The Iran War and the Future of American Empire
The choice is between controlled retrenchment now and
forced retrenchment later.
Jennifer Kavanagh
Jun 8, 2026
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-iran-war-and-the-future-of-american-empire/
Wars often go wrong in unexpected ways. Even
well-planned operations can be derailed by surprise events, equipment failures,
bad weather, or bad luck. But the disaster that followed President Donald
Trump’s decision to attack Iran on February 28 was not a surprise. War-gamed
and red-teamed dozens of times over decades, the risks of the campaign were
well-known and obvious.
Still, the war’s outcome has been worse than the most
pessimistic predictions. Three months into what the Trump administration has
called an “excursion,” the initial assessment that Operation Epic Fury was a “tactical success but strategic
failure” appears too
generous. After all, neither strategic nor tactical goals were achieved. The
United States did not replace the Iranian regime with new, moderate leaders. It
failed to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium or eliminate Iran’s nuclear
program. Worse, most reports suggest Iran has retained much of its military capacity, including access to large portions of its missile
and drone stockpiles. Finally, the war has created a new, bedeviling problem.
The Strait of Hormuz, once the passageway for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas,
remains effectively closed.
No matter how the war ends, the costs of the latest
U.S. military adventure in the Middle East will be steep and the geopolitical
consequences irreversible. The next generation of U.S. leaders will face a
stark reality. The United States, which for decades has made decisions based on
what policymakers thought America should do, will be forced to
consider what the United States can do. The change will have major
implications for the United States, but also for U.S. allies who have come to
depend on American security guarantees and for the international community that
relies on the United States for provision of global security goods, like
freedom of navigation.
It will take time for the American imperial project to
disappear for good, but from this point, U.S. retrenchment is inevitable. In 20
years, the world will look back on this moment as a turning point: the
beginning of the end of American empire.
President Trump has declared victory in the Middle East. But to anyone with eyes, his
rosy prognosis does not match the reality. The most obvious evidence of the
American failure is the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before
the war), despite several attempts by the U.S. Navy to get traffic moving again
through the narrow chokepoint. Although a small number of tanker and cargo
ships have successfully transited the strait in recent weeks, most of the
traffic remains stalled due to the security concerns of ship owners, captains,
and their crews.
Away from Hormuz, the inability of the United States
and Israel to suppress Iranian missile and drone attacks is perhaps the war’s
biggest disappointment. Ambitious U.S. goals like regime change and eliminating
Iran’s nuclear program were never achievable using military force alone, but
destroying Iran’s ability to produce and launch missiles and drones that could
be fired at regional neighbors seemed attainable. Recent reporting, however,
suggests that even this objective has slipped through the U.S. military’s
fingers; Iran appears to retain as much as 70 percent of its pre-war missiles
and launchers and access to 30 of its 33 missile sites. Iran’s ability to manufacture drones also seems
robust. That Iran was able to sustain a consistent rate of fire after the war’s opening days is further evidence
that the damage inflicted by the U.S. military was somewhat less devastating
than suggested by the Pentagon and the White House.
The results of the war, then, are dismal. The costs of
the military failure, on the other hand, are significant—and not only in
monetary terms.
The Pentagon has told Congress that the first 40 days
of war, up until the April ceasefire, cost $29 billion, but this is almost certainly a vast underestimate.
The Department of Defense (DoD) has been ambiguous about what is included in
this estimate, but at the very least it does not account for the massive damage to U.S. military
infrastructure or
the full costs of replacing U.S. military aircraft and other equipment lost in
the conflict. The full price tag is likely to be twice as high as DoD’s early tally.
