September 17, 2026 | The National Interest
The Three Quiet Victors of the Iran War
Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar have played their hands well since February 28, without disrupting their relations with either the United States or Iran.
September 17, 2026 | The National Interest
The Three Quiet Victors of the Iran War
Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar have played their hands well since February 28, without disrupting their relations with either the United States or Iran.
Excerpt
As the Iran War wages on, some of its emerging victors never fired a shot. Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar. With the US rationing its power across the Middle East, these three made themselves indispensable to US diplomacy.
Since the April ceasefire, the debate over who’s winning the Iran War runs along a single axis. One camp contends the Islamic Republic won by merely surviving. On February 28, the campaign’s opening day, American and Israeli air attacks decapitated the Iranian leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the senior command. Yet, the government—regardless of Mojtaba Khamenei’s fate—reconstituted itself and remains standing. From this perspective, survival marks a substantial victory for the Islamic Republic and frames the United States, the other Gulf states, and Israel as the losers for failing to topple the regime.
The other camp treats survival as an accounting error, a theory of victory reduced to still being there when the bombing stops, and blames Washington for refusing to finish what it started. Strategic, irreversible victory has escaped Washington and Tehran alike. But both interpretations suffer from the same flaw: confining the war’s outcomes to the United States and the Islamic Republic.
Surviving a war and achieving an irreversible objective are different things. To date, Iran has achieved an essential process goal—survival—because Washington proved unwilling to pay the costs of toppling the Islamic Republic.
Dr. Benjamin Acosta is a senior network analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Benjamin holds a PhD in political science from Claremont, an MA in Middle East studies from Ben-Gurion University, and a BA in international relations from California State University. He also studied at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University. Benjamin’s previous appointments include: chief data officer at tech startup Arcturus Intelligence, assistant professor of political science and international studies at Louisiana State University, lecturer of government at IDC Herzliya, and senior fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT).