By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
There are several ways that wars end.
–One side conquers and annexes the other.
–One side surrenders and gives up some of their land, treasure, and authority in a peace treaty.
–One side has a domestic change of government and the new one befriends the other side.
–Things reach a stalemate and the shooting stops in an ongoing, uncomfortable sort of permanent ceasefire.
The USA-Iran War has never fit comfortably into such normal classifications.
During the first 47 years of the war, the Twelver regime of Iran didn’t just attack the United States, but attacked countless countries and interests all over the world, few of them blatantly enough or frequently enough for their targets to really feel like it was a war. Iran was at war with everyone and no one at the same time, which made it difficult for the rest of the world to get up the will to start fighting back.
For 47 years, the Twelver regime would steadily build terrorist units and send them out across the world, funnel weaponry to their client groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis, and attack US ships or US-allied-flag commercial ships when in the neighborhood, but they would never do anything quite so blatant as to launch a full-fledged invasion that could be clearly recognized as the start of a hot war.
The few countries they did attack frequently, such as Israel, Yemen, Lebanon and Egypt, they attacked primarily through their work with the above-mentioned surrogates. It was a war for 47 years, but the USA could, if we chose, close our eyes to it. And for the most part, both Republican and Democrat administrations did.
Finally, in 2025, the United States and Israel determined that we could not allow this status quo to continue. Iran was already costing the world billions of dollars per day by the closure of the Suez Canal, the destabilization of multiple neighbors, and the rapidly approaching completion of a nuclear weapons program (which they have proven they would use with glee as soon as they had it). It was time for us to act, and we did.
In the past year, we have absolutely pummeled Iran. We’ve put their navy on the bottom of the sea, we’ve obliterated their air force, we’ve buried their nuclear program under immeasurable rubble, and we’ve emasculated much of their army.
By all traditional measures of war, they are defeated. Any normal country would have surrendered months ago.
But that’s because any normal country has a government with a sense of self-preservation. That is, normally, both the government wants to survive, and the government wants their people to survive. So eventually, in the interest of self-preservation, a defeated government will calculate the pain already inflicted upon them, and will come to the table to stop the bloodshed.
But Iran is ruled by Twelvers.
Twelvers don’t think like the rest of humanity does. They are happy to see bloodshed, anywhere, whether it’s their own, or their enemies’, or even noncombatants’. They just want to see bloodshed, because they think it will speed the “return” of their mahdi. If some of them die, even if all of them die, that’s fine, because in their warped minds, it will bring back their mahdi.
We have not fought a war against an enemy with this kind of a delusion before.
The Trump administration is therefore adjusting its plans and pivoting to a different end game, one in which Iran doesn’t surrender, but Iran doesn’t matter anymore.
This is a frustrating choice, and a sad one, because it wasn’t that long ago that Iran was a vibrant and successful member of the world community, and many of us were hoping for a return to that happy reality.
In the 1970s, Iran was the most modern, western-facing, successful country in the middle east. Then came the revolution that weaponized their oil and terrorized their population. For 47 years that once noble country has been a problem for the world, and with the long-postponed decision to act in 2025 and 2026, we hoped that this long global nightmare was finally over.
We must now acknowledge the reality that the Twelver regime will not capitulate, despite having been militarily wiped out. Iran will not have a change in government unless the people of Iran somehow manage to force such a change through a real civil war, which is not an easy task in a nation that’s been largely disarmed for 47 years.
So, what has the Trump administration done?
We are supporting neighboring Arab nations in finding ways to transport fuel outside Iran’s control, such as the new canal in Oman and the new pipelines across Saudi Arabia. We are protecting commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. And we are continuing to crack down on sanctions abuses, in order to further isolate and weaken Iran’s current regime.
This is admittedly not the slam-dunk that some of us (perhaps unrealistically) hoped for at the start.
But even so, contrary to claims to the contrary, the war has accomplished numerous major victories for the free peoples of the world, among them:
–Essentially eliminating Iran’s ability to support terrorism worldwide.
–Essentially eliminating (or at least pushing back by decades) Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons.
–Essentially eliminating Iran’s ability to supply its foreign surrogates (Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.) with munitions or funding.
–Greatly reducing Iran’s ability to supply our other major enemies (Russia, China, etc.) with oil.
–Reducing the ability of our enemies to replace the US Dollar as the world’s de facto tool of international commerce. It wasn’t long ago that the BRICS crowd was boasting of their ascendancy; the collapse of Iran as an economic power has dealt a serious blow to that effort.
Another change worth noting – not actually caused by the war, but perhaps exposed by it – is the considerable disapproval of islam that we see in the people of Iran today. We have grown accustomed to muslims at least professing to being devout in public opinion polls, but it is reported that the Iranian population’s support of islam has plummeted in recent years, with roughly half the country turning atheist or deist in their rejection of islam, or returning to their former observance of Judeo-Christian, Zoroastrian, Bahai, or other religions, having lived through 47 years of Twelver rule.
This means that as the likely civil war eventually arises, the new government will likely have a peaceful melting pot of religions again, free of the reign of terror known as sharia law. Iran was once a peaceful and religiously pluralistic nation; the odds are that it shall soon be again.
In the meantime, what do we need? We just need our administration to stay the course.
We must not capitulate, by offering the Twelvers an easy peace treaty that legitimizes their tyrannical regime. We must not ease up in our control of the skies and the coasts. We need to keep the pressure on the Twelvers’ regime, so that when the public is finally ready to rise up and overthrow their satanic overlords, they have as free a hand as possible in the effort.
Until then, stay the course, don’t back down, and pray that the good people of Iran regain control of their government again – with the blessing of Divine Providence, sooner rather than later.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
