Iran and the Accumulation of Losses: The Islamic Republic on the Day After the War
Iran’s regional influence is undergoing a phase of accelerated erosion on multiple levels. This decline did not emerge suddenly, nor can it be explained solely through external pressure. Rather, it reflects the cumulative consequences of strategic choices made by Tehran itself when it opted to position itself as a central actor in the regional order through an approach whose costs ultimately proved greater than its returns. On 8 December 2024, Tehran lost its influence in Syria almost entirely. This was followed by the gradual weakening of Hezbollah’s political leverage and the loss of the first tier of its political and military leadership. Meanwhile, the Iraqi militias, together with the Houthi movement (Ansar Allah), are facing a condition of strategic ambiguity and growing uncertainty regarding the future of their regional roles. How, then, did a project that expanded over decades arrive at such a turning point?
This article argues that what Iran confronts in the aftermath of the war extends beyond military setbacks or the weakening of its alliance network. More fundamentally, it marks a transition from an era in which influence could be maintained through relatively low political and symbolic costs to a phase in which regional influence has become far more expensive in security, economic, and domestic terms. For decades, Tehran succeeded in transforming the discourse of resistance and victimhood into substantial regional capital. Today, however, it finds itself facing a profoundly altered equation: a network of influence that demands greater resources, possesses diminished symbolic legitimacy, and operates within a regional environment increasingly willing to challenge and scrutinize the costs of the Iranian role.
From the Blessing of Influence to Its Burden
Before 2011, Iran enjoyed what could be described as the “advantage of the model.” It portrayed itself as the force confronting global arrogance and carrying the banner of the oppressed, while neighboring Arab regimes were increasingly associated with repression rather than resistance. This equation enabled Tehran to maximize political impact at relatively limited cost through instruments of soft power that generated a regional presence far exceeding what could have been achieved through direct military means. Satellite television networks, cultural organizations, and religious outreach through schools and husseiniyas all functioned as low-cost yet highly effective tools of influence. Iran’s strength during this period rested less on military deployment than on its ability to produce a political narrative that resonated beyond its borders. As a result, its regional reach appeared disproportionately large compared to the resources invested in sustaining it.
The Arab uprisings of 2011 disrupted this equation from within. Suddenly, new actors emerged across the region employing the very language that Iran had long monopolized: defending the oppressed and confronting tyranny. Yet the Arab protest movements articulated demands for change independently of the Iranian model-in Tunis, Cairo, Benghazi, and Sana’a. Iran thus found itself challenged not by external adversaries, but by constituencies it had long claimed to represent. Tehran’s response proved decisive in shaping subsequent perceptions. When it chose to stand alongside the Assad regime against its own population, describing the Syrian uprising as a foreign conspiracy while celebrating other uprisings as an “Islamic awakening,” the regional perception increasingly took hold that sectarian considerations had begun to outweigh its once-transnational revolutionary discourse. In doing so, Iran squandered the reservoir of admiration and solidarity it had patiently cultivated within Arab public opinion.
The Arab uprisings did not weaken Iran militarily as much as they eroded its symbolic image among broad segments of Arab society. More importantly, they stripped Tehran of its most valuable asset: its image itself. Once that image was lost, Iran forfeited a source of influence that neither financial resources nor military power could easily replace.
This marked the first major turning point. Iran could no longer reconcile a discourse centered on defending the oppressed with its support for a regime confronting a large-scale popular uprising. As Tehran shifted from investing in symbolism to defending allied regimes, its influence moved from the realm of legitimacy to that of hard power. This transition inaugurated a new era of mounting costs: financial costs in Syria, sectarian costs across the Arab sphere, and political costs reflected in its deteriorating standing within Arab public opinion.
Syria: The Loss of Strategic Depth, Not Merely an Ally
Then came 8 December 2024. The fall of the Assad regime was not simply the loss of an ally; it constituted a rupture at the core of the regional structure Iran had spent four decades constructing. Syria represented the central logistical and strategic link in Iran’s regional architecture. Through Syrian territory, weapons were transferred to Lebanon, and through it the so-called “Axis of Resistance” maintained its geographical continuity from Tehran to the Mediterranean. Estimates suggest that Iran spent more than thirty billion dollars in Syria throughout the years of conflict, in addition to the thousands of fighters who lost their lives on Syrian soil. The loss of this entire investment in a single moment signaled that the regional map had fundamentally changed and that Iranian influence in the Arab Mashreq had become geographically constrained for the first time in decades.
Within the same context, Hezbollah emerged from its confrontations having paid a heavy price in both leadership and organizational capacity. At the same time, Iraqi militias increasingly find themselves trapped in a condition of strategic uncertainty, caught between domestic pressures demanding a redefinition of their role and external pressures that continue to narrow their operational and political options.
Syria’s importance did not stem merely from its position as a political ally of Tehran, but from the fact that it served as the geographical infrastructure of the Iranian regional project itself. The loss of Damascus meant that the axis of influence had forfeited its most critical land corridor, that Hezbollah no longer possessed the same strategic depth, and that Iraq had ceased to function as part of a connected sphere of influence, increasingly becoming instead an arena for pressure and compensation. In this sense, Iran lost the geography of influence before it lost its instruments.
