The focus of the US-Iran war — and now the negotiations over the US-Iran ceasefire — has shifted to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, to such an extent that the main original justification for the war (destroying Iran’s nascent nuclear program) can sometimes feel like an afterthought. 

It’s not clear to what extent it’s still even a priority for the US government. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth insisted that Iran’s nuclear program would still be dismantled while Vice President JD Vance, who is leading ceasefire talks in Pakistan this weekend, suggested he’s not concerned about Iran forsaking its right to nuclear enrichment. Meanwhile, President Trump has suggested at various points that this is a moot point, since Iran’s nuclear program has been irreparably destroyed anyway. (It should be noted: He made the same claim after the airstrikes on Iran in June.) 

Does Iran still have a pathway to a nuclear weapon? If it does, can the US and Israel do anything about it? To help sort through the confusion, I spoke with Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Lewis is an expert on nuclear nonproliferation and a leading open source analyst studying the nuclear and military capabilities of countries like Iran and North Korea. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

On Wednesday, we heard Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and others insist that Iran must turn over its remaining uranium stockpile and dismantle its enrichment program. They also say it could still be removed by force if Iran didn’t agree. Is that remotely realistic? 

It’s realistic if we occupy the country, but short of that, no. The claim we’ve heard is that half the highly enriched uranium is at [the underground tunnel complex in] Isfahan. So, where’s the other half? And if it’s not all at Isfahan, then how many other sites is it at? Is some of it still at Fordow and Natanz? Is it at some third location? What about their ability to produce centrifuges? What about centrifuges they have in storage? What about the people who know how to operate them?

 You can set them back by destroying things, immobilizing things, and taking things, but there’s a large group of people who understand how to operate these things. There’s a basic capability that’s in place. 

And oh, by the way, the neighbor who has been handling the ceasefire negotiations [Pakistan] happens to have a very large and capable centrifuge program that was the source of Iran’s original centrifuges. So, what’s the plan here, guys?

In his speech last week, Trump said that Iran’s “nuclear dust” — as he called it — was buried far underground and unusable. Is there anything to that claim? 

There’s no evidence of that. I mean, we see the tunnels. The tunnels are intact, so it’s not buried. The only burying was the Iranians burying the entrances to protect them, but we’ve seen them open those entrances and access the tunnels. If you put something in a safe in your house, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to your money, right? You just have to open the safe.

Sure, but given the level of satellite surveillance Iran is under, and the level of US and Israeli intelligence penetration into the Iranian regime, isn’t there a case to be made that it would just be crazy for the Iranians to try to restart their nuclear program now?

The intelligence penetration was real. Is it still real? No one knows that. The surveillance is not anything like 24/7. We’re getting satellite images taken some number of times a day, and there’s some latency. But unless we are operating drones 24/7 over those sites, we’re not going to be able to know for certain unless the Iranians are really slow. 

If they were to open up the tunnels, I don’t think it would take them that long to move the [stockpile]. So if we saw them opening up the tunnels, that could cause a race to hit them. But it’s also true that we saw them opening up the tunnels back in September and October, and we didn’t do anything about it.

Just as a broad statement, I’m not as confident as [the US and Israeli governments] are that they know where all the material is. I’m not as confident as they are that they could detect a movement of the material. 

On Tuesday, when we saw Trump threaten to destroy a whole civilization, it got to the point that the White House actually had to deny that it was considering nuclear weapons use, and people like Tucker Carlson were calling on officials to disobey nuclear orders. I’m curious what you made of that as someone who considers nuclear risk on a regular basis.

I didn’t think that they were going to use nuclear weapons, and I didn’t interpret that as a nuclear threat. Trump likes bombast, and I took him to mean striking bridges and power plants — which is arguably illegal, and I certainly am morally uncomfortable with it.

But, you know, nuclear weapons would be useful for targeting the deep underground facilities. They would be very useful for these missions. I’m glad that the US has not used them, and I think it would be a terrible mistake to do that. But it does cross my mind that the uranium that I think is not buried in rubble could be buried in rubble if they hit Isfahan with a nuclear weapon, which I don’t want them to do. 

There’s still a taboo there, but I don’t know how strong that taboo is. 

