Provisional balance of the Iranian conflict

THE SURPLUS

APR 27, 2026

By Sviajsk

The question of whether the United States won or lost the war with Iran is being answered incorrectly by almost all those who participate in the debate, but those who answer it worst are, as always, those who have their heads most involved in the sauce of the epic of the end of the Yankee empire that has been brewing since at least the end of the Second World War. The progressivism that has been celebrating for months every rocket fired from Yemen, every rise in the price of oil, every statement by some Iranian official as proof of «imperial failure» commits the usual analytical error. He needs to define the success of the adversary with the maximum objectives that the adversary proposes, and when those objectives are not met, he declares the victory of a small, resistant scrap capital. The problem is that Washington did not simply go to Iran to install a friendly regime. It also went to degrade a regional military capability that disrupted the global circulation order at a manageable domestic cost.

Military data are the simplest to read and the ones that the progressive narrative most systematically ignores. Before Operation Epic Fury, Iran had an estimated inventory of 2,500 ballistic missiles and produced between 50 and 100 per month. On the first day of the war, it fired more than 400, its absolute peak, and never came close to that figure again. In the first week, launches dropped by 90%. By the third week, the coalition had destroyed more than 700 missiles in its own depots, eliminated about 70% of Iranian launchers, and crippled production supply chains. The Iranian navy was dismantled with even greater clarity. That’s not a draw. It’s not a swamp. It is the systematic destruction of the military apparatus of a state that the world had left had presented for years as a deterrent power of the first order, and which was extinguished in a couple of weeks of focused bombing. The U.S. never really sought to strike with an all-out war. He preserved the country’s economy by not running real campaigns focused on economic infrastructure. Something that did not have major military costs since the airspace was dominated.

The nuclear program tells a similar story. The Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan facilities were hit in June 2025, and subsequent attacks completed the task of making the country’s main enrichment plant inaccessible. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency acknowledged that the attacks set back the program considerably. The Iranian foreign minister herself had declared months before the major offensive that Iran could no longer enrich uranium. The great deterrent insurance, the reason why the world had to tremble at any operation against the regime, was severely damaged for years. The small capital that believed that the nuclear threat made it untouchable discovered that the difference in scale with the global capital it faces is not a matter of political will but of real productive capacity, and that no amount of inflammatory statements makes up for that difference when the moment of truth comes.

The cost to the U.S. was strikingly low in historical terms, and this is the fact that most bothers the narrative of «defeated imperialism.» Thirteen to fifteen soldiers killed, around four hundred wounded, and a total military expenditure of around 35,000 million dollars. The price of oil rose, inflation rebounded to 3.3% annually, and US GDP growth contracted by just 0.3 percentage points, as projected for 2026. Nothing like a recession. U.S. consumer spending grew 4.3% in March, the biggest jump in more than three years. The Fed postponed rate cuts but did not panic. The system absorbed the shock with the solidity that corresponds to an accumulation space that represents 25% of the world economy, and that, in addition, is a key fact as a net producer of hydrocarbons. When oil rises, U.S. energy companies benefit.

If we take the analysis of capital as a world process, the war was not just a military operation against Iran. It was a reconfiguration of global energy flows whose most severe costs fell on China, not the United States. About 45 to 50 per cent of China’s crude oil imports transit the Strait of Hormuz, about 5.4 million barrels per day. More than 55% of its imported crude comes from the Middle East. And almost 98% of the oil exported by Iran was destined for China, with a discount of between 10% and 20% on the market price, paid in yuan, in agreements that also served the Chinese project to internationalise the renminbi. The war simultaneously destroyed these two flows. Cheap Iranian oil stopped coming, and transit through Hormuz became impossible or extremely expensive for most ships. Beijing tried to mitigate the damage in several ways, but each had a ceiling determined by the same scale of production that defines its position in the global metabolism. It bought reserves, negotiated with Tehran, and increased its purchases of Russian crude. But Russian pipelines were already operating at full capacity. Seaborne purchases of Russian crude were complicated by Washington’s granting a waiver to India, not China, to purchase sanctioned Russian crude, putting the two Asian giants in competition for the same scarce resource. China’s strategic reserves are enough for about four months. The most profound effect is obviously not that of immediate shortages but a more subtle one, that of production costs. China is a massive exporter of energy-intensive manufactures, steel, chemicals, and electronics, and when the price of energy rises globally, its margins are compressed, and its export competitiveness is somewhat eroded.

This is the dimension that the progressivism that celebrates the «victories» of the Axis of Resistance cannot incorporate because its entire scrappy historical narrative depends on the lie of the resistance. It is not enough to map who fired first, who has the most civilian casualties, or which regime has the most anti-imperialist discourse. It is necessary to see how costs and benefits are redistributed among the different spaces of accumulation after the conflict, and this redistribution does not reflect the epic Third World but that of inter-capitalist competition on a global scale. When the energy shock hits Chinese capital harder than U.S. capital, when the destruction of Iranian Chinese oil deals in yuan simultaneously eliminates Beijing’s main source of cheap crude and its most advanced experiment in renminbi internationalisation, the result is unambiguous. It is a victory of position for Anglo-Saxon capital in its competition with Chinese capital, executed through a military operation that cost it a fraction of what any American war of the previous century cost.

Obviously, this has no cost 0. There are real risks that it would be foolish to ignore. The Iranian proxy network was hit hard, but it largely survived and, in some cases, stepped up its operations. The new Iranian leadership could logically conclude that the only guarantee of the regime’s survival is precisely the nuclear weapon that the US tried to destroy, which poses a long-term problem with no clear solution. Gulf allies paid enormous costs for a war they did not start. None of this invalidates the overall balance, but it does indicate that the victory is incomplete in the precise sense of the term. Although it achieved its immediate objectives, it did not resolve the structural tensions that generated the conflict.

What the Iranian case illustrates once again is the difference between capital that can absorb shocks because it has scale, productivity, and structural position in the global metabolism, and capital that cannot because its productive base does not sustain it. The former wins wars cheaply and transfers energy costs to its rivals. The latter sees all its military capacity decimated in less than two weeks of war. The left, like any religion, is going to contrast its discourses with the sacred texts and not with reality, immersed as always in the echolalic loop in which every sect that bets on a reactionary historical eschatology finds itself, in which small capital ends up achieving its revenge in an apotheosis eucatastrophe where the empire of big capital falls while the peoples of the world dance in the streets to the rhythm of Manu Chao with Palestinian and Mapuche flags hooting with pleasure.

El Sobrante