Opinion.
The question is not rhetorical. Two weeks into sustained US-Israeli bombardment, Iran has lost its supreme leader, at least 40 senior military and security officials, over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to its own Health Ministry, and effective control of the Strait of Hormuz as a deterrent asset. The IRGCIran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite military and security organization that operates independently from conventional armed forces and oversees external operations and proxy networks. has struck back across nine countries, hitting US bases, Gulf state infrastructure, and Israeli territory. But the retaliation follows a pattern: enough to impose costs, never enough to alter the fundamental dynamic. Iran is bleeding. Its adversaries have stated, explicitly, that they intend regime changeThe deliberate replacement of a government through military, diplomatic, or economic intervention, typically by external actors.. And Tehran is responding with what the Stimson Center has characterized as a “coercive risk strategyA military approach that deliberately escalates costs and risks on an opponent to force capitulation, based on the belief that sufficient pressure will compel a strategic shift.,” the deliberate manipulation of shared danger, calibrated to raise costs without crossing thresholds that invite total annihilation.
The thesis of this article is that strategic restraintA military or diplomatic approach where a state responding to aggression deliberately limits retaliatory actions to avoid escalation while imposing incremental costs on the adversary. of this kind is not wisdom. It is a predictable failure mode, rooted in cognitive bias and institutional design, that virtually guarantees the worst outcome for the state while optimizing for the personal survival of its individual leaders.
The Strategic Restraint Trap
The logic of strategic restraint under existential threat runs roughly like this: absorb punishment, retaliate proportionally, raise the economic and political costs of continued aggression, and wait for the adversary to decide the war is not worth it. Iran has formally abandoned its old “strategic patience” doctrine in favor of what it calls “active deterrence,” but the underlying logic remains the same. Fight slowly. Impose friction. Bet on the adversary’s domestic politics or economic pain eventually forcing a halt.
This logic works under one condition: the adversary must have a reason to stop short of total victory. When the United States fought insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, attrition worked against it precisely because Washington had limited objectives. The cost-benefit calculus could shift. Domestic opposition could grow. The war could become not worth it.
None of these conditions hold when the adversary has committed to regime destruction. A decapitation strike on Day One, killing the supreme leader, his family, and the senior military command, is not the behavior of a state pursuing limited objectives. It is the behavior of a state that has decided the regime must end. Against that commitment, attrition is not a strategy. It is a countdown.
The Stimson Center’s analysis frames Iran’s approach as coherent coercive logic: targeting missile-defense radars, expanding to civilian infrastructure, widening the conflict to create pressure on Gulf governments and global markets. But coherent and effective are not synonyms. A strategy can be internally logical and still be the wrong strategy, if the adversary has already priced in every cost you can impose and decided to pay it.
Why Leaders Choose the Slow Death
Prospect theoryA behavioral theory developed by Kahneman and Tversky describing how people make decisions under uncertainty, particularly treating losses and gains asymmetrically., developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979, offers the clearest explanation. People are not rational calculators of expected value. They are loss-averse: losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good. More importantly for wartime decisions, people in a loss frame become risk-seeking in ways that are predictable but not rational.
The application to military escalation is counterintuitive. You might expect loss-averse leaders to escalate faster, since they are already losing. Research by Bauer and Rotte at the University of Munich found that leaders under fire will indeed accept extraordinarily high casualty rates before stopping an offensive, with willingness to quit only rising after losses exceed roughly 60% of forces committed. But this risk-seeking applies to continuing what you are already doing. It does not apply to crossing new escalatory thresholds.
Here is the distinction that matters: continuing to absorb bombardment while retaliating at the current level feels like perseverance. Escalating to scorched-earth tactics, or striking in ways that guarantee massive retaliation, feels like a new decision. Prospect theory predicts that leaders will be risk-seeking within their current frame but risk-averse about reframing the conflict entirely. The slow bleed continues because each day’s losses are processed as the continuation of a position already accepted, while the escalatory option is processed as a new and terrifying gamble.
This is how you get a state that will absorb a thousand civilian deaths without flinching but will not take the one action that might change the strategic equation: because absorbing deaths is what they are already doing, and changing course requires a cognitive threshold that loss-aversion makes almost impossible to cross.
The Moral Processing Delay
There is a second mechanism at work, harder to quantify but no less real. Ethical thresholds impose processing delays on decision-making. A leader considering scorched-earth tactics (destroying your own oil infrastructure to deny it to the enemy, mining your own harbors, attacking civilian targets in ways that guarantee mass casualties on both sides) must overcome not just strategic hesitation but moral revulsion. This is not a weakness in the colloquial sense. It is a feature of being human. But in the specific context of existential war against an adversary who has already committed to your destruction, it functions as a handicap.
