Wars are not won only by those who drop bombs and kill people. They are won by those who achieve their political objectives while denying the enemy. By that measure, Iran has already won its war with the US even though it has not defeated America in any conventional sense.

Iran has been bombed, its leaders have been killed, its infrastructure heavily damaged, its military capacity degraded. Yet it has survived with its dignity intact. Even more importantly, it has forced Donald Trump to look for a way to exit his ‘war of choice’, with his ego intact. Iran has demonstrated that preparedness and resilience can trump firepower.

Donald Trump entered this war believing his ‘shock and awe’ tactics would overwhelm Iran. The US and Israel assumed that killing Iran’s supreme leader and striking its nuclear and military facilities would trigger a collapse of the ‘regime’. That assumption has unravelled.

The Iranian state did not disintegrate. Its institutions held firm. A new supreme leader emerged. The Revolutionary Guard did not splinter. The public did not rise to bring down the system. Instead, they came out in huge numbers to voice their support for the leadership. The regime, weak before the war, has been strengthened by resistance to foreign aggression.

This is a miscalculation the US has made over and over again in West Asia, even before Trump — the folly of equating dislike of a government with an appetite for foreign aggression. Many Iranians may resent the clergy that rules over them, they may desire an end to their economic hardship, but when the country is attacked by foreign powers, loyalties to the national flag prevail over internal divisions.

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