Against the backdrop of mixed signals from Washington about the possibility of talks with Tehran, the United States is at the same time continuing to build up its military presence in the Middle East. That alone says something important: four weeks into the American-Israeli campaign against Iran, the goal of forcing the Islamic Republic into a swift strategic capitulation has not been achieved. More than that, an increasingly uncomfortable reality is beginning to take shape for Tehran’s adversaries: Iran, despite absorbing heavy blows, has not broken. Instead, it is entering a harsher, more radical, and less predictable phase of adaptation.
In the opening days of the war, the strike on Iran looked, by Western standards, close to ideal. Senior political and military figures were eliminated. Air-defense networks were badly damaged. Key military infrastructure was hit. It created the impression of a classic decapitation campaign, designed to trigger a rapid internal collapse. But after two or three weeks, it became clear that in Iran’s case, the mechanics of that playbook work differently.
Yes, the Islamic Republic lost part of its command structure. Yes, much of its air defense was wrecked. Yes, its military infrastructure has taken a severe beating. But the state did not disintegrate, the army did not scatter, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was not thrown into chaos, the public did not rise up in mass revolt, and Tehran still retains its strategic lever in the Strait of Hormuz. That is the central contradiction of the current campaign: the greater the outside pressure, the faster Iran’s system sheds what remains of its internal balance and hardens into an even more rigid military-ideological machine.
Iran Without the Sky, But Not Without Options
One of the most significant military outcomes of the first weeks of war was the effective destruction of Iran’s air-defense system. By the third week of fighting, the United States and Israel were able to strike almost anywhere in the country without facing meaningful resistance in the air. On paper, that looked like an impressive success. In reality, the collapse of Iran’s air defenses reflected not only the enemy’s technological superiority, but also the glaring failures inside Iran itself.
The weakness of Iran’s air-defense system did not appear overnight. Its vulnerability had been visible for some time. Even during the previous major clash in the summer of 2025, it was already clear that Iran’s air defenses were technologically outdated, poorly integrated, and incapable of operating effectively in a modern war, where networked coordination, electronic warfare, low-observable aircraft, and real-time precision intelligence are decisive. Tehran understood the problem and tried to patch it fast.
To do that, Iran purchased seven or eight batteries of China’s long-range HQ-9B surface-to-air missile system. Deliveries began in late summer, but the full deployment of the new air-defense architecture was clearly running behind schedule. More importantly, the key YLC-8B radar systems - intended to detect low-observable targets and work in tandem with the HQ-9B - only began arriving in February 2026, effectively on the eve of war. That turned out to be critical.
According to available information, the Chinese technical personnel and military advisers assigned to the new systems left Iran literally a day before the fighting began. What Tehran received, then, was not a ready-made shield, but a collection of tools it had not yet mastered - systems that required time, training, and integration with the country’s existing air-defense network. Iran had none of that time. Iranian crews never fully learned how to operate the new hardware, especially the YLC-8B radars, and the new Chinese layer was never successfully fused with the preexisting network. As a result, the country entered the war with two parallel air-defense structures that coexisted but did not function as a single system.
That became one of the key drivers of the disaster. The United States and Israel made the HQ-9B/YLC-8B pairing a priority target, and by the second week of the war, most of the Chinese batteries had been destroyed. By some accounts, only a handful of radars remained operational. In Tehran, that produced frustration and disappointment, with accusations that the Chinese systems had performed poorly. But those complaints seem to reflect emotion more than reality. The problem was not only - or even mainly - the systems themselves. The real issue was that they were thrown into combat half-deployed, poorly integrated, operated by unseasoned crews, and abandoned after the supplier’s specialists had already left.
Iran’s remaining air-defense assets were also incapable of fundamentally changing the picture. By the third week of the war, the country reportedly still had only one of its four S-300 batteries in service, around six Bavar-373 batteries, and a larger number of less capable systems. But both the Russian S-300 and the Iranian Bavar-373 have clear limitations: neither was designed to effectively counter modern low-observable aircraft under conditions of enemy dominance in the electronic-warfare domain. In practice, their utility was largely reduced to dealing with drones and other less sophisticated targets.
And this is the key point: losing air defenses does not automatically mean military defeat. It makes a country vulnerable. It strips away freedom of maneuver, wrecks infrastructure, and demoralizes parts of the elite. But it does not automatically erase a state’s ability to fight. Iran is proving exactly that. Having lost much of its shield, it has shifted from trying to hold the skies to surviving under fire and inflicting asymmetric damage wherever it still holds real cards.
The Logic of Survival: Iran Learns to Fight From a Position of Strategic Vulnerability
Perhaps the most underestimated aspect of this war is that Iran, faced with an existential threat, has started changing its tactics quickly. In the opening phase, it genuinely was not prepared for an air campaign of this scale and intensity. After the 2025 conflict, Iranian forces began moving toward greater mobility, but as of February 28, a significant share of the country’s missile infrastructure was still fixed in place. That allowed the United States and Israel to rapidly destroy many launch positions, hit individual underground bases, and strike facilities tied to missile and drone production.