Most up-to-date assessments suggest that at
least 16 U.S. military installations across eight countries—most of the U.S. military
positions in the region—suffered severe damage. For many of these sites, the
damage incurred was so extensive as to render the facility effectively unusable
for military operations. The cost of reconstituting these bases and hardening
infrastructure across the region against renewed conflict will be high, but the
total is difficult to estimate since the U.S. government is still limiting
access to open-source satellite data in the region. Iranian missile and drone strikes
also successfully targeted dozens of U.S. sensors and radars across the Middle
East, including those underlying U.S. regional air defense and early warning
networks. Forty-two military aircraft, including an E-3 AWACS, four F-15s, and seven air
tankers, were also damaged or destroyed. Replacing these assets will require
tens of billions in additional spending.
Costs to long-term military readiness are hard to
measure and surely not counted in the Pentagon’s estimate, but they are worth
considering anyway. In addition to wear and tear to equipment and personnel
caused by the war, the loss of aircraft and air defense platforms and the
depletion of U.S. missiles and air defense interceptor stockpiles will affect
U.S. preparedness for future military operations. Some estimates suggest the
United States has burned through 1,000 Tomahawk missiles, nearly 50 percent of its Patriot and THAAD stockpiles, and significant portions of advanced stand-off
weapons like PRSM and JASSM missiles.
The constraints on U.S. military power created by
these shortages will be consequential and enduring. In congressional testimony,
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth admitted that it would take years to replenish the missiles expended in Iran.
During this time, American strategic flexibility will be limited. For example,
leading experts now assess that the U.S. military arsenal is not sufficient to
support a defense of Taiwan, long considered the highest priority contingency for
American military planners. To put this more bluntly, if China were to attack
Taiwan tomorrow, the United States might be forced to watch on the sidelines.
The same is probably true of a major conflict in Europe.
As seriously, the problems facing a diminished U.S.
military will be contagious, affecting the rearmament efforts of U.S. allies
across regions. As our stockpiles are rebuilt, the United States will have to
divert most defense production to its own military, reducing what is available
for sales to U.S. allies and partners who have based their rearmament plans on
such weapons purchases. Already, European NATO members are hearing that shipments of much-needed missiles and other weapons are
being delayed indefinitely. Allies in Asia have been similarly warned. Japan’s shipments of Tomahawk
missiles, for instance,
are likely to arrive late, as are most weapons in recent Taiwan arms
packages.
For many of these allies, such delays are
unsustainable. In Europe, for instance, there is talk of focusing more heavily
on indigenous production or shifting orders to other suppliers such as
Israel, Turkey, or South Korea. In some ways, allied assessments that the
United States is an unreliable partner are a good thing, pushing countries that
have long been dependent on the United States firmly and finally in the
direction of independence and self-sufficiency. But, for the United States, it
will be a dramatic change that contributes to a gradual erosion of its position
of global military dominance.
Beyond military costs, there is the economic damage caused by the
conflict, which is outside
the Pentagon’s purview but real and serious nonetheless. The economic losses
caused by disrupted trade are likely to be massive, measured in slowed economic
growth and lost corporate profits and national income. For the United States, the
effects of higher oil prices and inflation for American consumers are the
biggest concerns. And of course there are also the opportunity costs, that is,
the U.S. government investment in domestic programs that will now be delayed
and foregone to support higher military budgets.
The bottom line is this: The war has not made
Americans safer, but they will be paying for it for decades anyway.
The U.S. failure in Iran is unprecedented in its
effect on American geopolitical standing, but the military mistakes made in
Iran are themselves not unique for the United States. Like previous ill-fated
U.S. military campaigns, the Iran War began with unclear, broad goals that
could never have been achieved using military force alone. Also as in previous
wars, the stakes for the United States were considerably lower than they were
for the adversary, a fact that set the United States up for failure from the
start. For Iran, the stakes of the current conflict are existential and willingness to endure pain seemingly
infinite, while for the United States, the interests at stake are limited at
best. Iran was never close to having a nuclear weapon, and, despite its
aggressive rhetoric, Tehran posed no real threat to U.S. national security.
Finally, American political and military leaders once again made the error of
believing their goals in Iran could be accomplished quickly, and then failed to develop a strategy or theory of
victory for an extended campaign.
