The war with Iran has done more than open another front in an already volatile region. It has exposed the central tension in American foreign policy in the mid-2020s. The United States (US) still has the military reach, industrial depth, and alliance network of a superpower. Yet this conflict has shown that even a superpower must now choose more carefully between theatres, priorities and promises. Washington is being reminded that power is not the same thing as freedom of action.
The roots of this crisis are long and bitter. The US helped restore the Shah in 1953, backed Iran during the monarchy, and then watched the relationship collapse after the 1979 revolution and hostage crisis. Washington shifted between coercion, deterrence and negotiation, yet never found a durable understanding with Tehran.
The more immediate turning point came with the collapse of the earlier nuclear framework. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had limited Iran’s enrichment and lengthened its breakout time, but in 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the agreement and restored “maximum pressure”. In the years that followed, Iran expanded enrichment, regional tensions sharpened, and the US moved from uneasy containment towards direct force. By early 2026, athe US and Israel had entered a large-scale campaign against Iran, prompting retaliation against US facilities in Gulf states and disruption across the Strait of Hormuz. That shift is the real story. Wars do not simply test power; they reveal its limits.
Washington shifted between coercion, deterrence and negotiation, yet never found a durable understanding with Tehran.
This has changed the character of US foreign policy. The war has pushed the USbeyond into something more direct, costly, and politically binding. American credibility is now tied not just to deterring Iran, but to influencing a war that affects nuclear risk, energy flows, alliance politics and the wider regional order.
The first major consequence lies in America’s relations with its allies and partners. US alliances remain one of Washington’s greatest strategic assets, but the Iran war has again shown that allies do not view escalation in the same way, nor do they share the same appetite for cost and risk. The earlier US withdrawal from the nuclear deal had already exposed differences with Europe. Alliances are sustained not by power alone, but by consultation, predictability and the sense that force is being used for a wider strategic purpose. Allies can live with danger. What they find harder to absorb is uncertainty.
Israel, of course, stands apart. The 2026 National Defense Strategy describes strengthening Israel as a central response to Iran and calls it the “model ally”, while also urging other regional partners to do more for themselves. That language is revealing. It shows that Washington still treats Israel as its most dependable military partner in West Asia, while expecting others to carry more of the operational and political load.
The Gulf monarchies occupy a more uneasy middle ground. In recent years, the US tried to build regional arrangements aimed at deterring Iran, including the Negev Forum and quiet military coordination among Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on missile and drone threats. Yet Gulf states also know that when Washington and Tehran move into direct confrontation, they themselves become exposed targets. That is why American power appears reassuring up to a point, and dangerous beyond it. They need the US security umbrella, but not the storm that comes with it.
Alliances are sustained not by power alone, but by consultation, predictability and the sense that force is being used for a wider strategic purpose.
The effect on Asian allies has been no less important. As US military assets were shifted from Asia to the Iran theatre, allies near China grew uneasy about what this might mean for deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, precisely when Washington insists that China remains its principal long-term challenge. The Iran war is therefore no longer just a Middle Eastern problem. It has become a test of whether the US can ask allies in one theatre to support operations in another without weakening trust in its commitments nearer to China.
That issue leads to the deeper concern: the strain on America’s global defence commitments. The 2026 National Defense Strategy ranks homeland defence first, China deterrence second, allied burden-sharing third, and the defence industrial base fourth. It also makes clear that Europe must increasingly manage Russia with US support rather than full American primacy.
This is where the idea of the USas a superpower becomes more complicated. A superpower is not simply a state that can fight. It is a state that can fight in one region without losing authority in another. The US still possesses unmatched power projection, and the scale of its deployments and strikes around Iran confirms that. Yet the same conflict also reveals the limits of simultaneity. This is not weakness in the old sense. It is the recognition that primacy now requires triage. Great powers rarely begin by admitting decline. More often, they discover it when every theatre starts competing with every other.
Domestic politics in the US have also been affected. Even some of Trump’s own allies, including voices in the “America First” camp, have warned against drift towards a ground war as additional forces moved into the region. Their concern is strategic as much as political. Once air and missile strikes widen, they generate their own momentum. Shipping lanes must be protected, bases defended, logistics expanded and limited ground tasks justified. That is now the central argument in Washington: should the US keep acting as the armed manager of global order, or save its strength for narrower priorities?
The US still possesses unmatched power projection, and the scale of its deployments and strikes around Iran confirms that.
Another consequence concerns the US as a supplier of defence products and security systems. SIPRI’s 2025 trends data, reported in March 2026, showed that the US accounted for 42 percent of global major arms exports in 2021-25, up from 36 percent in the previous five-year period. That is not merely an industrial fact. It is a geopolitical one. Arms exports deepen alliance ties, lock partners into American maintenance and training ecosystems, create long-term dependencies, and extend U.S. influence far beyond the battlefield. But the Iran war also highlights the burden that comes with that role. A state that supplies weapons across regions must replenish inventories, expand munitions output and protect the credibility of delivery schedules. In the twenty-first century, a superpower is judged not only by the number of its bases, but by whether its factories can sustain its promises.
The war with Iran revives an old question in a sharper form: is the US still trying to be present everywhere, or only where it matters most? The answer appears to lie somewhere in between, and that is precisely the difficulty. Washington still seeks dominance in key theatres and still behaves, when required, like the one power able to strike deep, coordinate coalitions, secure sea lanes and reshape regional military balances. Yet it is also telling allies to spend more, fight more and carry more. The old model of hegemony is being revised, not abandoned.
In that sense, the Iran war may do for the US what Iraq once did, though in a different way: not a civilisational turning point, perhaps, but a moment of strategic clarification. Iraq showed the cost of maximalist intervention and regime-change ambition. The Iran war may instead show the cost of trying to preserve primacy while reducing exposure at the same time. Washington wants fewer open-ended commitments, yet it cannot tolerate hostile revision in strategically vital regions. It wants allies to do more, yet it knows that those allies still depend on American intelligence, logistics, naval power and advanced weapons.
Washington wants fewer open-ended commitments, yet it cannot tolerate hostile revision in strategically vital regions.
American power remains extraordinary, but it is no longer frictionless. The Iran war has not ended America’s superpower role, but it has forced Washington to operate under tighter strategic limits, sharper allied scrutiny and heavier industrial pressure. It has reminded allies that the US can still move quickly and hit hard, but also that its attention is finite and that one regional crisis can quickly reshuffle its priorities. That, in truth, is what many American partners worry about most: not weakness, but distraction. The real question is not whether the US can still bear the burden. It is how long it can do so without narrowing its ambitions. In the end, strategy is not about doing more. It is about deciding what can no longer be done.
Amb. Sanjay Kumar Verma was Former Chairman of RIS; Former High Commissioner of India to Canada and Former Ambassador of India to Japan and Sudan.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.