Overview
The first twelve days of the war have produced a paradox that now defines the conflict. On the one hand, Iran has suffered extensive military, infrastructural, and leadership losses under the sustained U.S.-Israeli military campaign. The war has degraded parts of Iran’s leadership and command structure, air defenses, naval assets, missile infrastructure, and internal security ecosystem, while also imposing severe economic strain. In purely military operational terms, Iran is clearly weaker than it was at the onset of the war. Yet weakening Iran and defeating Iran have proven to be fundamentally different outcomes. Tehran has remained politically cohesive, preserved retaliatory capacity, and continued to impose meaningful military, economic, and psychological costs on its adversaries through reduced but sustained missile strikes, maritime disruptions, and regional escalation.
This distinction is central to understanding the war’s trajectory. The U.S. and Israel have succeeded in damaging Iran, but they have not translated damage into decisive operational or strategic success. Their maximalist objectives, the ending of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the collapse of the regime, destroying its militant network, and the neutralization of Iran’s long-range strike capabilities, remain unmet. Iran continues to frame endurance itself as a form of victory.
The result is a conflict in which battlefield asymmetry has not produced political finality, and where Iran’s survival, retaliation, and ability to internationalize costs prevent the war from being read as coalition success. Instead, the war is gradually evolving into an escalation trap in which continued military pressure has failed to translate into decisive outcomes while generating mounting regional and global costs. In this environment, Tehran increasingly frames endurance as leverage, signaling that a ceasefire without political and economic reprisal is unlikely to be acceptable.
Why Iran is Weakened
The joint U.S.-Israeli campaign weakened Iran first by imposing a shock phase that targeted the regime’s highest political and military architecture. Early strikes prioritized on leadership decapitation, command-and-control disruption, and air-defense suppression. The killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, together with other senior political and military figures, was intended not merely as tactical success, but as an effort to create immediate institutional disorientation and force Tehran into wartime succession and reorganization under sustained pressure. Although the Iranian system adapted more rapidly than Washington anticipated, these losses still reduced coherence, continuity, and decision speed at the top level of the regime and imposed friction on strategic decision-making.
After this operation phase, the campaign evolved from shock towards systematic degradation. The U.S. and Israeli strikes increasingly focused on tactical and operational targets: missile launchers, drone infrastructure, defense-industrial facilities, boats and naval assets, military bases, and internal security forces and institutions. This transition matters because it shows that the coalition moved away from a one-time decapitation logic toward a sustained effort to reduce Iran’s practical ability to fight, regenerate, and police its own internal environment.
The result is not the collapse of Iran’s military system, which remains functional, but its progressive weakening. Iran now operates with a degraded command structure, a reduced launcher base weakened air defenses, damaged naval capacity, and increasing pressure on the institutions that sustain domestic order. This does not remove Iran from the war. It does, however, narrow Tehran’s room for maneuver and increase the costs of continued resistance, both militarily and institutionally.
A second reason Iran is weakened is the geographic breadth of the campaign. The U.S. and Israeli campaign did not remain confined to Tehran or a handful of strategic strikes as they did during the 12-day war in 2025. Rather, from the opening days, the campaign spread across multiple provinces and then widened further to include air bases, missile sites, industrial nodes, internal security facilities, and coastal defense infrastructure across much of the country. This forced Iran to defend a wide battlespace rather than a concentrated set of critical locations.
The intensity of the campaign has reinforced this pressure. The war did not peak on Day 1 and then tapered off. The US/Israel coalition maintained a sustained strike tempo, repeatedly attacking Iranian targets over many days while broadening the target set. This constant pressure has cumulative operational effects: Iranian units must disperse, relocate and conceal, and defend under persistent threat, which reduces their ability to plan and execute coherent operations.
The campaign also widened beyond Iran itself. Strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon and Iranian-backed networks in Iraq show that the coalition is trying to contain not only Iran’s direct retaliatory capabilities but also its horizontal escalation capabilities. This broader scope increases the burden on Tehran by forcing it to think not only about homeland defense, but also about the survivability of its wider deterrence network.
