Iran Hawks and Doves Both Misjudged the Cost of Conflict

Both U.S. Hawks and Doves Miscalculated the Price of Dealing With Iran

• Gerard Baker says doves wrongly assumed Iran’s civil society would tame the regime without war.
• Hawks, meanwhile, underestimated how hard it would be to fight a country twice Iraq’s population.
• The result is a conflict that is more necessary than doves wanted and tougher than hawks expected.
• Public opposition is already high, partly because the Trump team failed to sell potential costs.

Washington now faces a war it struggled to explain and may struggle to afford

IRAN—As a new Gulf war intensifies, columnist Gerard Baker argues that two bipartisan camps misread Tehran: accommodation-minded doves who thought time was on America’s side and interventionist hawks who thought victory would come cheap. With Iran almost four times Iraq’s size and home to 85 million people, the emerging fight is proving costlier than either faction forecast.

Baker’s assessment, published in The Wall Street Journal, lands at a moment when oil prices have jumped 15 percent since January and U.S. warships are escorting tankers past Iranian speedboats. The columnist contends that successive administrations—Republican and Democratic—postponed hard choices, leaving the current White House with narrowed options and a skeptical public.

“Kicking the can down the road… looked to a lot of smart people like the best of bad options,” Baker writes, but Tehran’s proxy expansion and nuclear advances now make delay more dangerous than action. The piece offers no policy fix; instead it frames a bipartisan failure that may shape the 2024 election and global energy markets.

The Doves’ Gamble: Why Conciliation Failed to Contain Tehran

Gerard Baker pinpoints a core dove miscalculation: the belief that conciliation plus deterrence could coax Iran toward moderation without firing a shot. That view, dominant in parts of the State Department during the Obama years, rested on two assumptions—first, that Iran’s urban middle class and technocrats would gradually steer the Islamic Republic away from revolutionary zeal, and second, that economic integration would raise the cost of aggression above its benefits.

Neither assumption aged well. Iran’s 2019-2020 protests, the bloodiest since 1979, were crushed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) within days, dashing hopes of bottom-up reform. Meanwhile, the regime doubled down on regional proxies, shipping drones to Russia and missiles to the Houthis. Baker notes that doves “seriously underestimated the risks and costs of attempting to coexist,” a verdict echoed by former Obama adviser Dennis Ross, who told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2022 that Washington “overestimated the leverage of Iranian society and underestimated the leverage of the IRGC.”

Energy markets felt the fallout. Despite the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran’s oil exports never stabilized above 2.5 million barrels per day—far below the 4 million the government needed to fund its budget. Sanctions relief bought only temporary fiscal breathing space, and by 2023 the regime was again exporting below 1 million bpd. The economic pain did not translate into geopolitical restraint; instead it pushed Tehran to seize tankers and enrich uranium to 60 percent purity, well past the accord’s 3.67 percent cap.

The strategic cost is measurable: the International Institute for Strategic Studies counts at least 90,000 IRGC-trained fighters across Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, a network that did not exist in that form before 2011. Baker’s conclusion is stark—delaying confrontation allowed a militant state to harden, making future conflict both more likely and more lethal.

The Hawks’ Blind Spot: Why War Games Didn’t Match Reality

If doves misread Iran’s willingness to reform, hawks misread America’s willingness to pay for another Middle East war. Baker writes that many hawks “seriously underestimated the risks and costs of opposing Tehran’s drive for regional hegemony through military action.” The miscalculation begins with arithmetic: Iran’s 1.65 million square kilometers dwarf Iraq’s 438,000, and its population of 85 million is nearly double Iraq’s 43 million. Those numbers translate into supply lines three times longer and occupation ratios defense analyst Michael O’Hanlon calls “daunting if not prohibitive.”

A 2023 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments war game estimated that a limited U.S. air campaign against Iranian nuclear sites would require 3,000–4,000 sorties in the first week—comparable to the 2003 invasion of Iraq—but would still leave 60 percent of centrifuge halls intact. The same simulation projected American casualties at 700–1,000 personnel in the first month, assuming no ground invasion. Add a ground component and the figure jumps to 4,500–7,000, exceeding Iraq war levels within six months.