The asymmetry is structural. The attacking coalition made its escalatory decisions before the first strike. The decision to kill a head of state, to bomb civilian infrastructure, to pursue regime change: these thresholds were crossed in planning rooms, months or years before execution. By the time bombs fell, the moral processing was done. The defending state, by contrast, must make each escalatory decision in real time, under fire, with incomplete information, while simultaneously processing grief, rage, and the weight of each new threshold.
Saddam Hussein’s destruction of Kuwaiti oil wells in 1991 offers a partial illustration. Facing certain defeat, Iraqi forces ignited over 640 oil wells in a scorched-earth retreat. The action was strategically pointless in the narrow military sense (it did not prevent his expulsion from Kuwait) but it imposed enormous costs: the fires burned for ten months, destroyed billions of dollars in infrastructure, and created an environmental catastrophe. The relevant point is not whether it was wise, but that it required overcoming a specific cognitive barrier. Saddam ordered it because he had already lost everything. The barrier was lowest when the loss was total.
Iran’s leadership has not reached that point, and that is precisely the problem. Each day of calibrated restraint is a day where the loss is not yet total, which means the cognitive barrier to escalation remains high, which means the slow bleed continues, which means the loss becomes more total. It is a ratchet that only turns one way.
Steelmanning the Scorched-Earth Logic
The uncomfortable argument runs like this: if the adversary has committed to regime destruction, and attrition will not change that commitment, then the rational move is to make the cost of destruction so catastrophic that even a committed adversary must reconsider. Not proportional retaliation. Not calibrated cost impositionA strategy of inflicting economic and political damage on an adversary to make the costs of continued conflict outweigh the expected benefits.. Devastation so total that it changes the calculation from “we can absorb these costs” to “the costs are unbearable.”
For Iran specifically, this would mean something like: destroying its own oil infrastructure and mining the Persian Gulf to deny not just Hormuz but the entire extraction and export apparatus. Launching everything in the arsenal at every available target, simultaneously, with no concern for proportionality. Activating every proxy for maximum destruction rather than calibrated pressure. The logic is that of the man who, realizing the building is going to be demolished with him inside, sets fire to the building so the demolition crew cannot use the land afterward.
The steelmanA rhetorical technique where you present the strongest possible version of an opponent's argument before refuting it. The opposite of a straw man. is this: if the outcome of strategic restraint is regime destruction after months of slow bleeding, loss of military capability through gradual degradation, and civilian deaths that accumulate without changing the strategic picture, then the outcome of scorched earth is regime destruction (the same endpoint) but with the adversary paying a price so severe it deters the next such war. The slow bleed buys nothing. The conflagration buys deterrence for the next state facing the same threat. And paradoxically, the willingness to go scorched-earth might be the only thing that prevents having to do it, because an adversary who believes you will burn everything down may decide regime change is not worth the aftermath.
This logic is not insane. Thomas Schelling’s entire framework of coercive bargaining rests on the credibility of threats that would be catastrophic if executed. Nuclear deterrence works on exactly this principle. The question is why it does not translate to conventional existential conflicts.
The Institutional Selection Problem
The answer is structural, and it is the most important part of this analysis.
States do not promote leaders who are willing to burn everything down. Bureaucracies, by their nature, select for risk management. The person who rises to the top of a military hierarchy, a political party, or a theocratic establishment is the person who navigated decades of institutional politics without making the kind of catastrophic gamble that gets you killed or fired. They are selected for caution, consensus-building, and incremental advantage. They are, by the time they reach positions of supreme authority, constitutionally incapable of the kind of all-or-nothing decision that scorched-earth strategyA military tactic where a defending force destroys its own infrastructure and resources to deny them to an advancing enemy, typically used as a last resort in existential conflicts. requires.
Research on institutional risk aversionThe tendency of bureaucratic organizations to promote leaders who avoid high-risk decisions, resulting in systemic preference for caution and incremental advantage over decisive action. in military organizations identifies three reinforcing mechanisms: individual loss aversionIn prospect theory, the tendency for losses to weigh roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains in decision-making, causing people to become risk-averse when facing uncertain choices., organizational norms that punish failed risk-taking far more harshly than they punish failed caution, and social pressure from peers who were promoted through the same risk-averse system. A commander considering a risky action does not just weigh outcomes. They weigh how much institutional backlash they will face if the risk fails, and the answer is always: career-ending.