The military campaign has also been increasingly accompanied by a political narrative that has gradually narrowed even while remaining strategically ambiguous. At the outset, U.S. rhetoric appeared to align with expansive goals, including the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program and the possibility of regime change inside Iran. However, as the war continued, the emphasis shifted increasingly toward degrading Iran’s military capabilities and reducing its ability to threaten Israel, Gulf states, and U.S. regional assets. This narrowing emphasis reflects a practical adjustment. The longer the conflict continues, the harder it becomes to sustain maximal political objectives in credible military terms. As a result, the U.S. position increasingly reads as one centered on long-term weakening rather than rapid strategic resolution. That does not mean the broader ambitions disappeared, it means the actionable objectives became more operational and less openly transformative. The political narrative caught up with operational realities.
At the same time, ambiguity has remained a central feature of U.S. messaging. Washington has not fully defined what outcome would constitute a success, leaving open multiple possibilities ranging from continued pressure to negotiated de-escalation, to sudden declaration of victory and withdrawal. This ambiguity preserves flexibility, complicates Iranian military planning, and allows the coalition to adapt its war aims without formally admitting strategic revision. In that sense, the narrative itself is part of the campaign: it keeps Iran uncertain while lowering the political cost of moving from maximal rhetoric to a more limited but still consequential weakening strategy.
Why Iran is not Losing
Iran is being weakened by the war, but it is not losing it. The United States and Israel have clearly succeeded in inflicting serious military, infrastructural, and leadership damage on Iran. Yet war outcomes are not determined only by the scale of destruction imposed on a state. They are determined by whether the attacking coalition has achieved its strategic objectives. In this case, the central aims of the campaign were not merely punitive: they were to break Iran’s coercive capabilities, erode the regime’s internal control, trigger political fragmentation, and ultimately force a strategic surrender from Tehran. None of these goals has yet been realized. Iran has absorbed severe blows, but it continues to function politically, retaliate militarily, and impose rising regional and international costs on its adversaries. For that reason, Iran may be weaker, but it is not losing.
First, the Iranian regime is not collapsing. Before the war, diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Tehran had centered on three principal U.S. demands: the full cessation of uranium enrichment, meaningful limits on Iran’s ballistic missile program, and the termination of support for regional proxy networks. Once the conflict escalated into direct military confrontation, however, it became evident that these goals could not be secured through airpower alone without also undermining the political order that sustains them. In this sense, regime change emerged as the war’s implicit strategic horizon. Yet the attempt to create a leadership vacuum did not produce systemic collapse. The killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was expected to trigger institutional paralysis and elite fragmentation. Instead, the Assembly of Experts moved rapidly to appoint Mojtaba Khamenei as successor, thereby preserving continuity at the apex of the regime.
This continuity, however, comes with a strategic twist. Ali Khamenei had long justified nuclear restraint through a religious position that framed nuclear weapons as contrary to Islam. Mojtaba Khamenei, however, does not necessarily carry the same declared normative commitment as his father. Therefore, while the succession has prevented regime breakdown, it has also preserved -and perhaps deepened- Iran’s nuclear ambiguity. The result is not regime collapse, but regime adaptation under wartime pressure. At the same time, another wartime expectation has also failed to materialize: the assumption that sustained airstrikes could trigger an internal military rupture, particularly a move by the Artesh against the IRGC. No such intra-military coup dynamic has emerged. On the contrary, the war appears to have further elevated the IRGC’s centrality within the Iranian system. Rather than being weakened politically by the conflict, the IRGC has become even more influential than in the pre-war period, consolidating its role as the regime’s principal coercive and strategic center of gravity. The result is not regime collapse, but regime adaptation under wartime pressure
Second, Iranian society is not turning against the regime in the way Washington appears to have anticipated. One of the underlying assumptions of the U.S.-Israeli campaign was that external military pressure, combined with leadership decapitation, could activate internal unrest and transform social dissatisfaction into regime-threatening mobilization. This expectation has not materialized. The death of Khamenei did not trigger a popular uprising against the state; on the contrary, it generated mass mourning rituals, anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli demonstrations, and a visible consolidation of nationalist sentiment. The declaration of 40 days of national mourning and the nightly marches that followed reflected not regime collapse, but social rallying under external attack. Whatever grievances exist within Iranian society, the war has not translated them into an anti-regime political wave. At this stage, the social base of the conflict is working more in favor of regime endurance than regime breakdown.
