This is a response to a comment by Kayvan Hosseini, a brilliant and intelligent journalist at BBC Persian, whose interventions are generally sharp, disciplined, and to the point. Precisely for that reason, his recent formulation merits serious engagement. In this instance, however, I find his conclusion too unrealistic. It compresses history, underestimates structural constraints, and implicitly searches for an easy and rapid political resolution to a problem that has never admitted such solutions. Iran’s crises were not born overnight, and they will not be resolved through the fantasy of sudden external correction. No serious reading of modern history justifies that expectation.
Kayvan’s central claim is that the biggest loser of this war has been the Iranian people. At the level of moral sentiment, the statement is understandable: ordinary Iranians have indeed suffered grievously. They have endured bombing, economic deterioration, fear, displacement, and the further contraction of an already restricted political field. But analytically, the claim is too blunt. It mistakes suffering for strategic defeat. A people may be wounded, impoverished, and violated without thereby becoming the principal loser in the political sense. To say otherwise is to collapse a crucial distinction between being subjected to violence and being defeated by history.
This distinction matters because the Iranian people were not the authors of this war’s strategy. They did not design the coercive frameworks, formulate the escalation ladders, or imagine that aerial pressure would somehow midwife democratic transition. They were the object upon which multiple projects converged: the project of an external military campaign, the project of regional power competition, and the project of exile political currents that continue to imagine that internal legitimacy can be substituted by foreign force. To call the people the “biggest loser” risks misplacing responsibility. The greater failures belong to those who possessed agency, articulated goals, and then failed to achieve them.
If one applies even a minimally rigorous strategic standard, the larger losers are not the Iranian people but the actors whose stated or implied objectives have been most visibly frustrated. Trump is one such loser. His method combined theatrical maximalism with conceptual incoherence. Coercion was treated as a self-sufficient instrument, as though pressure alone could produce political order. Yet the result has been the opposite of what such a strategy would require: not stabilisation, not legitimacy, not regime collapse, but deeper militarisation, greater uncertainty, and broader reputational damage. When a powerful actor applies overwhelming force and still cannot secure his intended end state, failure must be named where it belongs.
Reza Pahlavi is another and perhaps even clearer example. For years, his political relevance has depended on a premise that history has repeatedly discredited: that Iran can be delivered from above, that external intervention can compensate for the absence of rooted organisation, and that symbolic lineage can stand in for political labour. The war has once again exposed the bankruptcy of that view. Far from opening a path for his project, external pressure has strengthened the state’s securitising logic and made any opposition associated with foreign power more vulnerable to delegitimation. This is not a marginal setback. It is a structural refutation of the model itself.
Here history is indispensable. Modern political transformations, especially in states marked by revolution, war, sanctions, and deep institutional entrenchment, do not unfold according to the timetable of exile desire or foreign impatience. There are no clean shortcuts through such history. The longing for a quick solution is understandable, particularly after years of repression and disappointment, but longing is not analysis. Again and again, external force has narrowed internal political space rather than opening it. Again and again, projects presented as accelerants of liberation have instead produced harder authoritarian outcomes. This is not an anomaly; it is a recurring pattern. Any analysis that underplays this pattern, however eloquent in other respects, risks becoming captive to wishful thinking.
None of this means that the Iranian people have emerged unscathed, nor that the regime’s consolidation should be minimised. Quite the opposite: the public has paid a terrible price. But there is an important intellectual and moral difference between saying that a people has suffered profoundly and saying that it is the war’s greatest loser. The first statement recognises injury. The second risks implying passivity, as though society were merely the terminal point of forces acting upon it and nothing more. Yet nations are not reducible to the damage done to them in a single cycle of violence. They carry memory, endurance, contradiction, and the capacity for future political reconstitution.
That is why I would frame the matter differently. The Iranian people are not the biggest loser of this war. They are its most wounded subject, but not its most consequential failure. The largest failures are those of strategy, judgement, and political imagination: the failure of coercive externalism, the failure of exile maximalism, and the failure of those who continue to believe that history can be bullied into yielding quick solutions. Iran’s tragedy is real. But tragedy should not be confused with finality, nor suffering with the loss of historical agency.
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