In the first days and weeks, that strategy worked. Iran’s opponents took advantage of the fact that the country’s military machine had not yet shifted into a new wartime mode. But then the situation began to change. Once Tehran grasped that this was not a demonstrative operation but a fight for survival, it adapted. Missile and drone launches began to be coordinated more cautiously. Unprotected movement declined. The time between emerging from shelter, launching, and returning to cover was cut dramatically. What had looked like vulnerable infrastructure at the start of the campaign gradually turned into a fragmented but resilient network.
By some estimates, nearly two-thirds of Iran’s ballistic-missile launchers were destroyed by the end of the first week of war, and by the fourth week only about a quarter remained operational. At first glance, that sounds like devastation. But in war, what matters is not only the percentage of total losses. What matters is whether what survives can keep functioning. If the remaining quarter of mobile crews can quickly move into position, launch, and disappear again within minutes, then even a much-reduced arsenal becomes a constant threat. That is exactly what happened.
By the fourth week of the war, Iran still retained the ability to launch several dozen ballistic missiles and drones a day. Militarily, that means the U.S.-Israeli campaign failed to achieve what was likely one of its central objectives: the total paralysis of the Islamic Republic’s strike capacity. Yes, that capacity has been degraded. Yes, it is constrained. But it remains operational - which means Tehran still retains the ability to impose costs on its adversaries.
The Strait of Hormuz as Iran’s Main Weapon
If air defense proved to be Iran’s Achilles’ heel, the Strait of Hormuz has become its principal strategic trump card. It is here that Tehran has managed to turn geography into a weapon and limited naval capabilities into an instrument of global pressure.
For the first three and a half weeks of the war, the effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz went without a full-scale response. At the outset, it was enforced mainly through drones, isolated missile launches from shore, maritime drones, and fast attack boats. But later, apparently anticipating a possible U.S. attempt to forcibly restore control over shipping lanes, Iran began using an even more dangerous tool: so-called smart magnetic mines, which can be activated and deactivated depending on operational conditions.
That changes the equation in a fundamental way. Airstrikes on the coast may reduce the danger posed by anti-ship missiles, but they do not eliminate the mine threat, do not neutralize small maritime platforms, and do not guarantee safe passage for commercial shipping. Any attempt to force Hormuz open would expose American vessels to the risk of mine strikes, drone attacks, and missile fire. A minesweeping campaign itself would take weeks - and would unfold under fire. At that point, this is no longer just a tactical problem. It becomes an extraordinarily expensive and politically risky campaign with an uncertain outcome.
That is why, by the fourth week of the war, the United States still had not found an effective way to fully restore normal shipping through Hormuz. And that means Iran still retains the ability to shape not just the regional agenda, but the global one, through the oil and gas markets. For Tehran, this is not a secondary lever; it is the central lever of the war. Iran cannot match the United States and Israel in the air, but it can make the price of the conflict global. It can push the confrontation into the realm of energy anxiety, market turbulence, and pressure on Washington’s allies.
When Tehran understands that it cannot win the war in the conventional sense, it tries to make sure its enemies cannot win it cheaply. In that logic, Hormuz is not just a strait. It is a strategic valve of the world economy. And as long as that valve remains under Iranian influence, it is impossible to say that the United States has full control over the course of the conflict.
The Rally-Around-the-Flag Effect
One of the gravest mistakes outside players make in conflicts like this is assuming that destroying infrastructure and taking out elite figures will automatically trigger an internal political collapse. History shows it does not work that way nearly as often as people imagine. In some cases, the opposite happens: a society that may be deeply unhappy with its rulers begins to close ranks in the face of an external attack. That, by all appearances, is exactly what is happening in Iran.
Despite massive bombing, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the killing of senior officials, there were still no signs by the fourth week of the war that Iran’s armed forces were coming apart. Quite the opposite: by available estimates, the morale and cohesion of both military and paramilitary structures have not declined and, in some sectors, have actually strengthened. The reason is straightforward. The war is no longer seen purely as a clash between the regime and its foreign enemies. For a significant share of the population, it increasingly looks like an assault on the Iranian state itself.
That matters enormously. In the early phase of the campaign, part of the public may still have hoped that outside pressure would bring about a change of power. But strikes on hospitals, energy infrastructure, historic sites, and the mounting civilian death toll are beginning to radically alter public perception. More and more, people are no longer asking whether the current regime is good or bad. They are asking what, exactly, those carrying out the strikes intend to do to their country. And the stronger the impression becomes that the goal is not political correction but the destruction of the state as such, the weaker the chances of an internal anti-regime uprising.
Even among opponents of the government, there is a growing sense of respect for Iran’s ability to absorb blows from multiple adversaries at once - the United States, Israel, and parts of the Arab Gulf - and still preserve control. In the political culture of the Middle East, the very ability to hold the line becomes a source of legitimacy. A regime that does not collapse under attack begins to look less fragile than many claimed it was only recently.
