In Iraq and Syria, Iran-backed militias have repeatedly attacked U.S. bases and personnel. To this must be added a key element: technological evolution. It has allowed for sustaining a war of attrition and constantly hitting energy infrastructure. Inaction towards Iran not only strengthened a regional actor. If it were not at war with the United States at this moment, it would continue to do so. Shahed-type drones changed the nature of the conflict. Iran was already exporting this model to the West, particularly through its alliance with Venezuela. Iran not only accumulated more weapons, but also improved their quality. For years, Iran was allowed to develop, perfect, and scale its drone technology without effective containment. Iran expanded and sophisticated not only its regional projection, but also its ability to become a strategic supplier of foreign conflicts. The case of Ukraine is the clearest proof of the cost of waiting. It ended up altering the balance of a conflict in Europe. Considering these conflicts as separate rests on a mistaken premise. That the cost of waiting is zero. For almost half a century, Iran has followed a consistent logic of strengthening its conventional capabilities, expanding its regional reach, and building a network of indirect influence through proxies. Had it not been for the capture of Nicolás Maduro by the United States, the transfer of military capabilities to sustain indirect conflicts would be advancing in the continent today. In geopolitics, the error is not to anticipate the problem; the real error is to let it grow enough so that when action is finally taken, it is no longer a contained problem, but a system of interconnected risks. It has armed, financed, and transferred technology that Russia uses every day on the battlefield. For weeks, the public debate has repeated a familiar argument: Iran did not represent an “imminent” threat to the United States. And if the war in Ukraine is a strategic priority for the European Union, then how can they simultaneously claim that a conflict between the United States and Iran does not concern them? The confrontation between the United States and Iran is linked to the war in Ukraine, where Iranian military technology is actively influencing the battlefield, giving Russia significant advantages. It was an incremental leap in destructive capability. This is where the argument of non-imminence becomes dangerous, because it treats time as if it were neutral when in reality it played in Iran's favor. When Russia invaded Ukraine, that capability was already proven and exportable. Iran is part of that conflict with Ukraine. The result is that Moscow not only found a supplier in Tehran, but also a strategic solution. If today many experts and media outlets argue that a few missiles and drones a day are enough to prevent the United States from being able to win a conflict, then the inevitable question is: what would they say about Ukraine, where Russia, with Iranian support, launches between 350 and 500 drones daily? If the threat was not immediate, there was no urgency, and any preventive action could be considered premature. By then, the cost was no longer measured in decisions. Each year was not simply more of the same. Throughout this process, the European Union and many of the major international news chains have preferred to look the other way. This pattern was not limited to Europe or the Middle East. Each additional month meant more deployed capabilities, more training for its proxies, and more distributed infrastructure. However, this reasoning overlooks a crucial fact. It is about the effect. It is measured in harder-to-win wars. Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq, Houthis in Yemen, and support for Hamas. Hezbollah has been financed and armed for decades with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles capable of reaching virtually all of Israeli territory. According to estimates, Russia has launched more than 57,000 of these against Ukraine. In Yemen, the Houthis have evolved from a local insurgency to operating long-range drones and missiles that have impacted infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and disrupted shipping routes in the Red Sea. But they rarely quantify the risk of acting too late. The evidence of the last few decades points directly to the risk of having acted late. The logic seems simple. It also involved a gradual shift in the strategic balance in a more adverse direction. Those who question the idea of acting before imminence tend to focus on the risk of acting too soon. It is not just about volume. More range, greater precision, more sophisticated drones, saturation capabilities designed to complicate defensive systems.
