2. Leadership KIA doesn't matter, IRAN has a decentralized leadership, not a top down one.
3. Military apparatus is intact, majority of missile cities are still operating, over 1M IRGC forces mobilized with many more men willing to sign up.
4. Strait of Hormuz is fully under control of IRAN, "impotent threat of attacking ships" (even though IRAN has much more power) is more than enough to control it.
6. No regime change, IRGC is stronger than ever
7. Millions of dollars of damage to all US assets in the gulf
8. Multiple US air crafts damaged and many wounded (we'll see what the actual numbers are after CENTCOM releases them finally)
9. Sanctions lifted on Russia, helping them majorly profit. China is still collecting cheap oil.
10. Israel took heavy damage, losing many interceptors as well.
11. Brent 100$+ for 40 days, causing major global issues.
To be fair, US did manage to kill 170 kids on day 1 and bomb bridges, hospitals, universities and civilian areas.. so I guess that's a "win" for you?
Diplomatically, we saw Lebanon, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia expelling Iranian diplomats (some even threatening war with Iran). And the entire gulf region unite against Iran. All while Iran's allies were mostly passive.
It's quite likely that Iran would need to deal with the mess both internally (as the power grab in the leadership vacuum could take place), and externally with the neighbors it bombed. Iran needs to make it appear as a win internally, and that's something that would affect any long term agreement.
Regardless, whether it's a win to ETTHER side remains to be seen when a more permanent agreement is signed. If for example Iran actually manages to impose a fee on passing ships, then that's a major achievement for Iran, and could create a dangerous pretendant for other regions (like the strait of Malacca in Indonesia, Bab El-Mandeb and even the South China sea.
The US was goaded by Israel into joining a war that has not achieved it's stated objectives. America is deriding NATO for not joining this suicide mission, burning goodwill that would be valuable in a Russia/China conflict, because it's more valuable for Israel's geopolitical microcosm. Hegseth gutted the US' officers leading up to the war, precipitating war crime-adjacent strikes that have been decried even by GOP politicians.
Neither America nor Israel are better off because of this conflict, and China (once again) wins by embracing diplomatic capitalism. The economic soft-power of the dollar is now even more precarious than before.
The threat of the strait closure has always been a major factor in Iran policy from all relevant nations, it is just now explicit. It's hard to take the Russia point seriously when the war forced both Russia and Iran to shift resources form the Ukrainian theater to the Persian Gulf; it seems to be close to a wash. It's also kinda silly to gas up using interceptors for their intended purpose as "heavy damage" or catastrophize about rounding errors in damage to USA assets, while simulatenously writing off the total effect of all USA/Israel actions as inconsequential.
Disruption to global fossil fuel supply chains was also a goal of this war, so I am not sure you should list it as a negative. In the current state of the world, USA interests and global economic interests are becoming increasingly decoupled, and one shouldn't assume they are automatically aligned.
Also this has probably done more to hasten the world's weaning off fossil fuels than any action by any other government.
This is fake Iranian propaganda. It makes no logical sense. The force sent to extract the F15 officer (approx 2 C130s of equipment) is far to small to retrieve tons of nuclear material stored at Isfahan.
> Military apparatus is intact
No, the IRGC is struggling. After weeks of bombardment, they are unable to provide food or basic supplies for its own army. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202604074692
Sources said that over the past 72 hours, operational forces have faced acute shortages of basic supplies, including edible food, hygiene facilities and places to sleep.
Recent strikes on infrastructure and bases have left many Guards and Basij personnel sleeping in the streets, and in some areas they have had access to only one meal a day.
According to informed sources, some personnel were forced to buy food from shops and restaurants with their own money after expired rations were distributed.
At the same time, disruptions affecting Bank Sepah’s electronic systems have reportedly delayed the salaries and benefits of military personnel, fueling fresh anger and mistrust within the ranks.
Iran International had previously reported similarly dire conditions in field units, including severe shortages of ammunition, water and food, as well as growing desertions by exhausted soldiers.
Even in the Guards’ missile units, which have historically received priority treatment, sources reported serious communications failures and food shortages. They said commanders were continuing to send only technical components needed to keep missile systems operational, rather than food or basic individual supplies for personnel.
> majority of missile cities are still operating
Missile launch volume is down ~90% from the beginning days of the war.
> Millions of dollars of damage to all US assets in the gulf
Iran has taken $150-200 billion dollars in damage, to its assets, and also economy.
Their entire missile manufacturing supply chain was destroyed, with the destruction of both the Parchin Military Complex and Khojir Missile Production Center, they have no ability to produce more. The Iranian missile problem was one of the primary causes of this conflict.
Both the Mobarakeh Steel & Khuzestan Steel factories have shut down. They are responsible for 1% of Iran's GDP, and billions of dollars of profits which fund the Iranian economy.
If there were no ceasefire, Iranian power and petroleum facilities would be destroyed today. Both sides do not want this to happen, because it would set back the Iranian economy by a decade, and cause an enormous humanitarian crisis.
It is not possible to run a modern economy without fuel or electricity.
