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Was Operation Rough Rider a great demonstration of American invincibility too? They brought in multiple carrier groups, bombed Yemen endlessly and assassinated plenty of Houthi leaders even up to the Houthi Prime Minister but the Houthi missile/drone capabilities were basically untouched and Trump effectively gave up after a month when stockpiles started running low.
So if this goes the same way and Iran is still firing missiles and drones a month at every country hosting American military assets, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and possibly obliterating all of the soft oil infrastructure between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea would you still consider it to be a great victory for Trump?
My understanding is that all of the Houthi missiles and drones came from Iran. So it makes sense that bombing Houthis wouldn't really stop the missile attacks, at least not without completely genociding them which the US was obviously unwilling to do. But with Iran's regime gone, the Houthi's will no longer have a source of weapons. This clears up a lot of problems if you can simply stop the weapons at the source, instead of trying to target every single insurgent.
But yes, maybe I'm wrong and Iran is still firing missiles all over the place forever, in which case this looks horrible for Trump and the USA as a whole.
I think this is basically a fair assessment, and it also fully applies to why/how Ukraine has held out for so long against Russia (contra the cheerleading narrative).
In fact proxies with high capacity to absorb suffering backed by countries with a moat against immediate retribution seems to be one strategy with which the stronger powers still can be made to bleed - arguably this scheme was prototyped in Korea (imperfectly because China still had to commit its own forces in the end) and perfected in Vietnam.
However, the stars need to align for this to work, in that it must not be possible to physically sever the proxies from their backers. NK is adjacent to Russia and China, North Vietnam is adjacent to China, Ukraine borders NATO and the Houthis are a short swim from Iran. Hizbollah can't be a good proxy for Iran because they have too much hostile ground to cover, and Cuba is almost unreachable for Russia. Iran itself doesn't seem to want to be anyone's proxy (perhaps their ability to absorb suffering is not actually that high?), and Georgia failed as a Western proxy for some mixture of low capability to absorb suffering and not being that easy to reach and support.
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