Is Iran winning the MidEast war?

Bobby M. Tuazon 06 April 2026

Going by military strikes alone, Iran may be winning the war in the Middle East.

More than a month after the U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran,the latter’s defensive strikes have damaged at least 11 major U.S. military installations in the Middle East, with some rendered unusable. Overall, the attacks have destroyed at least 17 total U.S. military, diplomatic, and air-defense sites, including key locations in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and the Gulf.

US President Donald Trump dubbed the joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran as a “personal excursion” to decapitate leaders of Iran whom he called a “terrorist state”. The first day’s joint U.S.-Israel strikes led to the drone assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, Iran’s Supreme Leader.

Yet, Joe Kent, the resigned director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, said Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. Trump, he said, was bamboozled by Israel PM Banjamin Netanyahu and the Zionists into attacking Iran.

After over 30 days of war, nearly 5,000 people have been killed across the region. A drone strike on a Minab school in southern Iran left 175 schoolchildren and teachers dead.

The decision to attack Iran was rammed through by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu pushing the U.S. president to act against Iranian leaders. The attack is a 40-year project of Israel. In fact, the elimination of Iran dates back to 1997 under the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neocon think tank influential in the George W. Bush administration. The PNAC viewed Iran as a hostile regime and a key target for challenging American power. It listed Iran alongside Iraq and Syria for potential regime change.Trump has ordered the carpet bombing of Iran sending it back to the Stone Age.

The conflict with Iran is asymmetrical as it pits vastly superior conventional military forces against a weaker adversary that relies on unconventional strategies. Iran avoids direct, large-scale conventional battles, using cheap drone/missile swarms, proxies (like Hezbollah in Lebanon), and regional disruption to impose high costs, aiming to exhaust the stronger, more expensive forces of the U.S. and Israel. 

Iran is holding its own or "winning" in terms of strategic survival leveraging geography to disrupt global energy supplies, and using a "diffusion strategy". By surviving the conflict and forcing a war of attrition, Iran aims to compel a U.S. withdrawal, having severely strained Israeli interceptor stockpiles. Tehran’s end-game is to kick the U.S. out of the Gulf Region forever.

More so, the conflict is essentially an energy war, acting as a major global energy security threat that has disrupted oil flows, increased regional uncertainty leading to a sharp surge in global energy prices. The conflict weaponizes energy infrastructure and maritime chokepoints in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. 

Around 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products pass through the Strait daily - the only route from the Gulf to the open ocean. A closure will upend major energy supply impacting countries like China. Japan, South Korea, and India, which rely heavily on this route for imports.

With 92M people Iran is a diverse nation predominantly composed of ethnic Persians (51-80%), with significant Azeri (24%) and Kurd (7%) minorities; it has a 97% literacy rate. The population is young, with a 2025 median age of 19 years, and primarily adheres to Shiite Islam.

Iran's vast terrain and motivated security apparatus make a ground invasion unlikely, as Trump has contemplated. Tehran can outlast the political will of the U.S. administration.

While U.S.-Israel strikes have severely degraded Iranian military capabilities and nuclear sites, Iran considers surviving the conflict—and forcing the U.S. to consider an unpopular, protracted war—as a form of victory. The war can last for weeks or even months.

Trump had no clear strategy for bombing Iran and, worse, no exit strategy. Reports show he’s backing out.

At home, there is no support for Trump’s war with 75% of Americans opposed to it.

Trump’s war is illegal and unconstitutional. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, confers Congress with the sole, exclusive power to declare war against another country. Likewise, under the UN Charter, the Security Council has the sole responsibility to maintain international peace and security and may authorize the use of force under Chapter VII (Articles 39–51) to address threats, breaches of peace, or acts of aggression. 

As Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and geopolitical expert says, Trump is “delusional, megalomaniac, has a temporal dementia”; and is an “international gangster”.

(A retired UP faculty, Tuazon is the director for policy studies of the think tank, CenPEG. He co-wrote 12 books and is the sole author of the book, “Spes, Clan Politics, and A New World Order” published in 2024. He wrote commentaries for Philippine dailies for five years, Global Times, China Daily, and European dailies.)