Five Weeks In: Iran Isn’t Budging – The War America Can’t Win
Is there any sight more pathetic than a superpower surprised by the fact that its enemy refuses to fall over?
We are five weeks into a conflict that was sold as a clinical exercise in regime collapse, yet the “weakened” Iranian state continues to strike back. Blinded radars and downed AWACS aircraft prove that defiance is not yet exhausted. The American presidency now sits at a crossroads where every signpost points toward humiliation.
The latest Centcom briefings reveal a military establishment preparing for a “crunch point.” But the political reality is far more fragile. Donald Trump is discovering that while dropping bombs is easy, ending a war is an art his administration has failed to master.
“A war fought without objectives cannot possibly be won.”
THE DELUSION OF THE EASY DEAL
The administration’s first hope was the “Art of the Deal” applied to high explosives. The belief was simple: squeeze the regime until it is “virtually beaten,” then dictate terms. It is a schoolboy’s view of geopolitics. Instead of a white flag, the signals from Tehran suggest they believe they are holding their own.
BBC International Affairs Editor Jeremy Bowen was characteristically blunt when he demolished the administration’s case for war. “Israel used the word ‘pre-emptive’ to justify its attack,” Bowen noted, “but the evidence is that this is not a response to an imminent threat. Instead, it is a war of choice” .
The claim that regime change could be achieved through air power alone, Bowen warned, ignores all historical precedent. “There is no precedent for regime change happening just because of air strikes,” he said. “Even if this becomes the first case of air power alone collapsing a regime, the Islamic regime will not be replaced by a liberal democracy that upholds human rights. There is no credible alternative government in exile waiting in the wings”.
If a deal is not forthcoming, what remains?
- The False Exit: Trump could declare a “smash and grab” victory and bring the troops home. However, this would lack all credibility. You cannot claim to have smashed a foe that is still successfully hitting your air defences. One Iranian strike has already destroyed a $500 million US Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft, precisely targeting its critical tail section where its rotating radar dome is located. The aircraft, from the 552nd Air Control Wing, will be “particularly challenging to replace,” with funding for replacements only approved in early March and a long queue ahead.
- The Quagmire: The alternative is “getting in deeper.” Marines have arrived in the Gulf. The Pentagon is now preparing to deploy approximately 3,000 troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the region, adding to the thousands of Marines already headed there. “The buildup of troops is a drastic escalation in the U.S.-Israel war against the Iranian regime and heightens the possibility that American servicemembers will go into Iran” . This is the moment a “surgical strike” transforms into a generational disaster.
- The Regional Firestorm: To the west, the Houthis have joined the war. On Saturday, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed two missile attacks on Israel, raising concern about the conflict spreading to the Red Sea . The Red Sea is no longer a safe passage. Taking territory is a matter of firepower. Keeping it is a matter of blood and bottomless raid on public funds, and of national will that this administration has not yet bothered to test.
THE BUTCHER’S BILL THE GENERALS DIDN’T FORECAST
The economic consequences alone should have given any rational planner pause.
Here is what this war costs the people it was never about. The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately twenty million barrels of oil passed every day in 2025, is functionally closed. Brent crude rose from roughly seventy dollars a barrel before the 28th of February to peaks above one hundred and twenty dollars. The International Energy Agency has called this the greatest global energy security challenge in history.
For the British working class, the arithmetic is brutal and personal. UK consumer price inflation, forecast to fall toward two percent this year, is now projected by the OECD to hit four percent by autumn. Growth is forecast at barely half a percent. The Bank of England, which was expected to cut interest rates, is now more likely to raise them. Mortgage holders who were promised relief will not receive it. The National Farmers’ Union has already warned of rising food prices. The manufacturers’ body Make UK has flagged the impact of soaring industrial energy costs on every factory floor in the country.
Britain is, according to the OECD, more exposed to this energy shock than any other major economy in the G7. We import most of our oil and gas. We have almost no strategic gas storage. While the United States, a major hydrocarbon exporter, is projected to benefit from elevated global prices, British households will see their energy bills surge through the summer and into the autumn. Rachel Reeves has declared her fiscal rules ‘ironclad’ and declined to bend them. The working people filling up at the pump, or rationing the heating, are not covered by ironclad rules.
While the United States profits from elevated oil prices, British households foot the bill for a war they did not vote for and cannot influence.
There is a detail buried in a Financial Times investigation that deserves wider attention. Some five hundred and eighty million dollars in bets on falling oil prices were placed on financial markets precisely fifteen minutes before Donald Trump published his statement pausing attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure for negotiations on the 23rd of March. Fifteen minutes. Markets moved. Someone knew. This war, whatever else it may be, is also a business opportunity for those positioned correctly.
