Let me tell you something about Iran that Washington never quite learns. Iranians have been negotiating with empires for three thousand years. The Achaemenids, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the British and every single one of them, at some point, declared they had broken Iran. Every single one of them was wrong.
So when Donald Trump stood up and told CBS News that the war with Iran was “very complete, pretty much”, while his own Defence Secretary was simultaneously announcing the most intense wave of strikes yet, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve been watching this region long enough to know what that kind of contradiction means. It means nobody in the room actually has a plan for what comes next.
The Nuclear Problem They Didn’t Solve
The original justification for this campaign, Operation Epic Fury, (a name that tells you a great deal about the mindset behind it) was Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been the central anxiety of Middle Eastern security politics for twenty years.
But here’s what you need to understand about bombing a nuclear programme: you can damage it. You cannot destroy it. The knowledge doesn’t live in the centrifuges. It lives in the heads of the engineers. And those engineers are still in Iran.
The June 2025 strikes, the ones that were already supposed to have finished the job, set the programme back by months according to a leaked Defence Intelligence Agency assessment. The Pentagon’s own most optimistic public number was one to two years. The IAEA, which has been inspecting Iranian facilities longer than most of these policymakers have been in office, confirmed that Iran kept the industrial capacity and the technical knowledge to resume enrichment. And then it did exactly that. Nine months later, Trump used that resumption as the reason to bomb them again.
The sites that matter most, the deeply buried facilities near Natanz, Isfahan, Parchin have survived both campaigns. To physically seize and dismantle them, you would need boots on the ground, inside Iran, in some of the most mountainous terrain on earth, against a motivated population that has now had its country bombed twice in under a year. No American general is drawing up that plan. No American general should be. The casualties would be catastrophic and the political cost would finish whoever ordered it. So the nuclear question is not resolved. It has been deferred. Expensively.
The Navy That Somehow Moved Past Oil
Trump told the country that Iran’s navy is finished. Gone. That its air force, its radar systems, its communications, its air defences, all of it decimated. He said this with the kind of confidence that comes from never having had to defend it to someone who knows the region.
The same week, Brent crude surged past $100 a barrel, because traders read the same intelligence reports Washington does, and they looked at the military that had supposedly been neutralised and concluded it still had enough left to close the Strait of Hormuz.
The Strait of Hormuz, the 34-kilometre gap between Iran and Oman through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes every single day. You close that, even partially, even temporarily, and you spike petrol prices at every petrol station in the country where ordinary South Africans are already stretched thin.
Iran’s IRGC Navy was never designed to fight the US Navy ship-to-ship. It was designed to make the Strait ungovernable. Swarms of fast attack boats. Shore-based missiles. Mines. Drones. Asymmetric tactics that don’t require sophisticated hardware, just willingness to use what you have in waters you know better than anyone else. That capability was not destroyed.
They Replaced the Hardline With A Harder One
This is the part the administration talks about least, which tells you it’s the part they understand worst. At the State of the Union in February, Trump spoke directly to the Iranian people. “When we are finished, take over your government.” The implication was that the strikes would create a crack in the regime wide enough for a popular uprising to come through. That the Iranian street was waiting for America to give it permission.
What actually happened however was Ali Khamenei was succeeded by his son Mojtaba. A man described by every analyst who covers the Islamic Republic as a hardliner who makes his father look like a moderate. Trump said he was “disappointed.”
This should not surprise anyone who has studied this region. It is not a new phenomenon. When you bomb a country, you do not crack its government. You hand the government its best argument for why it exists. You give every citizen a reason to put aside their grievances and close ranks. It happened in Iraq in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion. It happened in Libya. It happened in Syria. External military pressure is the single most reliable tool for consolidating authoritarian regimes that political science has ever documented.
You do not bomb a country into liberalism. You bomb it into nationalism. And nationalism in Iran right now has a very specific face, the son of the man you just killed, who is angrier than his father was, and who now has every reason to prove it.
The Part That Should Make Us All Uncomfortable
Put yourself in Tehran’s position for a moment. Not because you agree with the Islamic Republic, but because understanding how the other side reads a situation is basic to understanding how the situation unfolds.
You signed a deal, (The 2015 JCPOA Nuclear Deal). You complied. The other side walked away in 2018. You were then sanctioned, isolated, and eventually bombed. Twice. And the second time, it happened the morning after your negotiators had told the Omani mediators that a settlement was possible. What conclusion would you draw? What conclusion would any rational actor draw? That the United States is not a negotiating partner. It is a sequence of threats dressed in diplomatic language until the moment it decides to stop pretending.
So What Was Won?
Trump can declare victory as many times as he likes. He is not the first American president to mistake the noise of ordnance for the sound of a problem being solved.
The goalposts in this war have been moving since 2018. The only thing that has been consistent is this, whenever Iran gets close to meeting whatever the current conditions are, the conditions change. That is not a victory. That is a policy without an ending. And policies without endings do not stay in the Middle East. They show up everywhere.
Written by:
*Chloe Maluleke
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Russia & Middle East Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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