Destruction is Not Strategy: Schelling and the Coercive Failures of the Iran War
“Military strategy… has become the diplomacy of violence.” – Thomas C. Schelling
Violence as Bargaining Power
On June 17, 2026, the United States and Iran signed a fourteen-point memorandum of understanding (MOU) to end the 2026 Iran War. In practice, the signing of the memorandum initially marked a transition in the conflict from full-scale war to a phase of fragile, high-stakes diplomacy and the occasional exchange of fire. By early July, however, renewed exchanges of strikes and President Trump’s declaration that the ceasefire was “over” had placed the agreement in serious jeopardy, even as negotiations remained possible. By mid-July, renewed US strikes against Iranian capabilities around the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian attacks on US regional partners and commercial shipping had pushed the conflict closer to a return to full-scale war. The rapid deterioration of the memorandum has only intensified scrutiny of both the agreement itself and the American-Israeli conduct that preceded it, raising renewed questions about whether the political objectives for which the war was fought were ever coherently achieved. Many have argued that the MOU appears to be both the culmination and manifestation of the United States and Israel’s failure to fulfill the strategic objectives that purportedly motivated the execution of Operation Epic Fury. The joint operation, conducted against Iran by the United States and Israeli militaries, marked the beginning of those hostilities which would expand and protract into the broader Iran War addressed by the memorandum.
In order to properly explore the criticisms levied against the memorandum and US-Israeli strategic conduct, one must situate the war and Operation Epic Fury within the goals and justifications provided by the Trump administration and the Thirty-seventh government of Israel. Among these justifications, a few stand out: preventing Iran from acquiring or restoring a nuclear weapons capability; degrading Iran’s missile, drone, and air-defense infrastructure; weakening Iran’s ability to coordinate with and support proxy forces across the region; restoring deterrence after years of perceived Iranian escalation; protecting Israel and regional partners from Iranian retaliation; preserving freedom of navigation and economic stability in and around the Strait of Hormuz; and compelling Iran to accept a new diplomatic framework on terms more favorable to the United States and Israel.
Taken at face value, these statements indicate that the Iran War was initiated to coerce the Iranian government toward desired political ends according to a calculus shared by the United States and Israeli governments. Why, then, has it taken the United States and Israel longer than expected to achieve their purported goals? Why has the question of whether they succeeded generated such contentious domestic and international debate? Because conjoined American-Israeli violence was the primary means by which they sought to achieve those goals, their difficulty in achieving their strategic objectives lies, at least in part, in the misapplication of those instruments of violence.
Thomas C. Schelling’s Arms and Influence provides a useful framework for understanding this misapplication of violence. Schelling pioneered the treatment of state-sanctioned military violence as a form of bargaining rather than simply an instrument of destruction. For Schelling, the political utility of force lay not only in what it destroyed, but in what it communicated, threatened, held in reserve, and the choices it forced upon the adversary. Violence could punish, but it could also signal; it could demonstrate resolve, but also close off opportunities for negotiation. It could create leverage, but only if the adversary understood what was being demanded, believed further pain was possible, and had some credible path by which compliance could stop the pressure.
Four Coercive Failures
Viewed through this lens, the deeper problem with American-Israeli strategy in the Iran War was not simply that too little force was applied, or even that force was applied to the wrong targets. It was that violence was not consistently translated into bargaining power. This article identifies four coercive failures: unclear and shifting demands; compressed escalation that exhausted intermediate leverage; attacks that weakened the command structures needed to negotiate and enforce compliance; and a failure to distinguish deterrence from compellence. Under those conditions, military success could coexist with coercive failure. The question is not simply whether the United States and Israel damaged Iran, but whether that damage was organized to produce the political outcomes for which the war was ostensibly fought.
