For Iran, Not Losing Is Winning

Spotlight

• Washington needs to win. Tehran only needs to avoid losing.Their radically different definitions of victory explain why the war continues.
• Iran has been severely degraded but not decisively defeated.Retaining enough military and economic leverage to impose costs will work for its strategy of persistence.
• The stalemate is sustained by mutual optimism and a commitment problem.Both sides still believe that continued fighting could produce better terms, while neither trusts the other to honour a settlement.

When the United States (US)–Israel military campaign began against Iran in February 2026, US President Donald Trump had estimated a four-week timeline to achieve his national objectives. While these goals have ambiguously oscillated between limiting Tehran’s nuclear programme to a regime change in Iran, the unambiguous reality remains that the war has entered its seventh month. It has continued despite the severe impact on Iran’s navy, the death of Iran’s supreme leader, extensive damages to its nuclear complex, and the weakening of its armed proxy networks. Yet, US and Iran continue to exchange fire.

The answer to why the war continues lies in the different definitions of victory on both sides and the interaction between those definitions. Henry Kissinger had compressed the logic of asymmetric conflict into a single statement: “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.” While Iran is a state, not an insurgent movement, the deeper insight holds true: Iran does not need to win the war, it only needs to not lose the war. For Washington, though, the goals are much more ambitious. The present stalemate is due to both these adversaries having radically different perception of what constitutes an unacceptable outcome.

Victory as Domination

Washington’s conception of victory is maximalist, consisting of multiple demanding deliverables aimed at US’s domination of Iran. President Trump stated that his aim was to destroy Iran’s ballistic-missile arsenal, annihilate its navy, sever support for proxies, and ensure that it could never acquire a nuclear weapon. Alongside these objectives sat the additional hope of regime collapse, expressed in his call for Iranians to “take over your government.” A fifth objective, of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, was added only after Tehran closed the Strait. The list of objectives thus expanded as the war failed to conclude.

Washington’s conception of victory is maximalist, consisting of multiple demanding deliverables aimed at US’s domination of Iran.

These goals are both hard to achieve and verify. It is difficult to ascertain the whereabouts of Iran’s roughly 440 kilogrammes of 60-percent-enriched uranium that inspectors cannot access, and even harder to account for the technical knowledge that Iranians possess, with which they can rebuild their nuclear programme (Iran is already rapidly restoring sites tied to past nuclear weapons). This objective is further confused by the communication from the White House. After the military campaign in 2025, President Trump had stated that “the nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed,” but continued to cite Iran’s nuclear programme as a reason for the military offensive in 2026. These conflicting statements, along with the difficulty in verifying these claims, has made a decisive victory for the US harder to achieve.

The ballistic missile programme faces the same issue. The US Central Command claimed that 90 percent of Iran’s defence-industrial base had been destroyed during Operation Epic Fury. Yet, by July 2026, Iran was again firing “high-speed, maneuverable” missiles at US bases after “adapting to US defenses.” Similarly, Hezbollah and Hamas have suffered serious setbacks, but Iran managed to move fresh weapons and fighters to the Houthis as Red Sea attacks have intensified.

Across each domain, the pattern is quite consistent: a setback, but not a shutdown. This is the minimum Iran needs to continue the conflict.

Victory as Persistence

Iran’s conception of victory is minimalist. It requires satisfying a single condition: surviving as a functioning state while retaining sufficient coercive capacity to ensure that the US finds it difficult to end the war.

Measured against that standard, the US–Israeli strikes have achieved remarkably little. The regime’s overriding objective has been to demonstrate that it “isn’t collapsing.” Within approximately a week, the Iranian Assembly of Experts had installed Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader. The state machinery continued to function.

