Why Iran Thinks Its Winning

Iran’s leaders believe they are prevailing in the war, and not without reason, analysts say. A month into a conflict prosecuted by two far more powerful militaries, the Islamic Republic has not only survived, but appears poised to dictate the terms of how it ends.  

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“Yes, military bases have been targeted. A lot of military commanders have been killed. But from their point of view, they are winning the war,” says Saeid Golkar, an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and an expert on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). “They have been able to push Trump back to negotiating.”

After more than 16,000 airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel, the fulcrum of the war is not Iran’s battered military but, rather, the fate of the world economy. The Tehran regime regards the impact it has had on global oil prices as validation of its doctrine of asymmetrical warfare—relying not on tanks or battleships, but pinprick attacks targeting the fragile infrastructure of the Middle East’s petroleum industry.  

Read more: Iranians Say Trump’s Intervention Brought Destruction, Not Liberation

Besides shuttering the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point for a fifth of global oil, the Islamic Republic has also stoked inflation by launching thousands of armed drones toward gas plants, bases and refineries across the Middle East. The pressure prompted President Donald Trump to lift sanctions on Iranian oil worth $15 billion to the regime; he had already suspended oil sanctions on Russia, which reportedly is supplying Iran with intelligence and drones.

“Rather than bringing down the regime, the campaign is, in several key respects, actually reinforcing it,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Iran specialist for Israeli military intelligence, wrote in Israel Hayom on March 27. Two days earlier, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, Alex Younger, told the Economist: “The reality is that the U.S. underestimated the task, and I think as of about two weeks ago lost the initiative to Iran.”  

More troubling to ordinary Iranians, Golkar says, is that Trump is suing for peace with a regime more extreme and aggressive than at the beginning of the war.

Hormuz: The Secret Weapon In Plain View

Speaking to reporters at the White House on March 26, Trump offered a succinct summary of why, for more than 40 years, Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked. “The problem with the straits is this,” he said: “Let's say we do a great job. Say we got 99%. One percent is unacceptable, because 1% is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost a billion dollars, right?”

That’s precisely the calculation Iran has relied on to deter attacks since the 1980s, when its war with Iraq included a 1987 “Tanker War” that drew in U.S. warships to escort Kuwaiti oil shipments through the Persian Gulf. In the years since, Iran loudly and consistently proclaimed that closure of the Strait was the linchpin of its defense, investing in everything from miniature submarines to mines to swarms of small boats to assure it can do exactly what it’s doing now. Why wasn’t the U.S. prepared?

A member of the Iranian Red Crescent Society stands at Hypercar, an auto service center, amid damages which according to the company's officials were caused by strikes on March 1, in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, March 28, 2026 —Vahid Salemi—Associated Press

Did 'decapitation strikes' backfire?

Trump’s confident prediction of a short, successful war followed the notably smooth operation to capture Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces two months earlier—and the handover to Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who kept the kleptocratic ruling regime in place.  

Government has also been the best place in Iran to get rich, especially through smuggling petroleum under international sanctions. But when the initial wave of airstrikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei, his regime, instead of scattering, closed ranks. “When they took Maduro out, everybody tried to save his own ass,” Golkar says. “In Iran, the system is ideological.”  

Martyrdom looms large in the foundational narrative of Islam’s Shi’ite minority, specifically the Battle of Karbala in A.D. 680, which takes lessons of resilience and righteousness from the death of Muhammad’s grandson Hussein in a battlefield loss to a larger but illegitimate army. In majority-Shi’ite Iran, the Revolutionary Guards were both the crucible of the revolutionary ideology on which the Islamic Republic was founded, and the most powerful force. Analysts say it now controls the country, having installed Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, as a Supreme Leader who may be more of a figurehead.

“It is now, for all intents and purposes, a military regime,” a journalist in Iran tells TIME, speaking anonymously for security reasons. “What exists now, in these wartime conditions, is only a façade of the old regime, and Mojtaba Khamenei is the window dressing. In today’s Iran, the Sepah rules alone at the top,” he says, using a Persian nickname for the IRGC.

Trump dismissed the choice as well, though for reasons of his own: “I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei. I want to be involved in the selection,” he told TIME in an interview on March 4. In an interview with Axios the next day, Trump said he would his like his involvement in choosing Iran’s next leader to be “like with Delcy in Venezuela.” 

That appears unlikely—chiefly because, as the IRGC closed ranks, observers noted that power was concentrated in its most extreme elements. After an Israeli airstrike assassinated the official Khamenei had left in charge, Ali Larijani—a regime loyalist with long experience in foreign affairs—his successor as chief of the Supreme National Security Council was Mohammad Zolghadr, an IRGC general one Iranian journalist privately described as “fascist.” Analysts say the most powerful figure in Iran appears to be IRGC chief Ahmad Vahidi, who is suspected of overseeing the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires early in his career, and in 2022 directed the lethal crackdown on Iranian protests. 

“In practical terms,” Farzin Nadimi wrote for the Washington Institute think tank, “this means the Trump administration may effectively be negotiating with an IRGC inner circle that has been involved in oppressing and killing the Iranian people at an industrial scale.”

Uncompromising hardliners 

Others wonder whether negotiations have any future, given the constraints of the regime’s ideology. Among Khamenei’s inner circle, Larijani was regarded as the only one who could be trusted to keep the revolutionary cause while also understanding enough of the world beyond Iran (which Khamanei never left during his 36 years in power) to realize when to heed the pragmatic counsel of realists who now appear to be sidelined—or killed in Israeli airstrikes. “It is amazing,” Mohammad Khatami, the reformist cleric twice elected president, said in a March 18 statement,  “that those who are capable and eager to achieve an honorable peace, if there is a way to achieve it, are being brutally attacked and assassinated.”

From this depleted field, Trump’s negotiators are widely reported to have fixed on Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammed-Baqr Qalibaf, as their interlocutor. A former Guards general who also showed up at Davos, Qalibaf has a reputation both for corruption and sycophancy.

“That's the whole idea of trying to actually engage Qalibaf,” says Golkar. “There is no doubt that Qalibaf is corrupt. There is no doubt that the IRGC makes a lot of money through the informal economy and criminal economy. But we usually forget that the IRGC are doing all of this through the lens of ideology. They think they deserve it. They are stuck in this ideological web, so their actions are very limited, and, unlike the Venezuelan politicians, they are not able to take the decision based on their own interest.”

Even if negotiations to end the war go forward, the fighting may continue. The IRGC has threatened to have its Houthi proxies, who on March 28 launched missiles toward Israel, also close the international shipping lane in the Bab al-Mandab Strait off Yemen. The Guards also published a list of energy facilities around the Persian Gulf that it vowed to target if Trump fulfilled his vow to bomb Iran’s power plants.

By many measures, the Islamic Republic is struggling. On Thursday, an IRGC official announced on state television that the minimum age for checkpoint duty was being lowered to 12. But it is also true that it is built for survival. 

“They have been ready for this kind of war,” Golkar says, referring to the regime. “But the loser of this conflict will be the Iranian people, without any doubt. We will see a much different animal from now on. After Trump is out of the picture, and Netanyahu is out of office, you will see a much more radical and aggressive Islamic Republic outside, and more repressive inside.”

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