Washington looks in the mirror again: why the US is wrong when trying to break regimes like Iran and Russia

The American strategy once again encounters an old problem: in Washington, there is too often an attempt to understand ideologized regimes through their own logic of market, benefits, and costs. For Israel and Ukraine, this is no longer an academic debate, but a matter of survival.

The US is once again facing the same problem that Washington loves to underestimate, only to catch up later in a crisis situation. The American political culture is too market-oriented, too ‘business-like’ in its internal logic. It assumes that almost any opponent will eventually start calculating the cost of conflict, looking at losses, getting nervous about sanctions, fearing budget imbalances, and ultimately seeking compromise. For a market democracy, this seems natural. For an ideologized despotism, it is not necessarily so.

This is not a random mistake or a failure of one administration.

It is an old American habit to mirror other regimes through themselves. To look at Eastern despotisms through their own experience, through their own model of rationality, through their own belief that the market, money, elite comfort, and public irritation will sooner or later force the authorities to retreat. RAND directly warns of the danger of such mirror-imaging — substituting the opponent’s logic with one’s own logic — and recommends building several models of opponent behavior, not just one convenient for oneself.

But in practice, political decisions in the US too often are still assembled according to the old template. First sanctions. Then a signal. Then pressure. Then a window for negotiations. Then the expectation that the opponent will react as a rational Western-type player.

With Iran, this is especially clear right now. On March 23, 2026, Donald Trump postponed strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure for five days, citing productive contacts, while the Iranian side almost immediately began to deny this. Markets reacted to the news with relief, but the situation itself showed a much more important thing: Washington once again assumes that after sharp pressure, Tehran must necessarily start thinking about an exit in the logic of a deal. And Tehran is not obliged to think that way.

The problem of the West is not a lack of strength, but an incorrect model of the opponent.

The most dangerous self-deception here is that in the US and more broadly in the West, too many still view such regimes as poorly functioning versions of their own world. They say, they also have elites, money, interests, budget, consumers, technological chains. So, if you hit the economy hard enough, the political system will eventually crack.

But in totalitarian and strictly ideologized systems, the backbone is different. The main role there is not played by the market. Not business. Not society. And not oligarchs, no matter how much money they have. The basis of such a system is the state-party and power apparatus, which controls media, communications, fear, repression, and the very notion of norm. As long as this apparatus holds, the system itself can endure losses that seem extreme to a Western observer.

On the Iranian example, this is almost textbook. After the assassination of Ali Khamenei and a number of key figures, the Iranian system did not collapse. The leadership quickly reorganized: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps received a more central role, lines of succession were preserved. That is, even after a heavy decapitating blow, the regime demonstrated not disintegration, but adaptation.

Even more indicative is the internal response of the regime. While Washington continues to talk about negotiations and the possibility of de-escalation, a massive wave of repression is underway in Iran. According to Reuters, on March 24, the authorities reported the arrest of 466 people for online activity allegedly undermining national security; the total number of detainees for the month exceeded a thousand. This is the essence of such systems: under external pressure, they do not necessarily become softer. Very often they become harsher inside.

Israel understands this logic better than many in the West simply because it has lived with it for decades. Here it has long been known: for an opponent built on ideology, the cult of victimhood, the sacralization of conflict, and the fear of showing weakness, the concept of ‘too expensive’ does not work as it does in Western political theory. For such regimes, the survival of power and symbolic prestige may be more important than the welfare of the population.

Why a mistake in assessing sanctions leads to a mistake in assessing war.

From this follows the next problem. In Ukraine and in Europe, and in the US too, there is too often a tendency to savor the official figures of the Russian Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank, industry losses, deficits, sequestrations, and signs of overheating. All this is important. All this really hits the regime’s capabilities. But from this, too often a false emotional conclusion is drawn: if the system is in pain, then it is almost on the brink.

This is a dangerous illusion.

Brookings research on sanctions against Russia directly shows a mixed picture: the restrictions are enormous in scale, but their effect is not equal to a rapid political collapse. Brookings separately emphasizes that the sanctions did not force Russia to stop the war, although they made the war more expensive and complicated its conduct. CEPA in February 2026 formulates a similar thought even more harshly: without some unforeseen financial shock, the Russian economy is unlikely to simply collapse, although the regime’s room for maneuver is narrowing.

This is what many do not want to admit out loud today. Sanctions can weaken the system. They can limit it technologically. They can hit the quality of the war, the budget, the pace of recovery. But they do not replace understanding the nature of the regime. If an analyst sees only the budget deficit and falling revenues, but does not see the apparatus that holds fear, media, repression, and mobilization, he sees only half the picture.

For Ukraine, this is not a matter of theory, but of historical memory. Ukrainians, unlike many Western experts, have not completely erased the memory of the Soviet administrative-command system. The memory of the KGB, of dissidents, of a state that hid disasters, rewrote reality, and kept society in subjugation is still alive. That is why it is especially dangerous for Ukraine to repeat the American mistake and believe that Eurasian-type regimes can be measured by the usual logic of the market.

In Russia, this system has not just returned.

It has reproduced itself in an updated form — with a Stalinist instinct, but already with digital technologies, total surveillance, modern propaganda, and much faster control over information. In this sense, the war really should be planned not as a story for months, but as a story for years. And not only in a military sense but also in an intellectual sense.

Israel and Ukraine need not faith in a ‘quick breakthrough,’ but a cold long strategy.

Against the backdrop of the war with Iran and simultaneous tensions with China, the American model once again shows its internal weakness. Reuters reported on March 17 that Trump postponed a trip to Beijing due to the war with Iran and its related strategic and economic consequences. And on February 4, Xi Jinping and Putin emphasized in a video call that the relations between Moscow and Beijing remain a stabilizing factor and a strategic energy partnership. In other words, while Washington still hopes to sort challenges into separate folders, the regimes opposing the US are increasingly acting as parts of one broad anti-Western environment.

For NAnews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency the main conclusion is important here. The mistake of the US is not that they are weak. The mistake is that they too often want to see a controlled, predictable, and economically rational response where a completely different logic operates: the logic of the apparatus, ideology, historical revenge, and readiness to translate society into a mode of long patience.

This means that Israel and Ukraine cannot build their own forecasts based on someone else’s hope. They cannot substitute regime analysis with joy over another budget failure of the opponent. They cannot take economic pain for an automatic political breakdown.

Such systems do not break when they simply become expensive. They break when the very apparatus of coercion, control, and management begins to crumble. And this is always harder. Longer. More dangerous.

And that is why the conversation about war today needs to be honest: ahead is not a quick finale and not a beautiful negotiation market, but a long, tough, and nervous confrontation with regimes that do not intend to become like the West just because it is more convenient for the West to understand them.

И именно поэтому разговор о войне сегодня нужно вести честно: впереди не быстрый финал и не красивый рынок переговоров, а длинное, жесткое и нервное противостояние с режимами, которые не собираются становиться похожими на Запад только потому, что Западу так удобнее их понимать.