End of cost-free empire

America had a policy of an asymmetric cost model. It means costing the other side far more. Select a small state, lash out locally and coerce it economically and militarily. It helped America to maintain invincibility and adventurism in states like Libya, Venezuela, Panama and Grenada. All these states lacked the capacity to penalise America. This asymmetric model of cost on the other side helped America, in all the historical years, to remain relevant.

Iran has done a historic thing which has never been faced by Americans. Iran started a security doctrine of forward defence in comparison with the asymmetric cost model. Iran attacked forward-deployed assets, US allies and targets against Israel and America in the region. By blocking the Strait of Hormuz and threatening Bab al-Mandeb across the Gulf, Iran has effectively shaped an equal cost distribution for the US and its allies. It was a geographic opportunity for Iran, which it leveraged very well. This idea of distributed retaliation to counter the asymmetric cost model helped Iran to emerge as a state with equal capacity to hurt America, which has never been faced by Americans, and they were strategically and operationally not prepared to counter such an obstacle before.

What America has miscalculated started in 2020. After the assassination of Major General Qasem Suleimani, Iran directly attacked a US military installation: the Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq. Iran didn't seek revenge through proxies or deniable escalation, and it was a clear signal that Iran has directly accomplished a capacity to resist a global power. Americans remained in a magnificent illusion that the greater the defence budget, the more it automatically establishes them as superior on the battlefield. America anticipated that, as they have a greater budget, they could survive a war. From the Vietnam War to the Iranian attacks, they politically and economically faced humiliation because of miscalculations. Iran, with a smaller chunk of military spending, doesn't believe in a higher military budget but in disruption. It creates low-cost, high-impact systems to make strategic denial.

With this strategy, Iran has managed to end the era of relatively cost-free US wars. America's greatest monopoly over global outreach with its military footprint has turned into a source of humiliation and lost glory. The American high-cost military assets have only proved a fundamental weakness in the American war economy. At both the tactical and economic levels, the Iranian low-cost, high-precision military build-up and alliance system to launch different weapons at low-cost pressured America to revisit its warfare approach, to engage in low-cost weapons and allies, and to deploy tactical and military capabilities in war zones.

Odd Arne Westad, in his forthcoming book, The Lamps Are Going Out, formulated how imperial overstretch is not just resisting America but proving that a cost-free empire is structurally over. Like Britain before World War I, the US has designed a global system of alliances, bases, and promises to protect the security of different alliances in different regions. Iran's recent strategy of distributed retaliation has proved that the powerful dominance of the US is only a network of pressure points. Every base, maritime chokepoint and regional ally has witnessed a potential site of cost imposition. It marks a new age of symmetric cost, where the US is also bearing an equal share of cost and security threat.

In the future, the contours of wars will change. The cost penalty over America has signalled to smaller states that they can hurt America. Wars initiated by great powers are no longer one-sided, and small states equally deter through distributed retaliation. The idea of scale has been replaced with precision. America's invincibility in foreign adventurism without meeting the cost of its military action has ended. It is the rise of symmetrical warfare.