What nearly fifty years of confrontation taught me about the difference between a recurring crisis and a permanent strategic condition
By Joe Cozart
I was born in 1958, which means something rather remarkable when I look backward at the history of the United States and Iran. I was twenty years old when the Iranian Revolution transformed the country in 1979, and twenty-one when Americans at our embassy in Tehran were taken hostage. I am now approaching sixty-eight. In other words, Iran has been sitting somewhere in the strategic background of almost my entire adult life.
Presidents have changed. Political parties have changed. The Soviet Union disappeared. Germany reunited. China became an economic superpower. The internet arrived. September 11 happened. America fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones went from curiosities to instruments of warfare. Artificial intelligence became part of everyday life. And Iran remained.
The particulars changed constantly. One decade it was hostages. Another it was confrontation in the Persian Gulf. Then terrorism, proxies, missiles, nuclear enrichment, sanctions, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah, Yemen, drones, shipping lanes, and Hormuz. Different chapters. Same book.
That is what struck me when I began thinking again about Iran in the context of America’s alliances and the broader international system. At first glance, Iran appears to be another geopolitical problem in another difficult part of the world. At my age, however, I see something different. I see the story of my adult life.
For almost half a century, every generation of American leadership has confronted some version of the same question: what do we do about Iran? Contain it, isolate it, sanction it, negotiate with it, deter it, engage it, pressure it, build coalitions around it, protect shipping from it, defend allies threatened by it, prevent escalation with it, prepare for escalation from it. The vocabulary changes, the administrations change, the strategies change, yet Iran remains.
And perhaps the most important lesson after nearly fifty years is not that Iran remains a problem. It is that we may have misunderstood the nature of the problem.
For nearly half a century, the United States has repeatedly treated Iran as a crisis to be solved. But crises are supposed to end. Iran has behaved much more like a persistent strategic condition. If that is true, then the objective should no longer be to search endlessly for the policy that finally “solves” Iran. The objective should be to build an international architecture resilient enough that Iran’s ability to disrupt the system steadily declines even if Iran itself does not fundamentally change.
That distinction matters enormously.
If something lasts for a year, you manage the emergency. If it lasts for a decade, you develop policy. If it follows you from age twenty to age sixty-seven, perhaps you stop asking when the problem will disappear and begin asking whether the architecture surrounding the problem is wrong.
That is where the subject becomes much larger than Iran itself. Iran is no longer merely a Middle Eastern question. If activity around the Persian Gulf interrupts oil, shipping, insurance, industrial production, military logistics, petrochemicals, or global supply chains, the consequences move almost instantly through Seoul, Tokyo, Europe, Washington, and everywhere else.
Suddenly South Korea matters. Japan matters. Shipbuilding matters. Industrial capacity matters. Energy reserves matter. Intelligence matters. Sensors matter. Missile production matters. Naval capacity matters. Supply-chain resilience matters. Redundant logistics matter. Distributed command and control matter.
What began during my youth as Americans being held inside an embassy in Tehran has evolved into a much larger question about how a globally interconnected civilization protects itself from persistent disruption.
That may be the lesson hidden inside these forty-seven years.
Not every strategic problem gets solved.
Some have to be architected around.
And perhaps that is one of the recurring mistakes powerful institutions make: assuming persistence represents policy failure when persistence may actually represent the nature of the environment.
American policy toward Iran has oscillated dramatically across Republican and Democratic administrations alike. At different times the emphasis has been pressure, negotiation, containment, deterrence, sanctions, military preparedness, diplomacy, or some combination of all of them. Through every variation, Iran remained.
That does not mean nothing changed. Quite the opposite.
It means the more useful question may no longer be how we finally solve Iran.
The upstream question is what the international system needs to look like if Iran, or any similarly persistent adversarial state, remains strategically disruptive for another fifty years.
That question leads somewhere very different from the traditional policy argument.
It takes us beyond sanctions and airstrikes. It takes us toward distributed alliances, resilient supply chains, redundant logistics, multinational ISR, allied industrial production, protected maritime corridors, diversified energy systems, distributed military capacity, and information networks capable of functioning even when individual nodes are attacked.
It also suggests that the real measure of strategy may not be whether an adversary disappears, collapses, reforms, or suddenly decides to become cooperative.
The real measure may be whether the system can continue functioning despite the adversary.
That is a much harder standard, but it is also a more mature one.
A resilient system does not depend on the adversary behaving differently. It does not require a favorable election, a diplomatic breakthrough, a regime change, or a moment of historic reconciliation. It assumes friction will continue and designs accordingly.
That is what nearly fifty years of Iran has taught me.
There is an odd personal perspective that comes from having lived through virtually the entire arc. At twenty-one, Iran looked like a crisis on television. At sixty-seven, I increasingly see architecture.
Perhaps age does that.
You stop assuming every problem is waiting for a solution.
Sometimes the more important intellectual breakthrough is recognizing that the problem is part of the landscape.
And once you recognize the landscape, you stop designing for the world you wish existed.
You start designing for the world that actually does.
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Joe Cozart, GMJoe™, GMJoe™ Consulting
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