By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How to Avoid a Russian-Style Quagmire

The United States and Iran are trapped in a conflict in which each new escalation only deepens a shared, losing predicament. Neither can compel the other’s surrender. Sooner rather than later, both will confront the urgency of finding an off-ramp - one that does not hinge on the other’s humiliation.

Any viable exit will require each side to claim a measure of victory. Like it or not, they are in the same boat: They will either sink or make it to shore together.

When the United States and Israel started bombarding Iran in late February, U.S. President Donald Trump and his advisers likely believed that they could debilitate the regime and the situation would stabilize quickly, as occurred with the military operation to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Given the repeated failure of nuclear talks with Iran and the Israeli desire to neutralize Tehran’s growing missile arsenal, Trump and his advisers likely reasoned that acting now was better than later for a conflict that would eventually have to be fought. Washington had already built up forces in the region, and the Iranian regime, which faced an emboldened Israel and rising domestic unrest, was weaker than it had been for decades.

But what has transpired looks more like Russia’s war in Ukraine than Washington’s quick intervention in Venezuela. The fierce Iranian response has led to a war of attrition and possible stalemate similar to the conflict in Ukraine. The United States, like Russia, does not have an obvious way to achieve a decisive victory and risks getting mired in an endless war.

To avoid the same mistakes that Russia has made, Washington will likely have to accept a compromise result in Iran. That could include agreeing to a cease-fire in exchange for permanent limitations on Iran’s enrichment of nuclear material, removal of its highly enriched uranium buried in Isfahan and elsewhere, and caps on the country’s ballistic missiles and their range. This would leave the Middle East more secure, even though it would allow Iran to eventually rebuild its capability to bully its Gulf neighbors with its remaining short-range missile and drone capacity. Trump’s proposed 15-point peace plan suggests that Washington recognizes the need to find an off-ramp. But the United States needs to stay committed to this path to avoid Russia’s dire Ukraine predicament.

Smoke rises from a recent airstrike in Tehran on March 6.

 

Rebel With a Cause

Whatever the Trump administration’s flaws in its strategy, Iran’s history of direct and indirect aggression meant war was someday inevitable. Iran, as Henry Kissinger explained in 2006, must decide whether it wants to be a cause - that is, an ideologically driven, anti–status quo religious state with claims to regional hegemony - or a nation, focused on typical interests such as security and development. Between 1979 and 2023, Iran succeeded in expanding its regional power by presenting itself as both a cause and a nation, never forcing the outside world to come to a definitive conclusion. Tehran gradually built alliances with Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, Shia factions and militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Houthis in Yemen. In 2005, as a sign of how remarkable Iran’s success was, Jordanian King Abdullah II warned of a new “Shiite Crescent” in the Middle East.

International concern during this period focused on Iran’s nuclear program. Although the United States revealed indisputable intelligence in 2007 that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, Tehran played its cards well. It convinced the Obama administration and key European leaders that it was in fact a nation, or had the potential to be one, if only the West would treat it as such. In an interview in 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama even advocated that Saudi Arabia “share” the region with Iran. The result was the 2015 nuclear deal, which acknowledged Iran’s right to enrich uranium with no limits after 15 years, in return for enhanced but imperfect inspections and a commitment (risible given the intelligence) to never pursue nuclear weapons.

Iran’s regional encroachment on the sovereignty of Arab states, largely through supporting its local proxies in conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and to a lesser degree, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza between 2004 and 2023, resulted in approximately one million deaths and 17 million displaced people. But this did not generate a sustained response by the United States and its partners to push back beyond brokering a 2018 cease-fire in Syria. Western leaders continued to believe that Iran was a problem that could be better managed by diplomacy - treating it as a nation, not a cause - than by military force. They also believed that Iran could win any escalation: Tehran had a high tolerance for pain, the ability to threaten Gulf states with drones and missiles, and the power to imperil the global oil trade by shutting off the Strait of Hormuz.

The October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel clarified for much of the international community that Iran could not be managed by diplomacy. Hamas, followed by other Iranian proxies and ultimately Iran itself, fought Israel. Hezbollah launched missile attacks from Lebanon; the Houthis closed the Red Sea to shipping; Iraqi pro-Iranian militias attacked Israel and U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East; and Iran unleashed two massive missile barrages on Israel in 2024. But the 12-day war in June 2025, in which U.S. and Israeli airstrikes assassinated Iranian leaders and nuclear scientists and damaged nuclear and missile sites, showed that military action could decisively weaken Iran and its proxies. Washington thereafter assumed that Tehran would accept defeat, but Iran instead sought to reconstitute its nuclear program and intermediate-range missile stocks. Israel and then the United States concluded that Iran was still a cause, not a nation, and that more military action was needed.

 

From Kyiv to Tehran

The United States and Israel bet that a quick decapitation strike would cripple the Iranian regime. This echoes tactics Trump has come to rely on. In both his terms in office, he has used missile strikes or raids to take out leaders or strategic sites, including the 2017-18 bombings of Syrian forces connected to chemical weapons attacks, the 2020 assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, and the seizure of Maduro in Caracas in January. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow, too, believed that a quick attack on Kyiv and its top leaders would cause the resistance to collapse. But Russia ended up instead in a war of attrition.

