A month after the start of this war, one can state something Washington prefers not to say aloud: the United States may be winning individual strikes, but in strategic terms it is already losing the campaign. Iran is winning simply by not collapsing. The Islamic Republic has survived, maintained governability, preserved the regime’s political core, continued to deliver retaliatory strikes and, perhaps most importantly, managed to impose colossal costs not only on its adversaries but on the global economy as a whole.
For Tehran, that is already enough to regard the first month of the war not as a catastrophe but as proof of the viability of its model.
Viewed solely through the prism of destruction, the United States and Israel can indeed claim military success. High-ranking political and military leaders in Iran have been killed. Its air force and a significant portion of its naval infrastructure have suffered severe losses. Its nuclear program has been set back again. Its missile capabilities have been weakened. One of Tehran’s most important allies in Lebanon has been subjected to a massive rout. All of this is true. But in wars of this scale, the raw tally of damaged targets guarantees nothing. What matters is not only the amount of damage inflicted but whether the political objectives of the war have been achieved. And here the picture for Trump is far from victorious.
At the outset of the conflict, the White House effectively set maximalist goals. From Trump’s rhetoric and that of his closest circle it followed that this was not merely about punishing Iran or delivering a series of intimidating strikes. In essence, Washington expected a far larger result: the breaking of Iran’s military-political will, the elimination of the country’s ability to produce missiles, the suppression of proxy groups that for years destabilized the Middle East, the prevention of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, and in the extreme case - political transformation of the regime itself. A month has passed. It can be said with full confidence: none of these objectives has been fully achieved.
This is the first and perhaps main reason why talk of a U.S. defeat no longer seems exaggerated. Washington entered the war with inflated expectations. It wanted not just to bomb targets but to change Iran’s political nature. But Iran is not a state that crumbles after the first blow. Iran has spent decades preparing for precisely this scenario. Its regime was built not as a peacetime construct but as a survival system under pressure. It has prearranged replacements for key political and military posts. It has multi-layered command structures. It has experience of living under sanctions, sabotage, isolation, targeted killings and a constant external threat. Therefore, the mere fact that the regime has held means the initial American plan has failed.
Here the main paradox of the current war emerges. The United States and Israel have indeed inflicted greater immediate damage on Iran than they have received in return. But Iran did not need to destroy American aircraft carriers, burn Israeli cities or break the U.S. military to claim victory. It only needed to survive the first wave, refuse to capitulate, retain the ability to respond, and turn the conflict into an expensive, irritating, politically toxic and economically destructive ordeal for its adversary. That is exactly what happened.
There is a telling indicator that things in Washington are not going as planned: public sentiment inside the United States. Recent data show 61 percent of Americans disapprove of how President Trump is handling the conflict; only 37 percent approve. Yes, these figures largely reflect America’s partisan divide. Seven out of ten Republicans support the White House’s actions, while among Democrats only about one in ten effectively approves of the war. But that is precisely the point: instead of consolidating the nation around the flag, Trump has opened another line of domestic division. He has not become a national wartime leader. He remains the leader of one half of the country, while the other half views this war as a dangerous gamble.
For Trump this is especially perilous. His political career was built for years on rejecting costly, protracted Middle Eastern wars. He came to power promising Americans strength without quagmires, pressure without occupation, deterrence without decades of nightmare. He criticized the old foreign-policy elite for Iraq, for Afghanistan, for the senseless expenditure of trillions of dollars, for attempts to forcibly remake other societies. And now he finds himself drawn into a conflict that with each passing day increasingly resembles the trap familiar to Americans: a rapid entry, clear slogans, spectacular strikes, followed by a viscous reality in which goals blur, costs rise, allies shy away, and victory becomes harder to define.
This is the second reason for the United States’ strategic failure. Washington managed to deliver a heavy blow but failed to disarm Iran to the point where it would cease to be a source of threat. Tehran’s missile capabilities have indeed been weakened. But they have not been eliminated. Iran continues to shell Israel and U.S. allies in the region. Moreover, it has shown in the past that it can relatively quickly rebuild its missile program after serious strikes. If the current war ends without the final destruction of Iran’s military-industrial base, Tehran will almost certainly throw everything into an accelerated restoration of its arsenal of drones, missiles and asymmetric pressure tools.
The same applies to its regional network of allies. Yes, Hezbollah has been routed but not annihilated. Its infrastructure has been damaged, its personnel potential undermined, its operational freedom sharply curtailed. But that does not mean disappearance. In the Middle East such structures rarely vanish completely. They retreat, change configuration, go underground, wait out the storm, and then return in another form. The same can be said of other elements of Iran’s indirect-pressure strategy. It is telling that the Houthis joined the war not at the very beginning but later, underscoring that Iran has a multi-layered plan to prolong the conflict. This is not improvisation under fire. It is a pre-calculated model of endurance.
A separate and deeply troubling thread is the nuclear one. Somewhere on Iranian soil there remain roughly 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. This is not an abstraction or a diplomatic caveat. It is a real stockpile for the future. Even if the country’s current nuclear infrastructure has been seriously damaged, the mere preservation of such material means Iran’s nuclear story is not over. On the contrary, the present war may push the next generation of Iranian leadership to much harsher conclusions. If previously one could point to religious-political constraints, to a past nuclear fatwa, to a tactic of balancing between threshold and bomb, after this conflict Tehran may decide that the only true guarantee of security is no longer a missile arsenal but full nuclear deterrence. Then it will turn out that a war waged, among other reasons, to prevent an Iranian bomb has, in strategic terms, only brought Iran closer to deciding to go all the way.
The third reason the United States is emerging from this war as a loser is the economic scale of the costs imposed on the world. Here Tehran has shown itself particularly calculating and particularly ruthless as a strategist. Iran understands perfectly well that in a direct frontal confrontation with the United States it cannot achieve symmetrical success. But it can strike where the West, Asia and the global market are most vulnerable - energy, logistics, insurance, maritime shipping, supplies of critical raw materials and the nervous system of global trade.
Economic and Political Consequences
Jet fuel prices have risen 120 percent this year. Brent has increased by more than 87 percent. The Strait of Hormuz has effectively been closed or, at the very least, turned into a zone of chronic danger. Normally about one fifth of the world’s oil exports transit that strait. Roughly 20 percent of global liquefied natural gas shipments also pass through it. And it does not stop there. About one third of the world’s helium supplies - a resource often underestimated despite its critical role in medical and industrial systems and in semiconductor manufacturing - move through Hormuz. About one third of global fertilizer sales transit the same route. In other words, the threat is not limited to oil and gas. It is a potential strike against several foundational pillars of the global economy at once: transportation, electronics, agriculture, food prices, and high‑tech supply chains.
Disruptions to LNG supplies, combined with damage inflicted on a major Qatari gas field by an Iranian missile strike, have already pushed European gas prices up more than 70 percent in a month. And this is only the beginning of a possible cascade. The longer the blockade of Hormuz persists and the longer the region remains a theater of strikes on infrastructure, the greater the risk that the world will face not only an energy crisis but also food, logistics, and semiconductor crises. This is the real power of Iran’s strategy. Tehran is effectively telling the world: if you decide to strangle us, we will not go quietly. We will make the cost of choking us global.
Here Iran achieves not only an economic effect but a political‑psychological one. International surveys conducted in Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and South Africa show that only 18 percent of respondents blame Iran for the conflict and its global consequences. Twenty‑nine percent blame the United States, and 38 percent blame Israel. These figures are highly significant. They show that even amid heavy Iranian losses, Tehran does not appear to a substantial portion of the world as the primary culprit. On the contrary, U.S. and Israeli strikes - especially those carried out against the backdrop of a negotiation process that many observers had seen as promising - created an image of Washington and Tel Aviv as forces that sabotaged a diplomatic chance in favor of military coercion. That damages America’s moral and political standing at least as much as rising oil prices damage its economic resilience.
From this follows the fourth reason for the American defeat: a deficit of legitimacy. Unlike the Iraq campaign under George W. Bush, this time Washington did not even attempt to wrap the war in a broad ideological narrative. There were no familiar invocations of “democracy,” no loud talk of a “rules‑based order,” and no serious effort to create even the appearance of a broad international coalition. In practice, the only real U.S. ally in this war has been Israel - a state that today finds itself in far deeper international isolation than at any time in the past generation.