When Influence Becomes a Burden: Allies and the Strategy of Endurance
The war has revealed that the network of allies which for decades provided Iran with a capacity for indirect deterrence has, at least partially, evolved into a political and security burden. Hezbollah emerged from the confrontations with a diminished ability to take the initiative and under expanding domestic Lebanese constraints on its movement. Iraqi militias, meanwhile, face dual pressure stemming from their ideological and political ties to Tehran on the one hand, and from the growing costs of turning Iraq into an open arena for American and Israeli retaliation on the other. As for the Houthis, despite retaining a significant capacity to disrupt maritime activity in the Red Sea, their role increasingly places Iran before a more complicated equation: every expansion in the function of the proxy enhances the capacity for disruption, but simultaneously raises the costs of international isolation and external pressure.
With the erosion of significant parts of its offensive instruments of influence, Iran gradually shifted toward a defensive logic based on increasing the costs of pressure directed against it. In the successive wars that unfolded in the aftermath of 7 October 2023-when Israel experienced the largest military attack carried out by a non-state actor since the occupation of Palestine in 1948-Iran endured a series of escalating confrontations. From the “Twelve-Day War” in June 2025 to the “Forty-Day War” in February 2026, nuclear and military capabilities were destroyed, infrastructure was targeted, senior commanders were assassinated, and intelligence networks were exposed. Yet the regime remained intact. This endurance did not reflect invulnerability, but rather mastery of a different equation: making defeat prohibitively costly for all parties involved.
When the Strait of Hormuz was closed, the move was not merely tactical; it represented a strategic message that the cost of Iranian collapse would be borne globally, albeit to varying degrees. Nearly one-fifth of global oil trade passes through the Strait each day, making it deeply intertwined with industrial production, supply chains, and broader political stability. This pattern of “endurance” reflects a deeply rooted strategic doctrine in which Iran does not necessarily seek outright victory as much as it seeks to make the consequences of defeating it unbearably expensive for those attempting to impose such an outcome.
In this sense, Iran no longer presents itself to its adversaries as a triumphant power, but rather as a state that cannot be broken without inflicting widespread damage on the regional order and the global economy. This distinction is essential to understanding Iran’s position in the aftermath of the war. Deterrence is no longer grounded in the capacity for expansion, but in the ability to make contraction costly for all parties involved.
Yet Iran’s capacity for endurance does not erase the question of the historical costs associated with that endurance, nor does it preclude the emergence of moments in which states are compelled to redefine their relationship with power, sovereignty, and political settlement.
Is Iran Facing a New Turkmenchay?
This question evokes one of the most painful episodes in Iran’s collective historical memory. In 1828, the Treaty of Turkmenchay was signed under the weight of defeat before Tsarist Russia. Under its terms, Qajar Iran ceded nearly 80,000 square kilometers of territory in the Caucasus, including Azerbaijan, Armenia, and parts of Georgia, while also paying what historians describe as crippling war reparations estimated at twenty million rubles. Yet despite the magnitude of humiliation, the Qajar state survived for nearly another century-exhausted and deeply wounded in its sense of dignity, but not collapsed. Indeed, some historians argue that the shock of Turkmenchay awakened within Iranian political consciousness a renewed sensitivity toward sovereignty and independence, one that has continued to shape Iranian political discourse up to the present day.
Does the potential abandonment of Iran’s nuclear program-or its substantial freezing within the framework of a comprehensive agreement with Washington and its partners-constitute a new form of Turkmenchay? The comparison, however, contains a fundamental distinction that cannot be overlooked. The losses of 1828 were territorial and permanent; in the context of great-power politics, lost territory is rarely recovered with ease.1 By contrast, the functional relinquishment or suspension of nuclear capability remains, in principle, reversible. Iran can continue to accumulate scientific expertise and rebuild its capacities whenever strategic circumstances shift. Tehran already demonstrated this after the collapse of the 2015 nuclear agreement, when it rapidly resumed uranium enrichment at levels far exceeding those stipulated under the accord.
What ultimately links the two moments is something deeper than a territorial comparison: it is the equation of survival in the face of wounded pride. The Qajar state accepted the Treaty of Turkmenchay because the alternative was collapse. Today, Iran faces mounting pressure from multiple directions: cumulative economic sanctions that have stripped the Iranian currency of more than 90% of its value over the past decade, the erosion of its alliance network, and growing domestic discontent that revolutionary rhetoric has failed to contain. This internal strain has manifested itself in repeated waves of protest, from the Green Movement2 in 2009 to the “Mahsa Amini” uprising in 2022.3
The central question, therefore, is not whether concessions will eventually emerge, but when, under what conditions, and with how much national dignity preserved. What makes the current moment particularly sensitive is that nuclear negotiations are no longer taking place in a political vacuum. They unfold within a regional and international climate in which the military option has become an active possibility rather than a purely rhetorical threat. As a result, Iran’s room for maneuver appears narrower today than at any point since the signing of the 2015 nuclear agreement.
