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CSS CURRENT AFFAIRS — INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS The War America Cannot Win: How Washington’s Iran Gamble Backfired — Politically, Militarily, and Ideologically How the assassination of Ali Khamenei reunited a divided Iran, elevated a dynasty it meant to destroy, and handed Tehran a narrative more powerful than any missile CSS Corner · csscorner.online · March 23, 2026 · Topics: International Relations · Iran · US Foreign Policy · CSS Essay Preparation |
There is an old principle in statecraft, ignored at enormous cost by those who fancy themselves architects of history: when you strike a nation on its soil, kill its leader during its holiest month, and bomb its schools and hospitals — do not expect its people to greet you as liberators. In late February 2026, the United States and Israel launched what Trump called “major combat operations” against Iran, assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, degrading its military infrastructure, and, in their own stated framing, expecting Iranians to rise up and dismantle the Islamic Republic themselves. Four weeks later, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil prices have surged over 45 percent, the global economy teeters on the edge of recession, Trump is talking about “winding down” — and Iran has a new supreme leader who is, ideologically, more hardline than the last.
This is not a military victory. This is a strategic catastrophe unfolding in slow motion. And for CSS aspirants preparing to engage with international relations, foreign policy, and contemporary affairs, understanding why America is losing this war — politically and militarily — is not just academically important. It is essential.
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CORE ARGUMENT Washington went to war against a country of 92 million people with no plan for what came after the strikes. It assassinated a leader whose death, paradoxically, gifted the regime its most powerful tool: the martyr’s narrative. When a nation’s identity is threatened from outside, ideology — however unpopular — becomes the last fortress people are willing to defend. |
The Illusion of Surgical Dominance
On paper, the opening weeks looked like an overwhelming American success. Iranian missile launches dropped sharply. The navy was devastated. Nuclear infrastructure was struck in a separate operation dubbed “Midnight Hammer.” The U.S. Department of Defense claimed Iranian drone and missile attacks had fallen by 90 percent from peak levels. Trump declared objectives “ahead of schedule.”
But military degradation and strategic victory are not the same thing. The IAEA’s director-general, Rafael Grossi, confirmed what analysts had feared: even after heavy bombardment, Iran’s nuclear enrichment material and residual capabilities remain. The uranium did not disappear. The knowledge did not vanish. And the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a decentralised, ideologically hardened force embedded across the state and society — was never going to collapse simply because its top tier was killed.
More damaging still is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran closed it on the first day of the war, and it has remained effectively shut to its enemies ever since. Over 3,000 vessels are stranded in a maritime parking lot stretching across the Persian Gulf. One in every five barrels of global oil supply passes through this 21-mile-wide chokepoint. Crude oil has now crossed $110 per barrel. Kuwait’s Mina al-Ahmadi refinery — one of the largest in the Middle East — was struck by Iranian drones. Saudi Arabia intercepted 47 drones in a single three-hour period. Iranian missiles reached Diego Garcia, 2,500 miles from Iranian shores. Iran fired at Dimona, Israel’s nuclear facility, injuring over 180 people. This is not the behaviour of a regime on the verge of collapse.
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$110+ Crude oil per barrel (March 2026) |
3,000+ Vessels stranded in the Gulf |
5,300+ Iranian military killed (est.) |
1,444+ Iranian civilians killed incl. 204 children |
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“Iran does not need to score major military successes every day. The regime only needs to inflict enough periodic damage to keep regional partners, markets, and the American public jittery.” — Nate Swanson, Former NSC Iran Director, Foreign Affairs, March 17, 2026 |
No Plan, No Endgame: The Political Collapse of Washington’s Strategy
Perhaps the most scathing indictment of American strategy is the incoherence of its objectives. Trump began the war saying victory would come when Iranians rose up and overthrew the Islamic Republic themselves — a request that the former NSC Iran director Nate Swanson described bluntly as “extraordinary and unrealistic.” When that did not happen, the administration reframed its goals: degrade missile capability, destroy the navy and air force, prevent nuclear weapons, protect Israel.
