How Iran Is Preparing to Outlast Trump in a Long War
As the largest U.S. military build-up since the 2003 invasion of Iraq amasses arounds Iran in the midst of nuclear negotiations, the Islamic Republic is setting its strategy to withstand a feared intervention and run out the clock against an administration known for favoring quick and clear-cut wins.
It’s not just President Donald Trump‘s “armada” that threatens the survival of the Iranian government. Growing discontent, marked most dramatically last month by the nationwide protests and violent crackdown that triggered the latest White House threats, has reinvigorated the hopes of those within Iran and abroad who wish to see the downfall of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the dismantling of the clerical system he oversees.
But even after suffering devastating blows in the 12-Day War during which Israel wiped out both top personnel and air defenses tasked with repelling just such an assault, and the U.S. following up with an unprecedented direct bombing of Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear facilities, a nation forged in ideological and existential struggle is preparing to raise the costs for the U.S. and possibly Israel as well, particularly if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seizes the opportunity to join the intervention.
“Despite the significant operational achievements of Israel and the United States in the recent campaign against Iran, strategically, very little has changed,” Danny Citrinowicz, former head of the Iran branch of the Israel Defense Forces’ Research and Analysis Division and now senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies’ Iran and Shiite Axis Program, told Newsweek.
“Iran entered the conflict with a missile force it had built precisely for this scenario,” he said. “While its nuclear facilities suffered serious damage, Tehran retains highly enriched material and, at least potentially, the capacity to resume enrichment-even if initially at a non-industrial scale.”
The nuclear card, one long teased by Tehran’s advanced enrichment despite Khamenei’s official ban on weapons of mass destruction, is not the only ace up the Islamic Republic’s sleeve.
“More importantly, Iran learns,” Citrinowicz said. “To maximize damage in a future confrontation, Tehran will adapt. It will further harden and disperse facilities, improve redundancy, and ensure operational continuity so that even if certain systems are struck, the broader architecture remains functional. And there are capabilities Iran did not fully employ in the previous round.”
Cost-Benefit Analyses
Trump has warned a new round of U.S. action against Iran would be more severe than the last, a threat backed by the immense level of firepower now gathered in the region. The first shot was already fired two weeks ago, when an F-35C jet operating with the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier downed an Iranian Shahed-model drone operating in the Arabian Sea.
Since then, Trump has announced the deployment of a second carrier strike group attached to the USS Gerald R. Ford to the seas near the Persian Gulf. The Ford had previously been operating in the Caribbean Sea as part of another massive build-up that preceded the U.S. Delta Force raid in January to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their home in Caracas following failed negotiations.
That stunning operation melded well with Trump’s signature style of precise and limited action, much like the bunker-buster strikes against Iran last June. And while the Venezuela intervention was not without bloodshed-dozens of Venezuelans were reportedly killed along with 32 Cubans-the U.S. was met with little resistance and the special forces personnel emerged largely unscathed.
A new showdown with Iran may prove more costly, given its geography, arsenal and regional network of allies.
“Tehran retains the ability to threaten or disrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz-a move that would immediately raise the global economic cost of escalation,” Citrinowicz said. “It maintains substantial short-range missile inventories that were not significantly degraded. It can leverage coastal anti-ship missile systems and asymmetric naval capabilities to challenge U.S. maritime assets.”
He continued: “And it can activate its regional network-from Yemen to Iraq to Hezbollah-to widen the battlespace and impose simultaneous costs on both Israel and the United States while trying to improve its capabilities in striking Israel with implementing the lessons learned from the previous war by for example launching directly from underground facilities. The strategic objective would be clear: force Washington and Jerusalem to fight on multiple fronts and dilute their focus away from Iran itself.”
Iran’s non-state actor coalition, known as the Axis of Resistance, has weathered its own set of substantial setbacks since the regional confrontation that erupted with the Hamas-led attack against Israel in October 2023. Top Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah leaders have been eliminated, along with large portions of their weapons stockpiles, yet the two factions continue to pose a threat.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq and Yemen’s Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi movement, also possess significant capabilities, with the former waging past campaigns against U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria and the latter mounting an effective blockade of the Red Sea through attacks targeting trade vessels, cutting down traffic through the Suez Canal by two-thirds. For the first time since the 19th century, most ships opted to transit around Africa, raising global shipping costs and disrupting supply chain logistics.
