The Oldest Lesson

What initially looked like isolationism under Trump is now better understood as a forced renegotiation. America is not withdrawing from the world. It is withdrawing from paying for everyone else to be in it.

Since Bretton Woods, the global order ran on American power. Dollar primacy, freedom of navigation, extended deterrence. Other countries kept defence budgets low, ran current account surpluses, and relied on American security as a free good. At some point the bill was always going to come due. What we are watching is the renegotiation. America wants to be paid for the order it provides, or it wants to hand the costs back to the people who benefit from it most.

Under that reading, Iran is not a contradiction of America First. It is an application of it. Before you can recalibrate your presence in the Middle East, before you can credibly pivot to the Pacific, you need to deal with the one regional actor that has spent forty years building the capacity to make your withdrawal costly. Iran's nuclear programme, its missile infrastructure, its network of proxies, and its ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz — all of it represents leverage Iran could use the moment American attention shifted elsewhere. The logic of the campaign was to degrade that leverage before the recalibration. Decapitate the leadership, set back the nuclear programme, suppress the missile capability, and exit with Iran substantially weakened.

The sequence

The assumed objectives were never just about Iran. Weaken Iran and you tighten pressure on China's energy supply lines. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a third of China's seaborne oil. Destabilise the Gulf, and Beijing's most critical import corridor becomes unreliable. Meanwhile Russia-Ukraine had already pushed Europe off Russian gas. American LNG was the obvious replacement, and the recent round of transatlantic trade talks included exactly that ask. Consolidate the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine. Then pivot to the Pacific with China already under energy stress and Europe already dependent on American supply. That is the sequence, or something like it.

It is not an incoherent vision. The problem is that Iran was supposed to be the preliminary. A manageable operation that cleared the board before the main event. What it has become, four weeks in, is the main event. And the geography was always going to make it so.

The fortress

I have argued in previous pieces on this site, and the map below makes this more plainly than words can, that Iran is one of the world's great natural fortresses.

The Zagros runs 1,600 kilometres along the western border. The Alborz seals the north. The interior plateau sits at an average elevation of 900 metres. Every approach requires fighting uphill through terrain that has defeated external powers for three thousand years. The Mongols took it in the thirteenth century. Nobody since has managed it. Air power can strike Iran. It cannot hold it, and the people who planned this campaign knew that.

What air power was supposed to do was decapitate. Kill the leadership, and the regime loses its anchor. Hit enough of the nuclear infrastructure, and the programme is set back years. Degrade the IRGC's command structure, and Iran loses its capacity to project force regionally.

The second miscalculation

This is where the deeper error sits, and it runs below the geography of the terrain.

The IRGC is not a conventional military hierarchy. It cannot be decapitated because it was never built to be led from a single point. It is woven into Iranian society in ways that took decades to construct deliberately. It runs businesses. It controls supply chains. It has institutional presence in every province. The decentralisation is a feature of its design, not a weakness. Killing Khamenei produced a successor. Killing IRGC commanders produces replacements. The social and institutional architecture of the regime mirrors the physical geography of the country. Both are distributed. Both absorb strikes and reconstitute. The fortress is not just the mountains. It is the structure of the state itself.

And then there is the information war, which was probably lost before the first bomb dropped. Bombing a regime that can plausibly claim victimhood rarely produces the internal collapse external powers hope for. It more often does the opposite. When Israeli politicians and the US president called on Iranians to rise up during January's protests, the regime reframed the unrest as foreign interference and mobilised counter-demonstrations. It worked. External bombardment handed the successor leadership exactly the nationalist narrative it needed. Whatever momentum the protest movement had built was complicated by the instinct, common to most populations under attack, to close ranks.

The toll booth

Before the campaign, Iran held the threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz as a deterrent. It was a card that could only be played once, at enormous cost to itself. Closing the strait meant cutting off Iranian oil revenues, inviting further retaliation, and exhausting a leverage instrument in a single use. The threat was valuable precisely because it had not yet been acted on.

The war changed that calculation entirely. The conflict itself did what Iranian deterrence never fully managed. Commercial shipping stopped transiting voluntarily. Insurers priced vessels out of the route. The strait closed not by Iranian decree but by the logic of the fighting. And then Iran began selectively reopening it on its own terms. Chinese vessels get through. Ships that pay get through. One reportedly paid two million dollars to use Iran's designated channel. Iranian oil has been flowing to China throughout. Brent crude passed a hundred dollars a barrel and peaked substantially higher. Iran is now earning more per barrel than before the campaign began.

The deterrent threat has become operational control. That is not a marginal unintended consequence. It is a direct inversion of one of the campaign's core objectives. Whatever the US hoped to achieve by degrading Iran's regional leverage, the strait — the world's single most important energy chokepoint — is now more firmly in Iranian hands than it was in January.

The board that won't clear

Iran was supposed to be the preliminary. What it has become is the main event. Two carrier strike groups, B-2 bombers, an expanding regional conflict, a succession crisis in a nuclear-adjacent state, and a ground invasion being openly discussed. The exit is not visible.

America First was always going to require getting the ducks in a row before withdrawal. The risk now is that Iran becomes the row that never ends. The historical record on this is not encouraging. The terrain that makes Iran impossible to occupy also makes it impossible to finish quickly from the air. The IRGC's distributed structure means there is no moment of decisive defeat to point to. No surrender. No clear endpoint. Just an adversary that reconstitutes, controls the chokepoint, and waits.

If there is a way out that preserves anything resembling the original strategic logic, it probably involves a regional power doing what America cannot. Turkey is the obvious candidate. It has the army, the geographic position, and its own reasons to want Iranian regional influence curtailed. Erdogan has spent a decade making Turkey the indispensable broker in exactly these situations. Whether Washington would accept that outcome, and what Turkey would want in return, is another question. But if America is serious about the Pacific pivot, it needs someone to hold the Middle East after it leaves. Right now it is not obvious who that is.