Iran Didn't Win the War
The regime gets painted as having the upper hand, but in truth it desperately needs peace
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The dominant narrative since both sides signed the Memorandum of Understanding on June 17 is that Iran “won” the war. That narrative is profoundly wrong and is often pushed by the same crowd that told us - over and over - that oil would go to $200. The truth is that Iran’s regime desperately needs peace and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. After all, if the hardliners in Iran really thought they had the upper hand, why would they be negotiating a peace deal with the US? And if Iran wasn’t having massive problems storing all the oil that was blockaded by the US, why was there a flood of oil tankers exiting the Persian Gulf as soon as the blockade was lifted? These vessels were obviously being used as floating storage in an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid shutting in oil wells.
The “Iran won” commentary has its roots in the same Western defeatism that paints China’s Xi as a human supercomputer running circles around the US or Russia’s Putin as a military genius who sees everything coming (just not the Prigozhin rebellion back in 2023). This defeatism is deeply unhealthy and wrong. I’m not a fan of the war with Iran - it should never have been started - but the notion that Iran has emerged from the war strengthened and with more cards to play vis-à-vis the US is nonsense.
The reason for this is that the US blockade did massive damage to Iran. When I first proposed blockading Iran in a post on March 16, the basic reason was that - just like Russia - Iran is a gas station masquerading as a country. Shut down its oil exports and its economy implodes. Iran doesn’t publish much data and - what little there is - isn’t any good. But there’s some countries that report monthly exports to Iran through May 2026. The overwhelming evidence is that those exports fell far more steeply than to other countries in the Persian Gulf. As I’ve argued many times, the US blockade was highly effective - you can’t import anything if there’s no money from oil exports - and the threat it may be reimposed means Iran wants peace just as much as the US.
The thing about the naysayers on the blockade is that they just make lazy assertions without looking at actual data. If they took the time to do that, they’d realize that the US blockade was extremely effective. The black lines in the four charts above are the value of exports from Thailand (top left), the Philippines (top right), Taiwan (bottom left) and China (bottom right) to Iran. I’ve indexed these data to be 100 in Feb. ‘26, i.e. the month before the war began in earnest. The black line in each chart is my “control group,” which is exports from each of these countries to Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz obviously hit exports to all Gulf countries. That’s what the control group captures. If exports to Iran fall by more - which is clearly the case for each of the four exporters - that says the US blockade was doing incremental damage. For the smaller countries like Thailand or the Philippines, this incremental hit looks big massive. China’s massive size means it will have found alternate shipping routes, which likely dampened the hit to its Iran exports from the US blockade.
These export data show that the US blockade of Iran was highly effective. After all, if your export revenues dry up, there’s no money to pay for imports. The result is severe economic shortages and hyperinflation. The threat that the blockade could resume means Iran - just as much as the US - wants this war to be over.
What a lazy article.
Iran won the war because the US lost the war. The latter’s objective was pure and simple: regime change. Yet, the regime is stronger than it has been since at least the green movement. Meanwhile, there is little evidence of meaningful structural damage to Iran’s missile program. And nothing was achieved in degrading Iran’s nuclear program compared to the 12 day war.
Yes, the blockade was effective, but Iran did not capitulate and still extracted more wins from the MOU than it ever managed from the JCPOA, including an unprecedented lifting - albeit temporary - of primary US sanctions on the sale of its oil.
You spent a whole article claiming the blockade was effective. Yes it obviously was. That is not synonymous with Iran not winning the war.
No, winning a war means that one is able to enforce their political will on the other nation[s].
It is not a matter of graphs or currency or markets.
The fact that they have significant power over the US was shown quite clearly and recently when Trump was about to give them a $330B war chest just to open the strait.
Then Trump only backed off when he couldn’t sell it as a win.
Oh and I’m not gonna put much stock in how folks were or were not able to predict a market as volatile as energy - especially when the physical price for oil has been recorded over $150 in recent weeks.