The day after the US midterm elections will mark 47 years since protesters stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 hostages, triggering not just a crisis that would help topple a presidency but nearly a half-century of conflict and distrust between America and Iran.

The White House has changed hands eight times since Jimmy Carter’s rocky tenure, with each president adopting different methods for dealing with the Islamic Republic. What largely hasn’t changed is an American expectation that Iran can be coerced, or at least prodded, into operating on the US political timeline.

The current administration is no exception. In the early days of the war, US officials largely stuck to a “four- to six-week” timeline, though by May the messaging was more muddled. President Donald Trump has oscillated between saying that time is of the essence and that it’s on the US’s side.

The midterms have complicated that calculation further: He wants to show Iran is under pressure to negotiate without appearing to give too much away. Iran, by contrast, takes the long view.

Washington is wedded to two principles that don’t fit an adversary like Iran. The first is the belief that superior military power can swiftly win wars. The other is that the American public has consistently shown a distaste for “forever wars.”Together, those views limit US options against a foe with both the intention and political infrastructure to plan for the long term.

Diplomacy can in theory take a longer view, but it requires tremendous focus and patience from policymakers, and, critics argue, it risks sliding into a containment scenario that allows problems to fester.

“Iran is like a thorn in the US’s side,” says Sanam Vakil, Chatham House’s director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme. “For the Islamic Republic, this is like all they do every day — wake up, breathe and figure out how to survive. So there’s this asymmetry, and they play for time. It might appear that they have less time, but because of the existential nature of this conflict, time is on their side in a way.”For Iran, conflict with the US has always been existential.

Iranian officials regularly draw on thousands of years of history as a means for expressing civilizational pride, alongside a steadfast opposition to foreign intervention and a belief that Iran has been unfairly targeted again and again. The 1979 revolution, under the battle cry of “neither East nor West,” was itself the culmination of a longer struggle to thwart foreign meddling — including early-20th century pushback against Great Britain and Russia as well as the 1953 US-enabled military coup that toppled Iran’s prime minister and installed the US-backed shah.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated on the first day of the war, had been a cornerstone of the Islamic Republic since its inception. He watched the revolving door of US presidents as they came into office, tried to change Iran in some way and exited while he remained. “Essentially resisting and coming out of the other side of a US presidential term in itself became a marker of victory,” says Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The Strait of Hormuz, the central battlefield of the current conflict, also serves as a symbol of those long-held struggles — one constant in Iran that predates the Islamic Republic. The shah is quoted in a 1975 spread on the rise of Iran as saying that the free flow of oil is the country’s “jugular vein,” justifying his assertion that his country would “tolerate no subversion” in the Gulf. Last month, President Masoud Pezeshkian referred to Iran as the “historic guardian” of the strait.

That history also shapes how Tehran responds to pressure from Washington. “Iran has powerful incentives to resist the appearance that an American deadline forced it to concede,” Hamid Azizi at the International Crisis Group wrote in an The US has maintained a suffocating naval blockade on Iranian exports through Hormuz, while Iran is locked in a war of attrition. The world’s most powerful military struggles to finish the job as its enemy deploys cheap drones, a “mosquito fleet” of small attack boats and cluster munitions that are meant to drain US assets and make the conflict prohibitively expensive. That doesn’t mean Iran can wait indefinitely. The US blockade, coupled with amplified sanctions, has been an economic stranglehold, with Iran’s currency in crisis.

The longer the war drags on, the further Gulf states get with their own workarounds for moving oil and gas without the Strait of Hormuz, weakening key leverage for Tehran. A changed political dynamic after the US midterms could also bring increased volatility and military pressure. Iran does not have its own election outcomes to worry about.

And the way the Islamic Republic is organized further helps it absorb those pressures, play for time and frustrate Washington’s efforts to force a resolution. Power is dispersed among the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which answers to the supreme leader but also flexes its military muscle independently; bureaucrats who are the face of international dealings but sometimes shift between diplomatic and nationalist stances as they fight for their own domestic political survival; and the supreme leader, who’s meant to rule above all.

That multilayered decisionmaking process complicates and elongates negotiations. The dispersion allows Iran to obscure its intentions, but it can also make it harder for factions to agree on strategy. Either way, it’s frustrated US officials, who detailed the painstaking logistics of reaching the June memorandum of understanding even when both sides wanted a deal — including several days’ wait for human couriers to ferry messages to and from a secluded supreme leader.

Regional proxy groups with connections to Tehran add another layer of complication. While they don’t always operate in Iran’s best interests, they share a common enmity toward Western meddling and view Israel and the US as prime adversaries.

That means every conflict with Iran threatens to kick a hornet’s nest across the region. “Iran has enormous vulnerabilities, such as economic pressure, technological disadvantages, military asymmetry, domestic discontent, and significant damage to its regional network,” wrote Azizi. “But those vulnerabilities do not necessarily translate into political capitulation. The Iranian system has spent four decades learning how to operate under sanctions, military pressure, leadership losses, and institutional disruption.”

Iran doesn’t need to defeat the US to deny it victory. When Trump announced major combat operations in Iran in a Feb. 28 video, he cited 47 years of “mass terror” and pledged to ensure that the country never gets a nuclear weapon.

He also called on the Iranian people to rise up and “take over your government.”The US has since declared military triumph while acknowledging its failure to install new leadership and continuing efforts to secure Hormuz and subdue a global energy crisis. Iran’s stated objectives include an end to the fighting, a guarantee of no further attacks and sanctions relief — all in a bid to help rehabilitate its international image.

That has left the two sides at a seemingly interminable stalemate. After the midterms and through the end of Trump’s term, Iran may try to “checkmate Trump by making him a Carter example,” says Geranmayeh.

The regime could withhold the resolution Trump wants, punishing him for starting the war, and then cut a deal with his successor. The danger for Iran is that a weakened Trump could be even more unpredictable, Geranmayeh and others have noted, and might lash out by seizing land, sending ground troops or going after Iran’s nuclear stockpiles.

Whatever path future US presidents pursue, the war is already creating longer-term problems for Washington.

Gulf nations that have for decades operated on an energy-for-security sort of pact with the US are increasingly questioning how much to hedge that partnership. Put more bluntly, the war “accelerated the dynamic of declining American power,” says Alan Eyre, a lead negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and a fellow at the Middle East Institute. More troubling is one potential consequence of American dominance: Iran could collapse into a failed state.

Several analysts identified this as a worst-case scenario to watch in the medium term, with Eyre projecting a 50-50 chance of a failed Iranian state within three years.

That could mean mass poverty, an immigration crisis that spills into Europe and a ballooning guerilla force. More likely for a society with such a rich social fabric and cultural identity, says Seth Kaplan, an expert on fragile states at Johns Hopkins University, is that Iran becomes dramatically poorer while the regime remains in power, further hardening its military state.

Beyond its borders, Iran and its proxies would continue to harass shipping and neighbors. “In the Middle East, you do not have solutions,” says Kaplan, describing the US’s options.

“You only have problems that you manage.”