Iran didn't lose the war — it rewrote the rules of American power, Pape argues

The 1991 Gulf War taught the world that American precision airpower could impose Washington's will almost anywhere at low cost. The confrontation at the Strait of Hormuz, Robert Pape argues in Foreign Affairs, has taught the opposite lesson. For weeks, Iran — not the United States — has effectively controlled the world's most important oil chokepoint, using missiles, drones and shadow-fleet tactics to impose costs Washington cannot easily counter. Pape traces how globalization has diffused precision-strike technology far beyond the great powers, so that a militarily weaker state can now disrupt global commerce without ever matching America's raw strength. The lesson, he writes, is generalizing: from the Red Sea to the South China Sea, states and armed groups alike are learning that disruption, not domination, is the more available currency of power today. Washington's old assumption — that overwhelming force plus economic weight guarantees compliance — no longer holds when adversaries can strike chokepoints and shipping at a fraction of the cost of defending them. Pape's forecast for the coming era is stark: more frequent crises, higher costs to protect global commerce, and intensifying competition over the chokepoints that keep the world economy moving. It is a bleak diagnosis for a White House still narrating the Iran confrontation as a story of American dominance restored.