This was never going to be an easy one.
Iran is not an easy country to dominate, and it certainly cannot be brought to its knees with bombs alone. Too many people in the West still imagine Iran as little more than a collection of fanatics hiding in mountain caves. That caricature bears little resemblance to reality.
Iran is an old civilisation.
It is a country of engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, academics, craftsmen, and families. It has institutions, industrial capacity, and a society that has spent decades learning how to function under immense external pressure. You do not erase that with an air campaign.
Many years ago I worked on developing a project with a German engineer. He managed engineering companies across several Asian countries and had worked under almost every imaginable political system. He knew the region well, and he had no romantic illusions about any of it.
When I asked him which country had impressed him the most professionally, his answer surprised me.
Iran.
He spoke of Iranian engineers with genuine admiration. Their competence, ingenuity and relentless, practical approach to solving problems stood out even among a very capable field of competitors. According to him, they possessed an ability to make things work under conditions where others would simply give up.
Perhaps that should not surprise us.
Living under decades of sanctions, shortages and restrictions forces people to improvise. It rewards practical intelligence over theoretical perfection. Necessity remains the greatest engineering school ever invented.
I had the opportunity to see some of it myself.
I was invited to visit refineries and processing plants in Iran. I am hardly an engineer—my background is much closer to law and large international projects—but even I could see what was happening.
Some of the facilities were undeniably old. Years of sanctions had left their mark. Replacement parts were difficult to obtain, modern equipment was often unavailable, and many systems had clearly exceeded their intended design life.
Yet they kept running.
Not because spare parts magically appeared, but because Iranian engineers compensated with experience, improvisation, common sense and an extraordinary talent for finding workable solutions where none seemed to exist.
I came away genuinely impressed.
That is not a society that simply collapses because someone drops more bombs on it.
Military strikes can destroy infrastructure. They can kill people. They can delay programmes. They can impose enormous costs.
What they cannot easily destroy is a population that has spent generations adapting to adversity.
That is why I suspect Washington may be underestimating the problem.
If President Trump wants to achieve lasting strategic objectives, military power alone will not get him there. Iran presents a far more complicated challenge than many of America’s previous adversaries. It requires a strategy that understands the country itself rather than merely its military targets.
And there is another reality that deserves equal attention.
The United States no longer has the luxury of simply walking away.
Once military force has fundamentally altered the strategic balance, events acquire a momentum of their own. Decisions begin creating new decisions. Every move narrows the available exits.
The genie has already left the bottle.
Attempting to put it back rarely succeeds.
If America now chooses to disengage abruptly, it may discover that it is not merely leaving the region. It is leaving behind credibility, influence and deterrence that took decades to build.
That makes the next decisions considerably more important than the first ones.
The easy options have already disappeared.