Why Deterrence and Compellence Failed Against Iran
CEBRI JOURNAL
Abstract
This article analyzes the US decision under President Trump to escalate military action against Iran in 2026 and the persistence of the ensuing conflict. It argues that the US strategy shifted from deterrence to compellence after decades of oscillating coercive policies that failed to alter Iranian behavior. The shift increased costs for Washington without securing compliance. Iran instead adapted and escalated, revealing structural limits in coercion when credibility, objectives, and asymmetric capabilities are misaligned.
How should we make sense of the US decision under President Donald Trump to go to war alongside Israel against Iran at the end of February 2026? And how should we explain the durability of the conflict, despite Trump’s initial claim that it would last for only a month? One possible explanation is that the war reflects a failure of coercion, through both deterrence and compellence. These strategies constitute two sides of the same coin. Deterrence refers to an actor dissuading another from taking action; in this sense, it is conservative, in that it aims to maintain the status quo and is usually associated with the absence of war. Compellence, by contrast, refers to an actor pressuring another to undertake a particular course of action. It is therefore active, in that it seeks to change the status quo (Slantchev 2014, 4; Slantchev 2005).
Deterrence is generally understood to require less effort, although this requirement can increase substantially as the stakes, demands, and costs being threatened grow. By contrast, compellence typically requires greater effort, and any reduction in effort is more difficult to sustain when stakes and costs rise (Schaub 2004). Although the two strategies begin from different initial conditions and imply different objectives and assumptions about utility–namely, whether the target actor finds greater value in maintaining the status quo or in changing it–they nonetheless share several common requirements. These include knowledge of the adversary and its behavior, credible military capability, active monitoring, and at least some degree of shared communication and expectations (Echevarria 2024).
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