Writing in Foreign Affairs on July 24, 2026, University of Chicago political scientist Robert A. Pape argues that the US-Iran war shows that, using cheap drone weaponry made largely from commercially available components, a weaker power can challenge US military dominance, creating market uncertainty that imposes real costs on American and global business interests.
The Iran war, he writes, has “signaled the arrival of a second revolution in precision warfare. If the defining image of January 1991 was a laser-guided bomb entering an air shaft in Baghdad, the defining image of the Iran war is that of a small one-way drone, assembled from commercial electronics and launched by a mobile team somewhere along Iran’s southern coastline, soaring toward targets in the Gulf.”
“The diffusion of new technology supplied inexpensive drones, cruise missiles, commercial sensors, and mobile launch teams. Iran’s objective was never to outright defeat American naval power in the ship-to-ship battles of old. It was to convince commercial actors that American naval power could no longer guarantee their absolute security.”
“American intervention,” Professor Pape argues, “no longer assures economic stability in the targeted region. For three decades, markets assumed that American power helped reduce risks. Today, U.S. interventions instead stoke uncertainty. Globalization created extraordinary prosperity, but it also created vulnerabilities that military power alone cannot easily eliminate. Weaker powers now see that it is possible to defy the United States—that resistance is no longer obviously futile. These actors do not need to defeat the United States in order to frustrate it. They merely need to erode confidence, impose costs, and outlast expectations of their defeat. The objective is no longer conventional victory on the battlefield but rather creating leverage through disruption.”
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