View from Asia: The winner of Trump’s Iran war? – Iran!

US standing has plummeted with inability to protect Gulf allies and Hormuz navigation, while Iran’s regime is still largely intact, ‘Asia Times’ stresses.

US President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday, April 7, the 39th day of the Israeli-US war on Iran. He depended on Pakistani mediators and a 10-point peace plan put forward by Iran itself.

And so, Iran won the 2026 war. It did not win as in, scoring a knockout.

The Israeli-US attempt to decapitate the government failed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated along with family members, but the 88-member clerical Assembly of Experts simply elected his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to succeed him. The civilian minister of defense was killed, which is probably a war crime.

President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed IRGC General Majid Ebnelreza as acting minister of defense. The pragmatic civilian Secretary of the National Security Council, Ali Larijani was assassinated, likely another war crime.

He was succeeded by hardliner Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former IRGC general. In essence, Trump and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu made an internal coup against Iran’s centrist pragmatists in government, ensuring that they were replaced by far-right hardliners.

Israel comes out of the war a pariah

Trump and Netanyahu committed breathtaking war crimes on Iran and acted and spoke so monstrously that many countries ended up at least rhetorically supporting Iran, or at least opposing the war on it.

Israel comes out of the war a pariah. The US is too rich, big and powerful to be a pariah but its standing has certainly plummeted and it can expect much less cooperation going forward.

Iran likely inflicted a billion dollars worth of damage on the 13 US military bases in the Middle East, most of which are largely destroyed. It used cheap little drones to take out radar installations in Kuwait and elsewhere worth hundreds of millions of dollars, blinding the US to its missile barrages and allowing some deadly strikes, as on Dimona in Israel. Iran demonstrated that having a US military base does not protect the host country but rather exposes it to greater danger.

Whether Gulf states will want US bases in the medium to long term, after this, is now an open question. And are any US personnel at all left in Iraq? Iraqi Shiites supported Iran in the war.

Israeli military censorship makes it difficult to assess the damage to that country. The Haifa refinery was hit, as were military and intelligence research institutes. Netanyahu was clearly over-confident in Israeli interceptors.

Many Israelis have had to move house to sleep in shelters. Moreover, Israel is running out of interceptors faster than Iran is running out of ballistic missiles, so that if the war continued, at some point Israel would be a sitting duck.

Arrow interceptors are so low that Israel has had to let some missiles through if they seemed to be headed for relatively unpopulated areas. In that sense, Israel lost on points.

Petroleum prices could remain high in the coming year

The war failed not only because the government still stands but because its annual income from petroleum and new Strait of Hormuz tolls could be several times what it was earning from petroleum sales to China before the war.

Petroleum prices are falling from highs because of the two-week ceasefire, which may or not signal the end of the war. But so much supply has been destroyed or delayed in the Gulf that prices could remain high in the coming year. Likely a third of the Gulf’s refining capacity has been damaged.

The Israeli-US aggression on Iran has taught it that it can use drone sabotage to extract tolls from ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz. It is difficult to see how that claim on fees can be reversed, since cheap drone strikes can always start fires on petroleum and Liquefied Natural Gas tankers.

It is so expensive to erect an anti-drone system that it would be much cheaper just to pay the toll. Moreover, insurers would want a system that was 100% effective, which no anti-drone or anti-missile system is.

Iran can’t be made to back off by threatening its oil rigs, since if they were hit Iran could take out the Saudi, UAE, Bahraini and Kuwaiti oil rigs and cripple the world’s energy.

As it is, Iran did substantial damage to Kuwait oil fields and on Monday struck the Saudi petrochemical complex at Jubail, as well as taking out 17% of Qatar’s LNG production capacity at Ras Laffan.

It is likely that Russia and China will help Iran with the rebuilding

Iran certainly suffered horribly during the 39-day Israeli-US campaign this spring. Iran has seen important research institutes, university programs, steel mills, petrochemical complexes, and other economic and infrastructural sites destroyed. It is likely, however, that these can be rebuilt if Iran has convinced Israel that it has the means of deterrence.

