The US can destroy the Iranian regime. But Iraq shows what happens in a power vacuum

The United States military achieved every objective it set when it went to war in Iraq in 2003. Decapitation: Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and hanged. Air dominance: total, within days. Regime collapse: The Iraqi government fell in 21 days.

Now, consider Iraq more than 20 years after the US-Iraq war. Iraq is still an authoritarian state governed by political parties with deep institutional ties to Tehran. Iranian-backed militias operate openly on Iraqi soil – some holding official positions within the Iraqi state.

The country the US spent US$2 trillion and 4,488 American lives to remake is, by any reasonable measure, within the sphere of Iran’s influence.

As an international security scholar specialising in nuclear security and alliance politics in West Asia, I have tracked the pattern of US military success across multiple cases.

But the military outcome and the political outcome are almost never the same thing, and the gap between them is where wars fail.

Two and a half millennia ago, Thucydides recorded the Athenian empire at its most confident in his “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Athens then destroyed Melos and launched the Sicily Expedition with overwhelming force and no coherent theory of governance for what came next.

The lesson, then and now, is not that empires cannot destroy. It’s that destruction...

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