Pages

4 April 2026

The Price of Strategic Incoherence in Iran

Richard K. Betts and Stephen Biddle

Contrary to the Trump administration’s callous public relations campaign early in the onslaught against Iran, war is not a movie or a video game. Starting a war is a decision to kill real people, destroy property, and divert limited resources from other priorities. For such moral and material costs to be acceptable, they have to be for a good purpose. No purpose will be good enough, however, unless it is accompanied by a strategy that can achieve that purpose at an acceptable price. Strategy simply means a plan by which military power will produce the desired political result. The

No comments:

Post a Comment