That is also why hopes that the public would pour into the streets at the urging of foreign-backed opposition figures have gone nowhere. Despite statements from Reza Pahlavi and the expectations of certain circles outside Iran, society has shown no willingness to turn an external war into a domestic uprising. And that is hardly surprising. For a large part of the population, it is difficult to believe that forces widely associated with the destruction of the region and support for bloody campaigns across the Middle East have suddenly arrived as agents of liberation for Iran.
According to information from Iranian security structures, the number of volunteers joining the IRGC and the Basij is increasing. Even if such reports are treated with caution, the mere fact that the authorities are leaning so heavily on mobilized patriotism says a great deal about the nature of the moment. The war is not dissolving the system. It is hardening its most ideological core.
The Regime Is Changing, but Not in a Softer Direction
The most important - and most alarming - conclusion from the first four weeks of the war may be this: the strikes on Iran are not giving rise to a more pragmatic or more compromise-minded political order. On the contrary, they are accelerating an internal transformation that was already underway but is now taking on far harsher forms.
By targeting the top leadership, the United States and Israel appeared to be betting that they could shatter the chain of command and possibly create the conditions for a more flexible political center to emerge. In practice, the opposite is happening. The figures disappearing from the scene are precisely those who, at least in theory, might have served as political intermediaries between the state, the elite, and the security apparatus. The weakening of the traditional establishment is not constraining the IRGC. It is clearing the field for it.
Iran is effectively being stripped of influential politicians capable of restraining the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - or even balancing its power. Any talk of some kind of soft transition, of a post-revolutionary technocratic model, or of a Venezuela-style scenario now looks increasingly detached from reality. If there were figures who might have played a role in such an arrangement, their political or physical capacity has now been wiped out.
It is telling that the last prominent politician who could plausibly be seen as a potential conduit for a more complicated, less ideological path was Ali Larijani, who was killed on March 17. His death was not just another episode in the war. It marked a point after which the internal balance of the Iranian system began shifting even faster toward the security services.
The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader does not weaken that trend. It locks it in. He is too closely tied to the IRGC to function as an arbiter between the regime’s civilian and military wings. An added source of instability is his serious condition after being wounded. If he is in fact unable to govern on a day-to-day basis, the real center of decision-making shifts even further toward a web of security actors and semi-autonomous command nodes linked to the Corps.
That means Iran is becoming not less hardline, but more so. The younger IRGC cadre stepping into the place of killed or sidelined figures is less inclined toward compromise, more ideological, and far more committed to a doctrine of long-term confrontation. For them, the current war is not a reason to seek an exit at any price. It is proof that concessions only invite new attacks. In that environment, the idea of a settlement without major concessions from Washington has virtually no chance.
A Negotiating Dead End and the Threat of a Long War
This is where the central political deadlock comes into view. The IRGC and the radicalizing core of the Iranian system have no interest in ending the conflict without major concessions from the United States. But Donald Trump does not look like a politician prepared to make the kind of compromise that could be sold at home as a sensible settlement. His political instinct is built around pressure, coercion, and the display of force. Iran’s logic, after four weeks of war, is built around survival, mobilization, and refusal to capitulate.
That means the space for negotiations is not widening. It is shrinking. Every additional week of war makes the Iranian regime more dependent on the security apparatus, more suspicious, more aggressive, and less capable of making political decisions outside the mentality of a besieged fortress. At the same time, every new week without a decisive outcome makes the campaign more expensive, more difficult, and more dangerous for Washington and Tel Aviv.
That is the paradox at the heart of the entire operation. What was conceived as a campaign of decapitation and coercion is, in practice, creating the conditions for a more radical version of Iranian statehood to emerge. Not one prepared to integrate into a new regional order, but one that becomes fully convinced that survival is possible only through militarization, hard centralization, and asymmetric warfare.
That is why the claim that Iran has been weakened after four weeks of war is only half true. In military and technical terms, yes, it is taking severe losses. Politically and psychologically, it is going through a process of hardening. And regimes of this kind are often most dangerous precisely when they are wounded but not broken.
Conclusion
By now, one thing is clear: the bet on a rapid collapse of the Islamic Republic has failed. The destruction of Iran’s air defenses did not trigger the collapse of the system. Strikes on the elite did not produce administrative paralysis. Pressure on society did not spark an uprising. Control over the Strait of Hormuz has not been lost. Iran’s missile and drone capabilities, though reduced, have not been eliminated. And most importantly, the regime itself is beginning to evolve in an even harsher direction.
That is the most dangerous outcome of the first four weeks of the war. Iran has not become a weak state ready to accept someone else’s terms. It is becoming a state that, having survived the initial shock, is sinking deeper into a model of survival through mobilization. In that model, compromise is treated as weakness, and war becomes a natural condition. If that process continues, the region will not get a post-conflict Iran. It will get a darker, more closed, and more radical version of the Islamic Republic.
What does not kill Iran is, in fact, making it stronger. More precisely, not stronger in the usual sense, but more dangerous, more embittered, and far less governable. For the Middle East, that may prove even worse than Tehran’s temporary military resilience.