Unclear Demands and the Absence of a Bargain
If violence is to function as a tool of coercion — a means of making another actor do what one wants — demands must be communicated clearly enough for the adversary to understand what is expected of it. Otherwise, how can it succeed? If the United States and Israel conducted the war to prevent Iran from acquiring or restoring a nuclear weapons capability, but at other times justified the war in terms of degrading Iran’s missile and drone infrastructure, weakening its proxy networks, restoring deterrence, protecting regional partners, preserving freedom of navigation, or compelling a broader diplomatic settlement, which claim was Iran supposed to treat as authoritative? If at times the United States and Israel demanded nuclear restraint from the Iranian government, and at others demanded changes in its regional posture, its proxy relationships, its retaliatory behavior, or even the composition and conduct of the regime itself, which demands were the Iranian government supposed to prioritize? If the demands of the United States were not identical to those of Israel, then how could Iran satisfy both?
The United States and Israel’s inability or unwillingness to produce a set of consistent and communicable demands likely made it more difficult for Iran to make any informed calculations about what concessions might reduce the prospects of continued and future hostilities. When the object of coercion shifted between nuclear restraint, regional rollback, deterrence restoration, regime behavior, and diplomatic submission, Iran was given a moving target as opposed to any kind of bargain. Under those conditions, continued resistance may have appeared more rational to Iran than compliance, because compliance itself had not been clearly defined by the United States and Israel. This was the first coercive failure: the violence communicated pressure, but not a stable bargain.
Compressed Escalation and Exhausted Leverage
When using violence as a means of influencing an adversary, its application must be carefully calculated to leave something in reserve. Coercive power depends not only on the pain already inflicted, but also on the adversary’s belief that additional pain remains possible if it refuses to comply. If the airstrikes that initiated Operation Epic Fury were not enough to force Iran to acquiesce to the demands of Israel and the United States, then what could Iran be credibly threatened with thereafter? If those same strikes killed the Supreme Leader and much of the Iranian leadership, then what threats were the United States and Israel to direct toward Iran if the opening blows failed to achieve their coercive purpose? It may have been precisely this exhaustion of intermediate coercive options that led President Trump to issue threats of civilizational scale against Iran. Yet such threats were difficult to make credible, because carrying them out would have required a level of destruction, escalation, and political risk that the United States was unlikely to accept except under the most extreme conditions. This was the second coercive failure: the campaign spent too much of its coercive leverage at the outset. Having escalated so quickly, the United States and Israel were left threatening forms of destruction that were too extreme to be credible and too catastrophic to be useful as bargaining instruments.
Damaging the Structures Needed to Bargain
Just as coercive leverage can be exhausted by applying too much violence too quickly, coercion can also be undermined by destroying the institutions through which compliance must occur. When making demands of an adversary, it is important to consider which structures must remain in place for those demands to be reliably satisfied. Coercion does not operate upon an abstract state, but upon leaders, institutions, command networks, and channels of communication capable of interpreting demands, making decisions, transmitting orders, and enforcing compliance. Applied without such restraint, violence can become counterproductive by damaging the very structures through which compliance would have to occur.
This problem was especially acute in the Iran War. If the United States and Israel sought to compel Iran to restrain its nuclear program, limit missile and drone attacks, control proxy activity, avoid retaliation, or accept a new diplomatic framework, then some functioning Iranian decision-making structure had to remain capable of authorizing and implementing those concessions. Strikes that killed the Supreme Leader and much of Iran’s senior leadership demonstrated resolve, but they also weakened the command structure needed to satisfy specific demands. In the aftermath, authority within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the broader security establishment became more fragmented and uncertain, making coordinated compliance harder rather than easier. Violence, in this sense, damaged not only Iran’s capabilities but also the institutional machinery through which a bargain could have been accepted and enforced. This was the third coercive failure: the campaign weakened the very structures through which compliance had to be interpreted, authorized, and enforced. The United States and Israel damaged Iran’s capacity to fight, but in doing so they also damaged its capacity to bargain, ultimately working against their own stated objectives.
Deterrence, Compellence, and the Costs of Compliance
In any use of coercive violence, it is important to distinguish between deterrent and compellent threats. Deterrent threats seek to prevent an adversary from taking some future action. Compellent threats seek to force an adversary to take some affirmative step it would otherwise resist. The difference matters because compellence can prove to be more difficult: it requires not only that the adversary absorb pain, but that it visibly change its behavior, make concessions, or accept restraints under pressure.
