Mohsen Askari is an Iranian researcher and educator based at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. His work crosses the fields of language education, AI and technology, political communication and digital authoritarianism. Recently, his writing has primarily focused on Iranian politics, wartime internet repression and the structural silencing of public voice; while continuing research on AI-mediated learning and second language pedagogy. He writes with particular attention to Persian-language discourse that rarely reaches international audiences.
Did Iran win the war with Israel and the United States? The question has dominated commentary since the fighting ended. Yet it assumes that victory can be measured on a single scoreboard.
In reality, the war produced different outcomes in different arenas. Iran suffered severe military damage. The Islamic Republic survived. Israel and the United States achieved tactical gains but may still struggle to translate them into lasting political outcomes. Meanwhile, Tehran is trying to transform survival into a narrative of victory. Understanding the war requires separating these factors, or "scoreboards," rather than collapsing them into a single verdict.
Military outcomes dictate the first scoreboard. Some experts have argued that assessing victory is difficult because the actors entered the war with different objectives that are often unclear and malleable. The United States and Israel have generally sought to degrade Iran's nuclear, missile and conventional military capacities, while Iran has sought to preserve the regime, restore some deterrence — especially to prevent a new round of fighting — and impose costs on its enemies. By conventional military measures, the United States and Israel have done well: Iranian missile attacks dropped sharply after bombing and suppression campaigns, and Iran lost many missile launchers, weapons-production sites, naval assets and components of its defense base.
Survival is not victory, and Iran's situation constitutes a catastrophic survival: The regime absorbs immense damage, then lowers the definition of success until merely remaining in power becomes triumph.
- Mohsen Askari
Yet these facts do not make Iran harmless, nor do they equate to a strategic victory for Israel and the United States. A damaged state can still be dangerous, and potentially more so in Iran's case. Tehran can pressure the region through shipping disruption, energy markets, drones, militias and internal repression. It still possesses significant military capacity to do so. Indeed, Washington and Tel Aviv's war of choice may have pushed Iran into new arenas of leverage, such as its control of the Strait of Hormuz. Such developments do not suggest any clear victory for either side.
Regime survival constitutes the second scoreboard. Here, the Islamic Republic has a narrower claim. It has not collapsed. Brookings analysts note, however, that even after major political and military losses, the regime remains unified, with no major defections observed among its remaining leaders. That matters because regime collapse requires more than military defeat. It requires political rupture, elite fracture, mass mobilization or some combination of the three.
But survival is not victory, and Iran's situation constitutes a catastrophic survival: The regime absorbs immense damage, then lowers the definition of success until merely remaining in power becomes triumph. The state no longer asks whether it protected the country, preserved military capacity, improved citizens' lives or avoided disaster. It asks whether it still exists.
This logic is familiar in authoritarian and asymmetrical conflicts. If a weaker actor faces a stronger enemy and is not destroyed, it claims victory. The bar is set after the fact. For the Islamic Republic, this rebranding is politically necessary. A state built on resistance, divine legitimacy and anti-imperial defiance cannot easily admit defeat. It therefore reframes the narrative: "We endured; therefore, we prevailed." Yet that reasoning is not analysis; it is regime therapy.
The strategic dimension populates the third scoreboard. It is possible that Washington and Tel Aviv will fail to turn military success into political, let alone strategic, success. Destroying targets is not the same as producing a stable outcome. Killing commanders is not the same as changing a regime's behavior. Weakening a nuclear or missile program is not the same as solving the political problem that produced it.
The people most absent from this narrative struggle are ordinary Iranians. The international debate about whether Iran won is conducted largely without those who must live with the costs of Tehran's Pyrrhic victory.
- Mohsen Askari
This critique matters because there is a difference between tactical and strategic success. The United States may end up with tactical victories and strategic liabilities. Israel may degrade Iran's military infrastructure and still face a long-term deterrence problem. But American or Israeli strategic failure does not automatically equate to Iranian victory either. Both can coexist, as has long informed this rivalry.
Narrative control informs the fourth scoreboard. The Islamic Republic has long invested heavily in this realm given the low cost. It does not need to persuade the world that it won the war. It only needs to prevent the word "defeat" from becoming widely accepted. Tehran needs enough supporters, sympathetic commentators, regional allies and anti-interventionist voices to repeat a simpler formula: The United States and Israel failed. Iran endured.
To be clear, criticism of American or Israeli military action is not support for the Islamic Republic. Concerns about civilian harm, humanitarian catastrophe, international law, regional escalation, failed military interventions and strategic ineptitude should be taken seriously. But analysis becomes distorted when state survival is recoded as Iranian victory.
The people most absent from this narrative struggle are ordinary Iranians. The international debate about whether Iran won is conducted largely without those who must live with the costs of Tehran's Pyrrhic victory. Wartime censorship, surveillance, fear and internet restrictions make Iranian public opinion structurally difficult to hear. Access Now has described Iran's wartime shutdown as a near-total internet disruption that cut millions off from global communication when access to reliable information was most urgent. Internet monitoring by NetBlocks has documented a connectivity drop off nearing 1% of normal levels during the blackout.
Experts have highlighted why this matters politically. During the war, Iranian officials openly treated connectivity as a tool for amplification, granting access to those who could carry the state's voice while ordinary citizens remained largely offline. In such a system, the regime not only censors dissent; it selects who gets to speak to the world.
That dynamic explains why the victory debate surrounding the war is also a democratic question. A regime official in Tehran, a foreign-policy analyst in Washington, a television commentator in London and an Iranian citizen living through bombardment and blackout in Isfahan are not equally positioned to define what happened or is still happening in the war. Yet the first three often see their perspectives reach wider audiences more easily than the fourth.
Many Iranians can oppose foreign military attack and still believe the Islamic Republic has brought catastrophe upon the country. They can fear American and Israeli power while rejecting the regime that claims to defend them in Iran. They can understand survival not as victory, but as captivity continued in a worsened form.
A better way to assess this war begins with a simple discipline: Specify the scoreboards before declaring the winner. On the military scoreboard, Iran suffered severe damage. On the regime-survival scoreboard, the Islamic Republic endured. On the strategic scoreboard, the United States and Israel may still struggle to turn tactical gains into durable political outcomes. On the narrative scoreboard, Tehran is trying to convert survival into victory. The task for analysts is not to accept that conversion, but to ask who pays for it and whose voices are missing from the verdict.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
