The West Knows How to Escalate. It Has Forgotten How Wars End

The United States and Europe are escalating two wars without a convincing theory of victory. Behind both lies the same dangerous assumption: that sufficient military and economic pressure will force an adversary to surrender, even when that adversary believes surrender would threaten its survival.

Washington’s problem in Iran is no longer simply that its military campaign has failed to produce the political result it wanted. It is that every alternative now being considered requires more of the same strategy that produced the failure.

The air strikes did not compel Tehran to surrender. The blockade did not break Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. Limited exchanges of missiles and drones have not created decisive American leverage. The temporary agreement signed in June did not settle the conflict because Washington and Tehran interpreted its obligations differently and neither side trusted the other to carry them out.

Yet admitting that the strategy has failed would require the United States to acknowledge that a much weaker state has survived the application of overwhelming American military power and imposed costs Washington cannot easily absorb.

So the pressure increases.

Something similar is happening in Ukraine. Sanctions did not collapse the Russian economy. Western weapons did not restore all the territory lost by Ukraine. Long-range attacks have damaged Russian refineries, military installations and transport networks, but they have not removed Russia’s ability to continue the war. Russian forces are still advancing in parts of the battlefield, even if slowly and unevenly.

The emerging Western answer is therefore more sanctions, more drones, more weapons production and deeper integration of Ukraine into the military structures of Europe and the United States.

Two wars are moving in the same direction: escalation without an agreed destination.

Wars without a theory of victory

A theory of victory is not a declaration that an opponent must be defeated. It is an explanation of how military action will produce a defined political result.

It must identify what the adversary is expected to accept, what pressure will persuade it to accept that outcome and what settlement will remain viable after the fighting stops. It must also account for what the adversary believes it is defending and what it may do when placed under greater pressure.

Neither the United States in Iran nor the West in Ukraine has supplied a convincing answer.

In Iran, Washington has moved between strategic bombing, maritime coercion, temporary negotiation, renewed blockade and limited retaliation. None has changed the central balance. Iran still possesses the ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, strike American bases and threaten the energy infrastructure of neighbouring states.

The United States has reinstated attacks on Iranian coastal defences and missile sites and has attempted to enforce a naval blockade. Iran has answered with missile and drone attacks against American partners in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, while threatening wider restrictions on regional energy exports.

This is not evidence of a country preparing to capitulate. It is evidence of a country demonstrating that the price of coercing it may exceed the price Washington is willing to pay.

The June memorandum of understanding was therefore not merely a pause in the fighting. It was evidence that Iran had acquired substantial bargaining power. Whatever language was used to disguise the result, Washington accepted that the conflict could not be ended solely on American terms.

Renewing the same methods after the agreement began to collapse does not create a new strategy. It merely restarts the previous one from a weaker political position.

Iran discovered America’s exposed flank

Iran cannot defeat the United States by matching it aircraft for aircraft, ship for ship or dollar for dollar. It does not need to.

Its power lies in geography.

American bases, allied capitals, oil terminals, desalination plants, pipelines, refineries and ports are concentrated around a narrow maritime system. The same network that allows the United States to project power across the Gulf gives Iran a catalogue of fixed and economically indispensable targets.

Bahrain hosts the United States Fifth Fleet. Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan provide military facilities, logistical routes or political support. Saudi Arabia possesses the infrastructure through which Gulf oil might be redirected if Hormuz becomes unusable.

In peacetime, this is an architecture of American influence. In war, it is an architecture of vulnerability.

Iran has shown that the vulnerability extends beyond the Strait of Hormuz. Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman, was developed precisely because it sits outside the strait and could provide the United Arab Emirates with an alternative export route. But a pipeline that bypasses a maritime chokepoint does not bypass Iranian missiles.

Fujairah has now been struck, disrupted and rendered unreliable. Fuel activity there has fallen sharply as the regional supply system has fractured.

In strict physical terms, individual facilities may still operate intermittently. In strategic terms, however, Fujairah has been shut. A port cannot serve as a dependable bypass if insurers, shipowners, traders and governments must assume that it can be attacked whenever Iran chooses.

That is why its closure is likely to be permanent for the duration of the confrontation. Iran does not need to destroy every storage tank or loading arm. It needs only to demonstrate that Fujairah cannot provide secure and continuous passage around Hormuz.

The same applies to Yanbu on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast. Saudi pipelines can carry oil westwards, but the oil must then pass through the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb. Iran has urged the Houthis to prepare to close that gateway if the United States attacks Iranian electricity infrastructure.

Even without a complete closure of Bab el-Mandeb, Yanbu itself remains within reach of missiles and drones.

Iran’s message is brutally simple: if Iranian oil cannot reach the world, the oil of America’s regional partners will not reach it safely either.

The fallacy of escalation dominance

The United States can inflict far more physical destruction on Iran than Iran can inflict on the continental United States. That does not mean Washington controls the escalation ladder.