When it comes to Iran’s missile program, the Pentagon has put out a lot of figures on the numbers of missiles and drones and launchers destroyed, but how much do we actually know about the capabilities Iran still has after being hit for almost 6 weeks? 

The problem is, we didn’t have a good baseline for how many launchers, how many missiles, there were [at the outset].

Those kinds of estimates are always a bit of voodoo. We don’t make them on the open source side, because we don’t think we can do it reliably. When you have a factory that’s operating [making drones or missiles], unless you try to count every box that goes in and every box that comes out, it’s pretty hard to know. 

It’s also hard to know what you’ve destroyed. I mean, the Iranians are almost certainly using lots of decoys, which the Serbs did in the 90s. That’s not to say that these are all decoys that are getting struck, but until you go in on the ground, it becomes really hard to know.

What lessons do you think other potential nuclear proliferators might take from this war?

That it makes sense to finish that nuclear weapon as soon as you can. I would certainly look at the three countries that disarmed — Iraq, Libya, and Iran — or at least made disarmament agreements; the US double crossed all of them. And then, I would look at North Korea, and they seem to be fine. I’d rather be North Korea or Pakistan than I would Iran, Iraq, or Libya.

The Iran war of 2026 will continue, but it appears to be entering its final phase. Or at least, that’s what President Donald Trump hopes.

Claiming that the “hard part is done,” Trump made the case in a televised address on Wednesday night that America has “beaten and completely decimated Iran” and suggested that the conflict was “very close” to completion and would wrap up over the next two to three weeks. 

“Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating, large-scale losses in a matter of weeks,” Trump said, noting the damage inflicted to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Navy, and missile program. 

Trump said he would prefer to make a deal with Iran, and would launch attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure and energy facilities if it did not agree to one. But he appeared to suggest that the US would wrap up operations soon either way.  Trump seemed to be asking Americans for patience, noting that the war was far shorter than previous conflicts like World War II and Vietnam. 

There are a number of ways the situation could still change dramatically in the next few weeks, but if Trump is, in fact, starting the process of winding down the war, there are a few lessons we can already take from it. 

The war may not really be ending

One military cliché has been getting a workout over the past month: In any war plan, the enemy gets a vote. That’s just as true in any withdrawal plan. Iran may not stop fighting just because the United States stops bombing. Given that its air defenses proved completely incapable of stopping the US and Israeli bombardment, Iran could look to raise the costs to the US and its allies to the point where they will be deterred from simply coming back and bombing Iran again in six months. 

In particular, Iran may not be in a rush to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — the vital global energy chokepoint it has effectively shut down. Hormuz has emerged as Iran’s main point of leverage in this conflict, and leaders in Tehran will be reluctant to give it up. Over the weekend, Iran’s parliament passed a measure authorizing the collection of tolls from ships transiting the Strait, though it’s not clear how that would work in practice. 

Trump suggested in his speech that he was unbothered by this, saying that the Strait would “just open up naturally” once the war ended, but also calling on countries that rely on it to show some “long delayed courage” and reopen it themselves. 

A group of European countries is reportedly preparing a diplomatic push to do that, with military options possible as a last resort. Some Persian Gulf countries, notably the United Arab Emirates, are also reportedly pushing for a military coalition to open the Strait by force. 

It’s also worth noting that US forces are still heading to the region. A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, consisting of about 2,200 Marines and three warships, is due to arrive in a few weeks to join another MEU as well as elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, who were deployed to the region last week. These forces, designed for rapid deployments to seize and hold territory, could be a form of negotiating leverage for the US as it winds down the conflict, or could give the president additional military options if he changes his mind.  

Then there’s the “axis of resistance”: Iran’s regional proxies, badly weakened by Israel’s post–Oct. 7 offensive, seemed like a non-factor in the war’s early days. But lately they’ve made their presence felt. Yemen’s Houthis, who sat out most of the war’s first month, have begun firing missiles at Israel. Iraqi militias have been stepping up their attack on US interests, and appear to have kidnapped an American journalist. Hezbollah, fighting Israeli forces in Southern Lebanon, has shown it can still fire barrages of hundreds of rockets into Israel. These groups aren’t as powerful as they used to be, but they’re not eliminated, and they may not halt their attacks when the war ends.    

