Mojtaba Khamenei doesn’t play golf and is not known to bench-press three plates. But when it comes to chest-thumping, U.S. President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have got nothing on Iran’s supreme leader. Barely had the American and Israeli bombs stopped falling on Iran when Khamenei, elevated after his father was killed in virtually the first strike of the war, declared that the Islamic Republic had achieved “final victory.” Chiming in, his Supreme National Security Council announced that “nearly all the objectives of the war” had been met. State media dutifully trumpeted the country’s new power.

In the West, too, a section of the commentariat is settling into a narrative that Iran has emerged from this war in a stronger position than it had been in just six weeks before. In this telling, the Iranians, having absorbed the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign, delivered a decisive counterstrike by closing the Strait of Hormuz, and the resulting shock to the world economy forced the United States to seek a parley in Pakistan.

This analysis mistakes endurance for strength. It is true, as many (myself included) have argued, that in this particular conflict America loses by not winning, while Iran wins merely by surviving. But there is no gainsaying the fact that the Islamic Republic has been badly battered by the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign. Recovery will require not only time and money, but also an extended period of political and geopolitical stability. These are things over which Tehran has, at best, limited control.

As for the Hormuz gambit, as effective as it has been during the current war, it is far from certain that the strategy can be deployed ad infinitum in future conflicts and yield the same result.

Now, while a fragile ceasefire remains in effect, it is a good opportunity for cold-eyed stocktaking.

Start with what Iran has lost, because it is a long list. The decapitation of the leadership was a body blow for the regime. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on Feb. 28, along with dozens of senior regime figures, including top military and intelligence commanders. Many more have died since.

The replacement of a supreme leader who spent decades consolidating religious and political authority with his relatively obscure son, Mojtaba Khamenei—elevated in a matter of days by an emergency convening of the Assembly of Experts—may signal institutional resilience, but it is hardly a flex.

Then consider the destruction wrought on Iran’s military infrastructure and manpower. Even allowing for the likelihood of exaggeration by the belligerents, there is little doubt that the country’s conventional naval and air force assets have been severely degraded, along with much of its air defense components, including radars and detection systems. Its ballistic missile arsenal, estimated at roughly 3,000 in 2022, was already reduced by last year’s 12-day war with Israel, and depleted even further by the current conflict. What’s more, over the course of six weeks, the United States and Israel systematically struck missile production facilities, storage sites, and launching infrastructure.

The human cost of the military campaign remains deliberately obscured by Tehran. Iran’s health ministry has released only civilian figures—but concealed any reliable accounting of military deaths. What the regime does not want you to know is the scale of what it lost in uniform. From the scale of the bombing and the specific targeting of Iran’s military strength, it is safe to assume that the death toll is far in excess of the 3,000 claimed by the country’s forensic chief.

And then there’s the damage to civilian infrastructure, from bridges to universities, and its industrial base. The Iranian economy, already enfeebled, now carries an enormous additional reconstruction cost that is unlikely to be covered from a toll on ships transiting Hormuz. Iran can only hope to raise serious money if the Trump administration agrees to lift its economic sanctions, which is hardly a sure thing.

Nor can Tehran expect much help from its neighbors, many of whom it has greatly alienated during the course of the war. This loss cannot be quantified in dollars but is no less weighty for that.

Iran’s strategic calculation at the outset of the war was that lobbing missiles and drones at Gulf Arab capitals—Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Doha—would coerce those governments into pressuring Washington to stand down. It failed in precisely the opposite direction. Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic advisor to the United Arab Emirates’ president and one of the Gulf’s most respected strategists, did not mince words. Iran had “deceived its neighbors before the war about its intentions and revealed a premeditated aggression despite their sincere efforts to avoid it,” he told the National. Thousands of missiles and drones targeting civilian infrastructure and energy facilities were not strength, he added—they were “hubris and strategic failure.”