In the past, America’s overwhelming military and
economic advantages have offered Washington a generous margin of error to
absorb these repeated military disappointments. Today, this cushion has
evaporated. Combined with the cumulative effect of decades of U.S.
overextension, China’s rapid military development, and the democratization of military power to weak
states and non-state groups, the war in Iran has erased much of the remaining
U.S. military edge. Forty days of fighting plus six weeks of blockade have not
only drained stockpiles but revealed systemic weaknesses in the American way of war and clear limits on
American military power. For the first time in decades, the U.S. military looks
beatable—and is.
First, the vulnerability of U.S. bases, ground-based
air defense, and military aircraft during the war has significant implications
for the sustainability of U.S. military commitments. U.S. operations in any
sort of Indo-Pacific contingency would depend heavily on forward bases to project airpower, to support intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance, and to manage logistics and combat support.
Pentagon plans also place faith in the ability of ground-based air defense to
protect U.S. military infrastructure, personnel, and aircraft. If U.S. bases in
the Middle East cannot withstand attacks from Iran, could those in Asia survive
in a conflict with the much more militarily capable Chinese military? Would
U.S. air defense networks, which were degraded so quickly by Iranian drones,
remain viable in a contingency in Asia? The answer to both questions is
probably no.
At the same time, the war has underscored the limits
of what can be accomplished with “stand-off” attacks (those executed from a
distance). American air and naval strikes achieved only narrow success against
Iranian military targets, despite Iran’s limited defenses. Iran was able to
protect much of its military infrastructure and capabilities and to innovate in
areas like air defense throughout the conflict. Similar attacks on Chinese
infrastructure are likely to be even less effective, especially if U.S. air and
naval forces must operate from beyond the second island chain to avoid Chinese
missiles.
U.S. failures in other areas are also revealing. The
United States has been unable to reopen the Strait of Hormuz using military
force, though some might contend that it could if it were willing to accept the
high escalation risks and costs of such a maneuver. And the sieve-like nature of the U.S. counter-blockade should raise a red
flag for those who argue that the United States could cut off access to
the Strait of Malacca or impose embargos on Chinese ports in case of a war in
Asia. Finally, U.S. ground forces have largely failed to counter Iran’s drone threat and are unable to
match it with capabilities of their own. Together with observations from the
war in Ukraine, U.S. Army leaders have already acknowledged that they will have to radically change how they
think about maneuver warfare as they plan for future contingencies, including
those to support NATO allies in a ground war in Europe.
The key takeaway is that U.S. military power simply
doesn’t reach as far or have the staying power that it used to. Just as
seriously, the war in Iran suggests that the insolvency of the current U.S.
military position is systemic and strategic, not simply a question of lack of
funds or insufficient magazine depth. A $1.5 trillion defense budget or investment in the defense industrial base
cannot solve these problems. Instead, the United States will be forced to
reevaluate and reduce its global commitments in a way that it has not in the
past.
Writing in Foreign Affairs earlier
this year, A. Wess Mitchell, an alumnus of the first Trump
administration, acknowledged that the United States is overextended. He calls
for a strategy of consolidation, in which the United States would shed burdens in
peripheral theaters—namely the Middle East and Europe—and revitalize the
engines of American military and economic power by investing in its defense
industrial base and rebalancing trade relationships with major partners like
China. He suggests that consolidation is an alternative to retrenchment, on the
assumed premise that the foundations of American military power remain solid,
needing only a reset.
Unfortunately, after the war with Iran, this option no
longer appears realistic. The gap between U.S. means and its currently
articulated ends is simply too vast and structural to be addressed with
industrial investments or new trade deals. The fundamental assumption of
consolidation, that the engines of American military power are still viable, is
now in doubt. U.S. manufacturing capacity has failed to rebound despite significant
investment, and with a national debt that exceeds 100 percent of GDP and rising energy prices, American economic
endurance is sputtering. There is little chance the United States can produce
enough missiles fast enough or reboot its shipbuilding capacity sufficiently to
sustain even a fraction of its current portfolio of global commitments.
