“Yes, military bases have been targeted. A lot of military commanders have been killed. But from their point of view, they are winning the war,” says Saeid Golkar, an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and an expert on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). “They have been able to push Trump back to negotiating.”
Read more: Iranians Say Trump’s Intervention Brought Destruction, Not Liberation
“Rather than bringing down the regime, the campaign is, in several key respects, actually reinforcing it,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Iran specialist for Israeli military intelligence, wrote in Israel Hayom on March 27. Two days earlier, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, Alex Younger, told the Economist: “The reality is that the U.S. underestimated the task, and I think as of about two weeks ago lost the initiative to Iran.”
Speaking to reporters at the White House on March 26, Trump offered a succinct summary of why, for more than 40 years, Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked. “The problem with the straits is this,” he said: “Let's say we do a great job. Say we got 99%. One percent is unacceptable, because 1% is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost a billion dollars, right?”
A member of the Iranian Red Crescent Society stands at Hypercar, an auto service center, amid damages which according to the company's officials were caused by strikes on March 1, in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, March 28, 2026 —Vahid Salemi—Associated Press
Did 'decapitation strikes' backfire?
Trump’s confident prediction of a short, successful war followed the notably smooth operation to capture Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces two months earlier—and the handover to Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who kept the kleptocratic ruling regime in place.
Martyrdom looms large in the foundational narrative of Islam’s Shi’ite minority, specifically the Battle of Karbala in A.D. 680, which takes lessons of resilience and righteousness from the death of Muhammad’s grandson Hussein in a battlefield loss to a larger but illegitimate army. In majority-Shi’ite Iran, the Revolutionary Guards were both the crucible of the revolutionary ideology on which the Islamic Republic was founded, and the most powerful force. Analysts say it now controls the country, having installed Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, as a Supreme Leader who may be more of a figurehead.
Trump dismissed the choice as well, though for reasons of his own: “I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei. I want to be involved in the selection,” he told TIME in an interview on March 4. In an interview with Axios the next day, Trump said he would his like his involvement in choosing Iran’s next leader to be “like with Delcy in Venezuela.”
“In practical terms,” Farzin Nadimi wrote for the Washington Institute think tank, “this means the Trump administration may effectively be negotiating with an IRGC inner circle that has been involved in oppressing and killing the Iranian people at an industrial scale.”
Uncompromising hardliners
From this depleted field, Trump’s negotiators are widely reported to have fixed on Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammed-Baqr Qalibaf, as their interlocutor. A former Guards general who also showed up at Davos, Qalibaf has a reputation both for corruption and sycophancy.
Even if negotiations to end the war go forward, the fighting may continue. The IRGC has threatened to have its Houthi proxies, who on March 28 launched missiles toward Israel, also close the international shipping lane in the Bab al-Mandab Strait off Yemen. The Guards also published a list of energy facilities around the Persian Gulf that it vowed to target if Trump fulfilled his vow to bomb Iran’s power plants.
“They have been ready for this kind of war,” Golkar says, referring to the regime. “But the loser of this conflict will be the Iranian people, without any doubt. We will see a much different animal from now on. After Trump is out of the picture, and Netanyahu is out of office, you will see a much more radical and aggressive Islamic Republic outside, and more repressive inside.”
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