As the war with Iran winds down, the United States has a choice. It can attempt to reconstruct the same Middle Eastern order that existed before the war, restoring sanctions, rebuilding containment, and pretending that nothing fundamental has changed. Or it can recognize that the war itself has changed the strategic equation and use that change to produce something far more valuable than another temporary ceasefire.
The strategic win now is to open Iran.
That means ending the sanctions regime—not temporarily, not through another collection of waivers that can disappear with the next American president, but through a comprehensive normalization of Iran’s economic relationship with the world.
Sanctions must become the central issue in any final settlement because they have become one of the principal barriers to Iran’s normal membership in the international community. Iran should therefore be willing to make substantial compromises to obtain their permanent removal, while the United States should recognize that removing them may now serve American interests better than preserving them.
This is particularly important because the old strategic rationale for containing Iran has been badly damaged by the war.
For decades, American Middle Eastern strategy rested in part on protecting the Gulf Arab states and the economic order that grew around them. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain benefited enormously from being stable, internationally connected commercial and financial centers, while Iran—the largest country directly across the Persian Gulf—was economically isolated.
Whatever one thinks of the original justification for that arrangement, the war has exposed its limitations. The Gulf conflict has demonstrated how vulnerable the entire regional economy is to confrontation around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The World Bank noted earlier this year that roughly 20 percent of global oil consumption and LNG trade passes through Hormuz and that the conflict directly affected GCC economies as well as Iran.
That changes the calculation.
The idea that Iran can simply be contained indefinitely while the economies surrounding it flourish assumes that containment operates primarily in one direction. The war has demonstrated that it does not. Iran possesses a favorable geography, a large population, energy resources, and control over access to one of the world’s most important maritime corridors. Attempting to economically strangle Iran therefore imposes costs far beyond Iran itself.
Iran can disrupt the economic environment surrounding it. Iran can impose costs. Iran can make containment reciprocal.
That doesn’t mean Iran should do those things. Quite the opposite. It means everyone has an enormous incentive to replace containment with integration.
Iran Is the Asset Hiding in Plain Sight
Iran is not some economically insignificant country that can simply be removed from the global system without consequence. It has more than 92 million people, according to the latest World Bank data, and possesses the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves and fourth-largest proven crude oil reserves. It also has a relatively diversified industrial base and a large educated workforce.
But Iran’s greatest economic asset may ultimately be something that cannot be sanctioned away:
its geography.
Look at a map.
Iran sits between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. To its west are Turkey and Europe. To its north are the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia. To its east are Afghanistan and Pakistan, and beyond them India and China. To its south is the Indian Ocean.
Iran is not merely an oil producer.
Iran is a crossroads.
And that matters enormously as Central Asia develops.
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and the rest of Central Asia are vast territories seeking efficient connections to global markets. Kazakhstan alone is receiving major international investment in rail connectivity, including a World Bank-backed project designed to strengthen the Trans-Caspian trade corridor between Asia and Europe.
But Central Asia doesn’t only need to go west.
It needs to go south.
And immediately south sits Iran.
Railways and highways through Iran can eventually connect Central Asian production with Persian Gulf ports, the Indian Ocean, Turkey, Pakistan and markets beyond. Chabahar can become part of that system. Bandar Abbas can become part of it. Iranian railways can become part of it. Caspian ports can become part of it.
Indeed, analysts are already examining whether a postwar U.S.-Iran framework could reopen what has been called Central Asia’s “southern route.”
This is the larger strategic opportunity that Washington should recognize.
Bet on Iran
For decades the implicit American proposition was essentially: contain Iran and build relationships with everyone around Iran.
Perhaps the next proposition should be different:
integrate Iran and build relationships through Iran.
That does not mean abandoning the Gulf Arabs. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and the other Gulf states remain important countries and potentially important American partners.
But American strategy should not require Iran to remain poor so that other countries can remain prosperous.
That is neither sustainable nor necessary.
There is enough economic opportunity for Dubai and Tehran, Abu Dhabi and Isfahan, Riyadh and Mashhad to prosper simultaneously. In fact, a genuinely integrated regional economy could ultimately make all of them more prosperous.
The United States should therefore stop thinking about Middle Eastern economic development as a zero-sum competition between Iran and the Gulf Arabs.
Iran is the new horse worth betting on—not instead of the Gulf states, but as the enormous missing economy that has been artificially disconnected from the regional system.
Imagine what normalization could mean.
Iran needs hundreds of commercial aircraft. It needs airports, railways, power plants, water infrastructure, telecommunications systems, automobiles, industrial equipment, refineries, petrochemical facilities, hotels and financial services. It has enormous energy reserves, major mineral resources, an educated population and a domestic market of more than 90 million people.
