Review of the US-Iran War

The essence of this U.S.-Iran conflict converges on the neutralization of the U.S. administration’s short-term war-termination design. The United States sought to force Iranian concessions and secure negotiating leadership in the short term by mobilizing overwhelming initial military superiority and high-intensity pressure. However, as Iran’s strategic endurance prolonged the battlefield situation, U.S. cumulative costs were transformed into political and economic burdens. As a result, the United States failed to construct the level of negotiating structure it had intended, and this conflict moved beyond the dimension of simple military pressure into a complex equation of costs, victory narratives, and implementation sequencing.

• The initial military superiority of the U.S.-Israeli combined force did not translate directly into political victory or strategic negotiating advantage. It attempted to shake the strategic calculations of the Iranian leadership through rapid strikes and pressure, but as Iran held firm, the center of gravity on the battlefield shifted from the absolute intensity of strikes to the rate of cost accumulation over time until the point of war termination.
• Despite its inferiority in conventional military power, Iran fundamentally restructured the cost structure of the war by using the Strait of Hormuz, a geopolitical chokepoint. Control over the Strait of Hormuz operated as a high-efficiency asymmetric leverage mechanism that simultaneously drove up global energy prices, maritime insurance premiums, logistics costs, inflationary pressure, and the economic burden of U.S. allies.
• The prolongation of the battlefield situation transferred the strategic burden of the United States beyond the battlefield itself into the domains of external economy and politics, causing total costs to rise nonlinearly. This functioned as a structural cost that the U.S. administration had to bear when its short-term rapid-war-termination design was frustrated.
• Top-level external hardline messaging and practical back-channel negotiation channels showed a pattern of parallel operation. On the surface, high-intensity pressure signals such as rejection of agreement, mutual threats, and suggestions of renewed strikes surged. Behind the scenes, however, back channels mediated by Pakistan and Qatar were operating. Therefore, the apparent breakdown of negotiations was not the termination of negotiations, but a strategic leverage action intended to adjust mutual conditions and implementation sequencing in favor of each side.
• The clash between the two countries moved beyond the setting of an ultimate destination and was reconstituted as a question of the timeline and political justification through which that destination would be reached. Both sides recognized the same destination: war termination, normalization of the Strait of Hormuz, easing of economic sanctions and blockades, and follow-up negotiations on the nuclear issue. However, as the war of attrition continued, the actor taking the first move and the securing of a domestic political victory narrative emerged as core issues alongside the total volume of material gains. The United States sought to draw out Iran’s initial concession in order to prove the effectiveness of its pressure strategy toward Iran, while Iran attempted to secure the cessation of hostile acts and the lifting of the blockade first, thereby defining the outcome not as unilateral submission but as an equal agreement after resistance.
• The nuclear issue was not on a trajectory for short-term comprehensive settlement, but on a track to be transferred to a medium- to long-term follow-up negotiation agenda. In addition to extreme solutions such as the overseas transfer or complete dismantlement of highly enriched uranium, various intermediate alternative pathways, including the freezing of nuclear activities, domestic dilution, strengthened inspection and verification systems, and phased capability limitations, had ample room to emerge as agenda items on the working-level negotiation table.
• The final war-termination phase had a high probability of resulting not in one side’s acknowledgment of complete defeat, but in a compromise structure in which both sides could mutually preserve victory narratives for internal cohesion. Washington had a political need to prove that its high-intensity pressure had been effective, while Tehran had to secure a domestic justification that it had won the lifting of the blockade, sanctions relief, and the termination of fronts through unyielding resistance.
• Although the Iran agenda was addressed at the U.S.-China summit, it did not lead to a substantive operating variable that changed the dynamic structure of this conflict. The contact remained at the level of managing regional escalation risks and confirming the basic positions of the two major powers.

In conclusion, this war termination can be interpreted as a loss-minimizing settlement formed after the U.S. administration’s short-term rapid-war-termination design was frustrated, in order to block the accumulation of strategic and economic losses. This proves that the nonlinearity and asymmetry of the cost structure, the ripple effect of the Hormuz leverage, and the functional relationship of implementation sequencing that SSI had continuously focused on throughout the conflict were core variables governing the actual war-termination phase. The failure of the short-term victory design, the external transfer of costs through Hormuz, the parallel operation of the official hardline posture and back-channel negotiations, the MOU structure combining detailed conditions, implementation sequencing, and victory narratives, the packaged settlement of the nuclear, sanctions, funds, and Lebanon-front issues, and the mutual preservation of victory narratives between the two sides are the core keywords of this conflict.