By Menahem Merhavey
The emerging U.S.-Iranian cease-fire framework invites a deceptively simple question: Who won the war? It is also the wrong question. Iran did not defeat the United States and Israel, nor did the Islamic Republic collapse under military pressure. What matters now is what Tehran managed to preserve, what it permanently lost, and whether a battered regime can convert a negotiated respite into political survival without unleashing the public expectations it has spent years repressing.
By Menahem Merhavey
The emerging U.S.-Iranian cease-fire framework invites a deceptively simple question: Who won the war? It is also the wrong question. Iran did not defeat the United States and Israel, nor did the Islamic Republic collapse under military pressure. What matters now is what Tehran managed to preserve, what it permanently lost, and whether a battered regime can convert a negotiated respite into political survival without unleashing the public expectations it has spent years repressing.
The reported framework centers on extending the cease-fire, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, relaxing some restrictions on Iranian oil sales and ports, and leaving the nuclear dispute for further negotiations. Iran has therefore achieved something real: After absorbing an extraordinary assault, it has compelled the United States to negotiate over the economic and maritime pressure it was still capable of imposing. But that is not the same as victory. It is the bargaining position of a wounded state that retained enough disruptive power to prevent its enemies from dictating terms unilaterally.
Iran’s most important success was domestic. It lost its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to an Israeli strike. It suffered attacks inside its own territory, damage to strategic assets, and the humiliation of seeing a leader who had embodied the system for more than three decades killed in Tehran. Yet the regime did not lose control of the country. Security institutions held; no decisive split emerged within the ruling elite; and the state rapidly installed Mojtaba Khamenei as his father’s successor.
Mojtaba Khamenei had long been regarded as a likely successor and had built close relations with the Revolutionary Guards, who reportedly pushed wavering clerics to endorse him after his father’s death. It is therefore misleading to present his elevation as the product of the war or as proof that military pressure suddenly radicalized an otherwise more flexible regime. The war accelerated the succession; it did not invent the successor. More broadly, it did not hand power to Iran’s hard-liners. It exposed how decisively they had already held it.
This is why claims that the war radicalized Iran are unconvincing. The supposed moderates of the Islamic Republic had ceased to command its strategic direction long before the first strike. Iran’s confrontation with Israel and the United States did not result from the sudden ascent of some previously excluded extremist faction. It was the culmination of decisions made by the core of the system: the supreme leader’s office, the Revolutionary Guards, and the broader security network. Those officials usually described as pragmatic could warn against reckless policies, negotiate tactical retreats, or manage their consequences. They could no longer prevent them.
Still, regime continuity should not be confused with regime strength. The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei ensured institutional survival, but it also dramatized the narrowing of the Islamic Republic. A system founded in opposition to hereditary monarchy responded to the assassination of its leader by transferring power to his son, under the evident sponsorship of the Guards. What appeared externally as resilience may come to be understood internally as something less flattering: the transformation of a revolutionary republic into a protected family-security enterprise.
Iran also lost one of the central assets of its regional strategy: the presumption that war could be kept away from Iranian soil. For decades, Tehran invested heavily in Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and other armed partners partly to make a direct attack on Iran seem prohibitively costly. The purpose was not only to threaten Israel, U.S. forces, and Arab neighbors; it was to create strategic depth behind which Iran itself would remain insulated.
That insulation has been broken. Iran was attacked directly and deeply. Its leader was killed. Its military and political infrastructure proved penetrable. Its allies were not irrelevant: They widened the confrontation, imposed costs, and contributed to regional instability. But they did not prevent the attack on Iran itself, nor did they impose a price sufficient to halt it. The proxy network delivered disruption, not immunity. For a regime that justified immense regional spending as the price of keeping war far from Iran’s borders, this is a severe strategic failure.
The Strait of Hormuz demonstrated both Iran’s residual power and its limits. Tehran did not suddenly discover this lever during the war; the threat to maritime traffic had always been available. What changed was its willingness, under extreme pressure, to use it on a scale that disrupted global energy supplies. In doing so, Iran showed that even a damaged regime could inflict pain far beyond its borders. It also appears to have forced Washington to seek a negotiated reopening rather than rely solely on military action.
Yet Hormuz was not a cost-free triumph. Restricting the strait deepened Iran’s isolation, damaged the interests of neighboring states, and provided the United States with justification for its own blockade of Iranian ports. Iran reached the negotiating table not because it had found a magic weapon but because the weapon had reached the point of diminishing returns. It could make the war costly for others; it could not turn the war into an Iranian victory.
Now comes the harder task. Sanctions relief, if it becomes part of a final agreement, could give Iran’s economy a short-term lift. Greater oil exports, access to frozen assets, and easier commercial transactions might stabilize the currency, improve state finances, and allow the new leadership to present itself as having secured economic relief without surrender. For a regime emerging from war and succession, that breathing space matters.
But relief is also politically dangerous. Sanctions have long served the Islamic Republic as more than an economic burden: They have been its most convenient explanation for failure. They allowed rulers to blame foreign enemies for inflation, unemployment, declining living standards, and the erosion of everyday life. Sanctions have certainly damaged Iran. But they have also helped conceal the damage produced by the regime itself: corruption, patronage, opaque foundations, Revolutionary Guard-linked enterprises, wasted resources, and an economy organized around political loyalty rather than public welfare.
A postwar Iranian government will therefore face a delicate contradiction. It must generate enough visible economic improvement to calm a battered society, reward its supporters, and finance the institutions that protect it. But it must avoid raising expectations so quickly that citizens begin to ask why sanctions relief has not translated into ordinary prosperity. Once the external excuse weakens, accountability moves inward. Iranians may begin asking not what Washington did to their economy but what their own rulers—those still alive and who inherited the institutions they built—did with the country’s wealth.
This is precisely where the regime’s greatest vulnerability lies. During an external attack, many Iranians who despise the Islamic Republic will hesitate to rise against it. War produces fear, patriotism, and a natural refusal to be seen as assisting foreign bombardment. It also gives the security apparatus a pretext to arrest opponents and hunt for alleged spies. But that enforced silence should not be mistaken for renewed legitimacy. Once the bombs stop falling, once the patriotic emergency fades and economic promises encounter the realities of a corrupt political order, the old grievances can return with greater force.
Iran has therefore emerged from the war with neither victory nor defeat. It lost its old leader, its claim to strategic immunity, and much of the credibility of its proxy doctrine. It retained control of the country, preserved the regime, and demonstrated enough coercive and economic leverage to compel negotiations.
But survival has only postponed the deeper reckoning. The Islamic Republic’s next challenge is no longer merely to withstand U.S. and Israeli pressure. It is to persuade its own citizens that, after all the bloodshed, sacrifice, and promised relief, the same system that led Iran into disaster can somehow be trusted to rebuild it. That may prove harder than surviving the war itself.
