07/04/2026

Iran and the Risk of Another Gallipoli

Iran and the Risk of Another Gallipoli
 By Verónica Pérez Taffi

Great powers tend to stumble over the same mistakes: underestimating their adversary, simplifying complex scenarios, and trusting that military superiority is sufficient to impose order. History offers multiple warnings, but they are rarely heeded. Today, the growing pressure on Iran appears to be moving in that same direction.

Between the Gallipoli Campaign (1915–1916) and the current U.S. strategy toward Iran, there is more than a historical analogy: there is a recurring way of conceiving power, territory, and the adversary.

In 1915, the United Kingdom believed it could alter the balance of the war by opening an indirect front. The objective was to control the Dardanelles Strait—essential for trade and military projection—undermine the Ottoman Empire, reconfigure the theater of operations, and open a route to Russia. The decision, promoted among others by Winston Churchill, rested on a premise that would be repeated throughout the twentieth century: technological superiority could compensate for any territorial or political complexity.

Gallipoli proved otherwise. Ottoman resistance—articulated, among others, by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—not only thwarted the operation but also revealed the limits of a strategic rationality that reduces space to a technical problem and the adversary to a secondary variable. The Ottoman strategy dismantled an operation conceived from a distance, without real understanding of the terrain or the opponent. The result was a costly stalemate that claimed the lives of thousands—far too many dead and wounded. A massacre that is still commemorated every April 25 by the relatives of the very young recruits of the ANZAC army.

A century later, the scene changes and so do the actors, yet the mistakes are repeated. The United States’ strategy toward Iran unfolds through sanctions, attacks, bombings, military pressure, and a persistent narrative of threat. There are no landings for now, but there is mobilization—a form of intervention aimed at disciplining. The means change. The logic remains.

Today, experiences such as the strategy taken at Gallipoli regain renewed relevance in a region marked by overlapping conflicts, geopolitical rivalries, and unstable balances.

Iran is not just another actor in this scenario. Its centrality is explained both by its geographic location—controlling the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz—its dimensions (1,648,195 km²) and demography (93 million inhabitants), a natural and geographically defensive country, with two major mountain ranges, deserts, and difficult-to-access coastlines. A civilizational state, as few others, capable of projecting influence through a network of state and non-state alliances. A terrestrial intervention in this war could replicate the dreadful experience of the Gallipoli Campaign.

Iran’s complex and contemporary relations with the West date back to the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh (orchestrated by British intelligence) and the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (a turning point in its relationship with the United States). Since then, indirect confrontations and episodes of controlled escalation have shaped a pattern in which neither side appeared willing to engage in open war. No one suggested it. The contentious relationship with the United States maintained a sustained level of friction, particularly around Iran’s nuclear program, especially since the early twenty-first century, and increasingly so following Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the signing of the 2020 Abraham Accords (in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates normalized relations with Israel), and the growing military presence in the region (particularly affecting the GCC countries).

This persistent tension with Israel constitutes one of the most visible axes from a historical perspective. The war erupted in the midst of negotiations mediated by Oman (as the main mediator) in Geneva; Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey joined in the second round, and Pakistan served as the communication channel to convey the proposals to the Iranian government. Nothing came of it. Negotiations were interrupted by the large-scale attack carried out by the United States and Israel on February 28, 2026, suggesting that the time for negotiation had expired.

THE SHORT-TERM CONSEQUENCES

The Persian Gulf is a space of high strategic sensitivity. Any disruption to maritime transit would have immediate consequences for global energy markets. That is precisely what occurred. The Persian Gulf serves as a vital corridor not only for large-scale oil and gas shipments, but also for fertilizers essential to agricultural production, critical inputs for the semiconductor industry, and global food supplies. The disruption of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was almost immediate as a result of attacks from both sides. There was no need to formally declare its closure. The effects on the global economy—on the potential shift from petrodollars to petroyuans, on logistical circuits, supply chains, and fuel prices—began to be felt rapidly, foreshadowing a new crisis, now of epic proportions.

The region also shows signs of increasing fragmentation. Conflicts in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq cannot be understood without considering the competition among regional powers. Minorities such as the Kurds and the Baloch, militias such as the Hezbollah and the Houthis. In many of these scenarios, Iran has consolidated its influence.

