Iran Survives the War It Could Not Win

The spring opened with Iran fighting for its survival. A combined American and Israeli air campaign that began in late February killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials, and by the time the window opens the country was already choosing his successor under fire. The clerical body that picks the leader named Khamenei's son Mojtaba in early March, a hereditary handoff the republic had spent decades insisting it would never make. President Masoud Pezeshkian stayed in place and became the face of a government trying to hold the state together while bombs fell.

Iran answered with the only leverage it had left. It fired hundreds of missiles and thousands of drones at Israel and at the Gulf states hosting American forces, hitting the largest U.S. base in the region in Qatar, an Aramco refinery in Saudi Arabia, and air defenses across the United Arab Emirates. Then it shut the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries a fifth of the world's oil. The closure hurt Tehran's neighbors and customers as much as its enemies, and it turned Gulf capitals that had spent years cautiously courting Iran into signatories of a joint statement with Washington condemning the attacks.

That overreach is what forced the table. A Pakistani-brokered ceasefire in early April broke down within days, and the United States answered by blockading Iran's ports. Weeks of stalemate followed before the fighting finally stopped. On June 17 Pezeshkian and Donald Trump signed a memorandum in Islamabad, witnessed by Pakistan and shaped by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, that lifted the blockade, reopened Hormuz, and promised a reconstruction fund and access to frozen assets in exchange for diluting enriched uranium and a sixty-day clock on a full nuclear deal.

The war ended without resolving the question that started it. Iran kept its program on paper and won money to rebuild, but it accepted outside supervision it had always refused, and the talks that opened in Switzerland this month could still collapse over Lebanon or over how much uranium leaves the country. Russia and China condemned the strikes loudly at the United Nations and offered nothing that stopped them.