When the Treaty of Turkmenchay brought the Russo-Iranian War to an end, the Qajar state did not immediately confront the challenge of recovering lost territories. Instead, it faced a more urgent and consequential task: rebuilding a state that war had nearly fractured internally before it was defeated externally.
The Qajar attempts at reform became particularly visible during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah and under the leadership of his minister Amir Kabir.4 These late modernization efforts sought to emulate the European model through the creation of a regular army and a centralized administrative structure. Yet they collided with the entrenched authority of the religious establishment, which possessed a parallel source of legitimacy, as well as with local elites who regarded reform primarily as a threat to their interests. The Qajar state survived, but it failed to transform. It continued to operate with a pre-Turkmenchay political mentality in a rapidly changing world it could not fully comprehend.5 The Constitutional Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century emerged as an expression of these accumulated contradictions, before Reza Shah ultimately brought the entire Qajar era to a close.
The lesson lies not simply in the final collapse itself, but in the long interval separating the two moments. Between the signing of the treaty and the eventual collapse of the Qajar order stretched eight decades during which the state remained trapped between the necessity of reform and resistance to change. The question today is whether the Islamic Republic of Iran now stands before a similar historical crossroads.
The answer begins with understanding what Tehran will define as its primary priority on the day after any settlement. All indications suggest that preserving regime cohesion will constitute the first line of any post-war agenda. Iran, having emerged from years of cumulative pressure, understands well that the most serious threat it faces lies not abroad, but within-a domestic sphere marked by widening gaps between a young and increasingly frustrated population and the governing order. This internal tension remains unresolved, and no external agreement alone will resolve it. Yet any easing of economic pressure through sanctions relief and the recovery of Iranian assets frozen abroad-outcomes that could emerge from a future nuclear settlement-may provide the regime with additional time to reorganize the foundations of its domestic legitimacy.
Reconstruction represents the second major battle. Iran enters this phase burdened by an economy weakened by sanctions, entrenched rentier practices, and chronic underinvestment in infrastructure. Tehran and other major Iranian cities now face mounting crises related to water scarcity, energy shortages, and environmental degradation that can no longer be postponed. In the Iranian case, reconstruction does not refer solely to repairing the direct destruction caused by war; it also entails restoring an economy that had already been deteriorating gradually for years before recent events intensified its fragility. The unresolved question remains whether Tehran will open itself to foreign capital and its accompanying conditions, or whether it will reproduce the model of self-sufficiency whose limitations have already become apparent.
The Qajar comparison is particularly revealing here. After Turkmenchay, Iran did not lack reformist intentions; rather, it lacked the ability to choose between two conflicting imperatives: preserving existing structures of power on the one hand, and undertaking deep structural reform on the other. The Qajars chose the first option. They implemented enough reform to survive, but not enough to recover and transform. The contemporary Iranian system now faces a remarkably similar dilemma, though with one crucial difference: the contemporary international environment is unlikely to grant Tehran the same amount of time that history once granted the Qajars.
Conclusion
The Iranian experience across five centuries-particularly since the sixteenth century-reveals a recurring pattern: the Iranian state may lose wars militarily, yet its collapse unfolds slowly, while its recovery rarely proceeds at a pace commensurate with the scale of the loss. The “Iranian phoenix,” as some scholars have described it, is not merely a metaphor, but an expression of a deeply rooted capacity for adaptation forged through centuries of pressure and endurance. Yet the phoenix does not rise without fire, and this time the fire is not exclusively external. The Islamic Republic of Iran now confronts a predicament similar to that faced by the Qajar state after Turkmenchay: a political order that survived while the world surrounding it fundamentally changed.
Following Turkmenchay, the Qajar state spent decades attempting reform without daring to undertake genuine transformation. It continued to operate with the mentality of a defeated state unwilling to fully acknowledge its defeat. Abbas Mirza understood the necessity of building a regular army, yet the political establishment failed to recognize that military reform alone could not rebuild the state itself. By the time the Constitutional era emerged and later Reza Shah rose to power, the Qajar state had exhausted one historical opportunity after another.6
The Islamic Republic possesses advantages the Qajar state never had: more deeply institutionalized structures, greater technological depth, and a conscious awareness of the historical experience that continues to shape its political education and strategic thinking. Yet it also carries the same structural dilemma that burdened the Qajars: the unresolved tension between the necessity of reform and the imperatives of regime preservation. The only difference is that the pace of history today is immeasurably faster than it was in the nineteenth century.
The central questions therefore remain unresolved. Will the Islamic Republic succeed where the Qajar state failed by combining regime cohesion with meaningful reform at the same time? Can it rebuild its economy without opening pathways that the political system itself perceives as threats to its ideological identity? Ultimately, what will Iran become on the day after the war: a state capable of redefining itself with the confidence of one that has learned from history, or a state content with managing crisis and remaining only marginally above the threshold of collapse? Between these two possibilities lies the difference between an Iran that shapes its future and an Iran that merely postpones its decline.
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