increase to 5% of GDP, it would still be bad, as building defense infrastructure and learning the necessary skills takes years. Yet, there were no such spending announcements. And worst of all, people in Europe don’t care at all. They don’t yet realize how catastrophic this decision will be for their way of life.

Europe made a fatal mistake thinking this is about Trump - the pressure on allies, the Greenland saga, and now support for the war in the Middle East. Europeans hope everything will go back to normal once Trump is gone. What they don’t realize is that Trump’s rise is the consequence of long-term political shifts in the US, not vice versa.

Even after Trump is gone, the US will remember how Europe failed to provide support when it was expected. We Europeans will pay for this strategic mistake, hopefully only with our money.