Despite having seen much of its conventional military capacity destroyed, Iran continues to have thousands of missiles and drones cheap, numerous enough to saturate any defense system. Most are intercepted, but that’s precisely the point. To brake drones that cost 20 thousand dollars, the United States and Israel are forced to fire missiles that cost four or five million. The war economy has turned the other way and, at this moment, is playing in Tehran’s favor, unless the regime falls in the meantime, with a population revolt, or a civil war breaks out in the country, a scenario that will be possible, but of very uncertain probability.
The Trump Administration has understood this reality and knows that the conflict has entered a stage where all options are bad. The first is to declare victory and leave, in a kind of recycled “mission accomplished”. However, it would be a fiction, because Iran has no incentive to stop now and Israel has its own interests that do not always coincide with those of Washington. The war would continue, it would just change the narrative. Furthermore, such a scenario could be a true “Suez moment” for the United States, an unequivocal sign of strategic decline that would not go unnoticed either by allies or, above all, by adversaries.
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