Curt Steinhorst

If you’d told me a few years ago this is where we’d be on Iran, I’d have said you were high: 1. Nuke program set back years. Enrichment and reprocessing gutted, weaponization sites destroyed, Fordow inoperable, Natanz in ruins, a generation of senior nuclear scientists eliminated. 2. Ballistic missile program crippled. Monthly production down from 100 to near zero. Roughly half the regime’s missiles and launchers destroyed. The IRGC Aerospace Force commander who ran the missile enterprise dead. 3. Air defenses devastated. American and Israeli airpower dominating Iranian skies, with strike aircraft operating over the country with near impunity. 4. Full economic warfare. Not just OFAC sanctions anymore, but military pressure layered on top: naval blockade, near-zero oil exports, choked imports, wrecked steel and petrochemical sectors, triple-digit inflation, and a currency that is effectively worthless. 5. Regime decapitation. Khamenei dead. Larijani dead. Hundreds of senior IRGC, intelligence, military, and Basij commanders dead including the IRGC commander-in-chief, the armed forces chief of staff, and the Aerospace Force commander. Mojtaba Khamenei inheriting a hollowed-out regime with no supreme authority and a gutted command structure. 6. The region turning on Tehran. Gulf states shutting down the sanctions-busting, money-laundering, and financial escape routes the regime has relied on for years. No Arab capital willing to throw Iran a lifeline. China and Russia providing limited support. 7. Proxy network shattered. Hezbollah and Hamas heavily degraded. Houthi political leadership taking direct Israeli strikes. The “Axis of Resistance” and “ring of fire” are now more slogans than real threats. 8. Syrian corridor severed. Assad is gone. The new government in Damascus is actively blocking Iranian arms transfers to Hezbollah: arresting smugglers and publicly declaring Syria will no longer serve as a transit corridor for Tehran’s terrorists. The land bridge to the Mediterranean that took decades to build is effectively closed. 9. Lebanon pivoting west. With Hezbollah battered and resupply choked, Israel and Lebanon have opened direct peace talks for the first time since 1983, aimed at a permanent agreement and Hezbollah’s disarmament. Beirut now asserting that the Lebanese armed forces alone are responsible for national defense. This is a direct repudiation of Hezbollah’s “resistance” claim. TBD. 10. Deterrence exposed as a bluff. Four direct attacks on Israel — April 2024, October 2024, June 2025, March 2026 — failed to impose strategic cost and instead triggered heavy retaliation. Iran couldn’t even use Syria as a launchpad. 11.Economy hollowed out from within. Power shortages, water crises, factory shutdowns, pension unrest, and mass protests. Nationwide demonstrations erupted in December 2025 after a year of economic freefall, with bazaaris, oil workers, and truckers, the regime’s traditional support base, joining strikes across all 31 provinces. Running out of oil storage space. Fuel shortages. The worst crisis since 1979. 12. Scientific and technical brain drain. Beyond the nuclear experts, Iran has lost a generation of irreplaceable expertise in missile design, centrifuge engineering, and weapons development. The survivors are harder to recruit and easier to deter. 13. Naval power decimated. The regular navy shattered, IRGC navy taking growing losses as CENTCOM moves to reopen Hormuz. And against all of this: the regime forced to play its Hormuz card at its weakest possible moment when the U.S. has options instead of when we didn’t: namely, Tehran with nuclear-armed ICBMs, 10,000 ballistic missiles, a Chinese- and Russian-built military, hundreds of thousands of attack drones, a fully operational terror network, and hundreds of billions of dollars to harden its economy. That’s the strategic picture. It’s extraordinary. Much more to do but I can’t comprehend how much has been achieved.

People are scared and don’t like uncertainty. Our brains are not designed to process this much information this fast. But we still want certainty. So when we can’t get it through reasoning, we create it through narratives. That’s why unifying theories - Israel controls America, Jews control the world, pedophiles run everything - have so much sway. People find instances where parts of these theories are true in small cases and use them to explain everything. They become substitutes for the hard, time-consuming work of actual critical thinking. It feels like understanding. But theories that explain everything explain nothing. Social media addiction, short-form content, media incentives, influencer incentives, and information warfare by foreign actors all compound the problem. It’s a difficult thing to solve in an open society. But revamping our education system to teach critical thinking and media literacy would be a solid first step.