Moreover, after expending so much military power on the war in the Middle East,
it is not clear that there is much left for the United States to consolidate
and redirect to the theaters that Mitchell defines as higher priorities,
including Asia and the Western Hemisphere.
Now retrenchment is the only choice for the United
States. But the news is not all bad. America’s military dominance is waning,
but the country continues to have notable advantages in most theaters over any
possible rival. Even in Asia, where Washington faces a peer challenger, China’s
military is not capable of driving the United States out of the region
entirely. Decisionmakers, therefore, have a degree of flexibility in terms of
what commitments to keep and which to surrender. Retrenchment, in other words,
can be managed.
In making tough choices, U.S. policymakers should
adopt a narrow definition of national interests—just two, in fact: defending
the homeland and ensuring access to key economic markets. Such a definition
would allow for a substantial reduction of U.S. military forces based abroad. The United
States does not need military bases and deployments in Europe or the Middle
East to protect these interests. There is no true hegemonic challenger in
either theater, and the threats that exist to the United States can be
addressed with periodic deployments of air and naval power, better missile
defense of the homeland, and a more robust global economic strategy. Managed
retrenchment would also demand a narrowing of U.S. security guarantees. Even if
the United States remains in NATO, it should return to a literal interpretation
of Article 5 that reduces U.S. obligations and should give up all security
commitments in the Middle East—a region that has brought only headaches.
In Asia, a managed retrenchment strategy would
similarly reduce American posture and security guarantees, though perhaps
initially to a lesser extent. Unsustainable positions, like the U.S. policy of
strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, should be dropped. Washington should state clearly that it will not defend Taiwan, a move that
would reduce the risk of a war with China that at this point the United States
is unprepared to fight. The United States should drop other necessary alliance
commitments, including those to Thailand, the Philippines, and South Korea,
while narrowing its commitment to Japan. This would allow for a repositioning
of U.S. military forces in Asia away from China’s coast toward northern Japan
and the second island chain—sufficient to defend U.S. access to markets and trade
routes.
These changes in posture and alliance commitments
would amount to a massive transformation of American foreign policy, but the
result would be a sustainable military position, consistent with U.S.
capabilities and resources and tailored to protecting U.S. interests.
Those hoping to cling to U.S. dominance—many of the
same people who see the Iran War as a success that requires just a few more
weeks of bombing—will abhor these recommendations, pushing efforts to sustain
the status quo. But such a delay will close the opportunity for managed
retrenchment and thrust the United States into a reality in which retrenchment
will be mandatory and required, forced on the United States.
Forced retrenchment could occur in many ways, but they
will all feel like a retreat. Resource constraints could require the United
States to reduce commitments, close bases, and shrink force structure. Defeat
in a military conflict, provoked by unsustainable deployments, vulnerable
bases, and chronic overextension, could also force U.S. pullback. In any of
these scenarios, involuntary reductions in U.S. military posture could
compromise U.S. interests. Under duress, policymakers will lose the ability to
control the pace or location of changes in U.S. military footprint. Instead,
these decisions might be made by U.S. adversaries, fiscal pressures, or
external constraints that leave Americans less safe and less well-off over the
long run.
Today, the U.S. foreign policy debate is driven by the
aftermath of the war with Iran. An agreement to end the root causes of the
conflict has yet to be signed, but policymakers now need to start talking about
what comes next. The war has revealed the fragility of U.S. military power and
the clear limits on what it can accomplish in the modern era. Instead of
maintaining the fiction that after the war U.S. foreign policy can return to
normal, policymakers should face reality: The period of U.S. military dominance—and
of American empire—is over. The resulting future will be less comfortable for
the United States, but its changes are overdue and its challenges manageable.
With the right moves today, American retrenchment can leave the United States,
and the world, better off.