THE INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE THAT MADE THIS INEVITABLE
There is a grim irony in the fact that those who planned this campaign seem to have forgotten the most basic tenets of their own education. Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke’s warning, that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”, has been ignored in favour of a strategy that failed to secure the Strait of Hormuz before the first shot was fired.
As Leon Hadar wrote in the Asia Times, this is a war born of strategic amnesia: “The US and Israel, calculating that Iran’s weakened position provided a strategic window, launched nearly 900 strikes in the opening 12 hours of Operation Epic Fury. The stated justifications shifted almost daily… When a government cannot settle on a single casus belli (occasion for war), it is usually because none of them is fully honest”.
This is not just a military failure. It is a failure of the democratic oversight that allows such hubris to flourish. When we assume an opponent will collapse because our spreadsheets say they should, we invite the very escalation we claim to avoid.
Or as the common variety grunt would say: “Piss poor planning leads to a piss poor war”…
THE DELUSION OF THE RISING REVOLUTION
Every war has its defining atrocity, the image that crystallises what is really being done in the name of security and civilisation. In this conflict, it arrived on the first day.
Outdated targeting data, later confirmed by multiple US news organisations, directed a Tomahawk missile toward an elementary school in the southeastern city of Minab. The school was a girls’ school. More than 170 children were killed in the strike. When pressed, the White House press secretary said the investigation was ongoing. Donald Trump, who had initially blamed Iran for the deaths, subsequently told reporters he had not been briefed on the preliminary findings. The administration that launched this war had already slashed ninety percent of the Pentagon teams responsible for reducing civilian casualties.
A nation, however fragmented, however exhausted by its own rulers, does not rally around its oppressors. It rallies around its dead.
Those who planned this campaign appear to have believed that the first bombs would function as a political signal: that an Iranian population weary of theocracy, battered by forty percent annual inflation and shaken by the mass killing of tens of thousands of protesters in January, would rise up and dispose of the regime on Washington’s behalf. It is not an entirely unreasonable calculation. But a calculation is not a strategy. When those bombs land on girls’ schools, the signal received is not liberation. It is massacre. A nation, however fragmented, however exhausted by its own rulers, does not rally around its oppressors. It rallies around its dead.
BOMBING THE VATICAN
The killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on day one was the act that made all subsequent de-escalation structurally impossible. It was presented as a masterstroke. It was, in fact, the strategic equivalent of bombing the Vatican and killing the Pope. Khamenei was not simply a head of government. He was, for the Shia world, a supreme religious authority, a figure whose theological legitimacy extended far beyond borders, far beyond politics, far beyond the material reach of any cruise missile.
His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has now been elevated to the position his father held for nearly four decades. Trump declared on Sunday, from Air Force One, that ‘regime change’ had been achieved. What has actually been achieved is the martyrdom of a spiritual figurehead and the installation of his son in a state now defined entirely by its resistance to external aggression. The regime has not been weakened by decapitation. It has been spiritually consecrated by it.
The Brookings Institution, hardly a publication given to anti-American sentiment, noted this week that even if the United States and Israel continued eliminating newly installed leaders for months, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its sprawling network of armed forces, religious institutions and economic assets would not simply dissolve. Even a future electoral process, should a transitional government ever emerge, would require years of careful external support to produce anything resembling a sustained democracy. There is no plan for that. There never was.
On Saturday, pro-Iranian demonstrators held a memorial for the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in London. They clashed with counter-protesters, but the very existence of the gathering, five weeks after his death, speaks to the enduring power of the symbol the US thought it had destroyed . Iranian state media continues to broadcast images of unity. The regime, wounded, remains standing.
THE PRICE OF STRATEGIC ILLITERACY
A war fought without objectives cannot be won. The administration has offered conflicting explanations ranging from “averting an imminent Iranian threat” to “pre-empting retaliation” to “destroying missile capabilities” to “preventing a nuclear weapon” to “securing Iran’s natural resources” to “achieving regime change”.
The Iranians, by contrast, have a perfectly clear objective: survive. Raise the cost of escalation until political pressure inside the United States, inside the Gulf states, inside the broader alliance forces a retreat. The logic is merciless and straightforward. It has already struck targets across nine countries, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It has declared all US financial institutions and multinational companies operating across the Middle East as legitimate targets. It is waiting, as its officials have stated publicly, for American ground forces. ‘To set them on fire,’ were the exact words used.
