The war, now in its sixth month, has become a textbook example of how overwhelming military superiority does not necessarily translate into political success. Early strikes inflicted devastating damage on Iran’s military infrastructure and decapitated much of its senior leadership. Yet the Islamic Republic did not collapse. Instead, it adapted. Its leadership was rapidly reconstituted, its security apparatus remained intact, and it shifted to an asymmetric strategy that has imposed growing costs on the US and its regional allies.
Despite sustained strikes against Iranian assets, US President Donald Trump’s administration has failed to achieve one of its principal objectives: restoring secure commercial navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran continues to wield its ability to disrupt one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints, keeping global energy markets under constant pressure and prolonging a worldwide economic shock. The war has destabilised the entire Persian Gulf region.
More fundamentally, the war has exposed a central flaw in the way Trump approached the conflict. No military campaign should begin without a clearly defined political end-state, a realistic strategy for achieving it, an assessment of how the adversary is likely to respond, and measurable criteria for success. Absent these, tactical victories can accumulate without producing strategic gains. That increasingly appears to describe America’s campaign against Iran—“a bombing campaign in search of a strategy,” as Joe Kent, a former top US counterterrorism official, put it.
The conflict has also expanded well beyond a bilateral confrontation. Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis and US-aligned Gulf states have all been drawn into the fighting at various stages. Repeated ceasefires have merely paused, rather than resolved, the violence, even as the financial, military and human costs continue to mount.
Trump’s war has revealed the limits of US power. Iran remains defiant, the Strait of Hormuz remains contested, and Washington’s objectives have become increasingly difficult to define. The longer the conflict continues without a coherent US political strategy, the greater the risk that Trump’s brazen military attack will be remembered not for its spectacular opening, but as a strategic liability that defined his second presidency.
Understanding how the world’s most powerful military arrived at this point—and what it means for American strategy, the Middle East, India and the global balance of power—is essential to understanding the conflict itself.
While the US risks turning military success into strategic failure, India risks becoming one of the Iran war’s biggest collateral casualties.
For more than two decades, India has carefully cultivated a policy of multi-alignment in the Middle East, maintaining close ties simultaneously with the US, Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, and Iran. That balancing act has served India remarkably well, securing energy supplies, protecting its large diaspora, expanding trade and opening new strategic partnerships.
A prolonged US-Iran conflict, however, threatens to unravel this equilibrium.
India’s greatest vulnerability is energy. More than 80 per cent of its crude oil is imported, with roughly half originating in or transiting the Persian Gulf. Even more critically, most of India’s imported Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) also pass through the Strait of Hormuz.