Four weeks ago, the United States and Israel set out to break Iran. Today, Iran is battered, leaderless, and more isolated than it’s ever been — and somehow, it’s still winning.

Think about what’s been accomplished: Khamenei assassinated, air defenses shredded, nuclear facilities in ruins. By any conventional military scorecard, that’s an overwhelming result. And yet Iran has already made its most consequential move: it’s closing the Strait of Hormuz. Not with a navy. With cheap drones and a willingness to absorb whatever gets thrown at it. Oil prices are spiking. The global economy is running out of runway.

The decapitation worked. The strategy didn’t. And understanding why gets at something the West has fundamentally misread about Iran — not just in this campaign, but for decades.

The Target Nobody Hit

Every serious military strategy needs a theory of what actually holds the enemy together — what you have to destroy to produce collapse, not just damage. Against Iran, the West has never figured out what that is. It’s struck around it, repeatedly, at enormous cost.

Iran’s nuclear program isn’t the center of gravity. Destroying the infrastructure doesn’t kill the institutional logic driving the regime to rebuild it. Neither is the Supreme Leader — Khamenei’s removal has made clear the system outlasts the man. And the proxy network across the region is a tool of Iranian power, not the source of it.

The actual center of gravity is the Revolutionary Guard’s financial independence. The IRGC has spent decades building a parallel economy — construction........

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