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Notes -
Donald Trump Won the Iran War
From an essay endorsed by Pete Hegseth on twitter:
Critics say that Iran is winning because they now control the Straits of Hormuz. In reality it appears that trade in the Gulf is returning to pre-war levels as it risks the Straits or bypasses them entirely:
Critics say that the Iran War has driven America's allies to shake off American leadership. In fact we see the opposite:
America recently carried out strikes in Iraq, working with the Saudi military, to push out Iranian militias, and is now concluding multi-billion dollar business deals:
Meanwhile, how's America's blockade going?
Iran’s oil exports stall and Kharg Island idles under US blockade
It's possible that Iran has been unable to successfully sell it's oil for even longer:
Iran is still able to make money from oil tankers that left the Gulf during the last ceasefire and are currently in Asia, but that crude will all be sold soon and Iran will start to be squeezed even more, unless they come to a deal with the US or somehow engineer a military miracle.
Iran is facing inflation of ~87.9%, which is to say, the average Iranian has lost almost half of their wealth compared to this point last year:
How's Iran's Nuclear Program doing? The New York Times put out this report today concluding that Iran's program is "slowed but not stopped":
[https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-program.html](Trump Vowed to Thwart Iran’s Nuclear Program. Here’s Where That Stands.)
However, under the headline, here's where things stand:
Iran has enough nuclear material to manufacture 10 nuclear bombs? Wow, what are they going to do with it?
America destroyed Iran's capability to "convert or enrich" that uranium, and then locked the uranium that remains deep under collapsed tunnels that can be bombed again as soon as Iran tries to retrieve it.
The sites that were bombed last year appear to remain inoperable, which is to say that, after America bombed them, they have not been used.
(The New York Times then concludes that this is both a significant setback and also doesn't actually matter at all. Well, that's what I heard three months ago. I'm sure that three months from now, people will still be saying that Iran can build a nuke anytime it wants to, it just doesn't want to.)
So here's where we're at now:
Trump, Iran, and Oman are apparently on the cusp of announcing another deal to reopen the Strait. But it increasingly doesn't matter: Iran needs to make a deal because their economic crisis is so acute, while America and the rest of the Gulf can shrug it all off as increasingly a minor inconvenience.
Trump won. Trump was right from the beginning. The Iran war is below-the-fold news now.
Iran will never toll the strait, Iran will never bring the global economy to its knees, Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Iran cannot defeat America militarily or overcome the blockade. The Iranian regime will eventually fall, or make significant concessions, or surrender, or continue to limp along losing strength and relevance -- it doesn't matter which. Either way, Iran loses, America wins, the writing is on the wall.
Trump won. Iran lost.
If, as your post claiming victory states, the end result is:
then the political situation is status quo ante, which means that the war is a draw, regardless of the battlefield results. More American rockets successfully exploded in Iranian targets than vice versa, but even when an American rocket explodes in an Iranian target, that represents both Iranian and American shit exploding to the net geopolitical benefit of Russia, China, Turkey etc.
All that’s left is for America to collect Iran’s nuclear dust. Or not, we can keep it buried under the mountains forever. Either way we completely decimated one of America’s greatest adversaries, and we did it for cheap.
I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with much of what you're saying, but I'm curious as to your definition of cheap.
As it stands, it's looking like the US military expended:
Now this war has been profoundly cheap in terms of servicemembers' lives, praise be
I also am not getting into the cost of the political capital expended, both domestically and abroad, as those are hard to measure without hindsight and so can be left to argue about after the midterms lol
But it's materially degraded the stocks of offensive and defensive effectors in a way that is quite bad for a pending great power conflict against a heavily industrialized foe (rhymes with Carolina).
Was the war cheap in an absolute sense/in a vacuum? Maybe, perhaps even probably. Was the war, from an opportunity cost perspective, cheap? Less likely, and if China decides to get spicy in the SCS in the next 5 years, that becomes a resounding "no"
My understanding is that ATACMS is currently in the early phases of replaced by PsSM, which essentially means the US fired off a lot of missiles instead of decommissioning them (or giving them to Ukraine) and a few test volleys of PsSM (which is likely worth it just for the training data).
If the massive reported build-up of US munitions production materializes, I think that most of these missile expenditures will be relatively negligible over the long run assuming that the long run is what matters. The next 5 years sounds about right.
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I think these claims were a hidden message that the entire thing is fake an a joke. There aren't many places these missiles can be fired from and hit Iran, and osint sources were pretty obviously reporting when they were used. And based on osint they were only used in a limited capacity in the latest round of strikes.
So either the US was firing off thousands of these from some secret place for most of the war, then all of a sudden decided to launch a few volleys from obvious and observable places, or the claims are complete bs.
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On the radio today they mentioned ongoing negotiations about Iran charging a toll. They want around 7 or 8%; other countries are demanding closer to 2%. It used to be 0. Their ability to shoot missiles into ships is not that discredited.
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Hamas is not disarmed. Iran's leverage over the Straits is not discredited, though it is weakened. Iran's drone manufacturing industry will be up in a month; Iran's not California, they can rebuild and rebuild quickly.
How is Iran going to rebuild their manufacturing when we can bomb it whenever we want and they are running out of money?
Cute, but California’s GDP is ~10x Iran’s. There are military bases in San Diego with more military capacity than Iran.
We can bomb things, we can't bomb everything.
The US has made building things 1000x more difficult than it needs to be. A US with the military efficiency of WWII US and modern weaponry would spank today's US. So a much poorer Iran can do quite well.
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The last time the USAF tried switching from using stand-off munitions to dumb bombs they began rapidly taking airframe losses and nearly had a pilot taken hostage. Hence why they instead used up nearly the entire inventory of ATACMs and PrSMs.
Is there any evidence that the USAF used dumb bombs at all?
The go-to bomb is JDAM, which is a guided bomb with maximum ranges in the double-digit miles - not considered a standoff weapon, but not a "dumb bomb" either. The JDAM-ER triples the range, making it arguably a standoff weapon.
I am also skeptical of your broader claim. Overall, Iranian air defenses likely performed worse than Iraq's in Desert Storm against manned aircraft.
In terms of a concrete timeline, Hegseth said that the US was switching to bombs on March 4, 2026. There's at least evidence of mines dropped in Shiraz dated to March 26, the US bombed the Karaj bridge with a JDAM on April 2, indicating strikes by bombs against targets far inland by that point at a minimum. Iran hit one F-35 on March 19 and 1 F-15E and 1 A-10 (doing CSAR for the F-15) on April 3. A ceasefire was declared on April 7, but on April 5 (the same day the WSO was recovered) Iranians are said to have reported a number of aircraft overflights, including over Isfahan and Alborz - hardly exterior provinces.
And as far as MQ-9s go, by my count the US lost (to ground fire) 16 Reapers in March (12 of them by the 19th), 8 in April, 3 in May, 2 in June, 5 in July.
I don't think that this data (which I am eyeballing, so welcome for any corrections) necessarily excludes the narrative you put forward, but I don't think it maps cleanly onto it. There's no real indication that the US slowed down after the F-35 was tagged on the 19th and there's evidence of a surge on the 5th, after the F-15E and A-10 were shot down.
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ATACMs are old missiles from 1991 that have been gradually replaced with newer models.
PrSMs are brand new missiles essentially being prototyped tested live on the battlefield.
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