Then Trump hinted at “winding down.” Then he threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened in 48 hours. Then he postponed those strikes for five days, citing “productive talks.” Then 2,500 additional Marines were dispatched to the region.
The shifting narratives tell their own story. This is not the behaviour of a state prosecuting a war with defined, achievable ends. It is the behaviour of a president who started a fire without a plan for putting it out. Congressional Republicans are now urging Trump to “declare victory and move on” — a damning phrase that itself concedes no actual victory has been achieved. Republican Representative Tim Burchett captured the mood with stark honesty: “I think we need to find an exit strategy as fast as possible.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s earlier expressed preference for who should lead Iran — publicly dismissing Mojtaba Khamenei as “a lightweight” and “unacceptable” — had precisely the opposite effect intended. To a regime with its back against the wall, foreign interference in its succession process was not a deterrent. It was a provocation. Within days of Trump’s comments and Israeli Defence Minister Katz’s threat to assassinate any newly chosen leader, the Assembly of Experts elected Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader. Washington’s pressure had transformed a constitutionally dubious, dynastically questionable appointment into an act of national defiance.
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★ CSS EXAM TIP — ESSAY ANGLE This is a textbook example of the “boomerang effect” in foreign policy — a concept examiners love. When external pressure meant to coerce a regime into compliance instead triggers nationalist consolidation, the intervening power has strengthened the very enemy it sought to weaken. Cite this war as a contemporary case study alongside the failed 2003 Iraq invasion. |
The Martyr They Made: How Khamenei’s Death Reunited a Divided Iran
Here lies the most profound strategic miscalculation of the entire war. Washington looked at Iran in early 2026 and saw a nation primed for revolution. It was not wrong about the discontent — the January 2026 uprising, which saw Iranian security forces massacre an estimated 36,000 protesters in the largest crackdown since the Islamic Revolution, had shattered the regime’s domestic legitimacy. The chants of “Death to the Dictator” were genuine. The fury was real. Seventy-five percent of Iranians, by some estimates, opposed the direction of the Islamic Republic.
But Washington made a fatal error in political psychology: it confused a nation’s hatred of its government with its willingness to accept foreign bombs on its soil. These are not the same thing. They never have been.
The moment American and Israeli airstrikes began killing Iranian civilians — including 204 children, including students killed when a missile struck a girls’ school — the political calculus inside Iran shifted. Not fully, not uniformly, but meaningfully. The silent 60 percent that political analyst Nate Swanson had identified — those who simply wanted a better life — began to coalesce, not around the Islamic Republic’s ideology, but around something older and more visceral: the defence of homeland against foreign assault.
Khamenei’s assassination deepened this transformation. In the symbolic universe of Shia Islam — to which the majority of Iranians belong — death at the hands of perceived enemies of Islam is not mere political killing. It is martyrdom. It is the fulfilment of a theological script thousands of years in the making, rooted in the tragedy of Karbala. As Al Jazeera’s analysts noted, his death was an idealised closure: the sacralisation of political life through sacrificial death. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior Shia religious authority in the world — a man who never endorsed velayat-e faqih — nonetheless mourned Khamenei’s “martyrdom” and called on Iranians to “maintain their unity” and refuse to let “the aggressors achieve their goals.” When Sistani speaks, 200 million Shia Muslims listen.
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“The bitter irony is that the U.S. and Israeli approach afforded Khamenei a martyr’s death — a gift to the regime, as it diverted attention away from the Islamic Republic’s failures.” — Nate Swanson, Foreign Affairs, March 17, 2026 |
The 40-day mourning period declared by the state functioned as what political sociologist Saleh al-Mutairi called a “funeral trap” for the opposition. Streets filled with mourners rather than protesters. The logic of wartime nationalism displaced the logic of domestic grievance. Even Iranians who had celebrated Khamenei’s death days earlier found themselves in organised pro-state gatherings, pledging allegiance to the new supreme leader. It was precisely the dynamic that Ayatollah Khomeini had exploited during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s — when Saddam Hussein invaded a fractured, revolutionary Iran and inadvertently handed the Islamic Republic its greatest legitimising crisis.
