Washington needs a long game on Iran | Opinion

Yahoo News | Ilan Berman

The Trump administration’s military campaign against Iran, initiated as Operation Epic Fury in late February, has encountered unexpected regime resilience despite sustained U.S. pressure. Tehran’s strategic weaponization of the Strait of Hormuz has successfully restricted maritime commerce, forcing Washington to narrow its expansive goals from regional proxy degradation to merely securing critical energy corridors.

This geopolitical standoff mirrors the protracted containment strategy of the Cold War, where Washington countered Soviet expansionism through comprehensive economic, technological, and ideological pressure rather than direct military conflict. Direct military victory remains elusive. To manage this enduring competition, American policymakers must transition from seeking decisive tactical outcomes to implementing a patient, long-term containment playbook. This comprehensive strategy requires restricting Tehran's access to sensitive Western technology, reinforcing vulnerable regional allies, and raising the financial and political costs of its proxy warfare to exploit internal systemic vulnerabilities and drive long-term domestic political change.

Comment

The transition from the rapid-effects model of Operation Midnight Hammer to the protracted friction of Operation Epic Fury exposes the limitations of short-duration strike doctrines against deeply securitised regimes. While precision strikes can temporarily degrade physical infrastructure, they frequently fail to disrupt the underlying political control mechanisms that allow the clerical establishment in Tehran to absorb tactical shocks. Consequently, the reliance on kinetic punishment as a primary deterrent has yielded to a positional struggle over maritime access in the Strait of Hormuz.

This doctrinal shift manifests operationally in the changing mission profile of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, which is forced to pivot from offensive strike coordination to continuous, low-intensity escort and interdiction duties. This persistent presence model strains surface combatant availability and shifts the primary operational metric from target destruction to the sustained suppression of asymmetric Iranian fast-attack craft and anti-ship missile batteries.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the US Navy's Fifth Fleet remains committed to a persistent escort model in the Strait of Hormuz, does this operational drain compromise its capacity to deter peer adversaries in other theatres, or does it establish a sustainable baseline for long-term maritime containment?

The persistent deployment of Fifth Fleet assets for low-intensity escort duties in the Strait of Hormuz inevitably diverts high-end surface combatants from the Indo-Pacific theatre. My assessment is that this operational drain weakens broader global deterrence postures, as the sustained suppression of asymmetric Iranian threats consumes the exact guided-missile destroyers required for high-intensity contingencies elsewhere. Consequently, the maritime containment of Tehran creates a strategic trade-off that directly benefits peer competitors in other domains.

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