Trita Parsi writes:

The war in Ukraine shattered a core assumption about great-power dominance: that size and military strength are enough to impose one’s will. Ukraine showed otherwise. With the right strategy, geography, and resolve, a weaker state can survive and blunt – and in key respects even defeat – a much stronger adversary.

The United States now faces an uncomfortable parallel. The war with Iran is exposing similar limits to American power.

For decades, U.S. grand strategy has rested on primacy — the belief that America’s unmatched military capabilities enabled it to uphold global stability and shape outcomes across regions.

After the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, many Americans have reached a stark conclusion: the cost of primacy is no longer sustainable — and no longer serves U.S. interests. A strategy that depends on military dominance everywhere, all the time, inevitably means being at war somewhere, all the time. America’s endless wars are not an accident; they are the product of this approach. And if there is one rare point of agreement in a deeply divided country, it is this: Americans are tired of war.

Yet despite a war-weary public, mounting fiscal strain, and politicians who promise to end endless wars, inertia — and powerful economic interests tied to war — have kept primacy intact.

The question now is whether the debacle in Iran will finally break that pattern. Early signs suggest its repercussions may exceed even those of George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq.

Consider this: the United States won the Iraq war in under three weeks. Its military dominance was never in doubt. But it lost the peace — failing to stabilize the country once the insurgency took hold.

In Iran, however, the United States didn’t even win the military phase — despite facing a far weaker conventional force. Iran leveraged geography and asymmetric tactics to blunt American power and inflict a strategic setback. Even more striking, early claims that U.S. airstrikes had significantly degraded Iran’s drone and missile capabilities now appear overstated. The lesson is clear: control of the skies does not guarantee control of outcomes. Without the will to deploy ground forces—and without the ability to translate airpower into decisive results — American primacy begins to look increasingly hollow. [Continue reading…]