6 min readApr 7, 2026 06:13 AM IST First published on: Apr 7, 2026 at 06:13 AM ISTFive weeks into an unprovoked and unjustified Israel-US war on Iran that started with the unprecedented “decapitation” of the top Iranian political and military leadership and a massive attack on its military and civil infrastructure, the US-led war seems to be faltering. Extraordinarily, the collective assassination of Iran’s leadership in violation of all laws, domestic or international, took place while the US and Iran were holding negotiations mediated by Oman on Iran’s nuclear programme, the ostensible casus belli. It shatters basic assumptions of diplomatic immunity and negotiations, leaving little room for good faith and diplomacy to end the war.Despite a serious degradation of Iran’s air force, missile defence, navy and defence production since the start of the war, Iran has been able to threaten Israeli, US and Gulf military, oil and other targets in the region with its seemingly deep and dispersed store of missiles and drones. It has leveraged its geography and control of the Strait of Hormuz to rattle Western capitals and markets. An estimated 3,000 ships with 20,000 sailors, many of them Indians, are reportedly anchored in and around the strait, facing food and water shortages and psychological stress. This is a potential humanitarian challenge for which the international community is ill-prepared.AdvertisementDespite the theocratic Iranian regime’s harsh suppression of human rights and internal reform, attempts at internal and externally sponsored regime change and fomenting ethnic conflict, inciting the Kurds and the Baloch, have not gained momentum. Fears of a sectarian Shia-Sunni conflict have not been borne out, with Sunnis largely backing Iran’s defiance of the US and Israel. Iran is now daring the US to launch a ground invasion, projecting confidence in its ability to withstand it. An air operation on April 4 resulted in an embarrassing downing of F-15s and other sophisticated US aircraft. This does not augur well for ground operations.The US is, simultaneously, threatening a ground invasion of Iran and naval operations as well as demanding that the Strait of Hormuz be opened. It’s also demanding that its Western allies join the war, or it might pull out of NATO. It has threatened to walk out of the war, leaving allies to deal with their interests and consequences on their own. It is not clear if Washington fully grasps the risks and implications of these actions. President Donald Trump’s March 31 threat to bomb Iran back to “the stone ages” is an implicit acknowledgement of the failure of the initial goal of regime change. Meanwhile, as Israel expands the conflict once again into Lebanon — establishing a security zone, ethnically cleansing Lebanon south of the Litani river and bombing historic cities like Tyre and Beirut (including residential areas) — more Western “allies” are breaking ranks with the US and Israel over the war.The Trump regime’s error is in thinking that Iran is like Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, or Syria under Bashar al-Assad. First, unlike the Arab, Central Asian, Turk and Mughal empires that grew by “incorporation” and were too dispersed to become “nations”, Iran has always had an inbuilt sense of identity, nationhood and civilisation bound by language, culture and history, which has the capacity to submerge fissiparous tendencies. Although Israel may be betting on inciting Iran’s multiple ethnic and religious minorities like the Kurds, Baloch and others against the theocratic regime, the Persian “glue” and nationalist reaction to Zionist anti-US-Israeli aggression are likely to hold it together.AdvertisementSecond, Iran has inherited the mantle of a Shia sense of belonging, struggle, sacrifice and martyrdom going back to the Karbala and Imam Hossein, which was given a contemporary twist by the anti-Shah, anti-US revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, the gruelling Iran-Iraq war and Israel’s occupation of holy Muslim lands. In keeping with Shia tradition, it is believed that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei chose to embrace martyrdom rather than flee when Israel attacked Iran’s top leadership .Third, what the US seems not to have understood is that, unlike Gaddafi’s Libya, Hussein’s Iraq, Assad’s Syria, or Maduro’s Venezuela, Iran is not some personalised dictatorship backed by a muscular but contrived political ideology. It has a deeply institutionalised, culturally nationalistic, theocratic system where different stakeholders were balanced and reconciled through institutions that evolved organically over successive crises and ruthlessly enforced by the IRGC. The removal of the “Supreme Leader” is not likely to change a layered decision-making system proven over decades. Rather, external aggression may well change the balance in favour of more adventurist forces that could raise the cost of war for the US and its Gulf allies even further.While vast sections of Iran’s highly polarised society detest the orthodox, conservative and repressive regime in power, one should not underestimate the capacity of the mass of the Iranian people to separate internal grievance from aggression by external forces, or the capacity of the regime to reframe the conflict in defensive and civilisational terms.you may likeWhether or not brute US-Israeli power prevails in the long run, Iran seems to have survived the elimination of its top military leadership for now. Its potency may be debilitated but it is far from incapacitated. Many military experts believe that it has used its store of cheap missiles, drones and decoys to successfully deplete much of the US and Israel’s far costlier missile defence capability, amidst uncertainty over the stocks, range and production capacity of Iran’s own missiles. The downing of four US aircraft on April 4 will be a huge shot in the arm for Iran.But Iran’s greatest asset is probably its ability to influence two crucial geographic chokepoints for world shipping, the Strait of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandab (through the Houthis). It is using these assets to raise the cost of war and shipping to prohibitive levels, which is rebounding on its allies and business partners. If the prospects of a military victory for the US and Israel are distant, if not bleak, a favourable negotiated outcome seems even less likely.The writer is former ambassador to Myanmar, Afghanistan and Syria