Third, Iran still retains the ability to sustain offensive salvos and horizontal escalation, even after suffering major degradation. U.S. Central Command data and President Trump’s own statements indicate that thousands of targets across Iran were struck, including missile and UAV production facilities, IRGC infrastructure, naval assets, airbases, and air defense systems. These attacks have unquestionably reduced Iranian capacity. But reduced capacity is not the same as strategic neutralization. Iran continues to retaliate and, more importantly, it continues to widen the battlespace. Tehran has not confined its response to direct bilateral exchanges with Israel. Instead, it has pursued a broader strategy of horizontal escalation by targeting U.S. military positions in the region, threatening the entire Gulf infrastructure, and disrupting maritime security. Furthermore, the regional security environment has deteriorated as Hezbollah intensified its kinetic operations against Israel, while Iraqi militia groups launched a series of coordinated strikes on U.S. diplomatic missions in Baghdad. This demonstrates that Iran still possesses an operational ability to raise the costs of war beyond its own territory. A state that can continue to impose such costs cannot yet be described as losing in strategic terms.
Fourth, the regional and international costs of the war are rising, and this trend works to Iran’s advantage. Tehran’s strategic logic is not based on outperforming the United States or Israel in conventional military power; it is based on making the continuation of war increasingly expensive for all parties involved. This is why the Gulf has become such a critical arena. The pattern of retaliation against energy and water infrastructure—especially the strikes that followed attacks on Tehran’s oil facilities and Qeshm Island—indicates that Iran is signaling a readiness to respond symmetrically if its own critical infrastructure continues to be targeted. The Haifa refinery, the BAPCO refinery in Bahrain, water desalination plant in Bahrain, and other infrastructure targets illustrate that the war is no longer confined to a narrow military contest. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, tanker insecurity, and repeated maritime attacks have transformed the conflict into a global economic problem, particularly in energy markets. The sharp rise in oil prices, increased energy costs, and disruption of shipping routes all indicate that the longer the war continues, the more the economic consequences will be distributed across the Gulf, the United States, Israel, and the broader international system. This is precisely the kind of asymmetric leverage Iran seeks.
Fifth, there is still no convincing signal of internal war or civil war inside Iran. The United States appears to have hoped that military pressure from above could combine with political and social fractures below to produce a deeper internal rupture. But the effort to activate a civil war dynamic has thus far failed. No meaningful anti-regime armed fragmentation has emerged, no large-scale territorial breakdown is visible, and no sustained internal front has been opened against the state. Even the Kurdish vector, which was at times discussed as a possible pressure point against Tehran, did not translate into serious tactical pressure on the ground against Iranian military formations. Iranian Kurdish groups such as PJAK, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), and Komala were all mentioned in reporting around potential cross-border mobilization and consultations with the United States. Yet these discussions did not mature into a meaningful battlefield front: some Kurdish factions denied plans for an imminent attack unless a broader U.S.-led ground invasion materialized, while sources reported that U.S. intelligence doubted the groups had the numbers and firepower to sustain a fight against Iranian security forces. Instead of multiplying internal conflict centers, the war has so far reinforced the regime’s narrative that Iran is under external siege. This matters because wars aimed at regime transformation usually require some form of internal political fracture to become strategically decisive. In the Iranian case, that fracture has not yet appeared. The absence of civil war dynamics is therefore one of the clearest indicators that the coalition’s broader political strategy remains unfulfilled.
