Students of modern military history looking at the US-Iran conflict might find uncomfortable parallels with previous Gulf conflicts in which military campaigns of extraordinary destructive power failed to produce the political outcomes their architects intended. The First Gulf War ended quickly because Iraq accepted the terms. The Second did not produce a stable outcome because the political planning failed to match the military execution. The lessons of these precedents were directly relevant to the current situation, where military success had been considerable and political progress had been far more limited.
The current conflict differed from previous Gulf wars in important ways that made those lessons even more challenging to apply. Iran was a much more internally cohesive society than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with a government that derived genuine domestic legitimacy from its resistance to external pressure. The Islamic Republic’s ideology, whatever its failures, provided a framework of defiance against foreign coercion that created a different kind of domestic resilience than what American forces had faced in Iraq.
The nuclear dimension added complexity that previous Gulf conflicts had not included. The explicit targeting of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure during the conflict, combined with the inclusion of nuclear disarmament in the US ceasefire proposal, made this a war about existential capabilities in a way that raised the stakes beyond what any settlement focused on conventional military issues could address. Iran’s nuclear programme was connected to its deepest security calculations, and demanding its dismantlement under military pressure was asking something fundamentally different from demanding withdrawal from Kuwait.
The economic dimensions were also more severe than in previous Gulf conflicts, because of Iran’s unique ability to disrupt global energy markets through the Hormuz blockade. No previous Gulf war had generated a comparable global economic crisis, and the international community’s stake in the resolution was therefore higher than in previous conflicts. This gave the mediating countries more motivation to be active but also created pressures on the US that complicated its strategic calculations.
The lesson of previous Gulf conflicts — that military campaigns produced durable outcomes only when accompanied by credible political strategies for the post-conflict period — applied with particular force to the current situation. Destroying Iran’s military capabilities without a plan for what kind of Iran would emerge from the conflict risked creating a more embittered, more isolated, and potentially more dangerous adversary than the one the war had begun against.