Substack launch: MUUSINGS
Reposted from Michael Sonnenfeldt’s Substack: https://michaelsonnenfeldt.substack.com/
Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its rapidly expanding ballistic missile arsenal, and its sustained support for proxy wars and terrorism constituted a real and grave threat to Israel, the United States, and the regional order. Tehran has been explicit about its hostility, explicit about its intentions, and persistent in its efforts to preserve the capability to produce nuclear weapons on short notice. Taken together, there has been more than enough justification to use every reasonable means—diplomatic, economic, covert, and, if necessary, military—to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.
It is important to state this clearly at the outset: Concern about the current war is not rooted in denial of the Iranian threat, nor in a reflexive aversion to the use of force. Iran is not an abstract problem. It is a dangerous, revisionist state whose actions have already cost many lives.
I also want to express my deepest sympathy for Israelis who have been wounded or killed, and for those who have lived under relentless rocket and missile fire for weeks. Israel did not choose this adversary. Its citizens have borne extraordinary physical and psychological costs, and any serious discussion that fails to acknowledge that reality is morally incomplete.
Where my unease lies is not with the decision to confront Iran, but with how this confrontation is being framed, and perhaps misunderstood. Much of the praise for President Trump’s decision to strike Iran rests on the claim that he showed courage where his Democratic counterparts would never have acted. But courage is not simply the willingness to act. It is the capacity to understand the nature of the conflict one is entering, the kind of adversary one faces, and the limits of what force alone can achieve.
The United States appears to be approaching this conflict as a war of military might—a domain in which it enjoys overwhelming superiority. Iran, by contrast, understands it as a war of wills: a prolonged struggle over endurance, legitimacy, and political resolve. These are very different contests. History suggests that when adversaries are fighting different wars, the side with greater patience and tolerance for pain often prevails.
This distinction matters because what Israel and the United States are ultimately seeking is not merely military degradation of Iranian capabilities, but a reordering of the regional balance of power. Any Iranian regime that survives—regardless of its internal legitimacy—will resist that outcome as an existential matter. Opposition to a U.S. and Israeli backed regional order is not incidental to the regime’s identity; it is central to its claim to rule.
That reality has been articulated openly. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a senior Iranian figure close to the Revolutionary Guards, recently stated: “The US doesn’t know how to start or to finish a war in this region. We are not going to sit here and let the Zionist regime and the US establish a new order.” This should not be dismissed as propaganda. It is a statement of strategic intent.
President Trump appears to believe that he can decide when this war ends. But unless the objective is full regime change—an undertaking with an appalling historical record—there is little reason to believe the Iranians will grant him that outcome. Iran is not a brittle adversary. It has spent decades preparing for precisely this type of confrontation: absorbing punishment, retaliating asymmetrically, widening conflicts through proxies, and waiting out opponents whose political systems reward short time horizons.
Years ago, after roughly fifty trips to the Middle East that I had taken in loose coordination with Prime Ministers Rabin, Peres and Barak, and the Clinton Administration, visiting with leadership in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, I had lunch with Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior advisor as he was helping to formulate the soon to be launched Iraq war, who had reportedly visited the Middle East exactly once. He confidently predicted that U.S. troops would be welcomed by Iraqis into Baghdad with flowers in the barrels of their rifles. That belief was not born of malice; it was born of ideology, overconfidence, and a profound underestimation of how adversaries and local populations would actually respond. The failure in Iraq reflected the belief that military superiority and conviction could substitute for a serious understanding of political will, social dynamics, and postwar realities.
Even under assumptions favorable to the war’s advocates, military strikes can degrade facilities but are unlikely to permanently eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities absent regime change. Scientific knowledge cannot be bombed away. Facilities can be rebuilt, programs dispersed, and stockpiles concealed. If Iran retains enriched nuclear material or the ability to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, today’s tactical successes may simply set the stage for a more determined nuclear effort tomorrow—one pursued under the banner of national survival.
This is where the distinction between courage and bravado becomes decisive. Courage accepts constraints. It values dissent, respects process, and prepares for outcomes that are uncomfortable and uncertain. Bravado treats war as an extension of personal will—assuming that force, properly applied, can compel adversaries to accept an imposed reality. American experience in the Middle East offers little reassurance to leaders who confuse the two.
What worries me most is that President Trump’s governing style—highly personalized, impatient with virtually no institutional checks, dismissive of expertise—undermines the qualities required to manage a long, ambiguous, and dangerous conflict. Wars in this region rarely end when their architects declare victory. They end when adversaries decide they have lost—or when escalation produces consequences no one intended. The reasons we hold Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Churchill in such high regard are not because they had the courage to start wars, but because they had the wisdom, character and fortitude, against seemingly intractable odds, to see them through over long periods of time.
For investors and entrepreneurs, the analogy is painfully familiar. The greatest damage rarely comes from risks we fail to identify. It comes from overconfidence, from dismantling safeguards before replacements exist, and from believing that conviction can substitute for disciplined process. Bold moves can create extraordinary value—but only when paired with humility, sequencing, and respect for second- and third-order effects. Otherwise, they compound risk rather than reward it.
Iran posed—and still poses—a grave threat. That fact should not be minimized. The harder question, and the one that will determine how this war is remembered, is whether the United States has correctly understood the nature of the conflict it has entered. If this is a war of wills rather than merely a contest of weapons, history suggests the outcome may depend less on who can strike hardest, and more on who can endure longest.
That is the fear beneath this argument. And it is a fear shaped not by ideology, but by experience.