Casualty of war: A country whose leader needs to keep claiming victory is unlikely to be winning

There is a war being fought right now where this distinction matters more than any weapon system.

The mirror-image trap: US President Donald Trump has declared victory in this war. Several times. We won in the first hour, on the very first day, etc. Their navy was destroyed, missiles degraded, army broken and leaders eliminated.

While this destruction is not a lie, he seems to be making a more fundamental error. Trump’s definition of victory reveals his own idea of a doomed state projected onto the enemy. If Iran had killed America’s entire military and political leadership and destroyed its navy and missile capabilities, the US would have suffered a constitutional collapse. So, in Trump’s apparent view, Iran must also be finished the same way.

This, however, is a strategic trap.

Military history has a name for this failure: ‘Situating an appreciation,’ rather than ‘appreciating the situation.’ You assume your adversary thinks, values and breaks the way you do.

During World War II, in 1944, the Allied command embarked on Operation Fortitude—a deception that placed US General Patton at the head of a phantom army opposite Pas-de-Calais in France. It worked because Nazi Germany was trapped by its own doctrine. If Patton was looking at Calais, that’s where Allied forces would be ready to invade.

When the Normandy beach landings began, Hitler refused to release his Panzer reserves, convinced Normandy was a feint. By the time the Panzers moved, the beachhead was unbreakable. Hitler’s projection overrode ground reality. And Germany pays for that till date.

The German leadership did not fail to understand Allied capability. They failed to understand that the Allies were not German.

While Trump understands Iranian military capacity, it is unclear if he grasps that Iranians are not Americans. An America that lost its president, joint chiefs, carrier groups, and missile arsenal in a month would be in an existential crisis. Iran lost comparable leadership but kept fighting. The question was never who could inflict more pain, but who could absorb more.

The depth that can’t be killed: When Israeli operations dismantled senior command structures of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah’s entire leadership tier and Quds Force generals that had taken decades to build, the expected outcome was paralysis.

What followed was continuity. Operations did not cease. Strategic coherence held. There was no visible scramble for succession and no power vacuum. This couldn’t have been an accident.

Iran’s late leader Khamenei built something most leaders never attempt: an organization designed to function without him. Every IRGC tier was structured to make the one above it redundant in an emergency. Commanders were trained to assume authority in the absence of orders.

He planned for his own irrelevance. Even his own death. That is not the act of a man who confused himself with the institutions he led. While most leaders build systems that ensure their own indispensability, Khamenei built one that outlasted him and outplayed his adversaries.

Now consider the other side. Dozens of US military officers and civilian officials sacked during an active conflict. Multiple simultaneous confrontations opened — with allies, trade partners, international institutions and the Pope. A chain of command visibly flustered mid-operation.

Stories outlast campaigns: In the final season of Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister, in chains, facing execution, makes one last argument. “What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags? Stories. There’s nothing more powerful in the world than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.”

Iran’s story is over 2,500 years old. Cyrus the Great authored the world’s first human rights charter on record in 539 BCE. Rumi wrote poetry that is widely read today. The Persian Empire was conquered by Greeks, Arabs, Mongols and Ottomans, but it absorbed every one of them. The conquerors learnt Persian and became more Persian over time. Iranians are not fighting for a regime, but for a civilization.

America’s story is 400 years old. The continent was not named after the European who ‘found’ it. Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492 but died believing he had reached Asia. Amerigo Vespucci arrived seven years later and was the first to recognize this was an entirely new continent. A German cartographer reading his letter put a name on that landmass: America.

Game of kings: Tywin Lannister’s line was not about monarchy. It was about the nature of authority. Real authority does not require constant reiteration. It is demonstrated through institutional depth: organizations that outlast their founders, succession structures that work smoothly and stories that cannot be uprooted.

Repeated declarations of victory are not merely US propaganda. They reveal what its leader might need to believe. And any leader compelled to constantly claim a win may be losing something that’s not on the battlefield.

The author is former CEO of the National Intelligence Grid, distinguished fellow at Observer Research Foundation and author of ‘Everyman’s War’.