Trump has been placed in an awkward position. At first he tried to rally NATO allies, then, realizing that no real support would materialize, he began to pretend he did not need it. This is one of the most telling episodes of the entire campaign. It demonstrates not strength but weakness. Not leadership but isolation. Not the ability to gather allies but the inability to convince even formally close states that this war serves their interests. As a result, transatlantic relations emerge from the current crisis weakened. Along with them weakens the United States’ ability to portray itself as the leader of a system whose norms it conveniently violates when it suits its interests.
The fifth reason is even more humiliating for Washington: this war unexpectedly enriches America’s adversaries. This is one of the most paradoxical outcomes of the first month of the conflict. To contain the explosive rise in oil prices, U.S. authorities eased oil restrictions on Iran and Russia. As a result, Tehran now receives more daily oil revenue than before the war. In other words, the country that was supposedly to be economically exhausted and strategically weakened is, under certain market configurations, earning more precisely because of the war against it.
The Russian factor is even more telling. Moscow is receiving an additional roughly $150 million per day amid high oil prices while the conflict continues. That is a huge sum that can be directed to sustaining the war against Ukraine, to military procurement, to budget support, and to softening external pressure. The picture becomes absurd: the United States has become embroiled in an expensive Middle Eastern campaign whose consequences simultaneously improve the financial position of one of its principal geopolitical rivals.
For China the situation is more complex but also contains advantageous elements for Beijing. Yes, the PRC gets more than half of its oil from the Persian Gulf and inevitably faces supply risks. But unlike the United States, China does not entangle itself daily in the political and military traps of this war. It watches, analyzes and learns. Chinese military planners are undoubtedly observing how quickly the United States expends missile interceptors, how it allocates military resources, and how other avenues of strategic deterrence are exposed. For Beijing this is not merely a Middle Eastern crisis; it is a practical lesson in how an American superpower consumes its strength under the pressure of a real conflict.
The sixth reason for the U.S. defeat is the erosion of support for the war within the Republican Party itself. This is perhaps one of the most important and most underestimated signs. When Trump launched the campaign, his circle clearly expected party discipline and a cult of strength to secure steady backing. But as the conflict drags on, the first cracks have appeared. The Department of Defense signaled it intends to request an additional $200 billion to support ongoing operations in Iran. There is no formal request yet, and that alone says a lot. Apparently, Washington fears that assembling the necessary support on Capitol Hill will be harder than anticipated.
It is especially telling when even Republican lawmakers begin publicly to distance themselves from the prospect of deepening the war. If voices within the party say, “I will not support sending ground troops to Iran, especially after closed briefings,” it means nervousness is growing not only among Democrats but within Trump’s own base. For him this is almost a strategic threat. An external war that begins to erode the president’s internal camp ceases to be a tool of consolidation and becomes a catalyst of political weakness.
And here it becomes finally clear why the United States is losing this war despite its obvious superiority in firepower. They cannot coherently answer a simple question: what does victory look like? Regime change? Not achieved. Complete destruction of Iran’s missile infrastructure? Not achieved. Full neutralization of proxy networks? Not achieved. Elimination of Iran’s ability to move toward nuclear weapons? Not achieved, while hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium still exist as a strategic reserve for the future. Reopening a safe Hormuz? Not achieved. Broad international support? Not achieved. Domestic political consolidation in the United States? Not achieved.
We are therefore witnessing a rare but instructive case in which a superpower can inflict colossal physical damage and simultaneously lose on virtually all major political metrics. Trump wanted to show the world swift, spectacular force. Instead he got a war that does not end on his terms, that drives up global prices, strengthens his adversaries, alienates a large segment of American society, and calls into question the very logic of his foreign‑policy course.
Of course, a full assessment of the war can be made only when it ends. The United States can still inflict additional damage on Iran. Israel can still expand the scale of destruction of Iranian infrastructure. Tehran can still suffer new heavy losses. But even if the conflict ends in the coming days, the reality will remain harsh: everything that survives of the Iranian regime will consider itself vindicated simply because it survived. That is Tehran’s psychological victory. Not triumph, not jubilation, not liberation of the region from enemies, but a far darker and more dangerous outcome - the confirmation of its own rightness through survival.
