The idea that the United States would launch an ill-advised war with undefined aims in the Middle East in order primarily to benefit its former adversary, Russia, would under almost any previous administration have been the preserve solely of the wildest conspiracy theorists. And yet in both economic and military terms, the benefits of U.S. President Donald Trump’s war on Iran for Russia have been a mirror image of its harmful effects on the United States and its allies.
This article has been adapted from American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame in its Long War with Washington by Keir Giles (Hurst, 224 pp., September 2026).
The surge in oil prices triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was welcome relief for Russia’s economy, struggling under the weight of its ongoing war against Ukraine. At the beginning of 2026, economists were predicting that economic challenges could force Putin to scale back the war or even, finally, enter peace negotiations seriously. By March, the boost in oil revenues meant Russia’s expected budget deficit was instead predicted to turn into a surplus. Demand for Russian fertilizer also soared as exports from the Gulf region all but stopped. And amid all this, Washington decided to suspend sanctions on Russian oil exports, boosting Moscow’s revenues still further and triggering even greater dismay among U.S. allies.
Those allies were also alarmed by the enormous expenditure of munitions against Iran—not only vastly outstripping the number of air defense munitions supplied to Ukraine over the preceding four years, but also critically depleting arsenals that might otherwise have helped defend European and East Asian allies. In just three days of the war on Iran, more than 800 Patriot anti-missile interceptors were used—more than Ukraine had received throughout four years of fighting off Russian attacks. Supporters of Ukraine saw the mismatch as making a mockery of previous U.S. claims that munitions could not be sent to Ukraine because they had to be preserved for confrontation with China.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stands in front of a Patriot air defense missile system at a military training area in Mecklenburg, Germany, on June 11, 2024.Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images
Other decisions made Ukraine’s situation even worse by diverting weapons that had already been slated for sale to Europe, either for onward supply to Ukraine or for Europe’s own defense buildup. The Pentagon notified Congress that it intended to divert about $750 million in funding provided by NATO countries for Ukraine, and use it instead to restock the U.S. military’s own inventories—which, in the U.S. view, did not require the consent of the European countries that had provided the funds.
The overall impact was a windfall for Moscow that helped sustain its war. In addition, the Iran war further strained relations between the United States and its allies while diverting attention away from Ukraine. With a clear incentive to keep Iran in the fight, Moscow expanded intelligence sharing and military cooperation to assist Iran in striking back against U.S. and partner assets in the Gulf. This reportedly included providing Iranian forces with the locations of U.S. military assets, including warships and aircraft.
But in another example of Russia getting a free pass no matter how much its behavior harms the United States, the Trump administration dismissed its own intelligence that Russia was assisting Iran with targeting information—whether by simply denying it or, like White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, by claiming that “it does not really matter.” This is consistent with Trump’s first term, when he declined to address reports of Russia paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
While Russia supported Iran with intelligence and targeting information, the United States appeared to be emulating Russia’s way of fighting wars.
U.S. presidents at war, as well as their subordinates, have customarily claimed to be acting in accordance with international and U.S. military law. Breaches of humanitarian law in war, even accidental ones, have been consistently and rigorously investigated and punished. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, by contrast, has called for “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” deliberately renouncing the moral high ground in conflict.
In terms of military effectiveness, Russia would agree with Hegseth. In March, Trump threatened to “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants, “starting with the biggest one first.” He repeatedly promised to destroy infrastructure that enables civilian life in Iran, and at one point said the United States would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” The threatened strikes against civilian infrastructure would have mirrored Russia’s repeated efforts to destroy Ukraine’s power generation and distribution system. That in turn reflects a Russian doctrinal concept that seeks to eliminate the adversary’s will or capacity to fight by destroying vital infrastructure that keep the government functioning and civilians alive.
Meanwhile, Hegseth declared that there would be “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” It was not immediately clear if he was announcing that the U.S. military will execute prisoners of war as policy—an unambiguous war crime under both U.S. and international law—or that he was simply unaware what “no quarter” means.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks about the Iran war at a news conference in the White House briefing room in Washington on April 6.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Some Trump supporters have exercised themselves trying to find legal justifications for such threats. The problem with this effort is that Trump, Hegseth, and other administration figures have already proclaimed they have an illegal objective, namely to inflict maximum harm and misery on the civilian populace and foment long term descent into chaos and civil war. Moreover, the prior removal of military lawyers and Pentagon specialists tasked with minimizing harm to civilians suggests a degree of premeditation for committing war crimes. The Trump administration’s decision to turn its back on the rules and norms that had guided the U.S. military for decades was reflected in the almost 90 percent staff reduction in the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, an official lowering of the threshold for lethal force, and an expansion of target categories.
