WASHINGTON – U.S. officials say relentless American and Israeli aerial attacks have crippled Iran’s air defenses, navy and missile arsenal. But the regime in Tehran has so far held on to power, and it effectively shut down a crucial choke point for the world’s oil supplies.
As the war President Donald Trump described as a “little excursion” stretched into a 12th day, Iran has shown it can trigger a global economic crisis. The U.S. and Israel have not managed to secure the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway, with commercial ships coming under fire from drones.
The White House anticipated that waves of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top leadership would swiftly upend Tehran’s ruling apparatus.
But Khamenei, the late supreme leader, was succeeded by his 56-year-old son, who is widely viewed as an equally hard-line ideologue with deep ties to the country’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. There are no indications of major fissures or breakaway opposition factions, according to current and former U.S. officials, lawmakers and experts.
“The regime is still intact, and continuity is the order of the day,” Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank, told NBC News. “Politically, I don’t see any signs of defection or other factions choosing this moment in time to come up with a counter-worldview.”
The Iranian regime’s resilience poses a challenge for the Trump administration as it grapples with the mounting price of war, including U.S. military casualties and economic aftershocks, and as it struggles to articulate an endgame to the conflict.
The Strait of Hormuz, which 20% of the world’s oil supply travels through, has been effectively shut to tanker traffic since the war started. Shipping insurance rates have skyrocketed.
Several commercial ships near the waterway have requested assistance or escorts from the U.S. military in recent days, but the threat posed by Iranian drones and other weapons remains too high to allow American naval escorts, a U.S. official and a former official familiar with the discussions told NBC News.
Oil prices swung this week amid conflicting information about security along the strait, including a social media post from Energy Secretary Chris Wright that was later deleted. Wright wrote on X that the U.S. Navy had “successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure oil remains flowing to global markets.” But the White House denied the claim, and a spokesperson for the Energy Department blamed “staff” for having “incorrectly captioned” a video of Wright.
Rising retail gas prices in the U.S. present a political danger for the White House, and Trump is concerned the markets will turn against him, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Advisers told Trump over the weekend that the situation could deteriorate significantly when the oil markets opened Sunday night, the people said.
Dozens of nations agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil from their reserves in a bid to ease prices, which fell briefly but climbed again.
Trump is weighing other measures that could help offset spiking prices, including possibly restricting U.S. exports and lifting some requirements of the Jones Act, which requires domestic fuel to be transported on U.S.-flagged ships, according two administration officials.
The White House believes it has until the end of March before rising gas prices become an “unsustainable” political five-alarm fire, one of the officials said.
If the current pace of airstrikes continues for two to three more weeks, Iran’s conventional military power — including its once-vast ballistic missile program — would most likely be set back several years, former U.S. officials and analysts say. That might provide a possible opportunity for Trump to declare the goals of the war have been achieved and to order an end to the campaign.
“The Iranian regime is being absolutely crushed by the U.S. military. Their navy is depleted, their ballistic missile arsenal is being wiped out, and their internal communications have been totally disrupted,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday.
Yet the growing fallout from Iran’s retaliation around the Persian Gulf has raised questions about the administration’s war planning and whether Trump and his deputies considered the regime’s resilience and potential for retaliation on neighboring Arab states or the vulnerability of the narrow Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. military strategists have long worried about the potential threat of Iran’s closing down the waterway by planting naval mines. On Tuesday, the Defense Department said U.S. forces struck 16 Iranian minelaying ships nearby.
Drones, a more elusive target, continue to pose a persistent threat for commercial ships trying to transit the strait, and Iran is likely to have a vast fleet of drones at its disposal, former officials and experts said.
“Iran has tens of thousands of drones, and they can produce them at a low cost,” said Vatanka of the Middle East Institute. “The drones are obviously not going to be much of a threat to U.S. forces, but the Gulf states, and those states’ massive amounts of infrastructure, are at risk here.”
“Unknown” projectiles hit a Thai commercial ship in the strait Wednesday, forcing the crew to abandon it in a lifeboat, according to Thailand’s Transport Ministry.
Compared with previous wars, the Pentagon has shared limited details and information about the scale and the effects of the air campaign. But last week, after several days of having pounded Iranian targets, U.S. Central Command said it had seen a major decrease in retaliatory attacks from Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, suggesting Tehran’s ability to launch retaliatory attacks had been diminished.
But the Pentagon has not provided new statistics, and the extent of damage inflicted on Iran’s missile or drone firepower could shape how long the war continues and how much of a threat Tehran will be after the campaign ends, former officials and analysts say.
Seven U.S. service members have died since the war started, and roughly 140 others have been wounded, according to the Pentagon. Hundreds of people have been killed across the Middle East, including more than 1,200 in Iran, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
A former senior defense official said Trump may need to keep up the air campaign for several more weeks to secure concessions from the regime on abandoning its nuclear program, halting its arming of proxy forces or backing off missile attacks.
“The regime will be responsive to direct pressure applied to it,” the former official said.
Trump has been inconsistent about how long the war will wear on. He has said it could last four to five weeks or “far longer,” and he also called the campaign “very far ahead of schedule.”
Of late, he also has claimed there will be no end except for “unconditional surrender” and a slate of Iranian leaders acceptable to him. Leavitt suggested there was more fluidity to the idea of “unconditional surrender,” saying it would be up to Trump to decide what that looked like.
“President Trump will determine when Iran is in a place of unconditional surrender, when they no longer pose a credible and direct threat to the United States of America and our allies,” she said.
