On Monday, Donald Trump declared that the war against Iran was “completely over“, The Telegraph wrote.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Iran would face “the most intense strikes yet“ as part of Operation Epic Fury“. If these statements seem contradictory, it may be because the US - and to a lesser extent Israel - have fallen into a classic trap.
By relying on firepower, they could find themselves drawn into a situation that could become another Vietnam. There, the US won every battle for 11 bloody years, but as we know, it lost the war.
This was despite the fact that, as now, they had complete air superiority and quickly destroyed much of the key military and industrial infrastructure on which the enemy was thought to rely.
However, by expanding the war horizontally, spreading it to cities and villages in the south and imposing their own logic on the conflict, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were able to outwit the US.
Tehran also has virtually no chance of defeating the US military, but escalating the conflict could once again play to the advantage of the weaker side, according to Professor Robert Pape, director of the Security and Threats Project at the University of Chicago.
“Horizontal escalation occurs when a country expands the geographical and political scope of a conflict rather than escalates it vertically within a theater of war“, he writes in an article for Foreign Affairs.
“This strategy is particularly attractive to the weaker side in a military confrontation. Rather than trying to directly defeat a stronger adversary, the weaker side multiplies the risk zones by drawing additional states, economic sectors, and its own population into the conflict“, the expert concludes.
Iran is no longer trying to contain the conflict within its borders; instead, it is ready to expand it across the region, Al Jazeera reported.
The goal is no longer simply a military response, but to turn the war into a full-scale regional crisis that could disrupt global energy markets, threaten sea lanes and disrupt international air transport.
In short, Tehran seems determined to regain its reputation as a major destabilizing force in the Middle East – and avoid appearing like a weakened player.
This shift has upended Washington's plan.