Three Narratives of Victory in One War

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched large-scale strikes against Iran’s military and nuclear facilities in an operation introduced under the names Epic Wrath and Lion’s Roar. On the first day of the war, Donald Trump described it as a “short-term excursion” that would end quickly. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared at his first press conference that “This is not Iraq. This is not endless.” Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, also reassured America’s G7 partners that the operation would be over “in weeks, not months.” Yet after forty days of fighting, the war culminated in a two-week ceasefire on April 9, 2026, with Islamabad hosting talks between Iran and the United States.

This essay examines the strategic logic at work in Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Washington in order to show how each side, shaped by its own security imperatives and political objectives, has arrived at a distinct definition of victory. These definitions are in direct tension with one another. Yet within the internal logic of each state’s wartime calculus, they appear entirely coherent and defensible.

In the Islamic Republic’s official discourse, victory is not confined to battlefield outcomes. It is rooted in a theological framework that allows even apparent defeat to be reinterpreted as success. As Afshon Ostovar argues in Vanguard of the Imams, during the Iran and Iraq War Iranian leaders did not simply pursue military victory; they actively reshaped its meaning. Messages directed at fighters emphasized sacrifice, endurance, and martyrdom as forms of achievement in their own right. As Ruhollah Khomeini argued, “victory itself is an act of devotion,” and the early Imams, while politically defeated, were spiritually triumphant. In this narrative, steadfastness itself becomes victory.

Yet in the current war, Tehran’s narrative goes beyond theology. It is closely tied to a strategic reading of asymmetric conflict. Recognizing that it cannot defeat the United States or Israel in conventional terms, Iran has defined success in terms of survival and resistance. Here, the goal is not to destroy the enemy, but to prevent the enemy from achieving its objectives. As Andrew Mack  in “Why Big Nations Lose Small War” famously argued, in asymmetric wars the weaker side wins simply by avoiding defeat an insight often echoed in Henry Kissinger’s dictum that “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.” From this perspective, Iran casts itself as the weaker actor that has denied Washington and Tel Aviv a decisive outcome.

After forty days of heavy strikes reportedly including damage to missile and nuclear infrastructure and the loss of senior commanders Tehran frames the preservation of its command structure, political system, and minimum capacity for retaliation as evidence of success. In this logic, the costs of war are secondary to the central objective of regime survival. Not losing becomes indistinguishable from winning.

A second pillar of Iran’s claim to victory lies in its ability to impose costs on the attacker and erode the adversary’s political will. From Tehran’s viewpoint, the shift from expectations of a rapid campaign to a ceasefire and negotiations suggests that the costs of continuing the war began to outweigh its benefits for Washington. While this interpretation is contested U.S. officials can just as plausibly argue that the ceasefire reflects the achievement of limited objectives within Iran’s strategic calculus, compelling the adversary to halt military operations constitutes a meaningful success. In this sense, the talks in Islamabad are presented not as a compromise, but as the outcome of sustained resistance.

At the same time, Iranian officials have emphasized the preservation of deterrence even in a limited form as a key indicator of victory. In the Islamic Republic’s security logic, defeat would mean the complete erosion of retaliatory capability and the perception that Iran is no longer able to respond. Short of that threshold, even limited military responses or the maintenance of residual capabilities can be framed as success. Moreover, the implicit threat of disrupting the Strait of Hormuz has functioned as a geopolitical lever, reshaping the cost-benefit calculus of the conflict in Iran’s favor. Taken together, these material considerations combined with the enduring theological narrative allow Tehran to portray the two-week ceasefire not as a setback, but as a “great and historic victory.”

In Tel Aviv’s narrative, the concept of victory is defined first and foremost within a security doctrine that dates back to David Ben-Gurion. This doctrine rests on several core principles: deterrence, early warning, and decisive victory in the event of war. These principles are rooted in a fundamental geopolitical reality: Israel is a small state with limited strategic depth and therefore cannot sustain prolonged wars of attrition.

For this reason, its strategy emphasizes delivering a rapid and effective blow that deprives the enemy of the ability to continue fighting. Within this framework, victory does not necessarily require the total destruction of the adversary. Rather, it consists in creating a situation in which the enemy is either unable or unwilling to continue the conflict. In Israeli strategic thinking, this condition is what constitutes “decisive victory.”