Less than two months after entering the Oval Office a second time on a platform of ending wars, Trump launched a sustained campaign to strike Ansar Allah in March, though by early May called a ceasefire following direct talks with the powerful Yemeni group. Ansar Allah continues to vow intervention in the event of a U.S.-Iran confrontation.
With Trump having announced on Thursday a 10 to 15-day deadline for Tehran to come up with a satisfactory offer following two rounds of nuclear talks, Iraqi militias such as Kataib Hezbollah have also begun mass mobilization campaigns in anticipation of a wider conflict.
Nate Swanson, former State Department official and director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, warned the administration has yet to clearly convey it objectives going into such an unpredictable endeavor, with hawkish voices potentially swaying the president.
“The U.S. objectives for a potential military campaign are unclear,” he told Newsweek. “It’s possible that the administration has a coherent strategy with a clear end game. It’s equally plausible that the President doesn’t have a clear objective and has been goaded into the conflict by outside pressure from Senator [Lindsey] Graham, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, and others with their constant reminders about Obama’s red line.”
Trump was among President Barack Obama’s most vocal critics when the then-U.S. leader declined to intervene against the Syrian government over its alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians and insurgents in the midst of a civil war that broke out in 2011. After ultimately succeeding Obama, Trump did inflict two sets of strikes in response to new reports of chemical weapons use, but then too, he stopped short of any regime change efforts.
Today, Swanson argued, Trump is faced with a growing chorus of anti-Iran interventionists who “have made it nearly impossible for him to back down without losing face.”
Meanwhile, he viewed the Iranian calculus as being driven by two competing factors, in which the nation’s own hard-liners are gaining traction.
“They know they cannot compete with U.S. and Israeli military superiority and might seek a quick off-ramp if they perceive a U.S. strike to be mostly symbolic,” Swanson said. “However, Iran is also aware that U.S. and Israeli strikes inside Iran are increasingly common and are likely to continue absent a change in American calculus.”
“As a result, there is apparently a growing constituency inside the Iranian government pushing Iran to hit back hard and try to inflict tangible consequences on the U.S.,” he added. “Iran might not be able to win a war, but if they can give the U.S. a bloody nose by either inflicting U.S. casualties or raising energy prices, that might be enough to change President Trump’s calculus. It is a plausible, but extremely risky gamble on Iran’s part.”
The Holy Defense
Iran’s doctrine of absorbing blows, retaliating with missile strikes and utilizing irregular warfare techniques was established during the first major test for the nation shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution-led by Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini-ousted a pro-West monarchy. The following year, Iraq-then headed by President Saddam Hussein-launched a large-scale invasion of the neighboring country as it was still in the throes of the revolutionary transition.
The eight-year conflict killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and saw virtually every major power, including the U.S., lean toward support for Baathist-led Baghdad. The formative conflict continues to serve as a basis for Iranian home defense tactics, strategic depth capabilities and a deep mistrust in the global order further entrenched by Trump’s 2018 abandonment of a multilateral deal established in 2015.
“The most important lesson that Iran took away from that bloody conflict was that Iran is alone-no one will come to its help and international institutions/norms are in practice meaningless,” Sina Azodi, director of George Washington University’s Middle East Studies Program, told Newsweek.
There are also valuable takeaways from Iraq’s own experience in dealing with two U.S.-led interventions in 1991 and 2003 that may be applied if tensions between Washington and Tehran should erupt into something resembling a Third Gulf War.
“I think another lesson that they took, especially after the first Persian Gulf war is that Iran cannot face a superpower like the U.S. in a direct conventional war, and therefore, should confront the U.S. indirectly (gray-zone area),” Azodi said. “Another lesson is that Iranians are keenly aware of the American public's sensitivities to the images of fallen American soldiers and they'd use that in any conflict to force the U.S. into a quick cessation of hostilities. Unlike the U.S., Iranians have a high capacity to absorb punishment at home and sacrifice life.”
In Iran, the government portrays slain soldiers and commanders as martyrs to further fuel the war machine, the most notable case being Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani, killed in a January 2020 strike ordered by Trump in Iraq. His portraits in Iran and friendly neighborhoods across the region are now joined by dozens of other top IRGC officials killed during the 12-Day War, their positions having been quickly filled.
While Iran has not fought a major land conflict since the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, it did once again employ its so-called “holy defense” ideology to support intervention against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) as the jihadis stormed through large parts of Iraq and Syria, one of Tehran’s few state allies until longtime President Bashar al-Assad’s December 2024 downfall. The situation saw a brief de facto alignment of Washington and Tehran as both sides waged parallel campaigns against ISIS in the two nations, only for bilateral frictions to later escalate into clashes under the first and second Trump administrations.
