Plenty has been said of the US and Iran signing the Memorandum of Understanding, which, supposedly, will pave the way to some kind of wider agreement. The view among many is that this has been a loss for both the US and Israel. The same voices that were confident when the conflict began now resent what they have deemed to be a bad deal that will empower Iran and leave Israel more isolated.
Much like in any conflict, the “enemy” also gets a vote. Iran is a key player in what has transpired and it's worth considering what the regime’s game plan has been. Over the years, Iran has refused to confer with the Trump administration. The regime didn’t want talks with the first Trump administration, particularly after the US walked away from the 2015 JCPOA deal.
Iran’s supreme leader, who was killed at the opening of the February conflict, was suspicious of the West. When Trump walked away from the 2015 deal, it cemented a perception among Iran’s leadership that the US and the West could not be trusted. This resulted in Iran’s attempts to distance itself from the West and shift towards China.
Iran already had close ties with Russia. However, after 2018, Iran increasingly sought closer relations with China and wanted to develop infrastructure that would create a north-south economic corridor and expand trade to Central Asia. This didn’t pan out fully because Iran’s economy is in bad shape. Iran and China did move toward a 25-year agreement, but not much Chinese investment flowed towards Iran.
Iran brings nothing to China in return
China views Iran as a chaotic regime that doesn’t offer a return on investment. As such, China presumed that it could secure more trade with the Gulf and other countries. Economic groupings such as BRICS, the SCO, and others offered China more opportunities abroad.
Iran believed it would benefit from the Israel-Hamas War. It sought a multi-pronged war against Israel, but failed to achieve that. Instead, Iran witnessed its two proxies, Hamas Hezbollah, repeatedly defeated and weakened.
After this, Iran’s goal was to salvage its proxy network. When the new Trump administration appeared, Iran signaled it was open to indirect talks. These indirect talks meant that discussions would be slow. Iran and the US turned to Oman as a mediator. However, these talks failed when Israel began its airstrikes in June 2025. The US followed this up with strikes of its own, and Iran and the US turned to Qatar to end the conflict.
From Iran’s point of view, the June 2025 attacks showed that Iran’s air defenses and other weapons were little more than a paper tiger. Iran had launched many missiles at Israel, both during June 2025 and in two large salvos in 2024. Both times, Iran saw that its missiles would not win a war against Israel.
Then, Iran was presented with a strategy against Israel that is similar to Hezbollah’s. The goal, now, was for the regime to survive and continue low-level attacks. It couldn’t win, but, so long as it didn’t explicitly lose, it could claim victory in some fashion.
When Israel and the US attacked Iran in February, the regime was already prepared for a strategy of “not losing.” Iran is a large country, some 150 times larger than Lebanon. If Israel couldn’t defeat Hamas or Hezbollah, Iran reasoned that it could hold out as well. Holding out became Iran’s strategy.
The US and Israel didn’t have a clear strategic goal
The US and Israel didn’t have a clear strategic goal. In March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran had been so decimated that it could no longer enrich its uranium or produce ballistic missiles. Ostensibly, these were Israel’s war goals. But these goals slowly escalated, which worked in Iran’s favor. In 2026, Iran faced a long conflict of diminishing returns for the US and Israel, which, of course, benefitted Iran rather than its enemies.
Iran acted to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and attack the Gulf and Iraq. Iran assumed that it could more effectively wage war in its neighborhood, while also clawing back some influence over policy in Lebanon. As such, Iran’s goal was to draw out both the conflict and the resulting negotiations. As long as Iran could ensure a return to the status quo, it could say that it had won.
In any kind of game, if one side wins by not losing and the other side has to win, then clearly, the latter has a harder road ahead. And, now that the results are in, many will portray Iran as achieving great success. However, the reality is that Iran set easy goals for itself. All it had to do was not lose.
During the war, a lot of commentary on the conflict seemingly missed key points about Iran. For instance, some argued that precision strikes on a few IRGC positions would make IRGC members fearful and cause them to lose morale and desert. But, in a country as large as Iran, with so many IRGC members, is it likely that strikes on a few IRGC checkpoints will demoralize a group of tens of thousands? Most IRGC members probably never witnessed an airstrike during the conflict. How, then, can they be demoralized from something they never experienced?
Soldiers in the trenches in the first World War survived, and so did soldiers in Stalingrad. The Iranian soldiers didn’t experience anything like that. Anyone that follows the regime knows that its ideology is rooted in its war with Iraq in the 1980s. If the regime survived that and was steeled by it, it is likely its troops could survive a few airstrikes.