> Multiple US air crafts damaged and many wounded
Iran lost its entire air force, and navy; losses are far higher on the Iranian side than US/Israeli.
So far, the US/Israel have not lost any ability to continue combat operations; they can maintain this level of bombardment for months.
It is not possible to run an advanced economy, capable of manufacturing missiles and drones at scale, under perpetual bombardment.
Pretty sure they've seen better days
2. Ah yes, "supreme leader" doesn't sound "top down" at all
3. If by "still operating" you mean, not shooting missiles out of fear of getting destroyed. Sure. But that's silly.
4. For now. But very unlikely to last, imo.
6. "IRGC stronger than ever" is an insane take. How could they be stronger than before this war? They aren't. Again, shows that you're completely unreliable on this subject
7. "Millions of dollars" haha. Oh no, not millions with an "M"!
8. Sure. But how are you going to downplay the damage to Iran and then emphasize the damage to the US when they are many orders of magnitude different? Like, surely you don't think the damages are at all comparable
9. So long as Iran has oil to sell, yes
10. K.. again, playing up damages that are orders of magnitude less than what Iran has sustained
11. True
You seem to be very confident in your understanding of what is currently going on in Iran, despite the fact that you no longer live there. Obviously the IRGC has the internet turned off for a reason. They want to be able to control the narrative. And if it were all roses like you're making it out to be, they would personally be paying the internet bill of every Iranian to spread the word. Yet instead, they silence your people.
And do you really want to bring up the school, as tragic as it was, after your government slaughtered like 30,000 of its own citizens days before that? Motes and beams and all that.
Iran has more leverage at the end of this war than it did at the start. Iran has proven that it has the capability to catastrophically disrupt global economy.
* Which doesn't mean much nowadays: see Ukraine, and the perseverance of the Taliban who eventually got their way.
* Are you talking about now? Or last year when everyone was told that the nuclear program was obliterated? If it was then, why was there a second round of attacks in this year? And it's not like the existing stockpiles of enriched uranium vanished.
* As Ukraine has shown, you can have a defence industry in people's basements churning out 4M drones per year that can do a lot of damage.
* Yes, the past leadership was KIA. And new people were put in place who are more hardliner hawks than what was taken out. So how is a more hawk-ish regime a "win" for the US?
* An "impotent attack" that has kept several thousand ships sidelined in the Gulf? That has caused fuel (petrol, diesel, kerosene, LNG) prices skyrocket? That have caused helium (needed in chip manufacturing, MRIs, etc) prices to triple? If that's "impotent" I would hate to see effective.
And really, that expectation is itself stupid. Suppose the US got involved in a hot conventional war with another superpower, and in the first week they killed the President, the vice President, a bunch of Representatives and Senators, and a bunch of senior figures at the Pentagon. Would the US just fold, or would it fill those positions via the line of succession, declare a national emergency, and fight back vigorously? You know the answer is #2, and the idea that other countries might do the same thing should not be a surprise. It appears the US administration has fallen into the trap of believing the shallowest version of its own propaganda about other countries, and assuming that Iran was just like Iraq under Saddam Hussein but with slightly different outfits.
The Iranian strategy is basically Mohammed Ali's Rope-a-dope: absorb punishment administered at exhausting cost (very expensive munitions with limited stocks) while spending relatively little of their own (dirt cheap drones with small payloads but effective targeting, continually degrading the aggressor's radar visibility and military infrastructure). The one limited ground incursion so far (ostensibly to rescue an airman, but almost certainly a cover for something else) resulted in the loss of multiple heavy transport aircraft, helicopters, and drones at a cost of hundred$ of million$.
Their military capabilities are diminished in the short term, but if their ability to impose a toll on the Strait of Hormuz holds then that's a massive win for Iran in the medium/long term. A mere $2M per ship represents 10% of Iran's GDP. They would become the only country in the world to impose a toll on international waters, and they would have established a defensive deterrent almost as effective as having a nuclear bomb.
They took on the most powerful military ever seen and lived to tell the tale. It's hard to spin that as a loss for Iran.
The best Iran could hope for given its inevitable defeat by a far superior aggressor was to deny the invader any kind of spoils. And by those standards they seem to be succeeding.
So now we have a pointless war that has resulted in thousands of dead with no tangible benefit to anybody, except of course those cronies of the administration doing insider trading.
The US and Israel can fight a conventional war with Iran. In a nuclear war, Israel would be destroyed by nuclear missiles in the two days. The possibility of a nuclear Iran is an existential crisis for Israel, and Israel will do anything possible to prevent Iran from gaining nukes.
Most people do not comprehend this conventional war is happening today, (with unclear goals), to prevent a nuclear one in the future.
clearly not, they had an already planned goal to remove the american ability to impose sanctions, and implemented the plan, while sufferjng a ton of losses to personel and materiel.
this is a major improvement from where the US could impose sanctions and states would comply. surviving iranians are in a much better position now than before the war
A nation can swarm an aircraft carrier with a 1000 drones, each costing about 40k USD. Only a few are needed to seriously damage the carrier. Not to mention ballistic missiles.
