An insidious strategic blindness afflicts victors — the “winner’s trap” — an assumption that lessons of war belong only to the loser.
In 1783, America won the Revolutionary War, defeating the British military — the most formidable force on earth at the time — who had stumbled into every trap that terrain, distance, domestic politics, and strategic confusion could lay. The colonists won not just because they were brave. They won because Britain was making strategic blunders.
Two and a half centuries later, in March 2026, the United States launched a war against Iran. The weapons are unrecognisably sophisticated. The geography has shifted. But the structural failure modes — the same five that destroyed Britain’s campaign in America — have returned. America seems to have inherited the British Empire’s blind spots along with its territories.
Start with logistics — the Achilles heel of sustaining force across distance. When war erupted in the American colonies in 1775, Britain was maintaining over 92,000 troops overseas at a time when it could take three months to receive an answer to any communication. Supply ships arrived rotten, half-empty, delayed by weather and contractor fraud. Cautious generalship, insufficient transportation, widespread corruption, and the lack of a coherent strategy combined to ensure British failure. In 2026, America is not struggling to feed soldiers across an ocean. But it is facing a different logistics crisis — the industrial kind. America’s trillion-dollar military doesn’t have enough ordnance to fight for more than a week or two, and is deficient in the critical components needed to make more. While prepositioned assets may enable the coalition to maintain strike tempo initially, a protracted campaign would generate significant logistical strain with escalating financial and operational costs. The oceans may have shrunk. The supply problem has not.
Next is strategy — specifically, the absence of one. The Donald Trump administration offered diverse and changing explanations for starting the war: To pre-empt Iranian retaliation, to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities, to prevent nuclear weapons development, to secure Iran’s oil resources, to achieve regime change. Not a singular objective. Five competing ones. The British generals in 1775 suffered identical confusion — they wanted to suppress the rebellion but couldn’t agree whether that meant holding coastal cities, breaking colonial supply lines, or winning loyalist hearts. Capturing New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston produced no decisive result. Over a month of relentless air strikes on Iran produced a similar outcome. Washington degraded key elements of Iran’s military capacity, yet what “victory” entails remains undefined. The war is suspended between escalation and exit, with no credible endgame in sight. A Pakistani-brokered ceasefire in April 2026 has since paused the bombing runs — but not the confusion. Twenty-one hours of talks in Islamabad ended without agreement on nuclear concessions or the status of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s foreign minister said the delegations were “inches away from an MoU” and accused Washington of moving the goalposts. The confusion simply migrated from the battlefield to the negotiating table.
The belief that destroying a regime’s leadership destroys the regime is the most expensive strategic error of this war. Iran’s political system is institutional — the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, and the Revolutionary Guard have survived for four decades, with bespoke succession mechanisms. When the British killed American commanders, the Continental Army promoted others. When they burned colonial towns, resistance hardened. Destruction by air power has never diminished a regime in the eyes of its own population — not in Nazi Germany, or North Korea, or Vietnam, and not even in Britain during the Blitz. Destruction is not, and has never been, the same as strategic success.
The domestic fracture is the most historically resonant parallel of all. By 1781, members of the British Parliament in opposition remarked that “those who could understand were against the American war, as almost every man is now.” As the continued bleeding of resources began affecting prices within British society, a growing number of MPs openly objected to the execution of the war. In 2026, the mirror is almost exact. Sixty-four per cent of voters now call the decision to go to war wrong. Trump’s overall approval rating has fallen to 37 per cent — one of his lowest points since returning to office, dragged down by the twin weight of the Iran conflict and the rise in the cost of living. Fifty-nine percent of voters believe Trump should have received congressional approval before launching the strikes. Seventy-four percent oppose sending ground troops. Even within the Republican coalition, influential voices have been vocal critics, and senior lawmakers have grown uneasy about the apparent lack of transparency about how the war is being handled or funded.
And then the cost reaches the kitchen table, which is where all regimes eventually end. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz stalled 20 per cent of the global oil supply and disrupted 18 per cent of air cargo. Crude oil prices peaked at $110 a barrel at the height of the campaign. Even with a contested ceasefire now in place, oil continues to trade above $100 — some 35 per cent above pre-war levels. The damage has proved structural, not episodic, and shows no sign of reversing. Trump is now seeking $1.5 trillion as the next defence budget — a 44 per cent boost and America’s largest defence budget increase since World War 2. The British public in 1779 did not withdraw support for the American war on principle. They withdrew it when the candles got more expensive, and the merchants started bleeding. Public opinion is moved more by the grocery bill than by geopolitical bloodshed.
The Americans in 1775 were fighting on their own soil, for their own survival, with everything to lose. In 2026, the Iranians are doing precisely the same. While they are not winning this war in the conventional sense, they are doing something more durable — they are surviving it. And in asymmetric conflict, survival is victory.
America’s founders won against a power that couldn’t define what winning looked like, in a war that was domestically unpopular in the country prosecuting it, bleeding a treasury that couldn’t sustain the campaign, fracturing a political class that had never agreed on the objective. And the deepest irony is that the current US dispensation is ridiculing the very ally, France, whose military assistance enabled the revolutionaries to birth America, in a peace treaty inked in Paris in 1783.
In May 2026, unable to exit the war he had started, Trump flew to Beijing, America’s declared strategic rival. He asked China to do what France had in 1783 — use its weight to help end a conflict the world’s most powerful military could not conclude on its own. Xi listened, took a 200-aircraft Boeing deal, offered assurances he didn’t commit to paper, and sent Trump home with nothing binding. Days later, Putin arrived in Beijing. Trump had mocked the ally whose assistance made America a republic. Then he flew east, looking for a new one. And arrived in the capital, where Moscow had already set the table.
The writer is founding CEO, NATGRID, and a former soldier
Curated by Dr. Elena Rodriguez
