No one starts a war expecting it to last forever.
Yet, since Vietnam, American presidents have repeatedly gotten into conflicts that seem like they could last forever, at least until the next president — or the one after that — decides that the expense and political pain are not worth it, declares victory and goes home.
On Iran, President Trump may have fallen into the same trap.
He campaigned for office vowing to end wars, not start them, and to never get involved in a forever war, let alone one in the Middle East. And yet he risks doing so in Iran, his critics say.
The war that Israel and the United States began with such force has alternated between moments of negotiation and military strikes. They have failed so far to reach Mr. Trump’s stated goals of regime change or ending Iran’s nuclear program, while the war has created a new, seemingly intractable problem, bottling up the Strait of Hormuz.
With diplomacy at a dead end, at least for now, a frustrated Mr. Trump finds himself back at war, the cease-fire broken, the strait blocked. The memorandum of understanding he said “achieves everything we set out to accomplish” — despite wildly divergent interpretations of it — is in tatters after less than a month.
“Both sides looked to the memorandum of understanding as the continuation of the war by other means, not as a bridge to peace,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group.
Without a long-term strategy to produce a sustainable settlement, he said, there’s a risk of creating “the circumstances for a forever war.”
The idea of the “forever wars” began with 9/11 and the “global war on terror,” pulling the United States into long military engagements, with troops on the ground, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Those conflicts, which began by toppling hostile regimes before turning into counterinsurgency campaigns, ended either inconclusively or in defeat after considerable expenditure and loss of life.
Powerful leaders with powerful militaries are prone to fall into “the short-war fallacy,” said Lawrence D. Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, London, who last year wrote an article, “The Age of Forever Wars.” “They think they can win quickly and not suffer adverse consequences,” he said.
Like Mr. Trump in Iran and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Ukraine, “they fail to appreciate the limits of military power and so set objectives that can be achieved, if at all, only through prolonged struggle,” Mr. Freedman said.
And even the most sophisticated military forces are not enough, if there’s no strategy to turn battlefield superiority into lasting political and diplomatic success. Mr. Trump faces the added challenge of trying to win using only air and sea power, without politically unpalatable use of ground troops on Iranian soil.
The Persian Gulf war of 1991 was quick and succeeded in its aims, because President George H.W. Bush had a limited political objective — drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That was a lesson lost on his son, President George W. Bush, in the second war against Iraq, which ended up enhancing Iran’s power in the region. In Afghanistan, after the younger Bush drove out the Taliban, he and his successors tried vainly to remake the society, but when Washington tired of the effort, the Taliban returned.
There is an argument, sometimes made by Mr. Trump himself, that he went to war in Iran to finally end what he considered a 47-year war between the United States and Iran, which began with the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the taking of more than 60 American hostages.
The U.S.-Iran “forever war,” argued Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is just another round of a conflict that has sometimes blown hot and sometimes resulted in agreement, like the 2015 nuclear deal Mr. Trump tore up in 2018.
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Mr. Trump, urged by Israel, has also inserted himself in a parallel “forever war” — the one between Israel and Iran, which is being played out with Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Yemen.
Mr. Trump still has the ability to sell this unpopular war to his base as a victory of some kind and go home. But to the surprise of many, he seems to be doubling down, albeit with no clear path to a diplomatic settlement. And his commitment to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, while Iran insists on maintaining control, could mean a very long American military engagement, even with the help of allies.
Still, the Iran war is different, especially compared to Afghanistan and the second war against Iraq. In both of those wars, thousands of American troops were on the ground for long periods of time and ended up fighting militias and terrorists opposed to new governments propped up by the United States — not fighting a state like Iran.
And unlike the case in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran can inflict economic pain on the United States by blocking access to the Strait of Hormuz, which gives Tehran more effective leverage and is a prime reason it will refuse to give up control.
There will be no return to the situation before the war, said Suzanne Maloney, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. As in Iraq, American assumptions and misperceptions changed the balance of power in the region, she said, and now the days of the Strait of Hormuz fully free for transit are probably over.
There can be “a new normal,” she said, “but with a much higher American force posture in the region” given Iran’s ability to hit ships whenever it pleases.
Because Washington’s stakes in this war are simply smaller than those for Iran, said Mr. Nasr, who worked on the Afghan war, “the pace begins to slow, while the other side is willing to keep the same level of intensity.” As America began to withdraw from Afghanistan, as from Vietnam, “the balance began to shift.”
But a negotiated end to the war in Iran still feels far away. Both sides have proven they can’t even stick to a minimal framework agreement that defers all the substantive issues to the future, Mr. Vaez said. If they can’t even do that, he added, “that could remove the last barrier between episodic confrontation and a forever war.”
