Three Scenarios for Falling into the Iranian Black Hole Sometimes, military victory is a prelude to political defeat.
- sara john
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Samir al-Taqi
Many see this war as nothing more than a final chapter in the erosion of the rule of the mullahs: an authoritarian, corrupt regime, burdened by contradictions, and besieged both from within and from without.But wars are not read through wishes. Regimes may stagger and yet not fall; they may be struck hard, then recoil and harden. Here lies the Iranian paradox: Tehran may lose a great deal, yet it may not collapse. And Washington may win militarily, only to discover that it has entered a tunnel from which it does not know how to emerge.
Recent experience has taught us that great powers often fail in small wars. Not because they are incapable of destruction, but because they confuse smashing the adversary with building a politically viable outcome. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, America did not fail to bring down regimes; rather, it failed to produce stability. It destroyed the state, then departed, leaving the wreckage to its people. Bombardment, no matter how intense, cannot be a political program.
History remembers the Epirote commander “Pyrrhus” not as a triumphant hero over the Romans, but as an example of the kind of victory that devours its owner. For “war is the continuation of politics”—Clausewitz. It is also said of صلاح الدين that he sent a horse to Richard the Lionheart after Richard’s horse was killed, because “a war in which you annihilate your adversary may also kill the chances for settlement.”
According to Trump’s narrative, the plan appears simple: strike the head, destroy the missile infrastructure, undermine the nuclear program, then impose unconditional surrender.And that is the moment at which illusions begin. Wars do not remain where their planners want them to remain. What appears in the operations room as a “clean achievement” quickly turns, on the ground, into a chaotic question: who rules after the strike? Who controls the cities? Who signs the settlement? And who possesses the legitimacy of authority in the first place?
It is naïve to assume that Iran is a state susceptible to rapid breaking. It is not a fragile banana republic born yesterday, nor a personal dictatorship whose head can be easily severed.Iran is a composite structure: the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij, the bureaucracy, the intelligence services, the parallel economy, and the influential religious networks all balance one another within a central system.For this reason, targeting the leadership did not lead to the dismantling of power, but rather to its reforging. What was supposed to open the door to collapse instead opened the door to mobilization. When ideological regimes feel that the battle has become existential, they do not move toward moderation, but toward greater savagery, repression, and the redefinition of war as “defense of the الوطن.” Internal rivalries recede, or are postponed, and the logic of survival advances.
Thus, reliance on an imminent popular uprising appears to be a lazy wager. Although Iranian society is exhausted, resentment is real, and legitimacy is shattered, resentment alone does not bring down a regime. As the bombardment intensifies, the Basij spreads throughout the cities, the security services widen the circles of suspicion, and the ferocity of brutal repression increases. Indeed, public talk of regime change and the encouragement of separatist tendencies have led to a strong alignment of the Iranian army alongside the Revolutionary Guard.This is not a minor detail. The external strike unified the instruments of violence instead of dispersing them.
Externally, the international environment does not appear enthusiastic about an American decisive outcome. Europe supports at the minimum level that protects its interests without entangling it. China, for its part, distances itself, while showing clear concern about preventing threats to energy routes and maritime corridors.There is no one in the world who wants to save Tehran, but there is also no one who wants to inherit its chaos. Some major powers even find in American attrition a free opportunity that they quietly seize. The more Washington becomes entangled, the wider the margins available to its adversaries become.
Regardless of the American show of force, it is easy for any American president to begin a war, but it has always been difficult for him to set a convincing objective for its continuation before the American people.Iran’s wager is that time does not play in Trump’s favor, as he rushes to “accomplish the mission”!
After the first strike, the question of cost begins: who pays? For how long? And why? What is the legitimacy of the war? Then the calculations of elections, divisions, and social fatigue advance steadily. In a country like America, wars are measured not only by what they inflict upon the adversary, but also by what they exhaust at home.
Against this background, three scenarios appear before us as the most likely.
First: the hardening and militarization of the regime.The strikes succeed in destroying a large part of Iran’s deterrent capabilities, but they fail to bring down the regime or paralyze the state. Iran then recoils inward as a more securitized and militarized besieged state living in permanent mobilization. The war becomes, for America, a chronic burden—low in intensity, high in cost, and long in duration. America emerges with a military success, while Iran emerges with a harsher regime.
Second: the dismantling of the state from the peripheries.This path assumes the activation of armed oppositions of a national or ethnic character, with direct or indirect American or Israeli support, so that Iran is exhausted through its margins: the Kurds, the Baloch, and perhaps others. This scenario may succeed in wearing down the center, but it does not produce a stable alternative; rather, it produces a long internal war over the fragments of a state across a highly sensitive geography over which international powers contend. While this scenario may appear tactically attractive, it is strategically catastrophic.
Third: limiting losses without a declared surrender.This appears to be the most rational scenario, yet the least likely in the short term. Elites do not tend toward moderation under bombardment; rather, they tend toward hardening. Even if a more pragmatic figure were to emerge within the regime, his ability to deliver unconditional surrender would be nearly impossible. Even Mojtaba Khamenei would be incapable of imposing an instrument of defeat upon this complex wars, if the adversary is not granted a reasonable exit, he fights not because he is capable of victory, but because he is incapable of retreat.
That is the essence of the Iranian black hole.The issue is not: can America and Israel strike Iran? Rather: what comes after? The war may achieve a tactical victory, then fail to end the fighting.And thus the Middle East returns, once again, to swallow the illusions of those who believe they can engineer it with bombs. How many American presidents came promising to stay away from this region, only to end up in it?The problem of the Middle East is not the difficulty of entering it, but the impossibility of leaving it after you think you have grasped its keys. In the Iranian case, the danger may not lie in direct military defeat, but in that more insidious kind of defeat: to win the war on the battlefield, then lose it in will take Trump more blood and more time to learn anew what the Middle East is.
Comments