Years of conflict and intensified sanctions have taken a serious toll. The World Bank estimates that Iran’s economy contracted in 2025/26 and identifies sanctions, conflict, infrastructure damage, energy shortages, and weakened investment as major constraints on the economy.
Turn that around, and the same weaknesses become investment opportunities.
Boeing and Airbus aircraft. American and European industrial equipment. International hotel chains. Banking. Insurance. Engineering. Telecommunications. Energy development. Mining. Transportation infrastructure. Consumer products. Tourism.
Instead of spending enormous resources trying to prevent commerce with Iran, imagine America competing for that commerce.
Sanctions Have Also Distorted Iran
There is another reason sanctions should end.
Isolation does not necessarily moderate a country. Quite often it does the opposite.
When a country believes itself permanently threatened, security institutions become stronger. Military expenditures become easier to justify. Political dissent can more easily be characterized as foreign interference. Businesses engaged in sanctions circumvention become economically powerful, while ordinary, internationally oriented businesses suffer.
The people most naturally inclined toward engagement with the outside world—entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, exporters, students and professionals—are precisely the people an isolation strategy disadvantages.
That is backward.
If the long-term objective is a more normal Iran, then create conditions in which normality pays.
Let Iranian airlines fly everywhere.
Let Iranian businesses trade everywhere.
Let Iranian students study everywhere.
Let American companies invest in Iran.
Let Europeans build factories there.
Let Japanese and Korean manufacturers compete there.
Let Iranian tourists travel, and foreign tourists visit Iran.
Let Iranian banks reconnect with the international financial system.
Let millions of ordinary Iranians acquire an economic interest in maintaining peaceful relations with the rest of the world.
That is not appeasement.
That is leverage of an entirely different kind, and potentially much more durable.
Don’t Repeat the JCPOA Mistake
There is one enormous qualification.
Iran cannot reasonably accept another sanctions arrangement that disappears whenever administrations change in Washington.
That lesson has already been learned.
If Iran makes significant concessions in a final settlement, sanctions relief must therefore be institutional rather than merely presidential. Congressional sanctions that can reasonably be repealed should be repealed. Executive sanctions tied simply to Iran’s status as an adversarial state should be removed. Secondary sanctions preventing legitimate third-country commerce should disappear. Banking restrictions should be normalized.
Iran does not need immunity from ordinary international rules. If an Iranian individual engages in terrorism, narcotics trafficking, corruption, or other sanctionable conduct, sanction that individual under the same rules applied elsewhere.
But stop sanctioning normal economic activity simply because it is Iranian.
The objective should not be another temporary period of sanctions relief.
The objective should be normalization.
Turn Defeat Into a Strategic Win
Wars rarely end exactly as their architects imagined.
Objectives change. Assumptions collapse. Unexpected strengths and vulnerabilities become apparent. The important question afterward is whether governments have enough imagination to adapt.
Whatever military objectives the United States originally expected to achieve in this war, the postwar question is different:
What outcome leaves America strategically better off ten or twenty years from now?
An isolated, angry Iran of 92 million people sitting astride the Persian Gulf and the transportation routes of Central Asia does not obviously accomplish that.
A prosperous Iran increasingly dependent upon international investment, trade, tourism, aviation, banking and regional transportation might.
And there is an enormous difference between the two.
The first Iran has every incentive to develop mechanisms for circumventing the international system.
The second has an enormous stake in preserving it.
The first Iran sees the world outside its borders primarily as a threat.
The second increasingly sees it as a customer.
The first depends upon confrontation.
The second profits from stability.
That is how the United States can turn an inconclusive or even unsuccessful war into a strategic win.
Not by pretending the war was something it wasn’t.
Not by searching for another enemy to bomb.
Not by attempting to reconstruct an unsustainable regional order.
But by recognizing the opportunity created by the destruction of the old one.
Open Iran.
End the economic siege. Normalize trade. Rebuild aviation. Connect Iran to Central Asia. Connect Central Asia to the world through Iran. Encourage American, European, and Asian investment. Give Iran an economic stake in international stability and give ordinary Iranians a stake in engagement rather than confrontation.
And then allow something that neither sanctions nor bombs have managed to produce over decades:
time.
Time for prosperity to change incentives. Time for international contact to change attitudes. Time for economic interests to displace security interests. Time for Iranian society to evolve internally without the permanent fear that foreign powers are preparing the next attack.
Peace can end a war.
But trade can change the relationship that produced the war in the first place.
That should be the strategic prize.
And if Washington has the imagination to recognize it, opening Iran may ultimately prove far more valuable to the United States than anything it could ever have achieved by defeating Iran.
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