Murat SofuogluThe United States maintains a military presence across much of the world, with hundreds of bases and hundreds of thousands of personnel deployed abroad.
That global reach has long allowed Washington to project military power across several regions at once. But it also depends on a finite supply of ships, aircraft, personnel and munitions — resources that become increasingly difficult to sustain when a major conflict drags on.
Six months into the war with Iran, those pressures are becoming increasingly visible.
According to recent assessments, the Iran war has been depleting US interceptors and missiles to levels considered “beyond critical” and putting American global commitments from Europe to the Pacific in danger, as Washington has moved a significant part of its naval and army forces to the Middle East to meet Tehran’s resistance.
While Tehran continues to target US military bases across the Middle East from Bahrain to Jordan, concentrating American military capabilities on the Iran war to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to global oil shipping might weaken Washington’s hand in the newly emerged great-power rivalry with China and Russia in areas from Taiwan to Eastern Europe.
“It is well known in Washington that keeping large numbers of high-readiness forces in the Persian Gulf weakens the US strategic position in the Pacific and in Europe,” Edward Erickson, a former American military officer and a retired professor of military history, tells TRT World.
“Moreover, there is a significant cost to maintaining ships, aircraft, and personnel in distant theaters on a war-readiness footing. Extended deployments take a heavy toll on the American capability to conduct large scale global deployments,” Erickson adds.
The strain has also become visible aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose deployment was extended after it was redirected to the Middle East for operations against Iran.
The carrier left San Diego in November 2025 and spent almost seven months operating in the Middle East before leaving the region in August.
Its roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines spent months without a port call, amid concerns from families and lawmakers about deteriorating living conditions, supplies and the mental health of personnel aboard.
The Lincoln finally arrived in Thailand on September 2 after 286 consecutive days at sea, underscoring the demands the prolonged Iran conflict has placed on US naval forces.
Can the US fight at all fronts?
While top US military commander General Dan Caine reportedly warned the Trump administration that military action against Iran risked drawing Washington into a prolonged conflict, the administration appeared to be preparing for a much shorter war, calculating that sustained military pressure and domestic unrest could eventually force Tehran to capitulate.
“The underlying assumption for the American military was that the war could be finished quickly on terms favorable to the US. When the Iranian regime survived the decapitation strikes that assumption proved invalid,” says Erickson.
But concentrating forces in “the Persian Gulf Area of Responsibility (AOR), as a principle of war, is only possible through its reciprocal — economy of force,” Erickson says, referring to the military principle of accepting greater risk in secondary theatres in order to concentrate forces on the main effort.
“This is deliberate, dangerous, and always incurs risk,” he adds.
The US could therefore face longer-term consequences from the Iran war well beyond the Middle East, particularly as Russia continues to test NATO's defences in Europe and Washington remains focused on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.
According to recent reports, the US is considering moving many of its bases from Arab states to Israel, thereby diminishing its military presence in the Gulf.
European states have already been alarmed by dwindling interceptor stocks in their military inventories, which could put them in grave danger if Russia attacked their territories.
Analysts also warn that, in the face of an imminent Chinese offensive, Taiwan, without enough missiles and other military munitions, might lose its ability to defend its territory.
Both possibilities indicate that the war in Iran makes it harder for the US to counter Russian activities in Eastern Europe and growing Chinese influence in the Pacific.
At the recent Shanghai Cooperation Council meeting, Russia and China issued a Bishkek declaration condemning the US-Israel war on Iran, signalling a growing global fatigue with Gulf tensions.
“The fact that Washington's military and political focus is locked on the Middle East—alongside its domestic crises—could facilitate Russia and China in achieving their operational objectives in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, respectively,” Ozgur Korpe, an academic at National Defence University, tells TRT World.
Despite all these negative developments, Washington signals no willingness to end the Iran war.
This week, tensions have once again escalated as US strikes hit IRGC targets across Iran, while Tehran has continued to retaliate against American bases across the Middle East.
In normal operational planning, army leaders have different alternatives, known in military jargon as 'branches and sequels', which allow commanders to adapt contingency options if the original plan goes wrong, says Erickson.
But in the current tensions with Iran, which also involve different actors and interests, from Israel to pro-Zionist US lobbying, various political interventions from Washington have “clearly destabilised American campaign planning” so far, he says.
Under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who advocates open-ended military operations against Iran, at least 20 top generals and admirals were either fired or resigned over the Pentagon’s overstretching decisions and hard-headed policies.
Most recently, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation to Trump following months of tension with Hegseth over the Pentagon’s direction and the departure of numerous top generals, including Randy George, Army chief of staff and Christopher Donahue, head of US Army Europe and Africa.
With or without allies
Analysts also point to another pillar of US global military power: its network of allies. Washington has historically relied on those partnerships to share the military and economic burden of conflicts and sustain its presence across multiple regions.
But the Iran war has also exposed the limits of that support, with several US allies reluctant to become directly involved.
Beyond the risk of a prolonged military stalemate in the Gulf and its consequences for the US and global economies, the war could further strain Washington's relationships with allies in Europe and Asia, some of which have declined to participate directly in military operations against Tehran.
In a recent speech, President Trump praised North Korea’s Kim Jong Un while criticising South Korean leadership for failing to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, which was open to global shipping before the war. Since the Korean War in the 1950s, South Korea, a pro-Western state, has been a steadfast US ally.
Ignoring and bashing allies after a prolonged war might not be a good strategy, as it can increase animosity towards the US worldwide, according to Korpe.
“The US's hegemonic security paradigm rests on the consent of allies—or follower states—and the hegemon's capacity to provide them with security,” Korpe tells TRT World.
But Hegseth’s preference for sustaining military operations against Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, while paying less heed to allied concerns, risks pushing the US away from its traditional role as a “benign hegemon” built partly on allied consent and towards what Korpe describes as an “empire by imposition”.
By contrast, Vice President JD Vance and senior military officials have pushed for an eventual exit from the conflict, partly because they worry a prolonged war could undermine other US military commitments overseas, Korpe says.
He points to reports of tensions between Trump and Hegseth over the Pentagon's handling of dwindling US munitions stocks as further evidence of divisions within the administration over how long it can sustain the war.
Taken together, Korpe argues, the strain of the Iran war and growing tensions with some US allies could “jeopardize” Washington's ability to sustain its global military commitments.
“The foundation of the current global system established by the US and its allies rests on the physical security guarantees it provides and the sense of safety derived from its technological superiority,” he says.
“It is assessed that the exposure of countries like the UAE and Bahrain to potential Iranian retaliation tends to undermine allies' confidence in the hegemon's protective capacity and could erode the consensus within the alliance.”
