The biggest U.S. victory may not be territorial or political but psychological: Iran no longer looks untouchable.

Even given the unrelenting flow of information emanating out of Iran and the Persian Gulf at the moment, it’s still hard to know what to make of this conflict on a daily basis.

As with almost all other political questions these days — and isn’t everything a political question these days? — the answer depends on who you ask. 

According to President Donald Trump and conservative media outlets, the U.S. has already won the war. If you prefer the prevailing counter-narrative from progressive media outlets, Iran is winning and the walls are (as ever) closing in on Donald Trump.

One thing that keeps getting lost in the noise is that two things can be true at once. The war is not over. Iran has not collapsed. Its regime is still standing, still dangerous, and still capable of making the world pay a price through missiles, drones, energy disruption and shipping chaos. But another truth is now impossible to miss: the Islamic Republic no longer looks untouchable. The aura it spent decades cultivating — the aura of inevitability, menace and strategic immunity — has been broken.

That matters more than a lot of people seem willing to admit. For years, Iran’s real power was never just in its arsenal. It was in the mystique. The regime sold itself, and was often sold by others, as too deeply embedded to dislodge, too networked to confront directly, too dangerous to challenge except through caution, delay and endless appeasement. 

And now look at what has happened. 

The war opened with the killing of Ali Khamenei. Senior commanders were killed with him. Since then, more top figures have been picked off, including Ali Larijani, one of the regime’s most experienced political power brokers. Tehran’s pool of senior figures capable of managing both war and statecraft is shrinking, and that decision-making is becoming more uncertain and reactive.

That does not mean the regime is about to disappear tomorrow morning. U.S. intelligence says exactly the opposite: the government is not seen as near imminent collapse, and the IRGC and interim leadership still retain control. Fine. Reality matters, and wishcasting is no substitute for analysis. But surviving is not the same thing as looking strong. Surviving is not the same thing as projecting command, confidence and inevitability. A regime can remain in power and still look shocked, diminished and badly exposed. Iran today looks much more like that second thing.

The military picture tells the same story. No, Iran is not out of ammunition. No, its retaliatory capacity is not zero. Iran still retains some missile capability and continues to hit targets in the Gulf and wider region. But the pace of Iranian attacks has slowed, while Israeli officials say Iran’s missile and drone capability has been “massively degraded” and that hundreds of launchers have been destroyed. Iran’s ballistic missile attacks are down 90% from day one.

It’s attrition.

And the psychological damage goes beyond battlefield statistics. Mojtaba Khamenei is now issuing Persian New Year messages about a “resistance economy under national unity and national security.” Read that phrase again. That is not the language of a confident regional titan. That is bunker language. That is siege language. That is the rhetoric of a regime trying to steady itself, brace itself, and keep the walls from trembling while insisting everything is under control.

The regional reaction is just as revealing. Gulf capitals are largely reserving their language of betrayal for Tehran, not Washington, even after absorbing some of the heaviest shocks of the war. The scale of Iran’s attacks on civilian targets in six U.S.-aligned Gulf states has ruptured whatever fragile trust in Iran remained. In other words, Iran did not just fail to look invincible. It managed to remind its neighbors exactly why they feared it in the first place. A regime that once wanted to look like the unavoidable center of gravity in the region now looks like the source of chaos everybody has to guard against.

None of this means the danger is over. Far from it. Missiles and drones are still striking or threatening energy facilities in Gulf states, while the Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s great pressure point. Tanker traffic through the strait dropped to zero in early March from 37 vessels per day before the war, and energy markets are still convulsing. A weaker Iran is still fully capable of hurting people, wrecking markets and making this war more expensive than many expected. That is precisely why it is so important not to confuse psychological defeat with total defeat.

Still, psychological defeat matters. It matters because regimes like this do not govern by popularity. They govern by fear, by myth, by the sense that resistance is futile and endurance is theirs by birthright. 

Once that mystique cracks, everything around it starts to move differently. Citizens begin to imagine alternatives. Neighbors hedge differently. Proxies recalculate. The outside world stops treating the regime as a permanent fact of nature and starts treating it as a damaged power center that can be pressured, contained and perhaps one day replaced.

So no, the war is not over yet. There is still too much violence, too much uncertainty and too much pain ahead to write some triumphalist fairy tale. But we should not miss what has already changed. The Islamic Republic may still be standing, but it is no longer standing in the same psychological position it occupied before this war. Iran can still strike. It can still threaten. It can still disrupt. But it no longer looks like the untouchable force so many analysts spent years insisting it was. And once that illusion dies, it does not come back easily.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)