The result of this campaign has been the cementing of the Gulf states’ alignment with Washington—note the explicit willingness of the UAE to join a military coalition against Iran’s threat to Hormuz—and a unified Gulf Cooperation Council demand that any peace settlement permanently curb Iran’s missile and drone capabilities.

Tehran spent 40 years cultivating ambivalence in the Gulf, through a policy of intimidation and occasional engagement designed to keep its neighbors from fully committing to the American camp. That ambivalence is gone.

Against all this, the “win” side of the balance sheet is conspicuously uncluttered. The one unambiguous strategic achievement Iran can point to from the current war is the closure of Hormuz. The possibility that Tehran could choke off 20 percent of the world’s oil supply—the International Energy Agency (IEA) called it “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”—had always existed as a threat in theory. Now it exists as a demonstrated fact.

But can the Hormuz weapon be used again? The closure succeeded largely because it caught an unprepared adversary by surprise. Trump had no contingency plan, no pre-negotiated burden-sharing framework with Gulf allies, no coordinated response architecture. Tehran won’t always be so fortunate with its enemies.

The Trump administration underestimated the risk that Iran may close Hormuz, and recklessly made no provisions for that eventuality. That mistake won’t be made again. When they game out the next war, American, Israeli, and Arab military planners will assume a quick Iranian move to choke off shipping through the strait and prepare preemptive strategies as well as countermeasures. These might include a more robust naval engagement, preemptive attacks on missile batteries that most threaten the shipping lanes, and the use of drones against Iran’s speedboats.

And military planners aren’t the only ones who will prepare for worst-case scenarios. Consumers of the vital commodities that pass through the strait—not just hydrocarbons, but also fertilizer and aluminum—will be making calculations, too. China, Japan, South Korea, and India will recalibrate their emergency supply assumptions with Hormuz closure as a baseline, not a tail risk. Investment in storage capacities will spike, as will spending on alternative fuels.

Producers and suppliers, likewise, will prepare for the next closure. The two existing bypass options for petroleum, Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline to Fujairah, currently have a combined maximum capacity of 8 million to 9 million barrels per day. They will be expanded as quickly as Saudi money can buy, and additional investments will go into their protection from Iranian missiles and drones. The IEA, which coordinated a record strategic reserve release in the second week of this war, will develop contingency programs for the next one.

There is a deeper problem with the Hormuz weapon, one that Tehran’s planners cannot ignore: It injures the hand that wields it. Iran ships its own oil through the strait, and the regime needs those revenues. On this occasion, it was allowed to sail its own tankers down the Persian Gulf by a Trump administration desperate to minimize the spike in oil prices. A better-prepared, more patient adversary may choose to wait out an Iranian blockade of Hormuz or even turn around and choke off Iran’s exports—as Trump is trying in an unprepared way right now.

It has long been assumed that the Islamic Republic has a higher pain threshold than its neighbors and might withstand a long blockade. But that hypothesis has never actually been tested. A combination of all the factors I’ve listed above—an economy in even worse shape than it was before this war started, plus a better-prepared enemy and a better-prepared market—would change both the baseline of pain for Iran and of patience for its adversary.

In the final analysis, Iran’s security doctrine since 1979 has been a succession of asymmetric innovations, each of which worked for a time and was then systematically neutralized. The proxy network comprising Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces was already being dismantled by Israel before this war began. The missile saturation strategy—the promise that Iran could overwhelm Israeli and American defenses with sheer volume—was tested in April and October of 2024 and found wanting. A Haaretz investigation concluded that Iran’s ballistic missiles were riddled with substandard components; one analyst asked whether they were “toy missiles for kids.”

Hormuz may indeed provide Tehran with a new deterrence concept. But if the pattern holds, this weapon, too, will be neutralized after its first deployment. The element of strategic surprise is now spent, and the world will find ways to mitigate the costs Iran can impose.

Mojtaba Khamenei may match Trump for braggadocio, but the country he has inherited from his father has been devastated, and the prospects for recovery are grim. All the problems that existed before Feb. 28 exist still, compounded by everything the war has wrought.

A survivor he may be. Stronger, he isn’t.