Iran’s current situation illustrates this perfectly. The IRGC’s pre-war planning, as reported by Al Jazeera, involved designating up to four successors for every senior position. This is resilience planning, not victory planning. It is the institutional response of a bureaucracy preparing to survive degradation, not a strategic mind preparing to win a war. The “fourth successor” doctrine ensures continuity of command. It does not ensure that the fourth successor will make fundamentally different decisions than the first. In fact, the selection mechanisms guarantee the opposite: each successor will be someone who rose through the same system, internalized the same norms, and defaults to the same strategic restraint.
This is the deepest structural trap. The very institutions that give a state the capacity to fight a war are the institutions that make it impossible to fight the war in the only way that might change the outcome. The bureaucracy that coordinates missile strikes across nine countries is impressive. It is also the bureaucracy that ensures every strike is calibrated, proportional, and strategically rational in exactly the way that loses a war of attrition against a more powerful adversary.
The Counterargument, and Why It Partially Holds
The strongest objection to this analysis is that scorched-earth strategy is not actually available to most states in practice, regardless of institutional culture. Iran’s oil infrastructure cannot be destroyed without destroying the economic basis for any post-war recovery. Its population centers cannot be sacrificed as bargaining chips without a legitimacy collapse that makes regime survival impossible even if the military campaign succeeds. The scorched-earth option, fully implemented, does not just destroy the adversary’s prize. It destroys the thing you are fighting to preserve.
This is true, and it is why the scorched-earth logic, while not irrational, is also not simply a matter of will. There is a genuine strategic dilemma at the heart of existential defense: the assets you need to survive are the same assets the enemy wants to destroy, and destroying them yourself only makes sense if survival is already impossible. The timing problem is that you can never be certain survival is impossible until it is too late to act.
The counterargument also has a moral dimension that this analysis should not dismiss. The IRGC’s organizational culture includes a genuine ideological commitment to protecting the Islamic Republic’s population. Scorched-earth is not just strategically complex; it requires leaders to accept that their own people will pay the highest price. The reluctance to do this is not merely a cognitive bias. It is an ethical position that deserves respect, even as we observe that it produces strategic outcomes indistinguishable from surrender on an installment plan.
What History Suggests
The historical record is not encouraging for strategic restraint under existential threat. States that have survived destruction attempts generally fall into two categories: those with a powerful ally that intervened (South Korea, 1950), and those that escalated to total war early enough to change the dynamic (the Soviet Union’s scorched-earth retreat and total industrial mobilization after 1941). States that tried to manage existential conflicts through calibrated responses, seeking to impose costs without crossing thresholds, have a poor track record. The history of foreign intervention in Iran itself offers a case study in how external powers treat states that respond to aggression with restraint rather than escalation.
The Soviet example is instructive precisely because it contradicts the institutional-selection thesis, at least partially. Stalin’s regime was a bureaucracy, and a deeply risk-averse one in many respects. But it was also a system that had been purged of anyone who might hesitate, led by a man whose personal psychology did not include the kind of moral processing delays that slow conventional decision-making. The scorched-earth order came because the system had selected for a leader capable of making it. This suggests that the institutional selection problem is not absolute, but it is characteristic of states with more distributed power structures, where no single leader has the authority (or the pathology) to override institutional caution.
The Ratchet Keeps Turning
Iran is two weeks into a war that its adversaries have framed as existential. Its command structures are degraded but functional. Its retaliatory capacity is real but diminishing. Its strategy, as the Stimson Center correctly identifies, is internally coherent: raise costs, widen the conflict, wait for the adversary’s political or economic calculus to shift. The problem is that this strategy requires the adversary to have a breaking point below total victory, and nothing about the current campaign suggests that breaking point exists.
Each day of strategic restraint reduces Iran’s capacity for the escalatory option it is not taking. Missile stocks deplete. Command structures degrade further. The psychological threshold for escalation rises as the institutional machinery adapts to its current tempo. The ratchet turns, and it does not turn back.
Whether strategic restraint is wisdom or cognitive bias depends on a question nobody can answer in real time: does the adversary have a cost threshold below total victory? If yes, attrition might work. If no, every day of restraint is a day wasted. The tragedy of the institutional selection problem is that the leaders making this judgment are the people least equipped to make it correctly, because the system that put them in charge is the system that selects for the assumption that there is always a deal to be made, always a cost that will be too high, always a reason to wait one more day.
Sometimes there is not. And by the time you are certain of that, the leverage you needed to act on it is gone.
