WASHINGTON—US President Donald Trump wants the Iran war to be a “win” for the United States. It could be—if Iran gives up building a nuclear weapon, opens the Strait of Hormuz, ends its support for proxy militias, and accepts limits on missiles and drones.
However, on March 30, Trump said that if there is no deal on these issues, the United States “will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!).” Two days later, in a primetime national address, Trump said, “If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric-generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.”
But strikes on Iranian infrastructure would not constitute a winning strategy for the United States. Iran’s peculiar sense of symmetry means that Tehran will almost certainly retaliate by attacking Arab Gulf states’ energy and drinking water infrastructure—with potentially catastrophic consequences. Moreover, given how Iran’s leaders think, infrastructure strikes are unlikely to get Iran to lift its blockade of the strait.
A history of symmetry
I have worked against the Iranian regime since 1981, when I successfully represented American companies that won hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the Islamic Republic at the Iran-US Claims Tribunal in The Hague. I was in the first US-Iran “track two” meetings in the 1990s and helped promote accountability for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s war crimes against Iranians. In the 2000s, on the State Department’s Iraq desk and in the US Embassy in Baghdad, I helped to counter Iranian influence in Iraq at a time when the United States pushed back hard, often successfully, against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies. Then as deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy at the US Department of Homeland Security, I chaired the department’s Iran Task Force from 2012 to 2018, helping to protect against a range of Iranian threats. I also worked closely with US allies and partners in the Middle East to help protect infrastructure from terrorist attacks. Then, as now, Iran was the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
My long experience with Iran has underscored this conclusion: For historical, cultural, and strategic reasons, the Iranian regime uses a peculiar sense of symmetry in conducting military and terrorist campaigns. Several examples demonstrate Iran’s approach:
- In June 2010, “Stuxnet” malware showed how industrial control systems could damage Iranian uranium-enrichment centrifuges. In 2013, Iran tried an industrial-control systems cyberattack against a dam in Rye, New York.
- In July 2012, the United States issued sanctions targeting Iranian banks. Two months later, Iran ramped up distributed denial-of-service attacks whose main targets were US banks.
- In August 2012, Iran’s surprise “Shamoon” attack deleted 35,000 hard drives at state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco. At the time this was described as “the biggest hack in history.” What got less attention was the revelation that in April 2012 “wiper” malware had deleted data on Iranian Oil Ministry and National Iranian Oil Company computers. It took Iranian programmers two months to figure out what had happened and two more months to carry out their symmetrical response.
- When Trump started his “maximum pressure” campaign in 2018 to limit Iranian oil exports, Iran called it “economic warfare” and tried to reduce US allies’ ability to export oil, first with May and June 2019 attacks on tankers and a Saudi pipeline, then with the September 2019 Abqaiq attack that temporarily halved Saudi oil exports.
- After Trump ordered a drone strike in January 2020 that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, Iran fired missiles against US bases in Iraq, then tried to assassinate Trump and other US officials.
- After US airstrikes during the twelve-day war in June 2025, Iran retaliated, claiming that it used the “same number of missiles as the number of bombs the United States used in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
This pattern has continued in the current war:
- On March 18, Israel attacked South Pars natural gas processing facilities. Later that day, Iran struck back at Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas processing facilities. Qatar had nothing to do with Israel’s attack, but the facility Iran hit processes natural gas from the same enormous field.
- When the United States struck a Iranian bridge on April 2, the semiofficial Fars News Agency immediately published a list of bridges in Arab countries and Israel that Iran could strike.
The implications of symmetry
None of this is to suggest that if the United States refrained from attacking Iran, Tehran would leave the United States alone. Regime leaders believe they lead the “axis of resistance” to what they consider unjust global domination by the United States. No post-1979 Iranian leader has recognized that the ways Iran projects power—for example, supporting proxy armies in other countries, enriching uranium well above any peaceful purpose, and calling for the destruction of the state of Israel—are precisely the reasons why so many countries, including the United States, oppose what Iran is doing. The irony is that if Iran stopped doing these things, then it would be more secure, not less secure.
In addition, Washington and Tehran do not approach military strategy the same way. In general, Iranian officials don’t follow the history and doctrines taught at Western military academies and political science departments. Conversely, very little of Iran’s actual strategic thinking is available in open-source English materials, save for rare articles published by interested think tanks.
What many in Washington overlook is that Iran tends to use operational and tactical symmetries while using asymmetric strategies. I’ve been in numerous high-level policy meetings with US officials talking about concepts such as escalation dominance and strategic deterrence. Yet these Western concepts fail to change Iran’s thinking.
To note one example, very few US leaders have taken the time to study how the brutal 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War shaped revolutionary Iran’s strategy. Tehran took several lessons away from that experience, including that the regime must be self-reliant. Iranian leaders felt it unjust that the world failed to rally to their side when Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980 in what Iran calls “the Imposed War.” What Iran’s leaders failed to recognize was that their holding hostage fifty-two US diplomats at the same time was a major reason international support was withheld. This experience left a bitter taste: When Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a United Nations cease-fire in 1988, he called it “worse than drinking poison.”
But Iran learned other lessons from the war as well. First, Iran took away that religious zeal was more important to victory than sophisticated military equipment. Second, it judged that the value of Western-style air power was overstated—a conclusion that led Iran to embrace missiles and eventually drones. Third, Iran’s ability to dominate the Persian Gulf was perhaps its most important weapon.
One of the few points where the Venn diagram circles of Iranian and Western strategic thinking overlap is that the top priority of the Revolutionary Guards and the clerical government is regime survival. This is why the regime has invested heavily in the tools of repression to forestall a color revolution and why the regime killed between 5,000 and 30,000 Iranians during protests in January of this year.
Factoring Iran’s approach into US planning
What all this means is that attacking Iran’s oil exports, generators, and water facilities would not be a winning strategy.
Militarily, such attacks would almost certainly succeed. Taking Kharg Island or knocking its production offline would have immediate effects. Tehran is short of water, and taking out electricity and water would internally displace millions. Many would likely head toward Turkey, creating a refugee crisis.
Iran also would retaliate, ramping up the intensity of its attacks. Not every Iranian missile or drone would be shot down. Vital energy and water infrastructure in the Gulf would be hit. While Gulf countries have prepared for such a catastrophe and repairs would begin immediately, widespread damage throughout the region could mean that backup options are unavailable. A direct Iranian attack on Arab oil and gas export facilities could take millions of barrels of production offline for months. A global recession could follow.
Iran can absorb extensive damage to infrastructure without changing its strategy, which is to have the Revolutionary Guards and clerical rule hold on at all costs. Trump’s two- to three-week deadline may actually work against his strategy. If Iran can absorb US punishment over that limited period, during which it inflicts damage in the region that is just as significant and turns the Strait of Hormuz into a knife at the throats of the Gulf countries and the global economy, then Iran could come out a winner. That would make Trump look like a loser, which is also an Iranian goal.