Why Amaresh Misra Doesn't Believe America Can Win a Ground War With Iran

Fresh Back From Tehran

War historian Amaresh Misra had just returned from Iran when he sat down with Nous host Bushra Khanam Fahad, having been in the country both for the funeral of its supreme leader — which he says drew an estimated 43 million mourners, a figure some called the largest funeral in human history — and for the period immediately after when the latest round of US-Iran hostilities broke out. He was also present, he noted, during the earlier twelve-day war that preceded this escalation, giving him, in his own words, a direct test of how the country had changed between the two conflicts.

By the time of the interview, Misra said, a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran had collapsed, and both sides were exchanging strikes: Iran had hit two tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the US had struck back inside southern Iran, and Iran said roughly 30 of its people had been killed, with claims — unverified — of American casualties too. Misra was careful to say he was not yet ready to call it a full-blown war, but treated the trajectory as effectively settled.

An Asymmetric Retaliation

What struck Misra most was how one-sided the exchange looked. Iran, he said, had retaliated against US-linked targets across Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and the UAE, hitting an American base in Jordan with four missiles that met no working interceptors, and striking Bahrain so precisely that footage showed a US Patriot missile explode in mid-air before it could even attempt an intercept — the same failure pattern, he added dryly, that critics used to mock in improvised Hamas or Hezbollah rockets, now visible in America's own hardware. His explanation was that Washington has been supplying Gulf allies with what he called "third-grade" equipment, while the US itself had answered barely a tenth of Iran's strikes.

Misra attributed that restraint less to strategy than paralysis. Trump's administration, he argued, is internally divided between hawks such as Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio pushing for war and Vice President JD Vance, who has favoured negotiation and the now-collapsed MOU. He also floated a striking interpretation of the leaked claim that Iran was plotting to assassinate Trump: in his reading, it was Israel signalling, through backchannels, that it could move against Trump himself if he failed to escalate — pressure, not intelligence.

Iran's Parliament Tears Up the Agreement

The most consequential development, in Misra's account, came from Iran's own institutions rather than the battlefield. Days after the funeral, Iran's parliament convened and passed what he called a historic resolution: renouncing the MOU, and announcing an inquiry into every agreement Iran has ever signed with Western powers, examining how they were negotiated and how deeply CIA and Mossad penetration had shaped them. The resolution, he said, explicitly pushed the government toward a "revolutionary line" — committed to removing both the United States and Israel from the Middle East, a mandate he read as parliament formally warning its own executive to hold firm.

A More Guarded, More Confident Country

Misra described a visible shift in Iran's public mood since his first visit around the twelve-day war. People were markedly more cautious and suspicious of foreigners, a change he saw firsthand at the funeral, where visitors of every nationality were carefully screened. Notably, he said, neither Vladimir Putin nor Xi Jinping attended in person, sending lower-level delegations instead — a deliberate choice, in his telling, because Tehran believes junior officials stay closer to ground realities. He also described a pointed piece of Quranic diplomacy: Saudi Arabia's delegation was read a verse invoking the Battle of Badr and the necessity of Muslim unity; Qatar's delegation heard a verse on repentance; Turkey's delegation heard a verse warning that passivity in the face of aggression is itself a wrong. Iran, he argued, has entered a war-mode mindset that now extends to its economy as well as its politics — not because its position is weak, but, in his reading, because its side is currently winning.

A Gulf Caught Off Guard

Misra's account of Gulf politics centred on Saudi Arabia's reluctance to be drawn in. He said Riyadh had already refused, back in early May, to let US aircraft escort tankers through Hormuz under what Washington called "Project Freedom," and that his sources inside the kingdom described its recent mobilisation against the Houthis as "half-hearted" — a face-saving gesture rather than a real commitment, since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman remains focused on Vision 2030 and has no appetite for war. He argued that pre-October 2023, the Gulf states had been riding an economic and diplomatic high — the Abraham Accords expanding, Palestine pushed to the margins, Iran isolated — and that the reversal since then has left governments across the region, in his phrase, clueless about what leverage they have left now that their economic roadmap, built around attracting foreign tech investment, has been undercut by the fighting.

Why He Says a Ground Invasion Would Fail

Asked directly whether Washington and Israel could sustain a ground war, Misra was unambiguous. He dismissed Trump's talk of striking Iran's buried nuclear stockpile, arguing the country's actual reserve — some eleven tonnes of material, he said, held roughly 200 feet underground at a mountain facility — sits beyond the reach of any B-2 bomber's bunker-busting payload, a claim he said even his own contacts found darkly amusing given how confidently American officials speak about it. His verdict on an invasion followed from the same logic: the US and its allies, in his assessment, have already lost the naval and air phases of the fight, and a ground campaign layered on top of that would mean nothing but further losses. No serious American military planner, he said, was currently advising the move, and the army itself was not ready.

A Warning About What Comes Next

Misra closed on a grim note, tying the immediate crisis to Benjamin Netanyahu's planned visit to Washington and the pressure the pro-Israel lobby could bring to bear on Trump. Should a full-scale war resume, he predicted it would be considerably more intense than the twelve-day conflict that preceded it, with Iran, having already exhausted its diplomatic patience, showing far less restraint than before. He went further, describing part of Israel's own ruling class as prepared to risk the country's destruction in pursuit of what he called an ideological, rather than national, project — a claim he offered as his own reading of the region's trajectory rather than an established fact, but one he delivered as the note he most wanted Nous's audience to sit with.