Destruction is Not Strategy: Schelling and the Coercive Failures of the Iran War

Small Wars Journal | Yilma Makonnen

The United States and Iran signed a fourteen-point memorandum of understanding on June 17, 2026, to end the 2026 Iran War, but renewed military strikes in July have pushed the conflict back toward full-scale hostilities. This rapid deterioration highlights the strategic failure of the joint US-Israeli Operation Epic Fury to achieve its core political objectives.

Applying Thomas Schelling's coercion theory reveals that the allied campaign misapplied violence by failing to translate destructive military force into viable diplomatic bargaining power. Specifically, the coalition exhausted its intermediate leverage through rapid escalation, issued shifting demands, and decapitated the very Iranian leadership structures required to negotiate and enforce compliance. Consequently, the inability to distinguish between deterrent and compellent objectives has left the regime in Tehran with powerful domestic incentives to resist rather than capitulate, raising the risk of a protracted regional escalation that threatens freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

Comment

The failure of the joint campaign reveals the doctrinal limits of Thomas Schelling's compellence theory when applied to the deeply institutionalised, factionalised command structure of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Decapitating Tehran's senior leadership eliminates the singular authority needed to command regional proxies like the Houthis to cease hostilities. Consequently, destroying central command nodes conflicts directly with the political requirement of securing a coordinated cessation of hostilities across the Axis of Resistance.

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