In this scenario, does a US massive, slow moving aircraft carrier possibly carrying hundreds of billions of assets really work ? Can the US meaningfully project power with these?
In this scenario, who holds more power or leverage ?
An aircraft carrier can project power within 500 miles. The idea is to use a few of these to knock out the air power of the opposing nation, basically airfields, missile stockpiles, factories, power infra, etc. And then drop in a ground invasion force.
Does this now work? I dont think so. 10 drones can be launched from the back of a truck.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tripoli_(LHA-7) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCMSKTxgQI4
QED
How are they still firing missiles and downing aircraft?
Air power alone can absolutely win a conflict, provided a compatible theory of victory. What it can't do is effect regime change.
All the ships stuck in the Gulf probably didn't consider the threat impotent.
On the other side: what more can the US do? Target civilian infrastructure? There is no appetite for getting stuck with boots on the ground, and everyone (including Iran) knows this.
You're probably right that it won't a win for anyone. If some of the points includes removing sanctions from Iran, it might be a huge win -- for Iran, or at-least it's population.
It not that impotent. Attacking civilan targets in the age of drones is not that hard - a small motor boat with explosives or a shahed style drone is all you need. And to keep the strait closed they don't need to attack all ships. Even 0.1% probability of an attack (maybe even 0.01%) is enough to halt the traffic. And they don't need to sink the ship - a fire on board is enough to create an unacceptable security risk for tankers and LNG carriers.
It was a while since Houthis attacked any ships and yet traffic via Suez is still 60% down from what is was befor attacks started in 2023. Because the risk of an attack is not zero.
the same thing the media keeps asking trump: what do these things matter?
there's a meaningful change to iran's negotiating position basically forever into the future: the US cannot impose sanctions without also banning states from using the strait, and its clear what states will choose between the two. I still dont think they care about nukes, but now they can keep enriching as much uranium as they want to 60% and they can use that as a negotiation chip for something else.
the US and israel are not nearly the threats they were a month ago, not just iran has paid the costs of war
the real problem for iran is that now they actually have to deliver good stuff for their citizens - for all the western bluster, its still a democracy, and they do have to hydrate their population
According to whom? POTUS claimed to have done this back in June 2025.
They did everything they could in this war, didn't they, and apparently it didn't do too too much? (other than the economic damage of closing the strait, which seems to be what worked). But I think they could probably keep doing everything they've been doing still? (including controlling the strait).
That's why it is crippling the entire world's economy and demanding concessions bigger than the status quo ante bellum, with the US powerless to stop it. Because it's no threat.
You've been paying attention to what's happened over the last few weeks and you qualify that threat as impotent? That impotent threat basically brought the rest of the world to it's knees.
Iran suffered a lot of losses in terms of people and widescale destruction of infrastructure.
But the US lost too, we come out of this war looking much weaker and more chaotic than we did going in, not to mention the amount of money we poured into it while accomplishing nothing (nothing we destroyed in Iran was a threat to us until we bombed them in the first place).
Painting this as a victory for Iran would be a stretch. But they definitely did not lose either.
This is something that keeps on happening to the US. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. are all conflicts where the US won militarily and then had to withdraw anyway. Vietnam is still ruled by the communists, Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban once more, and the regime in Iraq is nominally Iran supported and not exactly on the best of terms with the US either. This conflict seems to be a repeat of past mistakes. The US went in, bombed the shit out of stuff for a few weeks and only then steps back to literally think "Now what?!". It could have done that a few months ago and saved us all the trouble of having to deal with this BS.
Painting this as a US victory is also quite a stretch. Iran never really posed a credible military threat beyond its borders. Nor did Afghanistan or Iraq. I think China might consider this a win though. And they definitely pose a non trivial military threat. Some historians might end up arguing the US took some long term strategic hits here for essentially very little meaningful gains. And we'll see in November how Republicans fare on the economic aftermath of what you might describe as a gigantic cluster f** at this point.
Win some lose some.
2) Iran agrees to open the strait if they're not attacked.
What happened here is they caved under Trump's threat but they're going to make it look like they're opening the strait on their terms, while Trump will make it look like they're opening the strait on his terms (which actually makes more sense, because if they didn't open the strait we'd have probably started bombing them)
And Iran's military hasn't been destroyed, they still control the strait. How do you explain that if they don't have a military?
US gas was affordable, keeping not only passenger vehicle fuel low, but farming costs and groceries/ transporting goods in US.
Trump then claims Iran is dangerous and building nukes and is a threat, despite IAEA reports to the contrary.
At Geneva, Iran offers to hand over all their uranium. Trump refuses.
Hours later trump starts bombing Iran.
Iran closes the strait to choke US economy.
US fuel costs skyrocket affecting CPI basket.
Trump demands they open the strait, and makes threat if they don’t.
Iran now says “okay, we will open it if u stop bombing us but now we will charge 2million fee for vessels passage”.
Now US fuel remains high, an additional fee is in place, and Iran keeps their uranium.
No regime change. No uranium shift. Just a major inflation spike to the US (and global) economies. Oh, and Iran gains full control of the strait.
Art of the deal