The forever wars in Iran: The harder Washington pulls, the tighter it gets

On 26 June, nine days after the United States and Iran signed the Islamabad memorandum of understanding that was supposed to end Operation Epic Fury, US Central Command struck Iranian missile and drone storage facilities in Sirik, Bandar-e Lengeh and Qeshm Island after Iran targeted the Ever Lovely, a Singapore-registered commercial oil tanker, claiming Israel's occupation of Southern Lebanon as a breach of the agreement. 

Iran insisted it was acting under Article Five of the memorandum, which grants Tehran the right to make "arrangements" for passage through the strait. The US insisted that passage was meant to be unconditional. Both readings are plausible. That is the problem.

For years, Trump berated his predecessors for the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is now discovering what they discovered: that wars in the Middle East do not end with a press conference or ceasefire agreement or toppling the government. Often, that is the beginning of the quagmire. They end when one side can no longer absorb the cost. And at this point, that side is not Tehran. 

The short-war fallacy

Operation Epic Fury opened on 28 February with nearly 900 strikes in twelve hours, the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the systematic targeting of Iran's senior military and political class. The planners of the operation assumed that decapitation would produce fracture. Fun fact, it did not. A dynastic succession took effect within hours. The Revolutionary Guard held the state together. And Iran moved immediately to its most effective weapon: the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas passes.

As an exercise in destruction, Epic Fury was formidable. As an exercise in coercion, it failed. Iran's regime did not fold. Its uranium stockpile remained. Its enriched material stayed in the country. The IRGC, as an institution, survived intact.

Washington had succumbed to the short-war fallacy, concentrating so heavily on the power of its means that it lost sight of how to achieve its ends. The Trump administration assumed that Iran, as it had after the far more limited June 2025 strikes, would absorb the blow and moderate. It did not, because this time its existence was at stake.

Iran did not need to win the battle. It needed only to make the cost of continuing prohibitive. Closing the Strait of Hormuz — reducing shipping volume to roughly 5% of pre-war levels by some assessments — achieved that aim without a single territorial concession.

The Israeli veto on peace

The Islamabad memorandum, brokered by Pakistan and signed in Geneva, offered a way out of that trap. It reopened the strait, lifted the American naval blockade on Iran's southern ports, and set a 60-day window for negotiations on sanctions and the nuclear programme. It did not address Israel. That omission is now threatening to unravel everything.

Israel was not a party to the agreement. It has treated that exclusion as a licence. Defence Minister Israel Katz declared that Israeli troops would not withdraw from southern Lebanon, directly undermining a key Iranian condition for sustaining the ceasefire. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called the Lebanon framework deal — separately brokered between Beirut and Jerusalem — a "historic mistake" that gave Hezbollah "the lifeline it has begged for." Within 24 hours of that framework being signed, Israel struck the Beirut suburbs, killing three people. Trump publicly rebuked Netanyahu, calling the attack something that "should not have happened."

For the Trump administration, Israeli interference in Lebanon is not a sideshow. It is the central obstacle to locking in any durable arrangement. Iran has explicitly linked the Lebanese front to the maturation of its nuclear negotiations with Washington. Tehran cited Washington's failure to end the fighting in Lebanon as one reason it was not bound to the full terms of the memorandum. 

Most importantly, Israel has also proven that it is acting in bad faith, which really gives no confidence to Hezbollah to disarm or capitulate. It came as no surprise that Hezbollah has rejected the Lebanon framework as "null and void." 

Israel has killed at least 4,192 people in Lebanon since the war on Iran began four months ago, according to Lebanese state figures. Israeli forces continued striking southern Lebanese territory even as the ink dried on the framework agreement. 

A doctrine that cannot accommodate pause

Israel's conduct is not, in the narrow sense, irrational. It follows a codified strategic logic. Since 2015, the Israel Defense Forces have operated under what is formally called Mivtsa Bein Milchamot — the "campaign between the wars," or Mabam — a doctrine of persistent, below-threshold degradation of Iranian and proxy capabilities across the interwar period. As then-IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot described it in 2019, Mabam "strives for proactive, offensive actions based on extremely high-quality intelligence and clandestine efforts" as an alternative to either full war or passive containment.

