For four decades, Iran’s defining strategic achievement was ensuring that its wars were fought in the Arab world. The Islamic Republic cultivated an elaborate network of state and nonstate actors, from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen to a constellation of militias across Iraq and Syria, precisely to keep the battlefield away from Iranian soil. The logic was simple enough: project force forward to bleed adversaries and deter direct strikes on the homeland by making retaliation costly. That logic has all but collapsed, and despite a two-week ceasefire announced on Tuesday, the war is now inside Iran.
The balance sheet of the war that just paused is striking in both directions. Israel killed more than 250 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and almost all of Iran’s senior military leadership, and thousands of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) personnel were reportedly killed or wounded. The Pentagon also claims it has sunk over 90% of Iran’s navy. Yet the regime remains intact, with a functioning leadership structure. Iran has also done something it spent decades only threatening, closing the Strait of Hormuz and turning the world’s most critical energy choke point into a tollbooth. Iran’s strategy has been to endure and impose costs, and by that measure it has achieved meaningful success. A regime that lost its supreme leader in the opening strikes and 90% of its navy in five weeks nonetheless forced the most powerful military in the world to negotiate through Pakistani intermediaries rather than deliver a knockout blow. That is not victory, but it is not the collapse the strikes were designed to produce.
Yet the mixed record of this war obscures the broader reality of what Iran has lost. That is why it is more useful to widen the aperture and to frame what is unfolding as the Third Gulf War. The first began with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, with American campaigns formally codenamed Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, and ended with a coalition victory that left the Iraqi regime intact but severely degraded. The second, launched as Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, toppled that regime in three weeks, a speed that masked the fact that the conditions for the collapse had been building for 12 years. The third is playing out now, and the pattern will likely be more visible in the years to come.