Escalation dominance exists when one side can intensify a conflict while imposing costs the other side cannot return or tolerate. America possessed something close to that advantage against Serbia, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. Its adversaries could resist, but they could not credibly threaten the foundations of the wider economic system on which American power depended.

Iran is different.

Washington can attack Iranian bridges, power stations, missile factories and command centres. Iran can retaliate against Gulf electricity networks, refineries, ports, water systems, shipping and American bases. Washington can destroy more. Tehran may nevertheless be able to generate greater economic and political disruption.

That distinction is crucial.

Military superiority does not automatically create coercive superiority. The stronger power may possess the greater ability to destroy while the weaker power possesses the greater ability to make continued warfare intolerable.

Hormuz illustrates the problem. The strait is only 29 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, with narrow designated shipping channels. The United States may be capable of destroying Iranian coastal batteries, naval vessels and command facilities. It cannot guarantee that mines, missiles, drones, small craft and attacks on commercial vessels will not make the route economically unusable.

A shipping lane is not open merely because a warship can force its way through. It is open when commercial vessels, insurers and energy traders believe they can use it repeatedly at an acceptable risk.

On that test, Iran has already demonstrated effective control.

Ukraine and the same strategic mistake

The conflict in Ukraine appears different because Russia is a nuclear-armed great power and the West is not formally at war with it.

But the underlying strategic assumption is strikingly similar.

Western leaders continue to argue that greater pressure will eventually compel Moscow to accept an outcome it has spent four years fighting to prevent. More sanctions will weaken the economy. More drones will damage refineries and transport systems. More weapons will increase Russian casualties. Greater integration between Ukraine and NATO will demonstrate that time is not on Moscow’s side.

But Moscow may draw precisely the opposite conclusion.

Ukraine is becoming more closely integrated with Western intelligence networks, weapons production, military technology, financing and operational planning. Europe and Ukraine are expanding cooperation on drone production, while long-range attacks are reaching deeper into Russian territory.

From a Western perspective, this creates leverage. From a Russian perspective, it confirms that a surviving Ukrainian state will be converted into a heavily armed Western military platform.

That changes Russia’s territorial incentives.

Moscow is no longer likely to regard possession of the four annexed regions as sufficient. So long as Ukraine retains its Black Sea ports, industrial centres and the capacity to host Western weapons, it will remain capable of rebuilding as a military threat.

Russia will therefore take Odessa if it possesses the military capability to do so.

The strategic logic is unavoidable. Capturing Odessa would remove Ukraine’s principal outlet to the Black Sea, connect Russian-held territory more securely to the coast and deprive any future Western-backed Ukrainian state of an independent maritime economy. It would reduce Ukraine’s military, commercial and geopolitical value to NATO.

The obstacle is not Russian intention. It is capability and cost.

Russian forces have advanced slowly and have struggled to capture the entirety of the four regions Moscow already claims. A campaign towards Odessa would require considerably greater manpower, logistical capacity and battlefield success.

But if the war continues and Ukraine’s army weakens, the destination of Russian strategy is increasingly clear. Russia will not stop merely because the current front line has been recognised. It will seek an outcome that prevents Ukraine from being rapidly rearmed against it.

The making of a rump state

Ukraine will therefore emerge from the war as a dysfunctional rump state.

That is not a moral judgment and it is not an endorsement of Russia’s invasion. It is the likely result of the strategic choices made by every major participant.

Russia has an incentive to seize economically valuable territory, destroy military infrastructure and prevent the remainder of Ukraine from becoming a strong Western outpost.

The West has encouraged Ukraine to continue fighting while declining to provide the one resource it most urgently lacks: an unlimited supply of soldiers. European states will provide money, drones, missiles and political declarations. They show no serious intention of sending the armies required to defeat Russia directly.

Ukraine is therefore being asked to sustain a war of attrition against a larger state with a greater population, a larger industrial base and a deeper capacity to absorb losses.

Even if the front stabilises, the surviving country will carry an immense demographic, financial and institutional burden. Millions have left. Infrastructure has been destroyed. Debt has accumulated. The economy depends heavily on foreign support. A large share of the most productive territory may remain outside Kyiv’s control.

The longer the war continues, the smaller and more dependent the eventual Ukrainian state will become.

This is the cruelty at the centre of Western policy. Europe describes continued war as solidarity with Ukraine, but every additional year of fighting makes the Ukraine that eventually survives less viable.

The promise is that endurance will improve Kyiv’s negotiating position. The more probable result is that endurance will improve Moscow’s territorial position while hollowing out the state the West claims to be saving.

The lesson the Cold War taught

None of this would have been difficult for an earlier generation of Western statesmen to understand.

Cold War leaders were often cynical, ruthless and wrong. But they understood that nuclear-armed powers could not be handled like minor states.