Graphics: TBS

The doctrine has a certain tactical logic. It delayed and degraded Hezbollah's precision-guided missile programme. It set back the Iranian centrifuge assembly. It killed key IRGC commanders in Syria and Lebanon. But it has never been able to resolve the fundamental asymmetry: Hezbollah's pre-war rocket and missile arsenal still numbered an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 units. Iran rebuilt its centrifuge facility within months of a 2020 explosion, this time relocating assembly underground.

More critically, Mabam assumes an interwar period to operate in. There is no interwar period if the war never formally ends. The result is that Israel's campaign between the wars "risks widening the split with Washington and restarting war with Iran and its allies over the long term." 

That split is no longer latent. Vice President JD Vance, speaking publicly on 19 June, told Israeli leaders they needed to "wake up and smell the reality of the situation." He cited America's missile systems and weapons flows as evidence of a partnership that Israel was testing past breaking point. "You're a country of nine million people," Vance said. "You can't just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have." Trump, separately, warned Netanyahu: "Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon."

Many experts think that Netanyahu believes that as long as he has a war going on, he can avoid accountability for his corruption charges and responsibility for  7 October. As thus, war, for Netanyahu, has become existentially useful in a domestic sense at precisely the moment Washington most needs it to stop.

Iran's game: Time as a weapon

While Israel and the United States argue about ceasefires, Iran is playing a longer game it has played before. The Islamic Republic's strategy since 14 June has been to contest the terms of the memorandum rather than repudiate it — keeping the diplomatic framework alive while using it as cover for continued economic pressure. 

Iran extends the conflict beyond direct military exchange into political and economic domains where time favours the side absorbing pain rather than the side imposing it. Every week the strait remains functionally closed, pushes oil prices upward, strains Gulf partners, and widens the political cost for an American president who ran on economic revival. 

Iran is not in a strong position absolutely. Its economy ran at close to 70% inflation through the war. The public is disaffected. The regime rules through repression hardened by the emergency of conflict. But it has one decisive advantage over every adversary that has attempted to break it by force: it does not need to win. It needs only to deny the other side a recognisable victory and make the cost of continuing rise faster than the political will to bear it.

The Afghan comparison is instructive, if imperfect. 

What Washington is confronting is not a quagmire in the Vietnam sense — there are no significant American boots on the ground accumulating casualties week by week. It is something subtler and in some ways more politically corrosive: a war whose stated objectives are unreachable, whose costs are diffuse and ongoing, and whose principal ally is more invested in its continuation than in its conclusion.

Writing in Foreign Affairs this month, Carter Malkasian, who served as political adviser to US commanders in Afghanistan, described how successive American administrations stayed in a war they could neither win nor politically afford to lose, driven by threat assessments that were consistently overstated. The lesson Malkasian draws is not about Afghanistan alone. "Americans must not forget those changes of heart," he writes. "They must remember what it feels like to look back at a war they once embraced and think, 'If only I had known then what I know now.'" 

Trump is nine days into a ceasefire and already answering that question in real time.

A deal that cannot hold itself

The 60-day negotiating window in the Islamabad memorandum is now the only architecture standing between the current pause and a resumed, potentially more destructive, campaign. Its structural weaknesses are visible to everyone. It makes no mention of Iran-backed proxy groups. It does not bind Israel. It is being contested, line by line, by both parties to it. And caught in the fray, the Trump administration is simultaneously threatening to complete the job and negotiating with the adversary it is threatening. 

What Washington is confronting is not a quagmire in the Vietnam sense — there are no significant American boots on the ground accumulating casualties week by week. It is something subtler and in some ways more politically corrosive: a war whose stated objectives are unreachable, whose costs are diffuse and ongoing, and whose principal ally is more invested in its continuation than in its conclusion. 

The war Israel chose has become the war it cannot finish, cannot abandon, and cannot sustain. Washington did not choose that war. But it is now paying for it. And Iran, for once, does not need to win the war. It just needs to outlast the foe.