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Trump and Netanyahu wanted the world to watch Iran being humiliated.
Instead, the world is watching the myth of US-Israeli military supremacy being dismantled in real time.
It was supposed to be another demonstration of irresistible Western power: bomb Iran, decapitate its leadership, destroy its military infrastructure, cripple its economy and force Tehran to kneel.
But Iran didn’t kneel.
Months after the US and Israel launched their war, Iran remains standing, armed, defiant and, most extraordinarily, retains enormous leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.
The arrogance behind the war has consequently become almost as important as the war itself.
Washington and Tel Aviv believed possessing the world’s most sophisticated weapons meant possessing the ability to dictate political outcomes.
They confused destruction with victory, air superiority with strategic supremacy, and Iran with the smaller states they’d previously bombed with relative impunity.
The result is a strategic debacle.
America has lost its attempt to subjugate Iran through air and naval power, and the Iran war will ultimately end in American retreat. Iran can impose economic and military costs the US can’t sustainably bear.
These are not the words of Tehran, but the assessments of Americans watching their own government repeat one of the oldest mistakes in imperial history.
Netanyahu spent years convincing Washington Iran represented a problem that could ultimately be solved through force.
Trump swallowed the bait.
The underlying assumption was breathtaking in its arrogance: Iran could be bombed until it accepted whatever political order Washington and Israel demanded.
Kill the leadership. Destroy the missiles. Smash the nuclear infrastructure. Cripple the economy and wait for collapse.
Instead, Iran absorbed devastating punishment and continued fighting.
The failure matters because wars aren’t won by counting explosions.
They’re won by achieving political objectives.
Iran was supposed to be broken, it isn’t, and Hormuz was supposed to be secured.
It isn’t while, Israel was supposed to become safer.
It hasn’t.
American dominance was supposed to be reaffirmed.
Instead, Washington is threatening more sanctions and indefinite military pressure while trying to force Tehran back to negotiations over a waterway Trump claims America already controls. Current shipping traffic through Hormuz remains dramatically below its pre-war level.
The contradiction is extraordinary.
If America controls Hormuz, why can’t it restore normal shipping?
If Iran’s been defeated, why does Washington need Tehran’s agreement to reopen it?
If Trump’s strategy has succeeded, why is America still searching for the leverage required to compel Iran to do what Washington demands?
This isn’t victory.
It’s defeat masquerading as victory.
Trump’s rhetoric about American control of the Strait of Hormuz may ultimately become the perfect metaphor for this war.
The US possesses overwhelming naval power.
Iran possesses geography.And geography doesn’t surrender.
Iran sits along the northern coast of the Persian Gulf and Hormuz. It possesses missiles, drones and land-based systems capable of threatening maritime operations across an extraordinarily confined battlespace.
No presidential declaration can change that.
No aircraft carrier can move Iran’s coastline.
And no amount of chest-thumping can transform severely disrupted commercial shipping into evidence of American control.
Trump has now gone so far as to suggest the US could claim Hormuz as American territory.
It would be comical if the consequences were not so dangerous.
Once the world’s most powerful country has found itself arguing over ownership of a strategic waterway thousands of kilometres from America while the country it supposedly defeated continues exercising enormous influence over what moves through it.
That’s not imperial confidence but imperial desperation.
Netanyahu’s recklessness has produced an equally extraordinary outcome.
He wanted Iran weakened permanently.
Israel now faces an Iran that has survived direct war with both Israel and the US.
Worse still, Tehran has acquired something no military exercise could have provided: extensive real-world knowledge about Israeli and American defensive capabilities.
Iranian attacks exposed fundamental weaknesses behind inflated interception claims.
That should terrify Israeli strategists.
Missile defence depends upon interceptors.
Interceptors are finite and cost enormous sums.
They must be manufactured, transported and replenished.
Iran doesn’t have to penetrate every defence, just demonstrate no defensive umbrella is impenetrable indefinitely.
Netanyahu achieved the opposite of what he promised.
He turned Iran from a feared adversary into a battle-tested one. And Israel must now live beside it.
Washington and Israel have become dangerously accustomed to war as an instrument of political management.
Different conflicts, different circumstances, different responsibilities - but one recurring delusion: that sufficient violence can somehow manufacture political outcomes that diplomacy cannot.
