The longer the war with Iran drags on, the stronger Tehran's hand becomes - not despite its military weakness, but because of how it absorbs punishment. Former US State Department policy planning director Richard Haass drew a pointed comparison to the Vietnam War, arguing that Iran's regime can outlast American political patience even as its arsenal shrinks.
"Hvylya" quotes Haass from his conversation with historian Niall Ferguson on the Conversations with Coleman podcast, where he laid out the asymmetry at the heart of the conflict.
"Even though they've been much diminished militarily, they are objectively much weaker, so much about war in this case is going to be resilience and sustainability," Haass said. "Being a repressive system as opposed to a democratic system, their leadership, even though it's been decimated, might have slightly more flexibility or ability to sustain a war than ours." The parallel was unmistakable: "It reminds me a little bit of the Viet Cong - they win by not losing."
Ferguson agreed the Iranian regime has every incentive to drag things out. The current leadership under Khamenei's son, he argued, "is incentivized to keep the violence going because it maximizes the pain inflicted not only on the US but on its allies and friends in the region." The Israeli Air Force cannot maintain its recent sortie tempo indefinitely. US resources deplete with each passing week. Time, counterintuitively, favors the weaker party.
The strategic bind this creates for Washington is acute. President Trump needs the war over by the end of March - both for economic reasons and to protect Republican candidates in the midterms. Iran's leadership faces no such deadline. "President Trump has a strong incentive to end the war soon; the Islamic Republic has the exact opposite incentive," Ferguson said.
Haass added that this dynamic may ultimately force the US back to the negotiating table on terms worse than what was available before hostilities began - a prospect he called one of the war's cruelest ironies.
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