The Limits of Power: A Lesson from the Last War on Iran

Wars have taught us many lessons, full of insights for those who wish to learn. If politicians were to learn from the calamities of past wars, they would refrain from embroiling their peoples and nations in them, and their number would at least have decreased year after year in our world, if not completely ceased. The Israeli-American war on Iran is no exception; it brought with it many lessons, perhaps the most important of which relates to "the limits of power."In modern political thought, political realism is associated with the ideas of the Italian statesman Niccolò Machiavelli, presented in his book "The Prince," in which he offered advice to the prince of the Medici family regarding matters of governance. What distinguished Machiavelli's ideas in this regard was their directness, clarity, and frankness: the ultimate goal is to preserve the state's survival, and the prince must do everything necessary to achieve this, without any deterrent whatsoever; for politics and morality do not meet, and the end, which is the realization of the state's survival interest, justifies the means to ensure this survival.

If moral constraints are absent from political action, what then limits this action between states and defines the boundaries between them? The determining factor for politics between states, at the core of realist theory, is power; the amount of power a state accumulates compared to other states. According to the power it possesses, primarily military power, which has come to be known as "hard power," the state's position and status among nations are determined.

Realist theory of international relations settled on the basis that "hard power" is the foundation that grants a state its position among nations. The stronger a state is, the more it can achieve its interests and impose its will on weaker states. If a state is weak, it must accept that the will of stronger states will be imposed upon it.Therefore, in order to preserve the state's existence and independence, the political actor must make the accumulation of its power their primary concern. On this basis, realist theory held that the world is composed of geographical regions, and the international system is hierarchically structured from states that compete with each other for dominance over the region in which they are located.

Whoever tops the list of contenders enters the ranks of regional powers, some of which, through the power differential, transform into major powers. If any of them can achieve complete dominance over its region, its influence and status extend beyond it to become a superpower. As a result, the relationship between major powers, vying with each other for regional, and then global, hegemony, controls the contexts of the international system and the rules that govern its paths.Therefore, it is observed that since the inception of the state, the accumulation of "hard power" has been a primary goal for states, which have continued throughout history in a frantic race with each other for armament. This was the goal of militaristic Sparta to achieve victory over its rival democratic Athens, leading to the endeavor of both the Soviet Union and the United States to gain an advantage over each other in the military field, until the competition between them reached not only the possession of nuclear weapons, but also the number of nuclear warheads each of the two states possessed. As for the intense conflict that has been raging for decades in our region, especially between Israel and Iran, which have continuously accumulated their military power, it is a struggle between them to exclude one another from achieving the status of a dominant regional state.

Although the recent war launched by Israel and America on Iran falls within this context, its outcome, which ended without achieving the objectives it called for, specifically the overthrow of the Iranian regime and the termination of the Iranian project to transform Iran into an entrenched regional power, calls into question the foundation upon which realist theory was built, namely the maximization of "hard power." Indeed, it indicates that this power, no matter how great, has limits that states discover, and exceeding them makes reliance on maximizing the use of this power of little, if any, benefit. The resulting consequence is that states' achievement of an advanced position in the hierarchical international system transcends, and does not exclude, the accumulation of "hard power," to achieving progress in other fields—scientific-cognitive, economic, technological, and cultural—within a general vision with an optimistic radiance of moving the world to a better state. Sparta's reliance solely on militarization, and its victory over Athens because of it, did not last, but ended in its collapse and demise as a dominant power after little more than three decades, while Athens' intellectual legacy has endured to this day.

Returning to the limited effect of "hard power," the Israeli-American war on Iran alerts us to the necessity of deconstructing the relationship and differentiating between the influence and effect of three motives for state actions, which are different from each other, although they appear at first glance to be interconnected, even intertwined: desire, capability, and ability. Not everything a state desires can be achieved, even if it possesses the material capability to achieve its desire, as many factors can stand between it and its ability to achieve what it desires, and what its material capability enables it to achieve.

This is the limit of power: that a state cannot achieve its desire, even with the accumulation of the capability that qualifies it to achieve this desire.Since the overthrow of the pro-Israel Shah's regime, the latter has been wary of the alternative regime, as it possesses an opposing project for regional hegemony. With Netanyahu's rise to power in the 1990s, Israel's desire to overthrow the Iranian regime and replace it with a compliant one crystallized. Although Tel Aviv possesses a great deal of "hard power," it alone was not capable of achieving its goal, and therefore needed to enlist its major ally, America, to carry out the mission with it.

Despite his insistence, Netanyahu was unable to convince three American presidents who had no desire to embroil America in an unproductive war with Iran. Netanyahu persisted in his insistence and, with the help of his allies in America, managed to involve Trump in making American capability available to Israeli desire. Trump was convinced that superior American capability, when combined with Israel's capability, would overthrow the exhausted and dilapidated Iranian regime within days, and at most within two weeks. The war broke out, and America and Israel poured the lava of their bombers on Iran, successfully targeting the elimination of the regime's leadership and causing severe material destruction.

The war, especially in its early days, was a stark example of the intensive use of the combined "hard power" capability of two forces, a superpower and a regional one, who eagerly awaited the fall of the regime in Tehran. But the regime, which received successive waves of painful blows, did not fall. Instead, it relied on its high capacity for endurance to withstand the bombardment and managed to turn a mighty military campaign, which its perpetrators expected to be short-lived and without losses, into a war of attrition that Iran was prepared to keep long-term. With the losses Tehran inflicted on Israel and America and their interests in the region, and its creation of a global energy crisis by closing the Strait of Hormuz, which threatened to turn into a global economic crisis, and threatened to destabilize America's position as a superpower in the world, and warned Trump of the possibility of sabotaging what remained of his second term, the latter quickly concluded that he had to find a face-saving way out for himself and his country; to withdraw from a war in which his country's superior capability could not achieve victory.Of course, Trump's conclusion that American capability could not accomplish the mission did not align with the continued Israeli desire to escalate the use of that capability to achieve the unfulfilled goal. While Netanyahu and his allies in Washington intensified their pressure on Trump to continue the confrontation, the American president concluded that continuing would further plunge America into a bottomless pit with no way out. So he decided on an implicit acknowledgment of the inability to achieve the desired goal, regardless of the capability at his disposal, by agreeing to negotiate with the very regime that was targeted for overthrow. The result was that negotiations led to a framework agreement, which not only curbed Israel's rampant desire to change the Iranian regime but also solidified Iran's position as a regional power with American recognition.

Events have proven that the war failed to achieve its objectives, foremost among them the overthrow of the Iranian regime, not due to a lack of desire and capability, as these were available in unprecedented abundance. What was lacking was the ability to transform rampant desire and superior capability into a successful outcome. Therefore, Israel and America lost their failed war on Iran.A note worth mentioning: America and Israel's possession of nuclear weapons did not grant them additional power, as the purpose of these weapons is deterrence, not use. In contrast, Iran's ability to control the Strait of Hormuz, and its capacity to use this capability and actually close it, had a greater impact than America and Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, or even Iran's own possession of them.And the question that no longer needs an answer after this failed war is: Why does Iran seek to possess nuclear weapons in the short and medium term, as long as it has proven its ability and capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz?!