The first multipolar war

By now, it’s painfully obvious that the Iran war is of a qualitatively different nature than most other U.S. wars these past few decades.

Take Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, etc. (the list is unfortunately very long): the pattern was roughly always the same with an immense power differential between aggressor and victim. These wars were, by and large, imperial: the empire attempting to crush a much weaker people whose only realistic recourse was guerrilla resistance. And that is when they actually had the will to resist: some - like Libya - barely even bothered, just resigning themselves to their fate.

As spectators of these wars, if you had any moral sense, the dominant emotion was a kind of helpless disgust: you were watching a giant stomp through someone else's house.

Sure, the U.S. actually lost many - if not most - of these wars, famously replacing the Taliban with the Taliban or being expelled with their tail between their legs from Vietnam, but the power differential was no less real for it. It's just that power doesn't always guarantee victory: sometimes the giant can't kill everyone, and eventually tires of trying. But the “victories” won this way were always pyrrhic at best: the people endured, yes, but what they were left with was a country in ashes. Meanwhile, in the grand scheme of things, the giant walked away with little more than a bruised ego.

Iran is - remarkably - proving to be an entirely different beast: when others were merely surviving a giant, Iran appears to be able to compete with one.