When Identity Is Threatened, Ideology Peaks
This is perhaps the most important analytical insight for CSS aspirants studying this conflict, because it is not merely a lesson about Iran. It is a universal law of political psychology.
Before February 28, 2026, the Islamic Republic’s ideology — velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist, the revolutionary anti-Western framework — was at its weakest point since 1979. Decades of economic mismanagement, sanctions, electricity shortages, 70 percent food price inflation, and the brutal massacre of protesters had eroded the regime’s ideological grip on Iranian society. Young Iranians were tearing down posters of Khamenei. Women were burning their hijabs. The ideology was bleeding.
Then came the bombs. And something ancient and powerful was triggered — not ideology in the doctrinal sense, but identity. The identity of a people that remembers the Mongol sacking of Baghdad, the colonial carving of the Middle East, the 1953 CIA coup that toppled Mossadegh, the 1980s when the West armed Saddam against them. A people with 3,000 years of civilisational memory do not easily surrender their sense of collective self to foreign firepower.
Professor Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar of Texas A&M University, writing in Foreign Affairs, captured this dynamic with precision: Iran is using the war to bolster its domestic position… the conflict has allowed Iran’s leaders to argue that they are bravely standing up to foreign invaders. It is fostering a sense of cohesion akin to the one that took root after the Iran-Iraq War. The bombings, including the killing of nearly 200 children and teachers in a girls’ school strike, are generating a culture of martyrdom that is sweeping across Iranian cities.
When external aggression threatens not just a government but the physical survival of a nation, people who opposed that government yesterday find themselves defending the country today. The two impulses — resistance to the regime and resistance to foreign invasion — are not as compatible as Washington assumed. In the short term, the second overwhelms the first.
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“Within the symbolic universe of Shia Islam, Khamenei’s death can be interpreted as the fulfilment of a martyrological script. This martyrological framing has the potential to rally a significant portion of the population — including those who were previously critical of the leadership — around a narrative of national defence.” — Al Jazeera Analysis, March 1, 2026 |
The New Khamenei: A Dynasty Born of American Miscalculation
Mojtaba Khamenei should not be supreme leader. By the Islamic Republic’s own standards, he is not qualified. Velayat-e faqih demands deep jurisprudential scholarship. Mojtaba has published no scholarly work. No marja’ al-taqlid confirmed his independent juristic reasoning. His own father had, in 2017, condemned hereditary rule as equivalent to passing “a copper ablution pot from one shah to another.” Had succession occurred under normal conditions, moderate and reformist Iranians — led by former Presidents Khatami and Rouhani — would have fought it with everything they had.
Instead, Mojtaba Khamenei became supreme leader of a country at war, with the IRGC providing personal protection to Assembly of Experts members who voted for him, with the reformist opposition unable to access the levers of power in a wartime emergency, and with Trump and Israeli Defence Minister Katz having publicly declared him “unacceptable” — making his election an act of national defiance rather than merely an act of factional politics. Washington’s interference in Iran’s succession turned a domestically controversial appointment into an internationally symbolic one.
The parallel to his father’s own rise is not lost on Iranian analysts. Ali Khamenei was a minor political figure when the Iran-Iraq War began in 1980. That war consumed more experienced leaders, elevated Khamenei’s profile as a wartime president, and eventually positioned him to succeed Khomeini as supreme leader in 1989. Today, Mojtaba Khamenei — previously unknown to most Iranians, lacking even a recognisable public voice — is already receiving pledges of allegiance at pro-state demonstrations. The war is doing for him what the Iran-Iraq War did for his father: building a legend through the crucible of conflict.
