The U.S. Is Losing the Iran War by Nearly Every Metric

In early March, U.S. President Donald Trump said that the United States had already “won” the war against Iran but still had to “finish the job.” Months later, as fighting escalates across the region and diplomacy is stalled, the “job” remains unfinished with no end in sight.

Trump on Wednesday said that “hopefully we are toward the end of the war” and suggested that Iran wants to make a deal. But that optimism is belied by what’s happening on the ground—and there’s little evidence that Tehran is eager for an agreement.

The United States has had military successes in the war, but, overall, the conflict has been a strategic disaster for Washington. The fighting has exposed serious vulnerabilities for the U.S. military and left its forces spread thin, cost the United States an estimated $38.1 billion so far, and caused a global energy crisis. The war is extremely unpopular with American voters, and a growing number of Republicans in Congress are voting in favor of ending the conflict; one GOP congressman has even moved to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the war.

But for all of those costs, the United States has achieved very little in Iran—and in some cases, things have gotten worse. By nearly every metric—from Iran’s ability to project power in the region through its proxies, to its military capabilities, to the strength of its regime, to the status of its nuclear program—the United States is losing the war. What’s more, Tehran has now proved that it can shut down the Strait of Hormuz long term, an ability it long boasted of having but had never actually demonstrated.

“If you wind the clock back to February and take a look at what the U.S. stated it was trying to do, it’s irrefutable that the U.S. failed in its main strategic goals,” Gregory Brew, an Iran expert and senior analyst at Eurasia Group, told Foreign Policy.  

Proxies

When Trump announced the onset of major combat operations against Iran in late February, he said that the United States was going to ensure that “terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.” Similarly, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine in early March said that the United States was aiming to dismantle “Iran’s ability to project power outside of its borders, both today and in the future.” In a primetime speech to the nation a month into the war, Trump also said the United States was “systematically dismantling the [Iranian] regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders.”

But there’s no evidence to suggest that the United States has accomplished this. The fact that the conflict has for months been centered on a fight for control of the Strait of Hormuz—a waterway that was open when the war began—is indicative of Tehran’s enduring capacity to influence the course of events both in the Middle East and wider world (more on that below).

Tehran’s proxies also remain a major threat months into the war and are increasingly contributing to both regional chaos and rising oil prices. The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen made major territorial gains along the country’s Red Sea coast this month, including seizing the port city of Mocha and strategic islands like Perim, in a blistering offensive against Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces. As a result, the group has taken effective control over another critical waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and separates the Arabian Peninsula from Africa.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait was already a key shipping lane before the war but became even more important amid the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran and the Houthis for months warned that the Bab el-Mandeb Strait could be closed if the United States continued the war, and they are now in a position to make good on that threat.

Meanwhile, the Houthis and Saudi Arabia are exchanging fire, reigniting long-running tensions tied to a civil war that began in 2014 but were largely on pause following a 2022 truce. There are now growing concerns that Yemen is on the verge of returning to full-blown civil war.

Saudi Arabia also temporarily shut down its 750-mile East-West oil pipeline last week after it was damaged in a drone attack that Riyadh blamed on Iran-backed militants in Iraq, and it’s unclear when it will be operational again. The pipeline transports crude oil from the kingdom’s east to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, and its temporary closure impacts roughly 4 percent of the world’s oil supply.

It’s true that other Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah—long considered Tehran’s most powerful ally in the region—are now far weaker than they were a few years ago, but this is almost entirely due to Israeli actions in Gaza and Lebanon.

Ballistic missiles and drones

The Trump administration also launched the war with the objective of destroying Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities. In April, Hegseth said Iran’s missile program was functionally destroyed and that the country could “no longer build missiles.” Trump has also claimed that Iran’s military has been “totally destroyed.”

Iran’s military has certainly been significantly affected by the war. A number of top Iranian military and intelligence leaders have been killed since the bombs started falling, its industrial capacity has been diminished, and its conventional navy has largely been destroyed.

But Tehran’s continued ability to launch attacks on targets across the region with both missiles and drones shows that this goal remains elusive and that the Trump administration has greatly embellished its military successes.

Intelligence assessments also contradict the Trump administration’s public claims about the extent to which Iran’s military has been degraded. Iran has reportedly resumed ballistic missile production in underground facilities, even after thousands of U.S. strikes targeted its missile facilities and launch sites in the early days of the war. It was also always going to be difficult to completely destroy Iran’s drone capability given how cheap and easy they are to produce.