Tehran’s leadership has been unusually candid about the metric by which it judges success. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi framed the objective as ending the war in a manner that Iran’s enemies “never again think of repeating these attacks.” Recent assessments identify Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) hardliners as dominant in wartime decision-making, constraining civilian leaders’ influence. IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi stated, “The United States will not achieve its objectives through an economic blockade—even though it harms us—and we will undoubtedly retaliate.” Therefore, Iran’s narrow objective of survival and deterrence is relatively simpler to achieve than President Trump’s maximalist and often morally indefensible claims of “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

To endure, Iran needs to maintain enough weapons to retaliate against Israel and the US and hold enough leverage to disrupt the global economy. Iran retains a missile programme capable of firing and the capacity to close the Hormuz Strait. Small speedboats, a few mines, and cheap drones are sufficient to “terrorise shipping” and reduce daily transits from roughly 140 vessels to an average of 12. This, coupled with  Houthi attacks on Red Sea transit, can credibly signal that while Iran might be wounded, it is very much alive. It also reflects the cost asymmetry that Iran exploits: its inexpensive weapons force costly defensive responses from the other side.

None of this suggests that Iran is strong. Survival is “not strength:” the proxy network has been severely impacted, the Iranian economy is in crisis, and the state is materially poorer. However, degradation is not defeat and Iran’s definition of victory can accommodate a considerable degree. In that tolerance lies its strategic advantage.

Why Does the War Refuse to End?

The collision between the maximalist and minimalist conceptions of victory makes resolution structurally difficult. The bargaining model of interstate conflict theorises that as war is costly, there should almost always be some negotiated settlement that both sides prefer as compared to continued fighting. Wars persist when this rational bargain fails. In the US–Israel–Iran conflict, two simultaneous reasons make a settlement hard to reach.

The collision between the maximalist and minimalist conceptions of victory makes resolution structurally difficult.

The first is mutual optimism, reinforced by private information and incentives to misrepresent it. Tehran and Washington each believe that continued fighting will turn events in its favour. Washington is betting on its military supremacy, coupled with an “Economic D-Day” of financial pressure, to eventually force Iran’s collapse. On the other side, Tehran is betting on its endurance to outlast the global market’s patience and hoping that eventually the American public’s political sentiment will turn overwhelmingly anti-war. Therefore, neither side’s leverage is decisive: the US can continue to incrementally degrade Iranian capabilities and Iran can continue to defend and impose costs through Hormuz. Both believe that fighting may yield better terms than accepting a settlement today. Consequently, as Republican Representative Pat Harrigan put it, “We are stalled.”

The second reason is a commitment problem. Even when the parties can agree on terms, neither can be confident that they will hold: successive ceasefires have collapsed  and Trump declared the Islamabad Memorandum “over” barely a month after it was signed. The deeper problem is that each side’s central demand requires the other to relinquish the capability on which it believes its security depends. Iran cannot credibly commit never to reconstitute its nuclear programme, particularly as the US withdrew from the nuclear deal despite Iran meeting its terms and struck Iran even though the latter posed no “imminent threat” to it. Therefore, the commitment problem is rooted in distrust. The 2026 strikes validated Iran’s long-standing fear that it can be attacked by the US unprovoked; therefore, it now seeks hard guarantees. Meanwhile, the US position has often oscillated, so it cannot credibly commit to refraining from striking again.

To complicate matters further, this stalemate has extended beyond strategic reasoning to reputational positioning. For the Trump administration, it will be hard to rationalise exiting a seven-month-long expensive war without achieving any of its objectives. For Iran, defending its sovereignty has become a matter of national pride. Washington must demonstrate that Tehran can be coerced, while the latter must show that it cannot.

Domestic costs increasingly compete with the political cost of appearing to concede: weakening Republican support alongside American casualties strengthen Trump’s incentive to secure an exit he can present as victory. However, Trump recently stated, “Even when you have a great president, they tend to lose the midterms,” signalling that mid-term pressure might not be a final determinant for exiting the war. For Tehran, economic deterioration and fears of renewed unrest increase the urgency of relief, while hardline resistance to diplomacy raises the political cost of concessions. Its challenge lies in obtaining relief while sustaining its claim to have defended Iranian sovereignty.

To achieve durable peace, therefore, not only should the costs of continuing the war outweigh those of compromising, but both sides should be able to defend that compromise without admitting defeat.

Samriddhi Vij is Associate Fellow, Geopolitics, ORF Middle East.

The author acknowledges the use of Google Gemini 3.1 Pro for research purposes.