OP-ED: Who won the war with Iran?
Dotan Rousso writes, "This war appears to have stripped away many of the illusions on which Iran’s regional posture depended."
By: Dotan Rousso
Dotan Rousso was born and raised in Israel and holds a Ph.D. in Law. He is a former criminal prosecutor in Israel. He currently lives in Alberta and teaches philosophy at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.
If the ceasefire announced on April 7 holds, the answer is clear: Iran lost.
The war began on February 28, when the United States and Israel launched a joint campaign against Iran. After 39 days of fighting, Washington agreed to suspend bombing for two weeks while claiming that most of its military objectives had been achieved. Whether this becomes a durable end to the war or only a pause, the strategic result is already visible. Iran emerges weaker, more exposed, more isolated, and more internally vulnerable than before.
For years, Tehran built its regional posture on one central proposition: that any direct strike on Iranian soil would trigger devastating retaliation against Israel, U.S. forces, and the wider region. That was the core of its deterrent image. It was meant to make war prohibitively costly. It failed.
Iran did retaliate, and those attacks caused real loss. As of April 7, 23 civilians had been killed in Israel, while 13 U.S. military service members had been killed in the war. Every loss of life is tragic and should be treated as such. But on a macro level, this was still one of the most lopsided wars in recent regional history. According to the account on which this analysis relies, not a single Israeli soldier was killed or even injured during the war by Iran. This is extraordinary. Imagine a war lasting almost forty days without a single military casualty on one side. That fact alone captures the scale of Iran’s failure.
This matters because Iran was not fighting only for survival. It was fighting for the credibility of the image it had built over decades: a state at the center of a powerful “axis of resistance,” capable of igniting the region if Tehran itself were attacked. Yet when the test came, that axis did not save Iran. Its proxies offered only limited effective support. No major ally stepped forward prepared to absorb serious cost on Tehran’s behalf. Iran stood largely alone.
The military implications are severe. American and Israeli forces were able to strike targets inside Iran over a period of weeks and, by all visible accounts, operate with a degree of freedom that exposed the weakness of Iran’s defenses. A regime that spent decades presenting itself as a hardened revolutionary fortress proved unable to protect its own skies, shield critical sites, or impose major battlefield costs on its enemies. That is not a draw. It is a strategic defeat.
The economic and political damage may prove even more consequential. Once the fog of war clears, Tehran will still have to face its own people. The regime has long relied on censorship, intimidation, and force to suppress internal anger. But anger accumulates. A population that has endured repression for nearly half a century may now see more clearly that the state claiming to defend the nation instead brought it devastation.
None of this means the regime is certain to collapse. Weakened regimes can survive longer than many expect. But this war appears to have stripped away many of the illusions on which Iran’s regional posture depended. It was less capable of defending itself than its propaganda suggested, less able to mobilize decisive allied support than its strategy implied, and less able to inflict serious military harm on Israel and the United States than its rhetoric had promised.
Iran spent decades trying to look like a fortress. This war suggested that the fortress was far weaker than it looked.
For comments: dotanrousso@yahoo.com