If it is ending, nobody won

It’s important to remember that while Trump’s immediate justifications for this war have shifted over time, the one consistent case he has made is that, as he put it on Wednesday, I “would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” It’s notable that in his speech, Trump did not refer to Iran’s stockpile of 450 kilograms of enriched uranium. As long as that stockpile remains, the US cannot credibly claim to have eliminated Iran’s nuclear threat, though Trump did vow to launch new airstrikes if any new nuclear activity is detected. 

If the war winds down in the coming weeks, Iran will doubtless claim victory on the grounds that it is still in power, despite the onslaught, and was able to fight back more effectively than many expected via its missile and drone attacks throughout the region and its closure of the Strait. But we shouldn’t overstate that case either. 

In addition to dozens of senior leaders, including its most prominent figures like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and security chief Ali Larijani, Iran’s conventional armed forces, navy, and missile forces have sustained heavy damage. Its strikes across the Gulf have enraged the Gulf Arab nations with which it had reached a tentative detente in recent years. It’s unlikely to find many partners anxious to invest in its rebuilding effort. 

Israeli airstrikes have also targeted the Basij militia, which led the efforts to crush anti-regime protests in Iran earlier this year. It’s hard to know yet what effect the war — which is estimated to have killed more than 1,500 civilians — has had on public opinion in Iran. But it seems likely that the regime’s opponents, whether on the streets of major cities or in ethnic minority regions, might soon want to test just how much it’s been weakened. 

Trump is still allergic to big ground wars

The relative success of “Operation Midnight Hammer” last June — Israel and America’s so-called 12-day war on Iran that targeted its nuclear facilities — and, even more so, the US operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January appear to have increased the military confidence of a president who, until recently, was campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize. If Trump were running for office again, it would be hard for him to again campaign as the “pro-peace” candidate, but there do still appear to be some lines he’s reluctant to cross. 

In recent weeks, there has been widespread reporting that the administration was considering risky operations to seize islands in and around the Strait of Hormuz to break Iran’s blockade or to deploy special forces to seize Iran’s uranium stockpile. Extracting 450 kilograms of radioactive material buried deep under rubble while taking heavy enemy fire always seemed like a tall order. The Hormuz operations may have been doable but would also raise the risk of American casualties — thirteen American servicemembers have been killed in the war, already — and prolong an already unpopular conflict. The escalations that Trump discussed in his speech involved bombing Iran “back to the stone age” — not sending in troops. 

This may be the closest Trump has come to the sort of Mideast military quagmire that has bedeviled the US for the past 25 years, but despite his claims that the “doesn’t have the yips” when it comes to boots on the ground, he still seems intent on avoiding large-scale ground operations that would see a large number of Americans coming home in coffins. 

Colin Powell’s famous “pottery barn rule” is no longer in effect: The US is fine just breaking things and moving on.  

Chokepoints matter

One of the main questions likely to perplex future historians of this war is why its planners did not anticipate and prepare for Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz — a scenario that has dominated US strategic thinking about the region for decades. (A Marine Corps veteran I spoke with recently recalled war-gaming an amphibious operation on Iran’s Qeshm Island in the 1980s.) Ensuring the free flow of energy from the Gulf is one of the main justifications for having a large military presence in this region in the first place. 

It’s true that Iran was able to effectively close the Strait more easily than many expected, with just a handful of demonstrative strikes on tankers rather than a large deployment of mines. But that could have been anticipated when the Houthis did the exact same thing in the Red Sea in 2024. 

There are some parallels to how this administration escalated trade tensions with China last year, seemingly not anticipating that Beijing would leverage its dominance over the global supply of rare earth minerals — a scenario also discussed ad nauseam in Washington for years.  

For years, the US leveraged its control of chokepoints in the global economy — the use of the dollar in international financial transactions; the global tech industry’s reliance on semiconductors made by US allies — to punish its rivals. Over the past year, we’ve seen those rivals learn to play the same game. 

