Gen. George S. Patton famously said, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his.”
U.S. President Donald Trump is attempting something Patton never contemplated: winning without making most of the other side’s dumb bastards die at all. The theory is that economic strangulation—backed by precision strikes on hardware—will accomplish what armies have historically had to accomplish in the field.
It is an appealing theory. On the evidence, it is also insufficient.
Start with the arithmetic. Iran’s military branches—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij and the regular army—number roughly 610,000. After hundreds of airstrikes across Iran, estimates of Iranian military deaths range from 2,000 to 6,000. That is well under 1%. Whatever else this campaign has done, it has not defeated the Iranian army. It has barely touched its manpower. Yet the president expects surrender.
Most strikes come in the middle of the night, though the United States has air superiority and could strike at any hour. There are sound strategic reasons for this. But I am reminded of the scene in the 1995 film, “The American President,” starring Michael Douglas as the leader of the free world, who orders a retaliatory strike against Libya’s intelligence headquarters timed to injure the fewest people, then sits with the knowledge that an innocent night-shift janitor will die anyway. Restraint is a defensible moral choice. It is not, by itself, a war-winning one.
My point is not that the United States should be killing more Iranians. It’s that a war banking on economic pressure is counting on something necessary but not sufficient—and that the historical case for it is weaker than its champions suggest.
Economic exhaustion was indeed the major contributor to the fall of the Soviet Union, which let the United States “win” the Cold War without ever defeating the Soviet army in battle. However, that victory took four decades, and it required something Iran conspicuously lacks: a leadership that eventually concluded reform was preferable to collapse.
Iran is far weaker than the Soviet Union ever was, but the pain of sanctions hits the country unevenly. Economic pressure is falling hardest on the civilian population while leaving the Revolutionary Guards comparatively insulated. The IRGC reads sanctions not as a reason to yield but as a reason to tighten its grip.
Conflicts don’t always require destroying an army on the battlefield. But failing to do so can plant the seeds of the next war.
In 1991, Washington did not seek regime change in Iraq. Victory was declared because Saddam Hussein’s troops had been driven out of Kuwait. Ten years later, the United States was again at war with Iraq because of the threat its dictator president was still perceived to pose. One pretext—weapons of mass destruction—proved wrong. But the Bush administration also believed that regime change was a precondition for regional stability. And so, the Iraqi army was crushed, and Saddam Hussein was ousted.
The wisdom of that war remains contested; the outcome was that Iraq stopped threatening its neighbors and that Iraqis did become more democratic. The fact that Iraq is not more stable and prosperous today owes much to Iranian interference, which is precisely why the Trump administration’s failure to insist on ending Iran’s support for its proxies is so difficult to fathom.
Trump appears willing to declare victory if he can open the Strait of Hormuz, but it will be a hollow triumph. Much of Iran’s military assets have been destroyed; however, it still has a large army with missiles and drones capable of threatening its neighbors. It has already demonstrated that capability against its Gulf neighbors and Jordan. Moreover, these assets remain under the control of Islamic extremists who have not abandoned their goal of world domination and have a greater incentive to develop a nuclear weapon for that purpose and deterrence.
The contrast with Israel’s approach is instructive.
The United States has concentrated on degrading capability: IRGC command centers, missile and drone sites, air defenses, naval facilities, coastal radar, logistics and the maritime assets supporting operations in the Strait of Hormuz. Israel began with decapitation strikes against Iran’s leadership. It hit strategic targets, too—nuclear sites, missile production and launch infrastructure—but it also went after the machinery of internal repression: IRGC headquarters, the Basij, police and intelligence-linked units.
One campaign is aimed at what the regime can do to its neighbors. The other is aimed at what keeps the regime in power.
Only one of those theories has a plausible path to the outcome Trump says he wants.
A bloodless war is a worthy aspiration. But a war that ends without defeating the enemy or dislodging the men who chose it isn’t bloodless. It is deferred—and the bill comes due on someone else’s watch.