The many ways in which Trump’s war on Iran mimicked Russia’s on Ukraine swiftly outstripped serious analysis and even parody. In both cases, stated aims and objectives repeatedly shifted. Both wars were presented, implausibly, as defensive to prevent an imminent threat. Both were begun under the expectation of swift success.
In fact, Washington’s explanations for why it went to war numbered in the dozens by the time the war was three weeks old. They included preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, hampering Iranian-backed militias across the Middle East, implementing regime change in Tehran, responding to alleged Iranian election interference, and more. “The strategic language used by the United States in Operation Epic Fury has been incoherent, inconsistent and essentially incomprehensible,” strategic thinker Paul Cornish writes. “Strategy—especially strategy for armed conflict—that cannot be explained clearly and lucidly qualifies less as language susceptible to close analysis and intelligent debate, than as a series of involuntary, disconnected and meaningless eructations.”
One of Trump’s justifications for launching the war—to prevent Iranian development of nuclear weapons—was demonstrated to be fiction. An assessment prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee by then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stated that, as a result of Israeli and U.S. strikes in 2025, “Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There have been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.” (Gabbard omitted this point in her testimony, perhaps realizing when reading it that she was about to contradict Trump in public.)
Tulsi Gabbard, then-U.S. director of national intelligence, testifies during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington on March 18.Win McNamee/Getty Images
Russia discovered in Ukraine that it cannot fight a war without help from North Korea and Iran. The United States realized in its campaign against Iran that it cannot project power adequately without overseas bases, including in NATO countries—and that use of them depended on the cooperation of the host countries it had not consulted. For an administration fixated, just like Russia, on the idea that only great powers matter and on its image as a preeminent hard power, discovering the extent to which U.S. capabilities are dependent on allies and that it lacks the power to compel those allies appeared baffling.
But that discovery was not limited to the United States. The war has fundamentally altered global perceptions of U.S. power in the same way that the war against Ukraine dealt a devastating blow to the Russian military’s image as modernized and invincible. The gap between Trump’s bombastic claims and reality also led to a recalibration of attitudes toward U.S. credibility, with media outlets around the world looking for innovative means of translating TACO—the acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out”—into local language and idiom.
Both the White House and the Kremlin generated a series of wildly unreliable claims and statements on their respective wars. For Russia, concealing information on the damage and casualties inflicted by Ukrainian attacks is standard practice. For the United States, however, this was a sharp break from prior relative transparency. In both cases, the goal was the same: ensuring that the domestic population lacks a full understanding of the human cost of the war in order to avoid the erosion of support.
Instead, official U.S. social media accounts began posting footage of airstrikes and destruction spliced with clips from cartoons, action films, and video games, leading military veterans and national security experts to accuse the administration of trivializing violent combat and attempting to turn the war into entertainment. Service members and families who lost loved ones reacted with disgust.
A screenshot of a video from the official White House X account, mixing airstrike footage with sequences from the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, posted on March 6.The White House via X
As the war progressed, U.S. leaders seemed to be trying to complete a bingo card of Russian soundbites and cliches. Like Putin, Trump avoided calling the war a war. Putin declared his a “special military operation” for various domestic reasons, while Trump repeatedly explained that he was calling his own war a “military operation” in order to avoid having to ask for approval from Congress. “It’s for legal reasons. Because as a military operation, I don’t need any approvals. As a war you’re supposed to get approval. Something like that. So I call it a military operation,” he explained in late March 2026.
“Russia doesn’t start wars, it finishes them” is a widespread trope for Russian propagandists. “Our president didn’t start this war. He’s finishing it,” Trump supporters similarly claimed, despite the fact that Trump had earlier bragged about launching the war. In July 2022, after months of unsuccessful fighting in Ukraine, Putin said, “We haven’t even yet started anything in earnest.” In early March, after mass waves of airstrikes on Iran, Trump told CNN, “We haven’t even started hitting them hard.”
Russia anticipated that its takeover of Ukraine would be completed swiftly, often quoted as “in three days.” The United States reportedly told Turkey that its war on Iran would “be completed in four days.”
And amid repeated threats of wholesale destruction that echoed those of Kremlin court jester and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Trump caused global alarm at the prospect of nuclear escalation. Putin had threatened “consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if the West obstructed his invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s threats to Iran were broadly similar, but with added profanity, leading foreign policy analysts to ponder seriously whether it could be Trump, not Putin, who first launched a nuclear weapon to rescue a war that had gone badly wrong.
