Misjudging the Balance of Power with Iran

Wars are a breakdown in negotiations between states locked in a conflict or dispute. Often, tensions do not lead to war even when the dispute remains unresolved, because war is expensive, consumes vast resources, and its cost may exceed whatever benefit is gained at the end.

One explanation for why wars break out is known in the research literature as "asymmetric information." In the real world there is a great deal we do not know, and sometimes we misread the information we do have (for example, the information about Hamas's intention to launch a large-scale attack). This can lead the parties to a conflict to misjudge the balance of power:

• Overestimation can lead a side to believe it has a good chance of achieving its goals quickly and at a low cost, and therefore that it is worth going on the offensive.
• Underestimation can lead a side to insist on negotiating demands that do not match the real balance of power, which may end in a surprise on the battlefield.

Examples: Hezbollah and Ukraine

Nasrallah misjudged the balance of power between Israel and Hezbollah and believed it was roughly even. As a result, he thought he could sustain a limited conflict with Israel over time, until reaching a ceasefire on terms favorable to Hezbollah. This was not an unreasonable assessment. In Israel, too, some believed the balance was more even, myself included, and the prime minister also thought the cost of a war with Hezbollah would be far higher than it turned out to be (this can be understood from Gallant's interview with Yonit Levi and Amit Segal, and from other interviews with him).

In the end, Israel, which had spent a decade building up its forces for a war with Hezbollah, carried out the pager operation and a broad series of targeted killings of Hezbollah's leadership and military command. This led to the organization's collapse and to its agreement to a ceasefire on Israel's terms.

Putin believed he could take over Ukraine within a short time, replace its government, and turn it into a client state. He was not alone: the United States offered Zelensky a way out before the invasion began, and many expected the war to be decided quickly. In practice, the offensive was never completed. Once Ukraine managed to disrupt the plan, the balance of power became more even, and for four years now the front has been frozen in a stalemate.

Rising Lion: Iran's underestimation

The Israel–Iran war (Operation Rising Lion) is, in my view, an example of Iran underestimating the balance of power. The negotiations between the United States and Iran had apparently made some progress, but the Iranians refused the demand to stop enriching uranium. It is more reasonable to assume that if real achievements had been within reach after the fifth round of talks, Trump would have continued the process rather than allowing Israel to attack on June 12, two days before the date supposedly set for the sixth round, as part of the deception that preceded the strike. The result on the battlefield was unequivocal: Israel had a clear military advantage, and the nuclear program was significantly damaged (scientists killed, sites struck and put out of action), even if the enriched uranium was not destroyed but apparently left trapped at the sites. Iran's ability to break out to a bomb was pushed back by at least several months.

The second war: American and Israeli overestimation

The United States and Israel hoped that the military superiority demonstrated in Rising Lion would translate into leverage in the negotiations that followed, but that did not happen. I believe history shows that the weaker side often avoids negotiating for fear that doing so will signal even greater weakness and invite higher demands. In this case, Iran assessed that such weakness would lead the United States to demand the complete dismantling of its nuclear program, which Iran was unwilling to do; and had it agreed, the United States would then have raised its demands to include dismantling the missile program and ending support for Iran's proxies.

Given the resulting deadlock, and even though Iran (as far as we know) had refrained from resuming enrichment, Israel and the United States judged that it was worth using their military advantage again and going to a war that would quickly bring down the regime, or at least force it to capitulate on the nuclear issue. On both counts, this was an overestimation of the balance of power. In practice, the regime held on, and this time it was well prepared for war.

The United States and Israel not only overestimated the significance of their military advantage; they also underestimated the overall balance of power and Iran's ability to hurt the countries of the region and the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. We will probably never know whether this underestimation stemmed from optimism that the regime would fall early, from a flawed assessment process before the war in light of the impressive military success of Rising Lion, or from a combination of both.