Regime change

While the Trump administration has fluctuated on whether bringing down the Iranian regime is a central objective, when the war began it was clear that toppling Iran’s leadership was among the White House’s key goals.

“To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump said on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

Though top Iranian leaders, including former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, have been killed, the regime remains very much intact and, in many ways, has only calcified.

“Insofar as regime change was a goal, U.S. action has been almost entirely counterproductive. The regime is now more entrenched. It is more confident of its position inside Iran. It is more emboldened. It’s dominated now by military security leadership that, while pragmatic, are almost uniformly hostile toward the West and not interested in any kind of broader accommodation with the U.S. or the West in general,” Brew said.

Nuclear program

More than any other issue, Trump has repeatedly returned to Iran’s nuclear program as the primary objective of the war. The president has also misleadingly claimed that the United States “obliterated” Iran’s program, even as he justifies continuing the war for the sake of preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

There’s no doubt that U.S. strikes have set Iran’s nuclear program back by destroying infrastructure and killing important figures within Iran (including top scientists), but the country still has a roughly 440-kilogram (970 pounds) stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU). Experts have repeatedly emphasized that as long as Iran has access to this stockpile—the precise location of which remains unknown—its nuclear program remains a threat and cannot be considered neutralized.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi this week lamented that the agency’s oversight of Iran’s nuclear program “deteriorated” this year. “We have not conducted any in-field verification activities in Iran for more than six months,” Grossi said, while emphasizing that it’s been “well over a year” since the IAEA “lost continuity of knowledge” regarding Iran’s uranium stockpile.

“The Agency’s lack of information about this nuclear material and access to facilities to verify it is a matter of serious proliferation concern and needs to be addressed with the utmost urgency,” Grossi said.

Trump has flip-flopped on whether the United States needs to retrieve the country’s HEU stockpile—suggesting it’s buried under rubble and inaccessible due to previous U.S. strikes. “We will get it. ​We don’t need it, we don’t ⁠want it. We’ll probably destroy ​it after we get it, but ​we’re not going to let them have it,” Trump said in May.

Satellite imagery has also shown a “surge” in construction activity at Pickaxe Mountain, a suspected nuclear site, in 2026, according to a recent analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Last week, Trump suggested the United States could take action based on the reports of construction activity at Pickaxe Mountain. “We notice there’s a little activity at Pickaxe,” Trump said. “I would advise Iran not to get cute because we will have to hit them very hard.”

Despite such rhetoric, the Trump administration’s actions increasingly indicate that Iran’s nuclear program has been bumped down the White House’s list of priorities. Amid the lack of progress on the nuclear issue and the failure to achieve its initial goals in the war more broadly, the Trump administration has shifted its attention to other objectives.

The administration has moved to strangle Iran economically, via both a naval blockade and a financial campaign—dubbed Operation Economic Outcast—to further isolate Tehran via sanctions and other actions. “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said as he announced the effort in late August.

But Iran’s leadership has withstood economic pressure from the United States for decades, raising doubts as to whether this approach will actually move the needle and see Tehran make concessions in any future talks.

Control of Hormuz

The war is now fundamentally a fight over oil and shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.

While around 4 million to 5 million barrels of oil were flowing through the strait daily in early August, that number is now approaching around 10 million, Brew said. This is positive for the United States and also comes as its naval blockade appears to be working given Iranian oil exports have ground to a halt. But traffic through the strait is roughly a fifth of what was seen before the war, Brew said, underscoring that the situation is also being “managed through a pretty considerable outlay of resources.”

The process involves the U.S. Navy and air assets providing defense for tankers moving through the strait in small convoys. This system has steadily increased the flow of oil through the strait over the last month, and while it’s helping to delay a “general crisis” in energy markets, Brew said, it’s “not removing the risk.”

The price of Brent crude—the global benchmark for oil—sat around $104 on Thursday. Just before the war began in February, the price of Brent crude was roughly $72 a barrel.

In response to a request for comment on whether Trump believes the war will end on a positive note for the United States, a White House official on background told Foreign Policy that “Iran is calling constantly and is desperate for a deal,” but the president is “only open to making a good deal with Iran, whereby they permanently renounce their desire for a nuclear weapon.” The official also said that while Trump is open to talks under the “right circumstances,” he has “no need to negotiate with the Iranians.”

“Unlike previous presidents, President Trump will not be played by the Iranian regime. The President is satisfied letting the inevitable Iranian collapse play out,” the official said.