The United States did not intervene militarily when the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956. It did not go to war when Soviet forces entered Czechoslovakia in 1968. Washington condemned both actions, but it understood that directly challenging Moscow in territory the Kremlin considered vital could produce a nuclear confrontation.

Restraint was not approval. It was strategy.

The same discipline shaped the end of the Cold War. The administration of George H. W. Bush avoided triumphalism as Soviet power collapsed. It understood that humiliating a nuclear superpower undergoing internal disintegration would create dangers rather than advantages.

The generation that followed learned a different lesson.

It came of age during the unipolar era, when Russia was weak, China was not yet a peer competitor and the United States could intervene across the world without facing an opponent capable of imposing equivalent costs.

Air power appeared decisive. Sanctions appeared irresistible. American preferences were described as international rules, while the security concerns of adversaries were dismissed as propaganda, blackmail or aggression.

Red lines became something only unreasonable governments claimed. Spheres of influence were declared obsolete. Nuclear deterrence was treated as an embarrassing relic rather than the organising fact of relations between great powers.

The world has changed. The thinking has not.

Defeat has become politically unaffordable

The danger in both wars is now intensified by prestige.

An American retreat in Iran would damage Washington’s position throughout the Gulf. It would raise questions about the protection offered to states that host American forces and align their security policies with the United States.

A Russian victory in Ukraine soon afterwards would create the appearance of a second Western defeat. It would deepen doubts about American judgment in Europe and Asia and strengthen the belief that Washington can begin conflicts more easily than it can conclude them.

This creates a powerful incentive to escalate—not because escalation offers a credible route to victory, but because accepting an unfavourable result has become politically intolerable.

Iran believes that time strengthens its bargaining position. The longer the conflict disrupts energy markets and consumes American munitions, the more urgently Washington will need an agreement.

Russia believes that time weakens Ukraine and exposes the limits of European weapons production and manpower.

Europe believes that admitting failure would fracture the political unity built around the war and force its leaders to explain why they rejected earlier opportunities for negotiation.

The United States fears that two successive strategic reverses would embolden China and accelerate the formation of a Eurasian bloc linking Beijing, Moscow and Tehran.

Every participant can therefore produce a rational argument for continuing.

Collectively, those arguments are leading towards an irrational outcome.

The pressure trap

Western policy is based on the belief that additional pain will make negotiation more attractive to the adversary.

Sometimes it does.

But pressure encourages compromise only when the adversary believes that compromise will produce a tolerable and durable settlement. If it believes that a ceasefire will be used to rearm its enemy, that sanctions will remain in place after concessions or that an agreement will be discarded when the balance of power changes, pressure has the opposite effect.

It convinces the adversary that only greater resistance can protect it.

That is what has happened in Iran. The collapse of the June understanding has strengthened those who argued that Washington could not be trusted to honour a negotiated arrangement unless it was placed under overwhelming economic pressure.

It is also what is happening in Russia. Every declaration that Ukraine will be more deeply armed and integrated with the West after a ceasefire gives Moscow another reason to reject one.

Western leaders say that deeper strikes and harsher sanctions will bring their opponents to the negotiating table. Iran and Russia hear that the purpose of negotiation is to secure a pause during which the West can prepare the next phase of confrontation.

Both interpretations cannot be reconciled by applying still more pressure.

A world without strategic restraint

The West does not need to accept every Iranian or Russian demand. Understanding an adversary’s security calculations does not require approving its conduct. Recognising a red line is not the same as conceding that the red line is morally legitimate.

But strategy begins with understanding what an opponent believes, what it can endure and what it can inflict in return.

Iran has demonstrated that it can threaten the Gulf energy system more effectively than Washington can protect it. Fujairah has ceased to provide a secure alternative to Hormuz. Yanbu and the Red Sea are being drawn into the same contest. American regional bases have become hostages to further escalation.

Russia has concluded that a negotiated pause which leaves a powerful, Western-armed Ukraine intact would merely postpone the threat it went to war to remove. If the conflict continues, it will seek Odessa, more territory and a surviving Ukrainian state too weak to function as a major military platform.

Ukraine will be the principal victim of that logic. It will emerge smaller, poorer, depopulated and dependent: a dysfunctional rump state sustained by Western money but deprived of much of the territory, infrastructure and population required for genuine sovereignty.

These outcomes are not inevitable because of geography alone. They are becoming inevitable because the principal governments involved cannot reconcile their declared aims with the balance of power.

The United States and Europe know how to intensify pressure. They know how to announce sanctions, deliver weapons, widen target lists and describe each escalation as a final demonstration of resolve.

What they can no longer explain is how the pressure ends.

The most dangerous moment in a war is not necessarily when one side is winning. It is when powerful states discover that their strategy has failed, but decide that admitting failure would be more humiliating than continuing towards catastrophe.