This distinction was not always clearly reflected in American-Israeli strategy during the Iran War. Some objectives were deterrent in nature: preventing Iran from retaliating against Israel, closing the Strait of Hormuz, or escalating against US forces and regional partners. Others were plainly compellent: forcing Iran to accept nuclear restraint, limit its missile and drone programs, reduce support for proxy forces, or enter a new diplomatic framework on less favorable terms. These were not identical demands, and they did not impose the same political costs on Tehran. To refrain from a future attack is one thing; to publicly accept constraints on nuclear, missile, or regional capabilities after suffering American and Israeli strikes is another.
The latter kind of demand may have affected Iranian political calculations quite differently. A government can sometimes absorb deterrence without appearing to capitulate, especially if it can claim that restraint was chosen for strategic reasons. But compellence often requires a more visible concession. For Iran, accepting such demands under fire may have risked making the regime appear weak, exposed, or subordinate to foreign pressure. This problem may have been especially acute for a political system whose legitimacy has long been tied to resistance, sovereignty, and defiance of the United States and Israel. Under those conditions, the costs of compliance were not only military or diplomatic, but domestic and symbolic.
If the United States and Israel treated deterrent and compellent threats as though they operated according to the same logic, then they may have underestimated the difficulty of forcing Iran to move affirmatively in the direction they desired. The more a demand required Iran to publicly concede, reverse course, or accept externally imposed limits, the more resistance may have appeared politically necessary even when costly. This was the fourth coercive failure: American-Israeli strategy did not sufficiently distinguish between preventing Iranian action and compelling Iranian submission. In doing so, it underestimated the political costs Iran would attach to compliance itself.
Destruction Is Not Strategy
Because violence and war are destructive by nature, and because those destructive capabilities can be amplified by modern weaponry, regional escalation, and the interconnectedness of modern economies and societies, states that initiate or expand war must consider several questions before doing so. This is not a matter of abstract moral caution alone. It is a strategic necessity. War is not simply another instrument of policy that can be applied loosely and corrected later without consequence. Once unleashed, violence kills, destroys, disrupts, hardens political positions, forecloses diplomatic options, and creates effects that may exceed the intentions of those who ordered it. Clausewitz’s warning is particularly apt here: “no one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”
For that reason, the first obligation of strategy is clarity. A state contemplating war must know what political object it seeks, whether violence is capable of producing that object, and how the application of force is supposed to alter the adversary’s calculations. It is not enough to identify a threat, announce resolve, or demonstrate military capacity. The use of force must be connected to a theory of political effect. What is the adversary being asked to do? What is it being asked to stop doing? What concessions would be sufficient? What pressures are being held in reserve? What channels remain for communicating, authorizing, and enforcing compliance?
The central lesson, then, is not that force can never be used to achieve political ends. Schelling’s point was precisely that violence can communicate, threaten, bargain, and compel under certain conditions. The lesson is that violence does not become bargaining power automatically. It must be organized, limited, sequenced, and communicated in relation to a political object. Without that discipline, war can become not the diplomacy of violence, but the failure of diplomacy expressed through violence.
That is where American and Israeli conduct in the Iran War proved most consequential. The first failure was the absence of a stable bargain: the demands placed upon Iran shifted faster than compliance could be defined. The second was compressed escalation, which spent much of the campaign’s intermediate coercive leverage at the outset. The third was the destruction of command structures needed to interpret, authorize, and enforce compliance. The fourth was the failure to distinguish between deterring Iranian action and compelling public Iranian concessions. Of these, the absence of a stable bargain was arguably the most deleterious, because without a clearly defined political object, no calibration of violence could reliably produce compliance.
These failures compounded one another. The United States and Israel applied extraordinary military pressure without a coherent pathway from destruction to political compliance. The result was not simply a longer war, but a more dangerous and unstable strategic environment: one in which Iran has been damaged but not necessarily coerced, diplomacy continues under the pressure of renewed hostilities, and the rapid deterioration of the memorandum has left both sides with less trust, fewer credible off-ramps, and an increasingly dangerous temptation to answer the failure of strategy with still more destruction.