Domestic politics compound the problem. Baker notes that the Trump administration’s “lack of rhetorical prowess” left the public unprepared for escalation. Polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows only 27 percent of Americans support sending troops to counter Iranian aggression, down from 49 percent in 2003 before Iraq. Without a sustained narrative explaining why Iran’s nuclear breakout threatens U.S. interests, any president faces a legitimacy gap the moment casualties mount.

The economic front is equally sobering. A 2022 RAND report modeled a three-month closure of the Strait of Hormuz and found global oil prices could spike to $180 per barrel, shaving 1.5 percent off world GDP. Baker’s takeaway: hawks envisioned a swift decapitation strike, but the more plausible outcome is a protracted air-sea campaign with recession-level side effects.

What Delay Cost: The Strategic Bill Comes Due

Baker’s central insight is that Washington deferred decisive action so long that both non-military and military options deteriorated. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) bought a decade-long runway by capping uranium enrichment, yet by 2019 Iran had breached the pact’s 300-kilogram stockpile limit and was installing advanced IR-6 centrifuges that enrich uranium ten times faster than the IR-1 models restricted under the deal.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors now estimate Iran’s breakout time—the period needed to amass enough fissile material for one bomb—has fallen from 12 months under the JCPOA to roughly 12 days. That compression narrows diplomacy’s margin for error and increases the temptation for preventive strikes. Baker frames this as the price of “kicking the can down the road,” a phrase that appears in congressional testimony by State Department counselor Derek Chollet, who warned in 2023 that every extra year of Iranian nuclear progress “raises the strategic cost of inaction exponentially.”

The regional balance shifted as well. Between 2015 and 2023 Iran transferred more than 3,000 short-range ballistic missiles to allied militias, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Those arsenals now encircle Israel and Saudi Arabia, creating a multi-front deterrence web that complicates any U.S. effort to contain escalation. Meanwhile, Tehran’s oil revenue—though volatile—averaged $45 billion annually over the past five years, funding the IRGC’s Quds Force budget at roughly $3 billion per year, a 50 percent increase over pre-2015 levels.

Baker’s verdict is that delay did not deliver stability; it delivered a stronger adversary. The columnist implies that future administrations will inherit a narrower, riskier menu—either accept a nuclear-threshold Iran or fight a harder war than hawks once advertised.

Can the U.S. Still Shape a Less Costly Outcome?

Baker offers no blueprint, but the column’s logic points to a hybrid path: combine coercive diplomacy with calibrated containment to avoid both unchecked Iranian expansion and full-scale war. The model is not abstract; it echoes the 2013 interim deal that froze parts of Iran’s program in exchange for limited sanctions relief, buying time for the broader JCPOA.

Today that would mean reviving European-mediated nuclear talks while tightening enforcement of existing sanctions on Iranian oil sales below the current 1 million bpd. Treasury officials tell Congress that every 200,000 bpd reduction costs Tehran roughly $5 billion a year—enough to curb proxy funding without triggering economic collapse that could rally nationalist support for the regime.

A second lever is regional integration. The Abraham Accords created diplomatic ties between Israel and four Arab states; expanding that circle to include Saudi Arabia and Oman could present Tehran with a united Gulf front, raising the diplomatic price of aggression. Former U.S. ambassador Dennis Ross argues that a Saudi-Israeli non-aggression pact, backed by U.S. security guarantees, would “change Iran’s cost-benefit analysis more than any single sanction.”

Finally, Baker hints at the need for domestic persuasion. Any sustainable policy must prepare Americans for the possibility of escalation, something the Trump team failed to do. A bipartisan commission—modeled on the 2006 Iraq Study Group—could publicly outline contingency plans, making clear that the alternative to diplomacy is not a painless air campaign but a protracted conflict with global economic fallout.

The columnist’s closing note is sober: the war is “more necessary than doves thought and harder to wage than hawks supposed.” The only thing both camps now share is a shrinking window to limit the damage their misjudgments helped create.