The United States and Israel now also find themselves in a similar situation in Iran. Tehran has managed to keep firing missiles and drones at Israel and Gulf states and halted most oil and gas exports out of the Persian Gulf, which has created, at least for now, a stalemate similar to what Moscow faces in Ukraine.

The usual military method for ending a stalemate is offensive ground warfare. Yet after four years of fighting, neither Russia nor Ukraine has enough additional ground forces to launch decisive offensives. Major ground action is even less likely in the Iran war. Any significant ground movement by Iran would invite a devastating U.S. air attack. Although the United States has ground forces available, there is overwhelming American public opposition and huge tactical constraints. In contrast with the Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there is no territory adjacent to Iran on which the United States can amass troops to assault the Iranian mainland, and Iran’s territory and population are more than double Iraq’s.

Missile, drone, and air strikes - and defenses against them - are the primary military operations in both Iran and Ukraine. But air power is seldom decisive, as Russia has learned in Ukraine. Tehran can neither defend directly against the U.S.-Israeli bombings nor inflict significant damage on Israel in retaliation. Instead, it is running an attrition campaign in two dimensions. First, it is working to exhaust its opponents’ weapons stocks, using drones and missiles to wear down U.S. and partners’ air defense systems and, to a lesser extent, their stores of precision strike missiles. Second, it is waging a war of pain - one that encompasses both its own capacity to endure punishment and its ability to inflict harm on Washington’s Gulf state partners. The United States’ European and Asian allies, as well as the American public, are also feeling pain through high fuel prices and likely supply shortages.

Russia and the United States, as the parties on the offensive, are facing the reality that militaries don’t fight wars - states do. What matters goes beyond weapons and tactics. Production capabilities, economic costs, public morale and political mood, and broader international concerns limit the military options a state can use. Russia has stayed in the Ukraine fight in large part because China is purchasing its oil, providing high-tech supplies such as electronic components for weapons production, and offering diplomatic support. But this increases Russia’s dependence on Beijing, and thus the need to heed Chinese concerns, such as eschewing the threat of nuclear weapons. Washington, too, must keep its allies and partners - already hurt by the Iran war because of skyrocketing oil prices - from drifting away. If the United States disregards them entirely, they could decide to ban American military bases on their territory or pull back from other military cooperation in the region. And Washington needs to resolve the war without depleting its weapons stocks or tying down forces indefinitely so that it can improve its chances of deterring China in the Taiwan Strait.

A residential building damaged by a strike in Tehran, Iran, March 2026

 

Beware Endless Wars

Wars of attrition can drag on for years, especially if the sides see the conflict as existential - as Iran, Ukraine, and Israel do - or extremely important to their overall international role, as is the case for Russia and the United States. The Iran war is increasingly unpopular among Congress, the American public, and U.S. allies. But the Trump administration appears determined to demonstrate its toughness, and Israel, which wants to fight until the regime collapses, will pressure the United States to stay the course.

Although Russia’s aggressive invasion of its neighbor differs from Washington’s goal of reining in Iran’s expansionist threat, both states are finding it equally hard to align their end goals with the means available to achieve them. Russia wants Ukraine to be a weakened, neutral, and subservient state, and the United States seeks an Iran shorn of its ideological foreign policy - that is, an Iran that is a nation, not a cause dedicated to subjugating the Gulf and the Levant. But neither Washington nor Moscow has spelled out clearly the minimum it needs to accomplish to reach those goals, which generates pressure to perpetually press for a bit more. In both these cases, the most likely result is protracted war without a clear resolution.

The United States will almost certainly have to accept an outcome short of its maximum goals. But any conclusion must minimize Tehran’s ability to advance its ideological agenda. Washington thus could negotiate a compromise cease-fire, ending U.S. and Israeli military operations and economic sanctions in return for Iran giving up almost all enrichment capacity and other elements of its remaining nuclear program, as well as accepting strict limits on the number and capability of its missile holdings. Severe restrictions on enrichment, in particular, would avoid the major flaws of the 2015 nuclear deal. Those included an official blessing for Iranian enrichment, limits on its degree and quantity only for fifteen years, and no accountability for Iran’s proven weaponization program. Russia, for its part, has so far been unwilling to accept a attainable Ukraine compromise. But after four years of fighting at huge human, economic, and diplomatic cost, neither has it made significant progress on the ground nor broken the Ukrainian people’s will.

A compromise with Iran would not entirely end the risk of a new war and would require continued American vigilance. Critics might decry it as too little to justify the huge military effort and risks of the present campaign. Nevertheless, compromise now would contribute more to the underlying goals of regional stabilization and American credibility than the alternatives of regime change or allowing Tehran to re-create the means to threaten the region. And most importantly, it would prevent Iran from becoming a trap for the United States, similar to what Ukraine has been for Russia.

 

 

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