Sixth, the economic cost of the war is steadily increasing, but again not in a way that automatically translates into Iranian defeat. Iran is undoubtedly suffering deep economic strain under bombardment, sanctions pressure, and infrastructure loss. Yet the economic burden of the conflict is spreading outward rather than remaining contained within Iran. The disruption of maritime trade, the instability in oil markets, the rising insurance and transport costs, and the increasing vulnerabilities of Gulf economies all show that the war is producing a much wider field of economic damage. This is central to Tehran’s wartime strategy. Iran does not need economic normalcy to claim strategic survival; it needs to ensure that its adversaries also face mounting economic and political costs. As long as the war continues to generate inflationary shocks, energy insecurity, and regional commercial disruption, Iran can argue that the coalition has failed to impose a one-sided outcome. There is still no authoritative single estimate for the total cost of the war to the international economy. However, available indicators already point to a multi-layered economic shock.
In this sense, the war has reached a paradoxical stage. Iran has been deeply damaged, but the United States and Israel have not converted that damage into strategic victory. The regime remains in place, society has not turned decisively against it, offensive and horizontal escalation capacities remain partially intact, no internal war has emerged, and the regional as well as global costs of conflict are increasing. Iran is therefore not winning the war in a conventional sense, but neither is it losing it. It is surviving, retaliating, and regionalizing the costs of war faster than its adversaries are achieving their stated objectives. That is why the most accurate reading of the current moment is this: Iran is weaker, but it is not defeated.
Escaping the Escalation Trap
The next phase of the conflict is unlikely to be determined solely by events inside Iran. Instead, the trajectory of the war will depend on whether escalation continues to move horizontally across the region. Iran’s military capabilities have been degraded, but its strategic response increasingly relies on expanding the geography, scope, and economic consequences of the war rather than reversing the military balance directly. This dynamic suggests that the coming phase of the conflict may be shaped less by battlefield outcomes inside Iran and more by developments across the broader regional environment.
One potential escalation pathway involves the actional of additional regional actor. Hezbollah has already demonstrated greater operational resilience than Israel appears to have anticipated, maintaining sustained rocket fire and coordinating elements of its campaign with Iranian strikes. While Israeli counterstrikes in Lebanon have also inflicted damage, Hezbollah remains capable of imposing persistent pressure on Israel’s northern front. At the same time, the Houthis represent an additional step on the escalation ladder that Iran has not yet fully employed. If activated more directly, Houthi operations could threaten shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb corridor, potentially complicating access to the Suez Canal and widening the maritime dimension of the conflict.
Geographically, the conflict is increasingly exposing the vulnerability of the Gulf security environment. Iranian missile and drone attacks on energy infrastructure, shipping lanes, and regional radar systems have not decisively penetrated Gulf defenses, which maintained high interception rates. However, the scale of the attacks has nevertheless shaken the sense of strategic insulation that Gulf countries have maintained and enjoyed for decades. This restraint should not be assumed to be permanent. If Iranian strikes intensify further or begin to produce larger-scale damage, Gulf states may conclude that passive defense is no longer sufficient and move toward direct military involvement. Even if the current war ends without major damage to Gulf infrastructure, it is likely to trigger renewed efforts to strengthen regional missile defenses networks, maritime security coordination, and broader deterrence frameworks designed to limit Iran’s ability to threaten global energy flows in future crisis.
The Gulf front illustrates this dynamic particularly clearly. For the first time since the establishment of the modern Gulf security system, and arguably since the 1990-1991 Gulf War, the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula have faced sustained direct military threats to their infrastructure, economic system, and territorial security. If the conflict ends with Iran’s core regime structures intact and its ability to impose economic and security pressure on the region preserved, Tehran may claim a form of strategic survival. Moreover, Gulf states may reassess the United States’ role as their primary security provider and consider exploring alternative arrangements if their extensive defense investments continue to fall short of delivering the expected level of protection. Conversely, if the war leads to stronger regional security integration and sustained reduction in Iran’s ability to threaten energy flows and regional stability, the U.S. and Israel may ultimately translate their military advantage into longer-term strategic gain.
