If you’re not an attentive world citizen, you don’t know that Iran has been defeating the United States in combat.
And nobody is telling you it. The U.S. administration, including characters like U.S. President Donald Trump and so-called Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, has been telling you of course that Iran’s military has been “eviscerated” several times since February 28, 2026, when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran.
But institutions that should be less interested in having their credibility questioned have also been attempting to downplay Iran’s defense. Most American and international media essentially take the U.S. administration’s comical claims to be true, reproducing them on front pages and news bulletins around the clock. Even when they do report on Iran’s retaliation, they frame the stories in language that portrays it as underwhelming. The New York Times, in an article reporting belatedly in late March on the fact that Iran had been pounding U.S. bases in West Asia off the map, used the ridiculous wording that U.S. troops were being forced “to work remotely.”
Of course, people have their reasons to avoid reality. Some are charlatans. Others are propagandists masquerading as reporters. Most are scared that the bubble in which the West has been living since 1945 is busted. All seek to scoff.
But if you have been paying attention, you have likely been marveling at Iran’s conduct of a war launched against it by the world’s largest, putatively most powerful military. You may have even found yourself wondering, even if secretly, if Iran really is in the same league as a “superpower.”
In spite of the political and journalistic aerobatics explained above, after all, Iran really is humiliating the world’s largest military. And it is imposing ever-mounting costs on America, including on its home front.
On Day 1 of the war, Iran destroyed the regional naval headquarters of the U.S. military, the so-called United States Fifth Fleet, in Bahrain. As a result, U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the largest warship in an “armada” that Trump had been bragging about in the run-up to the war and that had already been avoiding waters near Iran, had to spend a harrowing nine months at sea, with no port at which to dock and resupply. That fiasco only made headlines in the U.S. after personnel leaked accounts of food shortages and the psychological toll. (At least eight sailors in the Lincoln strike group attempted suicide during the deployment.)
Likewise, Iran severely degraded or rendered inoperable America’s other bases in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf region. The U.S. troops deployed at those bases had to be moved to “hotels and office spaces” in the host Arab countries (you know, “to work remotely”).
It was only seven months after the war started that CBS News released an exclusive report on the extent of the damage to those bases. Remarkably, the CBS report was based on accounts and images anonymously leaked by active-duty U.S. service members. One such service member exceptionally spoke plain truth to the world: “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public. We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
U.S. interceptor missiles, which failed to prevent the destruction of the U.S. bases in the first place, were nevertheless fired at such a rate that the Pentagon had to request shipments of the projectiles from bases as far away as South Korea. U.S. commanders elsewhere in the world complain that they are now exposed. The production of the missiles “can take years” because components — including a screw — are hard to come by.
To thwart all of the U.S. military’s objectives and even throw that military into such disarray is a military and strategic feat no one has ever attempted, much less achieved, in history.
Of course, Iran’s economy has come under pressure, as the U.S. and Israeli militaries have been hitting the country’s civilian industrial infrastructure and as the U.S. is attempting a blockade in the waters south of Iran, among other hostile measures. Iran’s power to safeguard its economy may not equal its strength in defending itself militarily. But everyone must remember that the Iranian economy has been under siege since 1979. Decades of sanctions — individually and collectively acts of war of their own — have attempted to strangle the Iranian economy, and yet Iran has always found ways around and ultimately survived each and every one of them.
It has required not just military, economic, and social power to withstand supersize militaries and ferocious economic warfare but also incredible state nerve, which is the resolve to do perilous things and face their consequences without breaking. If a country capable of doing all those things is not a superpower, then dictionaries are defining the term wrongly.
*The views and opinions expressed in articles published in this section are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the official positions or views of AVASH.
