WAR always holds many lessons. There will be much to learn from the US-Israeli attack on Iran and Tehran’s response once the war is over. But some lessons can already be drawn irrespective of how and when the conflict ends. They are common sense lessons which sometimes get obscured by other, especially military, dimensions of war, with experts focusing on who used what weapon, to what effect and the strategies followed.
The first lesson is one the US should have learnt from its previous military debacles. That is about the power of nationalism. It is arguably the most important weapon in war for the country and people facing aggression, invasion and unprovoked assaults by a more powerful country. Nationalism motivates the will to fight and not submit as witnessed throughout history. The US has historically underestimated this, believing superior military force and technological supremacy are enough to subdue its target country. But discounting nationalist sentiment, as the US did in its interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, entangled Washington in unwinnable wars, produced strategic blunders and doomed its military adventures.
In all these cases, the people of the states attacked were fired by the indomitable spirit of defending their country against an outsider. They won by not losing. America’s war on Iran may end the same way. Expert analysis on the Middle East has identified several factors advantaging Iran in the conflict such as geography, time, a hard-to-counter asymmetrical response and high tolerance for pain. All these are significant factors. But so is the will to survive powered by nationalism that transcends internal political differences as the nation unites and closes ranks. This becomes a decisive factor even if advanced weaponry gives the other side transient tactical ‘wins’. Degrading a country’s military capacity doesn’t mean degrading people’s resolve to resist. The US has failed to learn this lesson of history.
The second lesson of the ongoing conflict is that a war fought without a plan, strategy or assessment of likely consequences risks becoming a fool’s errand. It is evident the US went to war without clear objectives — which it kept changing — mistaken assumptions and serious miscalculations about how Iran would react. One such assumption was that Tehran would capitulate within days. Washington also failed to anticipate the conflict’s economic consequences.
The US has always underestimated the power of nationalism in countries it attacked or occupied.
All this is acknowledged by President Donald Trump himself. In a media interaction last week, he seemed rattled by how the war was going and kept contradicting himself. More importantly, he said he was surprised by Iran’s retaliatory strikes against its neighbours.” “Nobody expected that. We were shocked. … They fought back.” Trump also said not even the “greatest experts” thought Iran would retaliate with attacks on Gulf states. Really? He added, “Even if we knew Gulf countries would be hit, big deal, we did what we have to do.” For Trump, Iran wasn’t supposed to retaliate! “It’s a little unfair of Iran to fight back,” he said.
The Trump administration didn’t foresee the economic repercussions of the war. Tehran’s asymmetrical response by striking Gulf states’ oil facilities and disrupting oil shipments sent the price of oil spiralling, threw global energy markets into turmoil and threatened global recession. It inflicted heavy costs on America’s GCC allies whose threshold for tolerating pain is not high. Iran’s ability to control the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz was surprisingly not foreseen by Trump’s team, considering Iranian leaders had repeatedly warned of this if attacked. It lays bare how Trump went into a war of his choosing without thinking through the consequences, much less having a plan to deal with them. The moral of the story is: no amount of superior fire power can compensate for the lack of thought or strategy in achieving the desired war objective.
Yet the US seemed to think that applying heavier doses of force and escalating the war would deliver the results it wanted. That only mired it in what is called the ‘escalation trap’ in which the more powerful country assumes that greater force is a sure path to win, and keeps attacking only to find diminishing returns from this. The lesson here is more escalation doesn’t assure ‘victory’ when other decisive factors are absent — a strategy, an endgame and clarity about the war objective.
The third lesson concerns how to treat allies if their help is sought in a crisis. Confronted with Iran’s chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump figured the US could not break on its own, he called on allies to send ships to secure it. The same allies he had berated and bullied in the past. This time he threatened if they didn’t respond Nato would face “a very bad future”.
When no ally agreed to commit a naval mission, Trump called European nations “cowards” and said he would remember their reluctance to join the war. They were of course neither consulted when Trump decided on war and nor did they want to be dragged into a conflict they did not endorse. Later, seven US allies jointly announced support for “appropriate steps” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but without committing warships. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Melloni explained EU countries support diplomacy and did not envisage a military mission in the Strait of Hormuz. This demonstrated Trump’s failure to build a coalition of the willing, which in turn offers a lesson about the consequences of coercive unilateralism that rides roughshod over allies’ concerns.
As for Washington’s Gulf allies, the war is a lesson about the practical value of the American security umbrella. They were left to fend for themselves in facing Iran’s retaliatory attacks. Having witnessed US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the Iran war would also have shown them that Washington’s commitment to Israel trumps everything else. Moreover, instead of buying them security, defence cooperation with Washington has endangered them. Whether this leads to a reappraisal by GCC states about their dependence on an unreliable security partner is a different matter.
It may be early days for all the lessons to be learnt from the war. But for now, the world continues to witness the capricious actions of an ego-driven man who is proving to be a danger to the world and to his own country.
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.
Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2026
