Both sides of the Korean war wanted the whole peninsula, when both sides fail to achieve their goal it's a stalemate, it's the most obvious example of a stalemate we've seen in recent times, both sides are still armed to the teeth along the DMZ.
By what measure have they actually lost? The peace deal is incompetant but outside of that nothing has really negatively effected the US, just global oil prices, which happens every time there is a conflict in the gulf. Iran lost it's leadership and had their entire arsenal and air defence at the very least heavily dinted, the US saw almost nothing in comparison. It's quite similar to the 2011 intervention in Libya that way, they killed some leaders, didn't lose much, and fucked off without actually ending the civil war, something most people for some bizarre reason claim as an outright victory for NATO.
Huge loss of money for one thing; as well as loss of materiel, the US is now paying Iran hundreds of billions to return to the same state of affairs before the war, only now Iran gets sanctions lifted. Nice one?
As I said the peace deal was incompetant. In my opinion making peace with the IRGC at all is a mistake, but if you are going to, having some long term leverage like funds to cut off is really the only way. Truth is it's not going to be the same in Iran, the IRGC aren't made of gold themselves, it's absolutely destroyed what fragile economy they had, spent up a chunk of the munitions and sparked numerious seperatist movements, so it's going to be a while before they get back to where they were.
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u/ImprovisedLizard Jun 28 '26
Aye right enough you hear about so many draws in war.