Building on this framework, Tel Aviv evaluates the outcome of war through a simple criterion: whether the enemy is weaker at the end of the conflict than it was at the beginning. In this context, another important principle within Israel’s security doctrine is the so-called Begin Doctrine. According to this principle, Israel will not allow any regional adversary that threatens its existence to acquire weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear capabilities. For this reason, in Israeli security thinking, preventing the emergence of such a threat through preemptive action is itself considered a strategic success in war.

Benjamin Netanyahu has invoked this same standard, describing the Islamic Republic as “weaker than ever” and treating this relative weakening compared to its initial position as evidence of success. Accordingly, in Israeli strategic discourse, “success” refers to a condition in which the adversary no longer possesses either the operational capacity or the psychological willingness to continue the conflict.

At the same time, Israel defines its primary victory in terms of direct and targeted strikes against Iran’s military, industrial, and command infrastructure. The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), emphasizing the principle of shortening wars, argues that prolonged and costly wars of attrition run counter to Israel’s operational, economic, and societal interests. On this basis, actions such as disabling command-and-control centers, eliminating senior commanders and nuclear specialists, and degrading missile production and launch capabilities are treated as indicators of victory. The reasoning is that such measures significantly increase the cost of any future confrontation for Iran while simultaneously reducing its operational capacity and freedom of strategic maneuver.

The sustained targeting of Iran’s critical infrastructure and key strategic assets over the course of the forty-day campaign demonstrated that even the most concealed defensive layers and underground facilities were vulnerable to Israel’s military capabilities and intelligence penetration. From this perspective, Israel’s most important achievement in the current war lies not merely in the scale of damage inflicted, but in the shift of the strategic balance in its favor.

In Tel Aviv’s official narrative, the war demonstrated that Israel continues to possess superiority in intelligence, technology, and operational capability, and that it is able, when necessary, to penetrate deep into the adversary’s military network. This perception contributes to the restoration of Israeli deterrence and signals to regional actors that the cost of direct confrontation with Israel remains extremely high. For this reason, within Israel’s security logic, victory is ultimately achieved when the adversary emerges from the war with less strategic initiative and reduced capacity compared to its initial position.

The Donald Trump administration defines victory in the war with Iran as the physical destruction of its military and nuclear capabilities without becoming trapped in a prolonged conflict. From the outset, Trump officials made clear that regime change in Iran was not the objective. Instead, the degradation of Iran’s strategic capabilities was understood as the central goal of the operation.

Within this framework, U.S. officials argue that the strikes shifted the balance of power to such an extent that Iran’s deterrent capacity was effectively neutralized and the cost of any meaningful retaliation became prohibitively high. When Trump speaks of a “major victory,” he is referring to the downgrading of the adversary’s warfighting capacity to a level where it no longer poses an immediate threat to U.S. interests. In this sense, the military phase of the conflict is presented as having achieved its objective.

At the same time, in the Trump administration’s narrative, the ceasefire itself is interpreted as the imposition of U.S. will on Iran. From Washington’s perspective, Iran’s presence at the Islamabad talks following a period of intense conflict is itself evidence of success. This participation is framed not as a voluntary diplomatic move, but as the direct result of military pressure and the disabling of critical infrastructure. In this view, the war was successfully shifted from the battlefield to the negotiating table, and any agreement reached under the shadow of military coercion is understood as a diplomatic victory for the United States.

For Trump, declaring victory was also a political necessity. He had entered the war promising a “short-term excursion” and a rapid conclusion, and any acknowledgment of stalemate or even limited Iranian success would have undermined his political standing and legacy. In the context of domestic politics, framing the outcome as a victory allowed him to deflect attention from the costs of the conflict, including economic disruption and potential casualties, and to avoid comparisons with past U.S. entanglements in the Middle East. In this sense, the declaration of victory reflects not only battlefield dynamics but also the imperatives of political survival and the maintenance of domestic support.

Ultimately, this war shows that victory in modern conflicts is no longer a single, measurable outcome, but a fluid concept shaped by each actor’s objectives. Iran defines victory as survival and resistance, Israel as weakening the adversary, and the United States as achieving results without a prolonged war. These definitions, while in tension, remain coherent within each actor’s strategic logic. In this sense, victory is less an objective reality than a narrative parallel claims of success that each side can rationally sustain.

Abdulwajid Soroush holds a master’s degree in political science from University of Tehran and is a columnist on Middle Eastern and geopolitical issues, with a focus on conflict and regional security.