Iran's strategy

Iran's strategy had two main components. The first was to strike the countries of the region that are U.S. allies, mainly through the American bases on their territory but also through their economies, so that over time they would pressure Trump to end the war, and later not to resume it. The damage to these countries was worse than expected, as was the damage to the American bases. Indeed, since the ceasefire all the countries of the region have lobbied against renewing the war, and so far they have persuaded Trump to avoid a broad escalation, even though the Iranians have not compromised in the negotiations.

The second component was damage to the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz and driving up the prices of oil and agricultural fertilizers. Gasoline prices in the United States jumped from $2.98 a gallon on the eve of the war to $4.56 in early May. Fertilizer prices rose by an average of 40% as a result of the war. Seventy percent of American farmers reported that they would not be able to pay for all the fertilizer they needed for the spring planting season. About a third of the world's helium supply for the chip industry was disrupted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, creating difficulties for the AI industry. As the war dragged on, the U.S. president received warnings that the world was heading for a severe recession if it continued.

Trump said several times:

The balance of power is not just military strength

Once again it turned out that the balance of power between adversaries is not measured by military strength alone, even though the military advantage of the United States and Israel on the battlefield was enormous. Their air forces operated freely over Iran, apart from the downing of an American F-15 and damage to an F-35. The direct damage inflicted on Iran was many times greater than the damage Iran managed to inflict on the Israeli and American militaries.

The balance of power also includes:

1. The gap in the ability to endure painAs the United States learned in Vietnam: despite all the bombing, the North endured the pain and kept fighting.
2. How important the issue (the interest) is to each sideFor Iran this is an existential war against the two strongest air forces in the world; for the United States it is not. Tellingly, in the National Security Strategy the Trump administration published in November 2025, the word Iran appears only three times, with a brief mention that it had been weakened by Israel's strike and that its nuclear program had been set back. From this we can infer that on the eve of the war, the Trump administration did not see the Iranian problem as an important U.S. national security issue.
3. Political pressure on the leaderIn the United States, support for the war was the lowest for any war since World War II (usually there is a rally-round-the-flag effect at the start of a war and support rises), whereas in Iran the attack made protests against the regime harder.
4. Diplomatic pressurefrom many countries around the world hurt by the global energy crisis, not only the countries of the region.

From Nixon to Trump

When Nixon was elected president in 1968, he was sure he could force North Vietnam into genuine peace negotiations through threats and bombing. Haldeman, his chief of staff, recounted that Nixon borrowed the "madman theory" from Eisenhower (Eisenhower believed that his threat to use nuclear weapons was what brought about the ceasefire in Korea; today we know it was Stalin's death). According to Haldeman, Nixon wanted the North Vietnamese to believe he had reached the point where he would do anything to stop the war. The message was to be: for God's sake, Nixon is obsessed with communism and cannot be restrained when he is angry, and he has his hand on the nuclear button. That, he believed, would bring Ho Chi Minh himself to Paris within two days, begging for peace.

Nixon did not manage to end the war in his first term. Only after he was re-elected did it end, in a ceasefire that included an American withdrawal.

As I understand it, in the second U.S.–Israeli war against Iran, Trump concluded after 40 days that the war had to stop, having realized that the balance of power was not what he had thought: the Iranians could withstand the attack, while the price paid by him and by America's allies (not Israel) was higher than he had expected. An American household has paid about $2,000 for the war so far, faster and more tangibly than in previous wars, which is probably more than he is willing to pay. Since then, despite high tensions, Trump has held himself back every time it seemed he was about to strike again. We saw how high the price was in the midterm elections, in which his party paid a heavy political price.

Conclusion

We should examine why we misjudged the balance of power in this war. Judging by the outcome, we went to war overestimating the effect of our military advantage on the balance of power, a balance that also includes Iran's willingness to absorb the pain of the attack, and its ability to inflict pain on the American and global economies and on the Gulf states, so that they would pressure the United States to end the war. We believed the capabilities of the air force would be enough, but apparently without examining whether they could achieve the goal. We also ignored the fact that a war with Iran is not a vital U.S. interest. “A note of caution: this does not mean Trump will refrain from further escalation against Iran.