After 13 days under relentless U.S. and Israeli attack, Iran’s military and security forces are degraded, its navy largely sunk, and its longtime supreme leader and top military officers assassinated.
But the Islamic Republic shows no sign of collapse and refuses to capitulate.
Instead, it continues to retaliate with missiles and drones, targeting oil, energy, and financial interests in a strategy aimed at raising the global cost of the conflict beyond anything the Trump administration appears to have expected – or is willing to bear.
Why We Wrote This
If the United States expected Iran to capitulate by now, it refuses to do so. Instead, it is pursuing a survival strategy of fighting on and selecting targets to raise the war’s costs so high that the U.S. and Israel would think twice before attacking again.
Iran is acting to disrupt, endure, and ensure that the United States and Israel are forced to halt the war – not on Washington’s terms, but on Iran’s.
It’s a war of attrition that analysts say is designed to deter the U.S. and Israel from striking Iran again in the future. And, says one, it’s a conflict that the regime sees as a “final war” of survival.
Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil supply is shipped. Since Wednesday, it has targeted half a dozen tankers around the Persian Gulf, sending oil prices beyond $100 per barrel.
“The only way for [Iranians] to stop this war on their terms has been to increase the economic costs of the war,” says Hamidreza Azizi, an Iran expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.
“That explains the targeting of energy facilities, and especially the restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz,” he says. “But it has not been enough yet, and [President] Donald Trump seems to still be interested in continuing this.”
Iran “will not retreat”
Mr. Trump warned early Tuesday that Iran would be hit “TWENTY TIMES” harder if it blocked the flow of oil. “Additionally, we will take out easily destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again – Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them,” he posted on social media.
Yet a message attributed to Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, struck a defiant tone Thursday and vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz blocked, to pressure “enemies” to end the war.
It was Mr. Khamenei’s first public statement – read out on Iranian state television, with no video images or voice recording – since he was chosen as supreme leader. He was wounded in the Israeli strike that killed his father, previous supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of his family on Feb. 28.
“We will not retreat,” read the leader’s statement, which included a call for Iran’s neighbors to expel U.S. bases from their soil. “The revenge we seek is not limited to the martyrdom of the great leader of the revolution, but for every single Iranian who is killed. … The enemies will pay the price.”
Iran has struck military and civilian targets in Israel, as well as U.S. military bases and their Arab host nations, oil infrastructure, and ports across the Middle East.
And overnight Wednesday, Iran and its Lebanese Shiite ally Hezbollah – itself under constant Israeli bombardment for more than a week since joining the war – demonstrated they could still coordinate significant attacks. By an Israeli count, Hezbollah launched a barrage of more than 200 rockets and 20 drones into northern Israel, as Iran simultaneously launched its own missile salvo at the center of the country.
“New strategic reality”
“Tehran is trying to create a new strategic reality – one that deters future attacks on Iran,” wrote Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch for Israel Defense Intelligence, now with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, on the social platform X.
“That is why its conditions for ending the conflict are likely to be extremely tough,” he wrote. “At the same time, the U.S. and Israel are riding the wave of operational success and still seem to believe that pressure may eventually force the regime to back down.”
The Pentagon says it has hit some 6,000 targets in Iran, and that Iranian missile launches are down 90% and drone launches down 83% from the first day of the war. President Trump says the U.S. is “winning” and will “finish the job,” and he downplays the economic impact of a conflict he calls a “little excursion.”
Iran’s Ministry of Health reported Thursday that in 13 days, 3.2 million Iranians had been displaced, and nearly 1,400 killed, more than 200 of them women and children.
As a next step, Mr. Azizi says, Iran is considering “activating” its Houthi militia allies in Yemen to block shipping through a second geographic choke point, the Red Sea, as the Houthis have done in the past.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said “not one liter” of oil would be allowed to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, until the U.S. and Israel stopped their attacks. The IRGC warned that the price of oil could reach $200 per barrel – well beyond the 2008 global record of $147.
Ali Larijani, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, this week posted a warning that the Strait of Hormuz will “either be a strait of peace and prosperity for all, or a strait of defeat and suffering for warmongers.”
Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters/File
Iranian Rear Adm. Ali Fadavi, a senior IRGC adviser, told state television Wednesday that Iran has high-speed torpedoes with technology that only Russia and Iran possess, and “we may use them just in the days to come.”
“NO PLAN” for strait
Mr. Trump has suggested that the U.S. Navy could escort ships through the strait, but senior officials say that option won’t be available until the end of the month.
After a closed-door briefing with Trump officials Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Christopher Murphy of Connecticut posted on X that they “had NO PLAN” for dealing with the Strait of Hormuz, and “don’t know how to get it safely back open.”
“The American decision-makers maybe did not understand correctly that, for the Islamic Republic, this is really seen as the final war. Either they survive, or they lose forever,” says Dr. Azizi in Berlin, about the regime formed from the 1979 Islamic Revolution, with its pillars of anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology.
“If I want to name just one factor [in Iran’s strategy], it’s the willingness – how far the Islamic Republic is willing to go in this war,” he says. A second factor is the assassination of the previous supreme leader, and reports that hard-line IRGC devotees engineered the son’s ascent.
“Ironically, the killing of Khamenei has contributed to what we are seeing, not in the sense that they are taking revenge, but because he was very much more cautious than many people within the IRGC,” Dr. Azizi says.
“Now, [IRGC officers] really feel free to do whatever they have been imagining all these years,” he says, noting that the view among a younger generation of IRGC officers is, “We need to change the equation. We need to be so decisive that there won’t be any further attacks.”
“It seems [Iran’s ruling system] has some incremental approach to testing Trump’s pain threshold,” adds Dr. Azizi. “They really are not going to negotiate. It’s all about forcing the other side to stop.”
An Iranian researcher contributed to this report.