Closing the Strait has resulted in global shortages in food, fertilizer, and other commodities — the reverberations of which could be felt for months after the fighting stops — and those worst-affected by it will be those living in the world’s poorest countries, who had nothing to do with this war. 

American military power has limits

Much of this war has been a display of absolute tactical and technological dominance by the American military and its Israeli partners. They’ve been able to strike Iran seemingly at will, pulled off incredible intelligence coups in the targeting of senior leaders, and intercepted the vast majority of missiles and drones fired by Iran. 

But we’ve seen the limits as well. In recent days, it’s been becoming clear that the Iranian strikes on US bases were more damaging than initially reported and that they’ve been having more success penetrating Israel’s air defenses as well. Whether that’s because Iran was learning how to evade those defenses (perhaps with Russian assistance) or because it has been saving its more sophisticated hardware for later in the war remains unclear. 

The US and Gulf Countries were never really in danger of running out of vital interceptors, but their heavy use in this conflict, along with other sophisticated systems like Tomahawk missiles, has forced tough decisions about how to allocate them, and the reduced stockpile may be felt in future conflicts, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. 

The fate of the USS Gerald Ford, which in recent months has had its deployment twice extended as it was diverted from the Middle East for operations in Venezuela, then sent back for the war in Iran, then finally docked in Croatia after its laundry room caught on fire and its toilets began malfunctioning, may serve as a cautionary tale.   

We’ve learned once again that even the most powerful and best-funded military in the world faces military constraints when the president is launching new major military operations every few months.

Israel is on a permanent war footing

If not for Iran, Israel’s escalating war in Lebanon, which has killed more than 1,200 people and displaced more than a million, would have been the biggest story in the Middle East for the past month. Israeli leaders are discussing what sounds like a long-term occupation of parts of Southern Lebanon and are invoking Gaza as a model as they destroy buildings in the area.

As for Gaza itself, Israel appears to be fortifying its military presence within the enclave, aid has been severely restricted from entering the Strip, and talk of moving to a new phase of reconstruction feels like a distant memory. 

Even as the Iran war was never popular in the United States, it was overwhelmingly so in Israel, despite much of the population spending the past month in and out of air raid shelters. Even if Trump forces the war to a close short of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultimate goal of regime change in Tehran, the Israeli expectation has always been that they would simply continue to degrade Iran’s capabilities as much as possible for as long as the US would allow. As for what remains, there’s always the next time — a regional expansion of the “mowing the grass” strategy that Israel has long employed in Gaza. “If we see them make a move, even a move forward, will hit them with missiles very hard again,” Trump said on Wednesday, suggesting that the US may again take part int he mowing. 

The war may have done serious damage to Israel’s standing in the US — and not only among Democrats, who were already a lost cause from Netanyahu’s perspective, but among Republicans looking for someone other than Trump to blame for this war. But that’s a concern for another day: For now, Israel sees its regional enemies on the back foot and will look to continue to press its advantage.     

The rules are changing

If there has been a clear winner from this war, it is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has benefited from both an economic shot in the arm from high oil prices and from the further strain that the conflict has put on the transatlantic alliance. (The Financial Times reports that Trump had threatened to halt aid to Ukraine if European countries didn’t take part in an effort to reopen the Strait.) Trump is once again talking about pulling the US out of NATO, in light of the alliance’s reluctance to allow their bases to be used for military operations or to join a fight to reopen Hormuz. Given the skepticism Trump is voicing about the alliance’s all-important mutual defense obligation, it’s fair to ask if the alliance is effectively dead already. That’s a cause for concern in a world where interstate wars are starting to become more common again. 

Not every country has access to something like the Strait of Hormuz, but other countries are likely to try to learn from Iran’s example of weaponizing chokepoints in the global economy to fight a more powerful adversary. Iran’s targeting of Amazon data centers may also portend a world in which tech firms are considered legitimate military targets.

Khamenei’s killing broke a precedent: There are very few modern examples of heads of state being deliberately killed in war. Given that new advances in precision targeting and drones have made “decapitation strikes” easier to carry out, this could make future wars a lot more dangerous for the leaders waging them. 