Postwar Outlook and Consequences
After such a war, the Iranian elite will not be inclined toward reconciliation. They will be inclined toward revenge. That sentiment may be directed inward - in the form of even harsher repressions, purges, reprisals, mobilization and the suppression of any dissent. Or it may be directed outward - in the form of an accelerated restoration of the missile arsenal, an expansion of asymmetric pressure tools, a rethinking of nuclear strategy and an even greater commitment to a long game against the United States and Israel. Future Iranian leaders will almost certainly draw a very simple lesson from this war: the principal means of deterrence is not appeals to international law, not hope in diplomacy, and not faith in external guarantees. The principal means of deterrence is the ability to impose colossal costs on an adversary and on the world.
That means a postwar Iran - if the current regime or its successors endure - will almost certainly begin a rapid rebuilding of drones, missiles, underground infrastructure and distributed military production. It also means that Tehran may finally conclude: the bomb is the best guarantee of security, as once happened in North Korea. Then the gravest question about this entire conflict arises: what was it for? If the war’s outcome is not Iran’s demilitarization but its harsher, more vengeful and more nuclear‑oriented transformation, what strategic purpose did the campaign serve?
One can argue that for Israel the logic of periodically “mowing down” hostile forces in the region has its own cynical but comprehensible rationale. Israel reasons that it is better to rout hostile forces from time to time than to wait until they accumulate critical strength. That is a distinct strategic philosophy. But for Washington that logic is far less persuasive. The United States is not a small besieged state but a global superpower with worldwide obligations, domestic political polarization, a debt burden, rivalry with China, a conflict over Ukraine, crises in trade and technology, and strains in its alliance system. For the United States, an expensive, protracted and strategically indeterminate war in the Middle East is not an instrument of power but a dangerous dispersion of resources.
That is why Trump, despite his bluster, appears to have misjudged the nature of the Iranian regime. He likely assumed he faced another unpleasant but ultimately brittle adversary who could be forced to capitulate by a lightning demonstration of brute force. But Iran is not Venezuela, not late‑Saddam Iraq, and not a state whose leadership is paralyzed by a single powerful strike. It is a large civilizational country with a distinct political culture, a historical memory of war, deep territory, complex terrain, strong state inertia and an ideology of endurance. Such an adversary may lag technologically yet remain extremely inconvenient for a superpower.
Finally, there is another layer of this story that is too often forgotten amid talk of missiles, oil and geopolitics: the people. The region’s inhabitants have once again become hostages to strategic games. Thousands have been killed in Iran and Lebanon. More than a million have been internally displaced. In Israel the population has lived for nearly two years under sirens, in shelters and under constant psychological strain. In the Gulf states expatriates and migrant workers have suddenly confronted instability they could not have imagined when they moved to Dubai, Doha or Manama for work and safety. A vast region has been turned once more into a space of anxiety, family separations, rising costs, fear and the expectation of the next strike.
And if all this - thousands dead, millions terrified, ruined cities, disrupted routes, price spikes, rising enmity, renewed militarization and the near‑inevitable preparation for the next round - is only to lead, after some time, to yet another war, then the most ruthless question remains: what was it all for?
By the end of March 2026 the answer looks stark. Trump did not secure a quick victory. He did not achieve a political breakthrough. He did not break Iran. He did not secure the global economy. He did not consolidate allies. He did not strengthen American leadership. He did not weaken the United States’ adversaries in any global sense. On the contrary, the war has already given Iran the principal thing it needed - proof that even under combined strikes from the world’s greatest military superpower and a regional hegemon, the regime can survive. And in Tehran’s logic, survival means the ability to continue the struggle.
That is the bitter truth of the present moment: the United States can destroy parts of Iran, but it cannot impose the outcome for which the war was launched. And if a superpower cannot achieve its political objective, if the adversary survives, preserves its will, continues to inflict harm, raises global costs and turns American power into a source of American vulnerability, then that is called defeat - even if it has not yet been formalized in official terms.