Can the Islamic Republic of Iran Defeat the United States?

Can the Islamic Republic of Iran defeat the United States? Certainly it can. It can do so in the same way that the Taliban defeated the United States in Afghanistan: by outlasting it.

Is this a call for a “forever war”? Absolutely not. Once the Islamic Republic falls, it will be gone. The Iranian people hate it. Once the Islamic Republic has been consigned to the dustbin of history, some Islamic hardliners will remain in Iran, but they have lost the political and cultural initiative in a way that the Taliban never did in Afghanistan. The Iranian people are to a tremendous degree not only thoroughly sick of the Islamic Republic, but of Islam itself.

Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic could survive, and what it needs to do in order to do so is quite clear: all it has to do is continue to exist until Trump is out of office, or the Democrats take the House and the Senate and force him to bring an end to the conflict.

The mullahs have the advantage of thinking that they are part of a 1,400-year struggle to advance the cause of Islam in the world. American politics, by contrast, moves in cycles of two and four years. And so on Tuesday, the New York Times, which will no doubt be crestfallen if the Islamic Republic of Iran meets its end, explained it succinctly: “The Islamic Republic of Iran’s first priority is to survive. To do that, its leaders will want to drive up the cost of the war for President Trump — in terms of American casualties, energy costs and inflation — to try to persuade him to declare victory and go home.”

The Times doesn’t say it, but Trump has to deal with a massive Fifth Column in the United States that includes both congressional Democrats and the New York Times itself, along with its fellow leftist propaganda outlets. The left in America is doing everything it can right now to “drive up the cost of the war for President Trump” in the court of public opinion. On Tuesday, the destroyer of California and currently leading Democrat presidential hopeful for 2028 jumped on the bandwagon of the newly fashionable antisemitism and blamed Israel for bamboozling poor Trump into getting in a war with the poor sinless Islamic Republic.

Newsom repeated the lie that Israel is “sort of an apartheid state” — you know, the sort of apartheid state where racial and religious minorities have full equality of rights with the majority population. He claimed without evidence that Netanyahu had dragged Trump into this war: “In so many ways, that influence in the context of the conversation of where Trump ultimately landed on this is pretty damn self-evident.” Netanyahu himself brusquely dismissed this claim: “That’s ridiculous. Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world.”

But Newsom was by no means alone. Another 2028 hopeful and one of the leaders of the Democrats’ powerful socialist base, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Would You Like an Olive?) issued a denunciation of the action against Iran in terms that many Democrats echoed: “The American people are once again dragged into a war they did not want by a president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions. This war is unlawful. It is unnecessary. And it will be catastrophic.”

Demonstrating her abject ignorance of the core ideology of the Islamic Republic, as well as of the success of negotiations with it in all contexts over the years and the Iranian regime’s long record of aggressive actions against the U.S., AOC continued: “Just this week, Iran and the United States were negotiating key measures that could have staved off war. The President walked away from these discussions and chose war instead. President Trump flippantly acknowledged the possibility of American casualties, stating ‘that often happens in war.’”

As counterfactual as all this was, it will gain traction the longer this goes on. And so Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group explained: “For the Islamic Republic, survival is a victory, even if it is a Pyrrhic one.”

Indeed. All they have to do is make it to November 2026 or November 2028. The Congressional Democrats and the establishment media will do the rest. This war won’t be decided in Tehran. It will be decided in Washington and New York.