Judging by the metrics of conventional conflict, Iran is not faring well against the United States and Israel. Its adversaries are destroying crucial targets in Iran, killing its commanders and degrading its military assets. But these are the wrong measures for assessing Iran's position in the war. The right measure is not even an assessment of whether Iran is absorbing punishment well -- which it is. The question that will matter when the fighting ends is whether Tehran is achieving its strategic objectives. And on that count, Iran is winning.

This outcome is not accidental. Tehran has been preparing for this war for nearly four decades, since the new revolutionary government faced its first major military test in the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. And it is now executing a strategy that has managed to neutralize key U.S. and Israeli air defense batteries, severely damage U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf, inflict substantial economic pain, and drive a wedge between the United States and its Gulf allies. The Iranian regime, in other words, is not just surviving the U.S. and Israeli bombardment. The serious economic and political problems it is creating for its adversaries are, on a strategic level, giving Iran the upper hand....

By the time the current war began, Iran had spent 35 years learning how to fight -- and how to survive -- against far more powerful adversaries. Those lessons are visible in Iran's conduct today. The same decentralized logistics networks that Iran built to move fighters and materiel through Iraq and Syria are now being used to maintain supply chains under bombardment....

Iran has long been preparing to fight an economic war, too. For decades, Iran has faced a sanctions regime, constructed primarily by the United States, that has cut the country off from international financial markets, frozen its assets, throttled its oil revenues, and excluded it from the global trading system. This exclusion produced its own strategic logic. A country that has been expelled from the global capitalist system has little stake in preserving that system's architecture -- and significant incentive to threaten it. Iran is now doing exactly that....

Iran's strategic doctrine has a phrase at its center: survive and exhaust. The goal is not to defeat the United States or Israel in any conventional sense. It is to show them both that the cost of confronting Iran is militarily, economically, and politically unsustainable. Tehran's job is to survive punishment long enough, and to inflict enough damage in return, that U.S. and Israeli will for continued conflict collapses.

This strategy is working for now. Iran is absorbing strikes and continuing to function. Its military command has decentralized, and a new generation of commanders is even more willing than the old one to fight. Its economic campaign is threatening the Gulf order that Washington spent decades building. The wedge between the United States and its Gulf partners is widening, even as those partners reluctantly consider joining Washington in the war. If these trends continue to move in Tehran's favor, the war could end with the Islamic Republic battered but intact while the U.S.-Gulf alliance fractures, threatening to limit the United States' regional power projection for years to come. Iran would emerge weakened in its conventional capabilities but stronger in the one currency that has always mattered most to Tehran: the demonstrated ability to defend its sovereignty against the most powerful militaries in the world. The United States and Israel, with their overwhelming firepower, may be winning the battles. Iran, with 35 years of preparation and a strategy calibrated to outlast rather than outgun, may be winning the war.

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Iran's Long Game