It is likely that Russia and China will help with the rebuilding, behind the scenes, because a strong Iran able to stand up to the US and its Israeli proxy is in their interests.

The Department of Defense alleges that it used 26 different aircraft, four land-based missile systems, and six sea-based weapons systems to hit some 13,000 targets inside Iran. Some of these targets were civilian objects and so the Pentagon is boasting of war crimes of a sort for which Japanese and German generals were prosecuted after WW II.

Iranian institutions gained some authority by standing up to foreign attackers

The Iranian government, however, clearly did not lose command and control, and though perhaps 1200 Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) personnel and officers were killed, there were plenty to take their place. The IRGC is thought to have between 125,000 and 190,000 active personnel.

The attacks by the US and Israel on IRGC, police and basij buildings do not appear to have weakened the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in any measurable way. Indeed, these institutions probably gained some authority by standing up to foreign attackers.

Apparently large numbers of the US and Israeli strikes on supposed missile launchers, missiles and drones hit cleverly disguised decoys. So the 13,000 targeted sites begin to seem less impressive if a lot of them just stirred up sand and destroyed Papier-mâché “missile” “launchers.”

Since one of the key goals of Israel and the US was to take out Iran’s ballistic missiles, they failed. They only appear to have destroyed half of the ballistic missile launchers in Iran.

Iran also likely still has tens of thousands of Shahed drones. It is a pyrrhic victory in many ways, since Iran has new enemies among its neighbors and it has lost industrial capacity. But it is a victory of sorts.

At the streets of Teheran – a giant billboard reading “The Strait of Hormuz remains closed”
Photo: AFP

What will happen to Iran now?

What now after the collapse in peace talks between America and Iran in Pakistan? The gap between the two sides on the two critical issues – Iran’s nuclear programme and the Strait of Hormuz – proved too big in the end. Is it back to war? What does the failure to reach a deal mean for the fragile, two-week ceasefire the two sides agreed? Whose fault is it that the discussions, which lasted for a marathon 21 hours, broke down? So far, there is little in the way of concrete facts about what exactly happened in Islamabad but the blame game is already under way, ‘The Spectator’ writes.

First out of the blocks was J.D. Vance, who led the American side. He said the US had given the Iranian regime its ‘final and best offer’ but to no avail. The Vice-President revealed that he had spoken to Donald Trump ‘a half dozen times, a dozen times’ during the negotiations – the highest-level talks between US and Iranian officials since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Vance also remained in touch with other members of the administration including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Vance was sanguine about the failure to reach a deal, saying that ‘it’s bad news for Iran, much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America’ and that he believed the US had been ‘flexible’. When pressed further on why he had decided to walk away from Islamabad, he said the Americans had not heard an ‘affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon’. The nuclear issue and Tehran’s claim to have a ‘right’ to uranium enrichment was always going to be a major stumbling block. No real surprise that this has proven to be the case. Vance suggested the door remained open for Tehran but warned that the US would not change its stance. He did not answer a question about whether the US was going back to war, nor did he offer any answer on what the breakdown in talks meant for the ceasefire.

Iran has its own version of events. It blamed America’s ‘unreasonable demands’ for the collapse in negotiations. ‘Repeated US demands derailed progress at every stage,’ it claimed. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baqaei said the two sides had ‘reached understandings on two or three key issues’ but didn’t specify what these were. ‘Diplomacy never ends,’ he added. Much of this should be taken with a pinch of salt. The Iranians would appear to have yielded little of substance in these negotiations but it serves Tehran’s interests to keep some form of dialogue open, if only to play for time.

The harsh reality is that there is still too much of a gap on issues of substance between the two sides. This makes a successful negotiated outcome to this conflict something of a stretch. President Trump appears to be in no mood to yield ground. He told reporters yesterday that it ‘made no difference’ to him if there was a deal or not. He added: ‘The reason is because we’ve won.’

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps have threatened to deal ‘severely’ with any military vessels transiting the waterway. Compromise appears as far away as ever. The Tehran regime, mistakenly or otherwise, still thinks it has time on its side and is in no hurry to make concessions.

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