Russia, China, and the Geopolitical Windfall
America’s strategic embarrassment extends beyond the battlefield. Russia, which signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty with Iran just last year, has provided limited material assistance — constrained by its own war in Ukraine and by its ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration. But Moscow is cashing in on second-order effects. For every $10 rise in the oil barrel price, Russia earns approximately $95 million a day more. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven oil prices up by 45 percent in four weeks. The U.S. Treasury has been forced into the extraordinary step of temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian crude oil to ease global energy markets — a concession that hands Putin a tangible victory without firing a single shot.
Meanwhile, China — deeply alarmed by the long-term instability of Middle Eastern energy supplies — is being pushed further toward Russian oil and gas pipelines. The war is simultaneously degrading American credibility as a guarantor of global stability, diverting U.S. military assets and attention from Europe and Ukraine, and enriching adversaries who had no hand in starting it.
What This Means for Pakistan — and for the CSS Aspirant
Pakistan occupies a uniquely uncomfortable position in this conflict. A Muslim-majority country with strong historical and religious ties to Iran, a deep relationship with the United States, and a geopolitical neighbourhood that includes CPEC, Afghan instability, and Gulf dependency — Pakistan cannot afford to be indifferent to what is unfolding. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz directly threatens the 3 to 4 million Pakistanis working in the Gulf, whose remittances constitute the country’s largest source of foreign exchange. Oil price spikes translate directly into inflation, current account deficits, and IMF pressure.
For CSS aspirants, this conflict is not merely a news item. It is a living case study in realism versus liberal internationalism, in the limits of military power, in the logic of martyrdom in Shia political culture, in the economics of energy geopolitics, and in the catastrophic consequences of going to war without a plan for the peace.
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★ CSS ESSAY FRAMEWORK — USE THIS WAR FOR: IR Theory: Realpolitik vs liberal institutionalism — why the US assumed Iran would behave rationally and was wrong. Political Psychology: The rally-around-the-flag effect — when external threat silences internal opposition. Islamic Political Thought: The martyrdom narrative in Shia Islam as a tool of state legitimacy. Pakistan’s Foreign Policy: The Gulf dependency, remittances, and the costs of a Middle East in flames. Thesis template: “Although the United States launched its military campaign against Iran with declared objectives of denuclearisation and regime change, its strategic miscalculations — from the martyrdom of Khamenei to the unintended consolidation of Iranian nationalism — clearly demonstrate that military supremacy in the modern world cannot substitute for political intelligence and a coherent endgame.” |
Conclusion: The War That Strengthened What It Sought to Destroy
Four weeks into one of the most consequential conflicts in the modern Middle East, the scorecard is sobering for Washington. Iran’s military has been degraded. But its regime has not collapsed. Its new supreme leader is more ideologically rigid than the last. Its ideology — unpopular at home before the war — has found a new lease of life in the language of national survival. Its Strait of Hormuz gambit is costing the global economy billions daily. Its missiles continue to fly. And Trump is quietly floating the idea of a ceasefire that, by definition, leaves the Islamic Republic standing — and able to frame the outcome as survival against the world’s most powerful military.
There is a lesson here that echoes through history, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan: the most dangerous thing a superpower can do is confuse the ability to destroy with the ability to win. America can bomb Iran into rubble. What it cannot bomb is the memory of Karbala, the identity of a civilisation, or the political instinct of a people who have survived every empire that ever tried to erase them.
The new Khamenei is in power. The Strait is closed. The oil is expensive. And Washington is asking for an exit. That, in the language of strategic outcomes, is not winning.
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“The war Trump started has no good ending. And every day it goes on seems to delay a better future for the Iranian people. This is a tragedy that only Khamenei and Trump, together, could engineer.” — Nate Swanson, Foreign Affairs, March 17, 2026 |
Sources
Foreign Affairs (Akbar Ganji, March 13, 2026; Nate Swanson, March 17, 2026; Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, March 20, 2026; Alexander Gabuev et al., March 16, 2026) · Al Jazeera · NPR · CNN · Wikipedia (2026 Iran War) · Boston Review · Iran International · The Arab Weekly