The wreckage across the Middle East should have killed that fantasy, with US and Israeli conduct in Iran involving wanton war crimes.
That accusation illustrates just how far criticism has travelled beyond the normal argument about whether this was merely a strategic mistake.
The question is increasingly whether an obsession with military dominance has become strategically self-destructive.
For decades Washington’s real power in the Gulf was psychological as much as military.
America was indispensable.
America guaranteed security. It controlled escalation and determined the regional order.
That assumption is being shredded.
Saudi Arabia’s movement toward new defence arrangements involving Türkiye and nuclear-armed Pakistan is part of a regional landscape changing underneath Washington’s feet.
The message is unmistakable: states that once organised their security overwhelmingly around American protection are increasingly contemplating alternatives.
America has literally disappeared from the Gulf.
Bases aren’t power if the governments surrounding them no longer believe American dominance guarantees stability.
The Iran war has demonstrated something considerably uglier.
Iran understands something Trump appears incapable of accepting.
It doesn’t need to conquer America to defeat Washington’s political objectives.
It needs to endure. America is fighting on a political clock.
Iran is fighting an existential struggle.
Trump faces elections, petrol prices, inflation, financial markets, military costs and an American population that must continually be persuaded another Middle Eastern war is worth paying for.
Iran merely must remain standing.
Every month, interceptor, disrupted tanker, increase at the petrol pump and additional billion dollars matters.
And every week Iran refuses to surrender further undermines the original premise of the war.
Continued escalation, risks catastrophic damage to Gulf energy and desalination infrastructure and economic consequences extending across the world.
Iran is suffering, but suffering isn’t surrender.
Washington’s fatal mistake was assuming they were synonymous.
Netanyahu’s great gamble was always underwritten by somebody else.
American weapons, intelligence, interceptors, aircraft, money, diplomatic protection.
And eventually American forces.
Israel could escalate because America stood behind it.
But what happens when America tires of paying the bill?
That is the question now hanging over Israel.
Trump and Netanyahu promised a decisive demonstration of power.
Instead, they’ve created an open-ended confrontation with a country they have been unable to force into submission.
Iran’s paid a price.
But it has demonstrated that the world’s greatest military power cannot simply dictate its surrender.
And that lesson will travel far beyond Tehran.
The Global South, Gulf, China and Russia are watching.
Every government that’s spent decades being lectured about the irresistible power of Washington is watching.
The spectacle is extraordinary.
America and can bomb.
They can destroy buildings, infrastructure and lives on a horrifying scale.
But they can’t bomb geography or political will out of existence.
Nor can they bomb Iran into surrender simply because their war plans assumed it would surrender.
And they can’t proclaim themselves victorious while the strategic problem they went to war to eliminate remains staring them in the face.
Trump and Netanyahu wanted Iran’s humiliation to restore the mythology of US-Israeli supremacy.
Instead, their arrogance has exposed its limits.
They went to war to break Iran.
But Iran remains standing and it’s broken them.
When did the US ever win a war ON ITS OWN? Same with israel. America made sure it had every western country in with them before it started israel's wars, israel has always had American money, ships, planes, tanks and bombs behind it. Now it's just the two of the in an illegal war where their ego started because - zionist big, fat, ugly ego. Israel wants to rule the planet(and make everyone not them, their slaves). Egotistically, America thinks it rules the planet, while it has had to back out of every war it started - on behalf of israel. They only reason WWII went to the west was because it was a true war started, not from ego but because a promise was made to Poland that Britain honoured, theother countries came in because ghey were attacked first. The US only "helped" to end WWII after Germany was almost on its knees - another war started because of an egotist. Why people follow them I'll ever understand.
Everything you write, George, comes despite that fact that Trump is bankrupting the nation! The national debt will surely exceed $2 trillion this year according to numerous sources, but for the benefit of any skeptical Trumpista/MAGAtistas, I shall cite Fox News! https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/federal-budget-deficit-track-surpass-2-trillion-fiscal-year-spending-outpaces-revenue -- with a gentle reminder that Trump wants $1.5 trillion for his Department of War: https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4465551/15-trillion-budget-request-prioritizes-service-members-modernization/
Meanwhile, people are struggling with food, housing, and medical expenses, and our educational system and scientific research have been severely compromised. What a great "victory" Trump has given us. We will soon be the wealthiest Third World "shithole country" on the planet.