The three exits from this trap are each worse than the last. Trump can claim victory and withdraw, but no one, including most Americans, will find that credible when an enemy is still successfully hitting air defence systems and AWACS aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He can get in deeper, commit the Marines, send in the 82nd Airborne, attempt to seize Kharg Island, through which ninety percent of Iran’s oil exports flow. Iran has been anticipating exactly this, laying traps and reinforcing the island for weeks. Or he can negotiate, but Tehran has said its positions are ‘absolutely non-negotiable,’ and has watched the United States destroy two successive rounds of nuclear diplomacy, the second time in the middle of active talks.
To the south and west, the Houthis have now re-entered the conflict, firing missiles at Israel for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. The Red Sea is no longer safe passage. Taking territory is a matter of firepower. Keeping it is a matter of blood and endless treasure, and of national will that this administration has not yet bothered to test.
These are not the strategic pillars of a coherent campaign. They are the post-hoc rationalisations of an administration that launched a war without asking the only question that matters: what happens the day after?
The answer, five weeks in, is not reassuring. Iran is not budging. BBC foreign correspondent James Waterhouse reported from Tehran: “Once again we’re seeing Iran slap down these claims from the White House that it is desperate for talks to take place… Iran is holding firm for now. Iran isn’t budging” .
The IRGC spokesman was more explicit: “Has the level of your own conflicts reached the stage of negotiating with yourselves? Neither will you see your investments in the region, nor the former prices of energy and oil, until you understand the stability in the region is ensured by the powerful hand of our armed forces”.
STARMER’S COMPLICITY
Britain may not be dropping the bombs, but we will still pay for this war on every supermarket shelf, every petrol forecourt, and in every household budget as inflation rises.
Meanwhile Keir Starmer has positioned himself as a man of restraint. He declined to join the joint US-Israeli war against Iran. He said, on social media, that he would “always make decisions that are in the national interest” and that he was not getting Britain “dragged into the Middle East conflict.” What he did not mention is that he told the Americans they could use British military bases for “defensive” strikes on Iran. He did not mention that Ukrainian and other specialists, at British facilitation, have been deployed to assist Gulf states in foiling Iranian drone attacks.
This is not restraint. This is the language of restraint combined with the practical actions of a participant. It is the worst of both positions: the political exposure without the democratic honesty.
If this is neutrality, it is neutrality in the same way a runway is neutral to the bomber that takes off from it.
THE QUAGMIRE WE BUILT OURSELVES
We are now trapped between the ego of a president who cannot afford to look weak and the reality of a Middle Eastern power that has no intention of playing the victim in a scripted American victory.
If the Marines go in, they are not just fighting a regime. They are entering a furnace that has consumed every Western ambition for forty years.
The only thing more dangerous than a lost war is a leader who refuses to admit he is losing it.
“The Middle East does not reward crusaders,” writes Hadar. “It never has. And no amount of air power can substitute for the patient, interest-driven, diplomatically serious engagement that Washington has consistently refused to pursue.”
The bombs that were meant to bring the Iranian people to the streets have instead brought them to the mosques. The “war of choice” sold as a short, sharp shock has become a month-long grind with no end in sight. And the superpower that thought it could remake the region in its image is discovering, once again, that the graveyards of empires are paved with the assumption that the other side will simply give up.
There is a word for leaders who start wars they cannot finish, who escalate when they should negotiate, who mistake bombing for strategy. That word is not “strongman.” It is “fool.”
Empires rarely collapse because they are defeated. They collapse because they refuse to admit they cannot win.
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Sources: BBC News transcripts (March 2026); HuffPost UK, ‘BBC Expert Demolishes Trump and Netanyahu’s Case for Bombing Iran’ (28 February 2026); Fortune, ‘Global economy takes gut punch from war in Iran’ (29 March 2026); Military Watch Magazine, ‘Footage Confirms Iranian Precision Strike Destroyed $500 Million US ‘Flying Radar’ Aircraft’ (29 March 2026); Politico, ‘Pentagon prepares to send another 3,000 troops to Middle East’ (24 March 2026); Asia Times, ‘America’s Iran quagmire and the failure of strategic memory’ (24 March 2026); Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, ‘Houthis missile attacks on Israel widen Middle East war’ (29 March 2026); Daily Mail, ‘Protesters clash as pro-Iranian demonstrators hold memorial for assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’ (28 March 2026); HuffPost UK, ‘BBC Reporter Says ‘Iran Isn’t Budging’ As Tehran Slaps Down Donald Trump’s Peace Talks Claim’ (25 March 2026); U.S. News & World Report, ‘Worries About Global Economic Pain Deepen as the War in Iran Drags On’ (29 March 2026).
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