Chandigarh: Few countries have done more to unsettle successive US presidents than Iran. Remarkably, it achieved this disruption with two US leaders who could scarcely have been more different in temperament, ideology or governing style.One was a cautious, seminal, morally driven former naval officer who placed his faith in diplomacy, restraint and human rights. The other is a combative 80-year-old populist who built his political identity around bravado, unpredictability and deal-making. Yet both Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump ultimately ran into the same uncomfortable reality that Iran possessed a unique ability to frustrate American objectives, absorb immense military and economic pressure and expose the limits of US power.For both presidents, separated by more than four decades, Iran became more than a foreign-policy challenge. Carter was consumed by a crisis born of revolution and upheaval; Trump was confronted by the consequences of a confrontation he had helped escalate during his second term. Yet both arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion: even the world’s most militarily powerful and wealthiest nation cannot always bend events – or determined adversaries – to its will. Operation Eagle ClawThat was the central argument advanced recently by Financial Times (FT) columnist and Chief US commentator Edward Luce. His thesis, in a cogently argued analysis published on June 10, was not that Carter and Trump were similar men. They were, in fact, almost complete opposites. Rather, Luce maintained that Iran became the issue that threatened to define both presidencies by revealing a deeper truth about American power itself: its limits and the difficulty of translating overwhelming strength into desired political outcomes.Jimmy Carter and President William Tolbert of Liberia wave from their motorcade during a visit to Monrovia, Liberia on April 3, 1978. Photo: White House photo, Bill Fitz-Patrick, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.For Carter, the humiliation came in the form of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis, during which 52 Americans were held captive for 444 days. The more Carter sought to resolve the crisis, the more he appeared trapped by it. The failed Operation Eagle Claw military mission, which he launched to rescue the hostages, involving a complex force of helicopters and transport aircraft, ended in disaster in the Iranian desert, killing eight US servicemen. This only further reinforced perceptions of US impotence and contributed significantly to Carter’s defeat in the 1980 Presidential elections.Trump, for his part, confronts a different version of the same dilemma.He entered office, for the second time last year, promising to restore American strength, deter adversaries and bend rivals to his will. Yet, in recent weeks, Iran has demonstrated an ability to resist coercion, absorb pressure, and force Washington to react to events rather than shape them. As Luce observes, the danger for Trump is not military defeat but political perception: the appearance that events are controlling the president rather than him controlling events.But Iran’s significance extends beyond Carter and Trump. It represents something larger: a recurring challenge to an enduring American belief – and hubris – that overwhelming military and economic power can reliably produce desired political outcomes in line with predetermined objectives.The US military history is not flatteringFor decades, the US has cultivated a global mythology of military competence and strategic mastery, reinforced by Hollywood’s powerful portrayal of a nation that enters global crises reluctantly, fights valiantly – and, of course, fairly – before ultimately emerging triumphant.A closer examination of US military history, however, suggests a far more complicated, and less flattering, reality. Repeatedly, and with notable exceptions, Washington has demonstrated a tendency to underestimate adversaries, misread local conditions and overestimate both its ambitions and military superiority. The result has been a succession of interventions that achieved temporary tactical success but failed to deliver durable strategic outcomes.Even America’s defining internal conflict – the Civil War (1861-65) – revealed many of these shortcomings. The Union ultimately prevailed, but only after years of military incompetence, repeated command failures and staggering casualties. Victory emerged less through strategic brilliance than through superior resources and relentless attrition.The two World Wars, thereafter often presented as the ultimate proof of American strategic competence, likewise deserve closer scrutiny. In both conflicts, the US entered late. In the instance of World War I, Washington watched events unfold for nearly three years before unrestricted German submarine warfare threatened US commercial and passenger shipping in the Atlantic, and the 1917 Zimmermann Telegram, in which Berlin proposed an alliance with Mexico against America, finally compelled intervention. Then, US President Woodrow Wilson framed entry into