Accustomed to swift success in coercion, Trump, like Putin, may have been surprised by a smaller adversary’s willingness and ability to fight back. In both cases, there were no preparations to fight a longer war because top leaders had believed their own propaganda and convinced themselves that the operation would be concluded swiftly because there would be no meaningful resistance.
The administration’s apparent position on Iran’s actions after being attacked was that they were entirely unexpected because there was no possible way of predicting them. This is far from the truth: The risks of attacking Iran were well known, not least because scenarios for a conflict had been studied and war-gamed for decades.
Nevertheless the administration failed to anticipate Iran retaliating, including by closing the Strait of Hormuz. It also failed to prepare to protect U.S. military bases and civilian targets from widely anticipated retaliatory attacks by Iran, leading to emergency evacuations of embassies days after the campaign began. Previous reductions in State Department staff exacerbated the impact of this failure to prepare, with widespread reports of stranded U.S. citizens receiving no support. In another demonstration of the Trump administration’s lack of concern for cause and effect, it launched its war on Iran after eliminating the dedicated Iran office at State and then was surprised at the results.
The planning failures were attributed to reliance on a close circle of advisors. The neutralization of the National Security Council has been particularly damaging, removing the interagency coordinating function that previously would have contributed to coherent policymaking and avoidance of unforced errors. In March, a knowledgeable and well-connected visitor to Washington explained that “all the structures that are vital to crisis management have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff … The military part of the Pentagon still functions, but the civilian part has been purged.” The resulting mismatch between intelligence advice and the course of action selected led to a widely repeated quip that intelligence played no role in Trump’s decision to go to war.
It seems implausible that U.S. commanders did not at least attempt to brief the administration on the inevitable negative outcomes of launching the war on Iran. Instead, the war showed that the senior-most levels of the U.S. military were not only unwilling to refuse illegal orders but also unable to dissuade Trump from issuing unwise ones.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has generated intense speculation on whether Putin is receiving a reliable picture of events from his advisors. Similarly, once it became clear that the campaign against Iran was failing, Trump-friendly media began to question whether the president, too, had not been fully informed on the risks and consequences of the operation. In a Russian context, this is referred to as a “good tsar, bad boyars” explanation for policy failures—where the ruler is infallible, but his underlings are responsible for advising him badly or for the corrupt or incompetent implementation of his wishes.
The war has inflicted serious damage on Iran. But for the United States, it is a self-inflicted strategic defeat that has left it substantially weaker both in the Middle East and globally than before the war. A senior British defense commentator marveled at “witnessing the astonishing picture of one of the greatest powers the world has ever known willfully weaken and undermine itself so that it no longer is either willing or able to play its accustomed role in the international system.”
The war’s most direct and immediate impact is the increased influence that Iran has secured over the global economy by interdicting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran now controls the movement of about 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. The war has removed any deterrent that would previously have prevented Iran from closing Hormuz. And with that comes immense diplomatic leverage, again handed to Iran by the war.
Vessels transit the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Bandar Abbas, Iran, on Sept. 5.Atta KENARE/AFP via Getty Images
The war also laid bare the vulnerabilities of the U.S. and other militaries to the new munitions that Iran has developed and Russia continues to perfect for its nightly attacks on Ukraine. The world has seen that a country with relatively limited resources can hold the world’s most powerful military at bay and inflict disproportionate losses through asymmetric means. The likely result is to embolden other challengers around the world.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that in the war’s first 39 days, U.S. forces expended more than half of their prewar inventory of several key munitions and that rebuilding stocks would take four years or more in some cases. This not only leaves the United States unprepared for confrontation with China but has also further convinced allies of U.S. unreliability. The realization has accelerated efforts by U.S. allies, partners, and friends to build coalitions both to protect themselves from known aggressors without U.S. help, and potentially against the United States itself if it chooses them as its next target.
The United States also severely compromised its credibility as a negotiation partner by repeatedly launching attacks during negotiations ostensibly held to avoid a conflict. And through the pronouncements of Trump and his appointed officials, the United States has comprehensively abandoned any pretense to moral authority. Trump’s repeated advocacy for unconstrained brutality in war eliminates the moral standing that previously set the United States apart from Russia.
One key distinction, however, remains. Unlike Russia’s war on Ukraine—which, far from being “Putin’s war,” enjoys wide popular support among Russians—the war on Iran is Trump’s war, not that of the United States, in that it is not backed by the majority of Americans. In embarking on their ill-conceived war on Iran, Trump and his inner circle may not have deliberately set out to grievously harm U.S. national interest. But once again, it is hard to imagine how they would have succeeded any better—and assisted Russia any more—if that had in fact been their aim.
