The great boxer Mike Tyson once mused that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. On the face of it, it is an obvious statement. Plans go out the window when faced with reality, and we must adjust or fail. The phrase, however, has many layers and remains one of the most picked-over sentences of any sportsman. What if the strategy you start with is correct? Do you still change? Is what you are changing to favoring your opponent, or does it give you an advantage? Have you trained for this change in strategy? And most important of all is, or was your reading and studying of the opponent correct, or were you looking at flaws that did not exist?
The USA has been punched in the face by Iran after the US and Israel launched an illegal war against it on 28 February, 2026. Operation Epic Fury, which began with the bombing of a girls’ school and the killing of Iranian leaders, has ended, or at least entered an extended pause for reloading, with the US capitulating on most fronts. Iran will get access to its money being held illegally by the US; investment from Arab nations to rebuild the country; have the ability to export oil without US sanctions; maintain its regional allies and keep its ballistic missiles. All they have to do is agree to never build a bomb, something they agreed to in Oman this year, before the US attacked, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action spearheaded by then-President Obama.
Iran, in short, is not promising something they have not already promised. There is even a fatwa from the former supreme leader condemning Weapons of Mass Destruction and stating that they are un-Islamic. The people who criticize Iran as a theocracy where religious edicts are law cannot have it both ways in this scenario. The Mullahs and Ayatollahs have said no, so how can people who follow their lead be in favour of these weapons?
But such is the logic of imperialism, they infantilize their enemies or call them weirdly devoted to their religion while also making them out to be warlike and untrustworthy. In any event, that is not the purpose of this article. We are here to understand how the US could have folded so neatly like a deck chair after being socked in the nose by Iran.
Iran won this because they survived. In a war like this, one where regime change is a stated goal, simple survival for the nation under attack equates to victory. We see this in Ukraine, where the government can claim with some credibility that they are winning because one of Russia’s key stated aims has yet to be achieved (regime change and denazification).
How they won this has been a matter that will be taught in military academies for years to come. The decentralized nature of their army meant that even when the top layer of command was killed, smaller autonomous units would operate. This is a key part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps but could also be seen in the regular army and militias. Iran’s ballistic missile program has been shown to be effective, making easy targets out of US bases in Gulf nations as well as peppering co-belligerent Israel to ensure that they, too, paid an economic price for this war. The ballistic missile, assisted by Iran’s use of drones, has shown itself to be supremely effective and is an equalizer in a region where Israel acts with impunity.
The shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz, however, was the key punch that made the Americans cry uncle. The strait carries around 20-25 per cent of global oil shipping, and the shuttering of it by way of sea mines, missiles, and fast boats saw gas prices globally shoot upwards and presented the very real risk of plunging the world into a recession at best and a depression at worst. Gas prices in the US, a metric used by presidents to gauge how well they are doing and how popular they are, shot up northwards of $5 a gallon, which had the effect of eating into American pay cheques as they paid more for gas and other things attached to it, such as food, clothes, etc.
The shutting down of the strait was a known possibility. Potential attacks on Iran have been gamed out, and they all generally end the same, with the straits shut and global oil prices skyrocketing.
Going back to Tyson and his saying, I don’t think the US had a plan going in. They thought that by wrecking stuff in a large opening salvo, they would have seen Iran cower and surrender. They were drunk on hubris following their attack on Venezuela and the change in tone of the government and believed that something similar would happen now.
Iran is not Venezuela. It has escalation dominance in an asymmetrical way; they are thousands of miles away from the US and its arsenal and can inflict heavy punishment on US regional allies at low cost. Iran and its civilization have existed for millennia; they were literally fighting the Greeks at Thermopylae, and it is the north star for Shiite Muslims. To think they would have surrendered without doing anything shows how silly the US has been.
The empire is teetering; it entered a fight with no plan and has been punched in the face. This loss, and that is what has happened here, make no bones about it, will be added to the ledger that all dying empires maintain. More bad decisions than good, overextension, overreliance on debt, and an American public where the majority cannot afford a $1000 emergency. All of those are signs of an empire on the decline. The US is going the way of Britain, declining at a slow rate but still kicking. Unlike the UK and its decline, the US is still powerful enough to cause smaller nations trouble, but this war has shown that if you can tough it out, you have a fighter’s chance.