Iran clearly has more incentive than ever to actually build a nuclear weapon — though whether it would actually be able to do this with much of its weapons program in shambles and its government penetrated by spies is another question. What’s more clear, though, is that the attack on Iran, the second launched by the US and Israel in the past year in the midst of ongoing nuclear negotiations, will convince many countries that it’s worth having a nuclear weapon and not trusting future efforts at nuclear diplomacy. 

Iran itself may be weaker than it was a month ago — but its tolerance for risk and desperation are also higher. The damage inflicted on the regime in this war may have satisfied leaders in Washington and Jerusalem, but the world itself has likely gotten more dangerous.   

One way or another, President Donald Trump would like you to believe the war in Iran is wrapping up soon. 

Trump said this week that he is “very intent on making a deal” and that his team has had good talks with unnamed Iranian leaders, who also “want to make a deal badly.” He has insisted that the war has already been won and that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.” Wall Street, rattled by the war’s disruptions, seems to love the new happy talk about negotiations. 

The White House has presented a proposal for a peace deal and is hopeful for talks via a new diplomatic track possibly led by Vice President JD Vance, with the government of Pakistan acting as intermediary. The 15-point plan to end the war that the US has presented to Iran, which includes Iran turning over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and accepting limits on its missile program, is probably a non-starter for the Iranian government. Iran has rejected the plan and presented a five-point proposal of its own, including the payment of war reparations. But warring parties tend to present maximalist demands at the beginning of ceasefire negotiations. It’s at least possible this is the beginning of a deal.

But a better question than whether the US and Iran can reach a deal may be why it’s even necessary. Why couldn’t Trump simply order a halt to airstrikes as he did at the conclusion of the “12-day war” last June? If he’s really done with the war, shouldn’t it be as simple as stopping the war?   

Iran won’t let Trump walk away 

The difference between this war and Trump’s previous military engagements with Iran as well as Venezuela and Syria, is that this time Iran has fought back to a much greater extent. 

While this was widely anticipated by experts and commentators before the war started, Iran’s attacks on Gulf Arab countries and the disruptions to the global energy industry seem to have come as a genuine surprise to the president. Whether it was the killing of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020 or the bombing of the Houthis in 2024, Trump’s enemies have generally found it worth it to deescalate in hopes that he would simply go away. Even the recent raid on Venezuela that captured dictator Nicolas Maduro — which seems to have given Trump confidence that the Iran operation would go more smoothly than it has — appears to have been less an example of “regime change” in the President George W. Bush sense, and more a backroom deal cut with members of the regime who wanted to preserve their hold on power. 

This time things are different: Iran’s leadership worries they will face an existential threat moving forward if they don’t prove Trump’s decision to strike was a disastrous mistake. And they may take Trump’s sudden skittishness about the war as a sign their counterattacks are working as intended. 

“You don’t put your opponent in a corner where their only way out is through you. That’s what he’s finally done to the Iranians,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Pentagon Middle East adviser now with the advocacy group J Street. “He’s so boxed them in and so threatened their feeling of regime survival, that they’ve basically taken off the gloves and just gone nuts.”

One Iranian response in particular may account for much of why Trump can’t simply declare victory and move on this time: its disruption of global trade, especially oil, through the Strait of Hormuz. 

“The simplest reason is Hormuz,” said Gregory Brew, an Iran and energy analyst at Eurasia Group. Even with the damage the Iranian regime has sustained, it has demonstrated an ability to strike at the heart of the global economy and inflict just the sort of pain — in the form of high oil prices — to which a US president heading into a midterm election year is most susceptible. “I think the White House is sufficiently aware that if Trump does just deescalate now it will look very much like an Iranian victory, despite the costs that have been imposed on Iran,” Brew added. 

In the short term, Iran’s leaders are also publicly skeptical of whether the US entreaties are genuine — and not just a feint while they move thousands of troops to the region, possibly ahead of a ground invasion to take over Kharg Island, Iran’s main offshore oil terminal, or to control the coast along the strait. It doesn’t help that Iran has been bombed by Israel and the United States twice in the past year while in the middle of nuclear negotiations.

