Six months on, Iran is still standing, but survival is becoming more costly

It has been six months since the United States and Israel launched their coordinated military campaign against Iran on February 28. The war is easily cast as the latest turn in the long antagonism between Washington and Tehran, but that frame misses its immediate context. Its real context is the aftermath of October 7, 2023: Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza that followed spread across the region, wore down Iran’s network of allies, and pulled Israel and Iran into increasing confrontation, culminating in the 12-day war of June 2025 and the US-Israel campaign launched this February. The bilateral track only sharpened this trajectory. Nearly eight years before the current war, Trump’s first administration launched “maximum pressure” aimed at driving Iran’s oil exports to zero. When it failed to force political change, economic coercion eventually gave way to military force. Six months on, the campaign has come full circle, back to economic pressure applied with greater force. Economics, then war, then economics again.At the 100-day mark, Tehran could plausibly present the outcome as a victory of survival: Its adversaries had failed to topple the system, and by its own measure that was w...