A War Iran Does Not Need to Win Decisively

Why the US-Israel's wider objectives are easier to frustrate than Iran’s narrower aim of survival and retaliation revealing the asymmetry between preserving a state and trying to break one

Iran holds the cards because it is fighting defensively on its own terrain, with time, geography and economic leverage on its side; Trump blundered by walking into a war where the attacker has to achieve everything while the defender only has to survive and make the costs. War in this case turns on first principles, so Trump can shout all he wants until his face turns blue, but the three old rules still matter. Defence is stronger than offence, high ground beats low ground, and infantry remains the arm that decides political outcomes on land. Clausewitz wrote that “defense is a stronger form of fighting than attack”, and the force of that claim lies in the fact that the defender fights for preservation, uses time to accumulate advantage, and operates on ground already known, prepared and supplied (Clausewitz). Sun Tzu added the second rule with equal simplicity when he wrote that an army prefers high ground and avoids the low (Sun Tzu, Chinese Text Project). Clausewitz then supplied the third when he argued that, however great the power of artillery, the actual core of battle remains personal combat and the occupation of ground by men who can hold it (Clausewitz). Those propositions belong to classical strategy, yet they remain useful because industrial and digital war have altered the means of destruction more than the political problem of conquest (RAND).