A further question now is whether Iran would restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz even if the US and Israel were to deescalate. Some analysts suggest the Iranians might keep the strait partially closed in order to impose costs significant enough that the US and Israel won’t simply do this all again in six months. Iran is reportedly now developing a selective vetting system for which countries will be allowed to use the strait.  

Given that the economic impact of rising energy and fertilizer costs are being felt globally — and far more severely in Africa and Asia than in the United States — Iran would likely come under enormous diplomatic pressure to restore normal traffic through the strait, including from its most important trading partner, China. But Iran has still demonstrated the ability to shut down more than 90 percent of trade through the strait and to do it with a relatively small number of tanker strikes rather than the extensive mining campaign that many expected. That raises the political stakes for both sides moving forward. 

Trump’s allies aren’t ready to back down either

Trump, depending on the day, may hope to wind down the war soon, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely happy for it to continue. 

From an Israeli perspective, every day that the US and Israel continue destroying Iranian missile launchers and killing senior officials is “pure profit” in the tactical sense. The strikes are making it harder for the regime to rebuild its military capabilities and they’re giving Israel more time to take on Iran’s allied “axis of resistance” groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Plus, there’s always the off chance that the leadership is weakened to the point that it becomes vulnerable to mass protests again. 

Netanyahu is also probably not the only foreign leader with Trump’s ear right now. Despite Saudi Arabia’s public opposition to the strikes on Iran, de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has reportedly been privately urging Trump to continue the war, viewing it as a historic chance to reset the balance of power in the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal reports that the leaders of Arab Gulf states are “pressing Trump in regular phone conversations to finish the job and destroy Iran’s military capabilities before moving on.”

While the Gulf states may have been reluctant about getting involved in the war at the outset, for the now-apparent reason that it would expose their cities and oil infrastructure to Iranian reprisals, the ferocity of the Iranian response may have shifted their thinking. Just as Iran has proven it can make the world pay a heavy price by choking off oil shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, its regional rivals are hoping to prove to Iran that it can’t hold their economies hostage without paying an even bigger one in order to prevent this from becoming a regular occurrence.

The US is still the dominant player in this war and could resist demands from allies to escalate things further. As Trump demonstrated in June when he effectively called off the 12-day war on social media with Israeli jets still in the air, this is ultimately the president’s call to make. But having some of Trump’s closest friends in the region insisting the war isn’t done could give him pause.  

Trump also might not want to end things just yet 

It’s worth noting that we’re roughly three and a half weeks into what Trump had predicted would be a four- to five-week war or longer. Perhaps Trump simply doesn’t feel much sense of urgency about ending the war. 

“What we’ve seen is he is very willing to just sort of pull the escape cord when he thinks he needs to,” said Emma Ashford, senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “So obviously he does not, or has not yet, felt that he needs to.” 

Wars of attrition tend to continue as long as both sides think they are winning. Iran’s leaders’ calculation, from the beginning, has been that their tolerance for pain is higher than Trump’s and that with relatively little effort they can continue to impose intolerable costs on the United States. 

But is Trump really feeling the pain? One would think the president would be alarmed by the spiking energy costs — and the way that diplomatic announcements appear to be timed to the opening and closing of the New York stock exchange suggests he at least has one eye on the markets, as well as his own poll numbers. 

But the president is also reportedly consuming the war in the form of two-minute highlight reels of “stuff blowing up” compiled by military commanders. It’s far from clear that the strategic costs of this war, despite the operational successes, are getting through to the commander-in-chief. It’s possible he’s concluded he can juice the markets as needed with a phone call or press conference downplaying a long operation while still preparing for more extensive maneuvers behind the scenes. 

Critics have coined the term “TACO” — Trump always chickens out — to describe Trump’s habit of backing off confrontations when he faces pushback. A more generous interpretation is that throughout his career, Trump has shown a remarkable ability to declare victory and move on rather than getting bogged down in crises. If that instinct isn’t kicking in this time, it may be because he doesn’t yet believe it’s a crisis.    

President Donald Trump has suggested that the US-Israeli air campaign in Iran will continue until “they cry uncle, or when they can’t fight any longer.” Iran’s foreign minister has said their own military will fight “as long as it takes” and that they have little interest in negotiating a ceasefire.

