A seductive thesis circulates in the information space: in a war between a conventional force and a hybrid force, in the absence of a decisive victory, whoever resists wins. The idea is simple. And it’s wrong.
It is wrong because it is based on a little-examined premise: that Iran would be the ultimate objective of this conflict. It wasn’t.
The error is in the confusion of plans. There are several levels of objectives, and their overlap has systematically distorted the analysis.
The first is structural. It does not belong to a particular administration, but to a line of continuity in American strategic thinking that spans mandates and that the December 2025 National Security Strategy codifies with unusual clarity: the economy is the decisive terrain, the competition is primarily technological and supply chain, and the structural adversary is not in the Middle East. What is in dispute is the architecture of global energy dependencies and control of the critical nodes that support it.
In this framework, the Persian Gulf is not a secondary theater of operations. It is an instrument of economic coercion. The disruption of hydrocarbon flows does not symmetrically penalize all actors: it asymmetrically affects large net importers, whose energy vulnerability places them in a position of structural negotiating inferiority vis-à-vis Washington. The impact differential is not accidental. It’s the mechanism.
The second level is strategic-operational and corresponds to the convergence of interests between Washington and Tel Aviv: degradation of Iran’s regional projection capacity and progressive dismantling of its proxy architecture.
The effects are concrete and measurable. Hezbollah is under extreme containment pressure; Hamas operates with a purely residual capacity and growing dependence on the Gulf countries; The Houthis did not have a decisive projection, a reflection of the wear and tear imposed in 2025.
The network built over decades according to a logic of broad deterrence revealed its structural limits when subjected to simultaneous and sustained pressure. For Israel, this is yet another moment in an ongoing conflict of strategic friction. It’s not an outcome, it’s a phase.
The third level is the Trump presidency. Here, the structural logic is superimposed on a transactional practice aimed at short-term gains and perception management. There is also a personal dimension, the search for historical inscription, which shortens horizons and introduces volatility into a process that, by nature, develops in long cycles. To this mix, a disturbing variable was added this week: the use of diplomatic statements as an instrument for moving currency markets. commoditieswith enough opacity to raise serious doubts about the border between state rhetoric and private opportunism.
This makes the reading clearer. For Israel, it is about continuing to wear down an existential adversary in calculated phases. For the United States, at a structural level, the objectives of repositioning the global economic architecture are being served regardless of the rhetoric of the moment. The temptation to present this episode as definitive belongs to the third level, not the other two.
On the ground, thinning is real and measurable. The Iranian regime emerges from this phase militarily degraded for a generation, with its economic base structurally penalized, its internal legitimacy eroded and its regional prestige reduced to a shadow of what it projected five years ago. The horizontal scaling he adopted as a response to the impossibility of vertical climbing, and which the Guardians never consented to reverse, accelerated this process irreversibly.
Resistance is not always winning. Sometimes it’s just surviving. And, in this case, surviving means remaining weaker, more isolated and with less projection capacity. The regime can last. But he will emerge from this conflict unrecognizable.
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