The way out of the escalation trap is not through another round of retaliation, but through the recognition that the war is no longer creating clear winners and is instead multiplying regional and international costs. With the Gulf increasingly exposed, maritime insecurity rising, oil markets under pressure, and even actors such as the UAE and Russia calling for de-escalation, the conflict has entered a phase where continued escalation risks producing collective loss rather than strategic gain. Weakening Iran is not a U.S.-Israeli victory if it leaves behind a fractured but more dangerous region; equally, Iran’s capacity not to lose is not a victory if survival comes with long-term economic and geopolitical attrition. For all sides, the real strategic challenge is no longer how to dominate the next phase of the war, but how to build an exit before mutual escalation hardens into mutual failure.
Ceasefire Without Reprisal Is No Longer Acceptable for Iran
One point has become increasingly clear: the current escalation trap is not being managed by the United States. On the contrary, the Trump administration appears to be increasingly constrained by it. A range of factors contribute to this dynamic, including compromised maritime security, rising global economic costs, disruptions in financial markets, the pressure created by unfulfilled political objectives, and the domestic political costs associated with the war within the United States. By recognizing Washington’s constrained position within this escalation cycle, the Iranian side seeks to demonstrate that it holds the strategic initiative and is therefore attempting to impose the terms of peace.
Iranian leadership has signaled its preparedness for a protracted war and its willingness to continue hostilities until its demands are met by the United States. These demands include compensation for wartime damages, the complete cessation of U.S./Israeli attacks, the creation of credible guarantee mechanisms to prevent similar attacks in the future. Some Iranian figures have gone so far as to demand the establishment of an international reconstruction fund to repair and rebuild damaged infrastructure. Calculating that President Trump’s increasingly constrained position will eventually force concessions, Tehran has deliberately raised the stakes.
Mojtaba Khamenei, who had been selected as Iran’s new Supreme Leader on March 8, confirmed this uncompromising position in his first written statement released on March 12. According to the statement, the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed. Consequently, Iran intends to continue generating strategic costs in terms of maritime security and global energy supply. Iran will also continue targeting U.S. bases in the Gulf. As pressure over the Gulf persists, the U.S. military presence in the region faces both a casualty risk and constant operational pressure. Existing defensive lines will be maintained, and if necessary, new fronts may be opened. Through this approach, Mojtaba Khamenei appears to be seeking not only to preserve but also to expand the horizontal spread of the conflict.
He further declared that Iran’s regional partners -commonly referred to as the “Axis of Resistance”- would continue their support for Tehran. In addition, Khamenei indicated that Iran may consider measures such as asset seizure if necessary to compensate for wartime damages. Finally, by emphasizing the unity between the Iranian state and society, he aimed to signal that despite the tactical successes achieved by the U.S.-Israel bloc, the strategic trajectory of the conflict remains favorable to Iran.
The selection of Mojtaba Khamenei itself constituted a political message to the U.S.-Israel coalition, signaling that a decapitation strategy would not succeed. The Iranian system did not collapse; it survived, albeit weakened. However, Tehran now appears determined to convert this weakness into strategic leverage by operating the escalation trap against the United States. Iran’s military losses have not yet crossed a threshold that would force a fundamental revision of its military–political strategy. The new Supreme Leader has emphasized that the system remains intact and that resistance will continue.
Accordingly, Iran is unlikely to accept a simple ceasefire similar to the one reached during the Twelve-Day War. Tehran is instead seeking to construct a stronger deterrence posture. As part of this strategy, Iran is attempting to instrumentalize the outcomes of its multi-layered approach, which is built on the premise that continued escalation ultimately works in its favor. The future trajectory of the conflict may therefore be shaped less by purely military developments and more by efforts to contain the political and economic fallout of the war. Another possible scenario, however, is that the United States and Israel may opt for significantly more intense military operations as a means of escaping the escalation trap.
[Contributors: Mehmet Devrim, İsmet Horasanlı]