But continuing the war isn’t just a question of will; it’s a question of means. And one key constraint on how long the conflict might rage is how much ammunition each side has to continue it. Currently, it’s an arms race between Iranian missiles and drones and US, Israeli, and Gulf State countermeasures to shoot them down. And while the answers to questions about their capacity are closely guarded, there are signs of strain on both sides. 

With its conventional military overmatched and its network of regional allies badly degraded, Iran’s main remaining means of “fighting” is its missile and drone stockpile. 

Iran has fired thousands of missiles and one-way attack drones at 13 countries, killing at least 43 people, according to data compiled by the Israeli think tank INSS. These include seven US servicemembers. Iran has struck a wide range of targets, from US military bases to luxury hotels in Dubai to Amazon data centers. On Wednesday, three ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz came under drone attack as part of Iran’s effort to shut down one of the key chokepoints of the world energy market. 

This is dwarfed by the damage that has been inflicted by the US and Israel on Iran, where more than 1,200 people have been killed according to Iranian authorities, and much of the country’s military and political infrastructure has been destroyed. 

But Iran’s attacks would have been far worse for the wider region if the countries they were going after didn’t have such strong defenses against missiles and drones. Most of the countries that have been heavily targeted appear to be successfully intercepting over 90 percent of the projectiles Iran has fired at them.

Doing so is not easy, however. Interceptors are among the world’s most sophisticated and in-demand weapons, and the successful interception effort has come at a tremendous cost. 

The US burned through an estimated $2.4 billion worth of Patriot interceptors, which cost around $4 million each, in just the first five days of this war. During last June’s conflict, the US used around a quarter of its total stock of THAAD interceptors, which are fired from a mobile anti-missile battery. Only around 11 interceptors are made per year, and the use rate is likely similar this time around. 

“You’re on the wrong side of the cost curve if you are doing missile defense in the first place,” said Sam Lair of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “That’s just the reality of how these, these types of wars work. Interceptors are expensive, they don’t have very many of them, and not many of them are produced each year.” 

These kinds of interceptors have sometimes been referred to as “the table stakes” of today’s missile and drone-heavy wars, and the reverberations of the current Mideast missile war are being felt well beyond the region. European officials say interceptors needed for the war in Ukraine are being diverted to the Middle East. In a sign of just how pressing the need has become, the US is reportedly moving parts of a powerful THAAD interceptor system from South Korea to the Middle East on the same week that North Korea is test-firing missiles from its latest warship. 

Offensive weapons, while a lesser concern, are also an issue: The US  may need years to replenish its stocks of Tomahawk missiles, to take one example.

“For years, all of the services have been firing precision stocks much faster than their replacement rates,” said MacKenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. 

How long can Iran keep firing?

Heavy US and Israeli bombardment of Iran’s missile facilities is taking a toll on its ability to fire them in the first place. According to the US military, the number of Iranian missile launches is down 90 percent, and drone launches are down 83 percent since the start of the conflict, which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called “strong evidence of degradation.”

Some experts believe the drop in launches is evidence that Iran is holding back some of its arsenal, anticipating a long fight, but it’s still safe to say that by any conventional metric, Iran is “losing” the missile war. 

But the goal of Iran’s leaders is not to defeat the US and Israel — there was never any question of that — it’s to continue to inflict pain to the point where Trump, facing skyrocketing gas prices, a jittery economy, falling poll numbers, and grumbling allies, decides to call it quits and resist calls to renew the war again later. 

Prior to last June’s “12-day war,” Iran was believed to have between 2,000 and 3,000 missiles in its stockpile. It fired around 600 in that conflict, and many more were destroyed on the ground by Israeli airstrikes, but in the months since, Iranian authorities had worked to replenish those stockpiles and harden their defenses.

Many of these were concentrated in vast underground “missile cities.” In the early phase of the war, these were hit heavily, and Iran’s own air defenses proved mostly unable to defend them. Mobile launchers were often destroyed immediately after leaving the facilities. The US has used bunker buster bombs to destroy the entrances to the cities, leaving hundreds of missiles buried underground. Israel estimates that it has destroyed or buried around 70 percent of Iran’s missile launchers. Even if those estimates are on the high end, the speed at which the US and Israel have been able to dismantle much of Iran’s once-feared missile deterrent has surprised many observers. 