the war as a mission to make the world “safe for democracy,” but America joined a conflict whose outcome was already being shaped by the Europeans.Undoubtedly, US manpower and industrial materiel capacity proved decisive, but Washington proved far less successful in shaping the peace. Wilson’s vision of a stable post-War order based on collective security was largely diluted at Versailles, where traditional European power politics reasserted itself. Consequently, the resulting settlement failed to secure lasting stability and contributed directly to conditions that ultimately produced World War 2.In the inter-war period that followed, even as tensions escalated through the 1930s with the rise of revisionist powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – seeking to overturn the post-war order, the US retreated into a posture of strategic detachment, guided by domestic priorities and a reluctance to re-engage in European affairs.And, when World War 2 erupted in 1939, with Germany’s invasion of Poland and the subsequent collapse of European stability, the US remained outside the conflict, despite repeated entreaties from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and others, and growing alarm over the Axis powers’ untrammelled occupation of large parts of Europe. Attack on Pearl Harbour, view from Japanese planes. Photo: Imperial Japanese Navy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.It was only the shock of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 that forced the US entry into the war, nearly 828 days after its outbreak. However, once engaged, the US rapidly transformed the scale of the conflict, with its vast military-industrial base and exceptional capacity to mobilise resources across multiple theatres of war in Europe and Asia. But this success should in no way be mistaken for strategic foresight, for, as in World War I, American entry was reactive rather than pre-emptive, driven less by anticipation than by necessity imposed by events. After 1945, the US emerged as the dominant global power and increasingly assumed the role of international policeman. Yet its post-war record reveals repeated difficulties in converting military power into either diplomatic or political successes.This dynamic was first clearly visible in the Korean War (1950–53), where intervention under the banner of the United Nations, framed as a defence of freedom, ended not in victory but in stalemate. The result was a permanently divided peninsula and the emergence of North Korea as a militarised, nuclear-armed state that remains a persistent and unpredictable challenge today. In effect, US military force produced not resolution but enduring division on the Korean peninsula, setting a pattern in which wars were concluded without stable political outcomes. Vietnam represented an even more profound failure.Also read: How the Deal is a Victory and an Opportunity for Iran, a Setback for US and a Bitter Lesson for IndiaArmed with unmatched firepower, advanced technology and vast resources, the US found itself unable to defeat an adversary fighting with little and according to an entirely different logic, one that combined endurance, patience and political will. America measured success in body counts, territory seized and enemy formations destroyed, but the Vietcong and North Vietnamese leadership determined it in terms of, survival and their ability to outlast a foreign occupier.Ultimately, the US was forced into an ignominious withdrawal. Images of desperate evacuations from Saigon in 1975 became enduring symbols of strategic failure, not because America had lacked military power, but because it never developed a coherent strategy capable of translating battlefield activity into a sustainable political outcome.The same lesson resurfaced twice in Iraq.Firstly, in 1991, the US-led coalition’s Operation Desert Storm decisively expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restored the country’s sovereignty, demonstrating the extraordinary effectiveness of American military power. Yet Washington stopped short of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, leaving unresolved many of the political problems that would return to plague the region. Twelve years later, Operation Iraqi Freedom rapidly toppled Saddam’s regime, while the opening “shock and awe” campaign showcased overwhelming US military superiority to television audiences around the world. Militarily, the operation was a remarkable success. Politically, however, it proved far more problematic. Weapons of mass destruction were never found, state institutions collapsed, sectarian violence exploded, and regional instability intensified. Once again, Washington demonstrated an unrivalled ability to win the immediate battle, but a far weaker capacity to secure the peace that followed. US Navy Seal’s search for al-Qaida and Taliban while conducting a Sensitive Site Exploitation mission in the Jaji Mountains on January 12, 2002. Photo: US Navy by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Tim Turner (Released) Official Navy Page from United States of America | PH1 TIM TURNER/TASK FORCE K-BAR/Wikimedia Commons.Afghanistan subsequently provided perhaps the clearest illustration of Washington’s recurring difficulty in translating military success into durable strategic gains. Executed under the banners of Operation Enduring Freedom and later Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, America’s longest war ultimately ended where it had begun: with the Taliban back in power in Kabul two decades later.What had begun as a narrowly focused mission to destroy al-Qaeda and remove its Taliban hosts after 9/11 gradually evolved into a misguided and over-ambitious nation-building project. For nearly 20 years, Washington sought to remake a society whose tribal, political and cultural dynamics it barely understood. When the final US chaotic and panicky withdrawal came in August 2021, the Taliban swept back into Kabul with startling speed.Two decades of war, vast expenditure and thousands of lives had culminated in an outcome that bore a striking resemblance to the situation that had existed before the intervention began.A similar disconnect between military success and lasting political outcomes can be seen across a range of other US interventions.Somalia descended from a humanitarian mission into a chaotic withdrawal, Libya’s regime change produced state collapse, and Kosovo halted immediate violence, but generated a fragile and contested settlement. In each of these instances, US military operations were tactically impressive, but the consequences that followed proved incomplete, unstable or outright disastrous.Why was the Iran challenge different?Iran, however, presented a fundamentally different challenge.Forever wary of American power and acutely conscious of the fate that had befallen regimes from Baghdad to Kabul, Tehran spent decades studying not merely US military capabilities but also the limitations exposed by successive interventions. Unlike other adversaries that sought to confront Washington through conventional means, Iran developed a strategy designed to exploit what it regarded as America’s principal vulnerability: the difficulty of sustaining long and costly confrontations in the face of domestic political pressures, financial burdens and shifting public opinion. It realised that American administrations operate within timeframes measured in election cycles, media narratives and, increasingly, social media dynamics.Residents swim and play in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz while cargo ships and commercial vessels lie anchored in the distance off Bandar Abbas, Iran on June 10, 2026. Photo: AP/PTI.Iran’s leadership also demonstrated a willingness to absorb punishment, endure sanctions and prolong confrontation, making any sustained campaign increasingly costly for Washington militarily, economically, politically and diplomatically. The significance of Iran’s strategy lay not merely in its ability to challenge the US on the battlefield but in its demonstration that even the world’s most powerful military and financial power faces limits when confronted by an adversary prepared to endure unremitting pressure and to wait out its opponent.Yet, as Luce indicated in his FT column, there was an important distinction between the setbacks suffered by Carter and Trump. Carter was overtaken by a revolutionary upheaval and hostage crisis that he neither initiated nor controlled. His humiliation in Tehran was largely circumstantial – the consequence of a rapidly unfolding crisis that overwhelmed his administration.Trump, by contrast, was constrained by a confrontation with Iran that he had helped intensify alongside Israel. Convinced that the firepower of the “world’s best military” would compel Tehran to yield, he ultimately found himself on Wednesday signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Iran aimed at ending the 105-day conflict that had convulsed the Gulf and wider Middle East since February – an agreement that appeared to leave Tehran with much of what it had sought from the outset. This included economic relief, preservation of its ballistic missile capabilities and continued strategic ambiguity over the future of its nuclear programme and control of the critical Strait of Hormuz. Intended to end the crisis rather than decisively resolve it, the Versailles accord was hailed by supporters as a pragmatic achievement; critics, however, saw it as an implicit acknowledgement that the ambitious objectives with which the confrontation had begun were unattainable.And, like Carter before him, Trump too ultimately encountered the same uncomfortable reality: even the world’s greatest military power has limits when confronted by a determined adversary willing to absorb pressure and sustain confrontation over time.In the final analysis, Iran did not defeat American power; it methodically exposed its limits, marking the end of the illusion of unquestioned global US omnipotence. The lesson from the US-Israel-Iran war was not that Washington lacked overwhelming military and economic strength, but that its unmatched power could not guarantee compliance from a determined adversary.