On February 28, the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior leaders of the country. Washington expected to decapitate Iran’s leadership within weeks and achieve “unconditional surrender,” but after six months, Iran has remained intact. Today, the central question is no longer who has destroyed more targets, but who has endured, stood, and resisted.
On a factual note, the United States possesses the overwhelming advantage over Iran’s military power. Iran suffered the loss of its military personnel. Its proxy networks weakened, but its government survived. The regime did not change; military power and deterrence remained active. Most importantly, it compelled the United States towards the negotiation table.
From the perspective of the United States and Israel, the loss of Iran’s supreme leader and other key officials was a potential opportunity to fracture the Islamic Republic of Iran from the top, but it proved wrong as it achieved political survival and capability of retaliation.
This is precisely where the distinction between decapitation and strategic paralysis becomes essential. Destroying leadership could not destroy state capacity.
Iran demonstrated institutional redundancy: religious authority, the IRGC, the regular political bureaucracy, and the broader state machinery were able to absorb the shock.
Iran’s second strategic achievement lies in its retaliation. Rather than attempting to defeat American armed forces in an asymmetrical contest, Iran substantially destroyed its regional military infrastructure on which American power depended. Iran inflicted billions of dollars’ loss on its military, its infrastructure, and its defense capabilities across the Gulf countries.
This is strategically important because American power in the Middle East is heavily dependent on geography.
The United States does not fight from the continental United States alone. Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf locations provide the physical architecture from which Washington projects military power.
Tehran, therefore, does not need to destroy the American military; it makes them vulnerable and less politically sustainable. The vulnerability of the large US Gulf installations has triggered serious questions of whether such bases should be rebuilt in their traditional form, while US personnel and aircraft reportedly have been shifted towards more dispersed locations, including Israel, Jordan, and Europe.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of global oil and gas cargoes pass, is one of the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints in Iran’s court, whose closure caused sustained disruption to global energy and trade. Six months into the war, shipping has been severely constrained, with only limited traffic crossing the Strait and dozens of commercial vessels reportedly stranded in the Persian Gulf.
This is where Iran’s geographical position becomes a strategic weapon. To reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the United States attacked Iran’s infrastructure, including bridges, universities, and hospitals, but the longer the war continued, the more its costs migrated into the areas where conventional military superiority was ineffective and indecisive.
For decades, the American security system in the Gulf has rested on a powerful assumption: that US military superiority provides credible protection to allied states and American installations. Iran’s retaliatory campaign proved them wrong. Now, the deeper question lingers over the United States’ reliable security for its partners. The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement can be seen as a step towards other reliable security defenses.
The nuclear dimension further complicates any claim of American achievement. The US and Israeli strikes certainly damaged Iran’s nuclear-related infrastructure and delayed its program, but its scientific knowledge base is retained in its scientific and technical expertise. Facilities can be bombed; knowledge never can. The knowledge required for enrichment, centrifuge engineering, and associated industrial processes are dispersed among people and institutions.
One of the goals of the war was to eliminate Iran’s nuclear potential permanently, but months of bombardment have not achieved it. This is the paradox of preventive war. To eliminate security through force can reinforce the need for the security capability.
The most revealing evidence about who is winning comes from the shifting of American objectives.
At the beginning of the war, Washington’s ambitions were “regime change,” “obliteration of nuclear program,” and “unconditional surrender,” and now, the objective increasingly shifted towards the Strait of Hormuz.
The resilience, one of the central defense strategies of Iran, demonstrated why it matters greatly alongside weapons in a modern warfare era where technological superiority is seen as a guarantor of victory. Iran challenged that assumption. On the battlefield, it adopted distributed deterrence: a combination of various types of missiles, sophisticated drones, regional proxies, naval strategy, and geological leverage. The purpose was to complicate the enemy’s attack and ensure its retaliation and survivability.
The Islamabad Memorandum offers Iran strategic superiority. If military force could have produced a decisive political submission, diplomacy would be an afterthought. The US and Iran signed a 60-day peace agreement to end the military campaign against each other.
So, who is winning? The honest answer is that neither side has achieved a clear victory, but Iran has survived decapitation and has not surrendered. It has preserved the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has retained retaliatory capacity. It has exposed vulnerabilities of the American Gulf basing system. For Iran, it is a resilience victory because the United States has yet to compel Iran to accept the political outcome for which the war was initiated.