Iran has also been something of a pioneer in the development of one-way attack drones. The low-cost Iranian “Shahed” has been used extensively by Russia’s military against Ukrainian cities for years. The US is now deploying its own drone closely modeled on the weapon. The size of Iran’s drone stockpile is unknown, but before the war, its production capacity was estimated at around 10,000 per month, though it’s surely less now. 

While less powerful, these drones could be pivotal in Iran’s efforts to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed to oil exports. In this campaign, the Iranians may have taken some lessons from their Yemeni allies, who used a relatively small number of drones and missiles to create chaos in the Red Sea during the war in Gaza. 

Iran’s choice of targets in this war has been somewhat unexpected. While some feared a massive salvo against Israel that would overwhelm the country’s air defenses, the strikes have been more spread out, with 20 times more total projectiles directed against the Gulf states than Israel. This may partly be the result of the damage inflicted on the command structure of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — Iranian doctrine gives missile commanders wide latitude to choose their targets when they don’t have word from Tehran. 

“It was 30 different IRGC, commanders doing their own thing, and that’s why we saw them doing things like launching against Oman, which made no sense to anybody,” said Decker Eveleth, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, noting that Oman was the country that had attempted to mediate a nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States in the lead-up to the war.  

Iran may also be targeting the Gulf because those are the missiles it still has available. It used many of its longer-range weapons to strike Israel during the 12-day war. Its shorter-range missiles, aimed primarily at the Gulf and US bases in the region, were relatively untouched and were not as heavily bombed in the early days of this war. They’ve been hit more heavily over the last few days. By striking airports and hotels rather than military targets, Iran may also be aiming to demoralize and frighten local populations, building on similar attacks against Israeli cities during the 12-day war last year. “They started hitting a lot more civilian areas,” Nicole Grajewski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said. “It turned out to have a high psychological cost for the Israelis — it was pretty terrorizing for them at the population level.” 

The hope may be that the damage to regional countries may get to the point that their governments start putting more pressure on Trump to end the war, though it could also have the adverse effect of drawing them into the conflict directly. 

As for Israel itself, Iran has begun launching missiles fitted with cluster munitions that burst at high altitude, scattering tiny bomblets. While not particularly effective against hardened military targets, these have the advantage of being difficult to intercept. (They’re also banned by more than 120 countries because of the dangers unexploded bomblets can pose to civilians long after conflicts end.) 

A numbers game

Despite the high intercept rates, there are signs that the region was not fully prepared for the Iranian onslaught. 

Some analysts have questioned why the six US troops killed in Kuwait on March 1 were working in what appeared to be a makeshift operations center, given that it was the US that determined when the war began. Axios has reported that US officials last year rejected a Ukrainian offer to sell the same anti-drone technology it is now installing under fire. There were also reports early in the war that Gulf states were running dangerously short on interceptors and that the US was scrambling to provide them with more. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE rely on advanced US-made systems like Patriot and THAAD for air defense, which, though highly effective, are extremely expensive and ill-suited to take on large numbers of cheap missiles and drones. 

The UAE has had success in using helicopters to shoot down drones at a lower cost, and experts from Ukraine — a country that now knows a thing or two about shooting down missiles and Iranian-made drones —have been dispatched to the region to consult. Overall, the fear of running out of interceptors has become less acute as the number of Iranian launches has dropped. 

As for Israel, it isn’t publicizing its intercept rate this time around in order to make it harder to assess its stockpiles, but the country was also reportedly running low on stockpiles at the end of the 12-day war.

Iran is still getting some missiles and drones to their targets. On March 10, more than 25 percent of drones fired at the UAE got through, significantly higher than previous days. Iran also now appears to be targeting the radar facilities used by the US to track incoming missiles. 

Modern interceptors may be able to take down most of what Iran is firing at US troops and the cities of the Middle East in this war for now. But the impact may be felt in the next one. And even if Iran no longer has enough resources to overwhelm the region’s defenses, they may hope they can keep up the threat long enough for the costs to become intolerable.