The analogy with Gallipoli becomes evocative: Allied powers underestimated geography and the adversary’s resistance, resulting in a costly stalemate. The outcome remains uncertain.

In Iran’s case, any ground intervention would have to confront not only a complex territory but also an interconnected regional network. From the perspective of critical geopolitics, geopolitics do not merely describe the world—it produces it. In that sense, Iran is not only an objective actor but also a strategic construction: an “other” that condenses risks and instability in a region that reproduces global competition without mitigation. Iran is part of the land-based Silk Road, part of BRICS Plus, maintains a Comprehensive Cooperation Treaty with Russia signed in January 2025, and also cooperates with them in economic, military, and energy matters. With China, they trade in Iranian oil—purchased at discounted prices—which is the most significant element; moreover, under the 2021 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, Chinese investment projections in Iran extend over a 25-year horizon. For this reason, any simplification of its internal complexity, its rationality, its will to resist, and its regional and global linkages should be considered with greater care.

There is, however, an additional element that makes this dynamic even more unstable. As Thomas Schelling argued, strategy in conflict contexts is not limited to the use of force. Coercion functions as long as the adversary perceives that the cost of not yielding will be greater than that of negotiating. Coercion is not simply the use of force, but the capacity to influence the other’s decisions. It works if the adversary believes that yielding is preferable to resisting. But this calculation is not unilateral—it is relational. It depends on perceptions, history, and context.

At Gallipoli, intervention did not break the adversary’s will. It reinforced it. In Iran’s case, external pressure may produce a similar effect: internal cohesion, legitimacy of the conflict, and regional projection. Coercion, far from disciplining, may consolidate the adversary.

There is also a dimension that is often overlooked. Just as the Dardanelles represented a critical axis of the international system, the Strait of Hormuz occupies an equivalent position today. This is not only about geography. It is about control, circulation, and power. On two occasions, negotiations mediated by third countries were underway when Iran became the target of attacks. The first was in June 2025, and the second triggered the war on February 28, 2026.

Here a critical point emerges. The strategy toward Iran lies on this logic of coercion: sanctions, military pressure through attacks and targeted killings of leaders (beginning with the religious leader Ali Khamenei), members of the Revolutionary Guard, infrastructure, and civilian population. These are accompanied by signals of force aimed at modifying its behavior. However, as Schelling warns, this type of strategy is inherently unstable. It depends on perceptions, cross-calculations, and the ability to sustain credibility without triggering an unintended escalation that, for the moment, the United States is unable to control.

At Gallipoli, this dimension was underestimated. It was not only a matter of occupying territory, but of breaking the adversary’s will. That never happened. On the contrary, the intervention strengthened Ottoman resistance and consolidated emerging leaderships for the future.

In Iran’s case, the risk is similar. Far from weakening the regime, external pressure may reinforce its internal cohesion and regional projection. Coercion, instead of disciplining, may harden positions and expand the conflict by reactivating militias once believed were destroyed, branching instability and severely worsening pre-existing conditions.

International strategies are not neutral: they respond to an order that is being sustained. When that order comes under strain, strategies tend to become riskier. Pressure on Iran cannot be read in isolation, but instead as part of a broader global dispute over the reconfiguration of the international system—an international order in interregnum.

Interventions do not guarantee order; they often produce the opposite. The experiences of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria attest to this.

The possible consequences are well known: a prolonged conflict, without clear resolution, with destabilizing effects throughout the region and global repercussions. The indirect involvement of actors such as China or Russia would only deepen this dynamic. For now, their strategies appear to be different.

Gallipoli left a lesson that transcends its time: power does not fail only due to a lack of resources, but due to errors in how the adversary and the scenario are conceived. Ignoring that lesson implies assuming a known risk. Because, ultimately, it is not always the presumed stronger side that prevails, but the one that better understands the conflict in which it is involved.

Verónica Pérez Taffi is President of the Argentine Association of International Relations Studies (AERIA). In the same country, she serves as Director of the Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations at the Universidad del Salvador (USAL) and is also a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) and the Universidad de Palermo (UP). She is a PhD candidate in International Relations at USAL.