Trump's 'Mowing the Grass' Iran Strategy Risks Becoming a Forever War

The United States has returned to a familiar pattern in the Middle East: strike Iranian military targets, watch them rebuild, strike again. After the most recent wave of American attacks on radar systems, air defenses, and maritime facilities, President Trump explained the logic plainly. The Iranians were reconstructing their radar equipment, he said. "We waited until it was almost built, and then we hit it." This is not a strategy designed to end a war. It is designed to manage one indefinitely.

The approach has a name borrowed from Israeli military doctrine: "mowing the grass." The metaphor is honest about what it promises and what it does not. You do not kill the grass permanently. You cut it back to a manageable height, knowing it will grow again. When it does, you mow it again. Applied to Iran, the strategy means the United States will monitor which military capabilities Tehran is reconstituting—radar installations, anti-aircraft systems, anti-ship missiles—and launch strikes once those capabilities cross a certain threshold. According to reporting from Axios, this is precisely what the Pentagon was considering: limited strikes at regular intervals to prevent Iran from rebuilding its military strength around the Strait of Hormuz.

In the short term, the approach has worked. American forces have significantly degraded Iran's military capabilities in the strait and have begun clearing Iranian sea mines. But these successes carry an expiration date. Tehran possesses the knowledge and industrial capacity to rebuild what has been destroyed. Bombs can demolish installations. They cannot erase the expertise or the factories. Reconstruction can be delayed. It cannot be prevented. This leaves the United States facing the same choice repeatedly: accept that Iran is regaining its capabilities, or attack again.

The strategy was never designed for this kind of opponent. Israeli academics who developed "mowing the grass" created it to combat non-state actors like Hamas—organizations without territory to defend, without shipping lanes to protect, without the ability to impose costs on an adversary simply by making people believe a passage is dangerous. Iran is a state. It controls critical infrastructure. Even a significantly weakened Iran can make the Strait of Hormuz seem like a risky place to sail. The United States needs the strait reliably open. Iran only needs to create doubt. This asymmetry is the strategy's fundamental weakness.

There is another problem: the United States cannot control how Iran responds. Trump warned Tehran not to retaliate after the latest strikes, threatening that Iran would be "totally wiped out as a country" if it did. Iran fired missiles anyway. Jordan reported thirteen ballistic missiles in its airspace, intercepting ten of them. The threat of annihilation did not deter a response. This suggests that repeated American attacks may be pushing Tehran toward a conclusion that alarms analysts far more than any conventional military capability: that only nuclear weapons provide lasting deterrence. Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has warned that the cycle of strikes and reconstruction could accelerate the precise nuclear development the United States and Israel sought to prevent.

For Trump, the strategy has domestic appeal. It allows him to avoid the occupation, nation-building, and large-scale troop deployments he has criticized his predecessors for pursuing. It lets him claim distance from the "forever wars" he has repeatedly condemned. But this is where the metaphor breaks down. A forever war is exactly what "mowing the grass" becomes if the United States is never prepared to accept Iran rebuilding its capabilities. Each successful strike merely creates the justification for the next one. Yacoubian calls it a "Sisyphean attrition strategy without end." The boulder rolls back down the hill. You push it up again. The work never finishes. The alternatives available to Trump do not look promising either. If he accepts Iran rebuilding its military strength, he risks renewed attacks on shipping and disruption of one of the world's most important energy routes. A political agreement between Washington and Tehran has failed repeatedly, apparently over insurmountable differences. What remains is the cycle: strike, watch, wait for reconstruction, strike again. The question is not whether this strategy will work. It is whether the United States can sustain it indefinitely, and what happens to Iran's nuclear ambitions while it tries.