In the slaying of Soleimani and the U.S. intervention during the 12-Day War, Iran opted for a single set of missile strikes against U.S. bases to retaliate. A longer confrontation would likely beget prolonged consequences, a factor that could complicate the White House’s approach in light of Trump’s stated aversion to “forever wars.”
“Iran’s past history shows strategy, opportunism and risk tolerance,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Iran Program, told Newsweek. “Even though it targeted things that some have said for a while were symbolic, even ‘symbolic’ strikes, like in January 2020, ended up being the largest ballistic missile barrage against U.S. forces up until that point in history.”
“So even symbolism can have an impact and the fact that both in the January 2020 and June 2025 cycles, it was the Islamic Republic that got to close the round and have the last word kinetically, and even though what the U.S. struck was qualitatively of much greater value than what the Iranians struck, I wouldn’t necessarily dismiss the Iranian responses before,” Taleblu said.
History can also offer only so much insight at a time when long-held assumptions of regional deterrence, red lines and balances of power have been shattered.
“I do think we are in a whole new world now,” Taleblu said, “and either the regime is bluffing in the hopes of playing to Trump’s fear of a wider war, the contagion effect any strike can have so that Trump backs down, or probably, unfortunately, more likely, they actually believe that if they land blows against U.S. interests early enough, perhaps even if they draw blood, that the political implications and the economic implications of that would lead Trump to back down.”
Such a mentality runs serious risks for Iran as well, Taleblu noted, as “one of the few through lines for [Trump’s] willingness to use force and be tough is in defense of American life.”
“Given the fact that this is likely going to be a bigger conflict, get ready to expect the unexpected,” Taleblu said. “The past has a pattern, but that doesn’t mean Washington shouldn’t be developing contingencies.”
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The Other Side of the Gulf
There are also factors beyond Washington and Tehran weighing in on the prospect of a new conflict erupting in the Middle East. A number of U.S. partners in the region, particularly Turkey and Arab states lying just across the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, have called for restraint, fearing the blowback of such a battle.
“I think the regional countries will be wary of the implications of a long-term intervention that could undermine Iran's stability-not that because they like Iran, but they are mostly concerned about the spill-over effects of domestic instability in Iran,” Azodi said. “They once experienced the implications of political turmoil in Iran in 1979 and are keen to avoid that as much as possible.”
“Again, to emphasize that they have their own territorial ideological and other key differences with Iran, but they prefer to deal with the ‘devil’ that they know,” he added. “They prefer a weakened Iran rather than an Iran that has diplomatic relations with Israel and U.S., and its economy is thriving and can rearm itself. That will come at the cost of their security, so they prefer to maintain the status quo.”
Citrinowicz called it “a geopolitical tug-of-war,” with the White House in the middle.
“On one side are Israel and hawkish voices in Washington pressing President Trump toward a broader confrontation,” he said. “On the other are Gulf states deeply concerned about the consequences of war-whether through direct Iranian retaliation on their territory or through the destabilizing effects of regime collapse in Tehran.”
“For the Gulf monarchies, both scenarios are alarming,” Citrinowicz added. “An Iranian strike on their infrastructure would be economically devastating. But a sudden implosion of the Iranian regime could be equally destabilizing, unleashing regional chaos with unpredictable spillover. As a result, Gulf states are working-quietly but persistently-to prevent a large-scale war.”
Moves known to the public include Netanyahu’s visit last week to the White House, influential Arab state representatives conversing with counterparts in Washington and Tehran and Turkey warning of regional instability in the event of a U.S.-Iran conflict.
In the end, Citrinowicz argued, “the bottom line is uncomfortable but clear.”
“Iran has options it has not yet exercised. The Gulf states have limits they will not cross. And Israel and the United States, despite tactical superiority, cannot assume that a future round would unfold on terms entirely of their choosing,” he said. “Operational success does not automatically translate into strategic advantage. In fact, it can create a false sense of control.”
“The question facing Washington is not whether it can strike Iran again. It is whether doing so produces a durable strategic shift-or simply sets the stage for a more complex, more regional, and more economically costly confrontation next time,” he continued. “In the Middle East, wars rarely stay contained. And once regional actors are pulled in, diplomatic initiatives-however ambitious-tend to become secondary to survival.”
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This story was originally published February 22, 2026 at 4:00 AM.