Any and all amount of damage that is being inflicted upon Iran now, economic or otherwise, would have to be repaid back to them in terms of sanctions relief or by GCC states, eventually. That is a fact.
Americans have no way to eliminate Iran's capability before Iran turns Israel into Gaza, or causes a civil war in the US due to the economic blowback from the Hormuz closure (explained precisely why earlier).
If you are living under your own bubble, and still get some impression of the US capability in 2026 from movies made decades ago, then that's on you, but this is literally what is happening in the real world now.
Yeah, if Houthis can defeat Americans strategically, so can Iran. I don't understand what is so hard to understand about this to some people? Americans are not omnipotent, but a decomposing corpse of an empire.
You seem to assume that Iran has a magic lever it can pull to infinitely escalate at no cost to itself. What's currently happening is mutual destruction between Iran and gcc/US assets.
Just as the US has no meaningful way to completely stamp out IRGC return fire, Iran basically has 0 ability to stop incoming US air strikes beyond shooting down a few drones.
The question is who will blink first, even with TACO yapping we're yet to see clear indication that US strikes are slowing, so I don't see how you're so confident that Iran will successfully eject US from the region.
That is because I keep seeing more and more signs, from Trump himself in his usual roundabout, self congratulatory way, from people in his administration, and from the US media, that they are looking for an offramp with Iran, want to step back, and are quietly admitting they miscalculated.
Which is honestly wild, considering how Orwellian all of them usually act in situations like this.
Meanwhile, from basically every serious Iranian official, I keep hearing the exact opposite repeated over and over, no talks for now, no negotiations, no pause. I do not even have to search hard for it. I open my Twitter feed and see it every day.
Yes, the US can keep launching periodic standoff strikes on civilians and civilian infrastructure in the western parts of Iran, including Tehran. But that does not mean much in terms of the actual strategic trajectory.
That is basically what they did in Afghanistan for twenty years, and we already know how that ended.
The real question is whether they can even sustain this kind of confrontation for twenty months without their own system starting to crack apart, especially in the current internal climate, where the country is already so socially and politically polarized it looks half broken even in peacetime.
And Hormuz is not just about oil. That is the shallow reading. It is also tied to US debt, the petrodollar system, regional credibility, and the broader financial architecture that props up American power in the first place.
