When Donald Trump ordered the first strikes against Iran, one assumption quietly underpinned the strategy: that pressure, military or economic, would either topple the Islamic Republic or force genuinely conciliatory figures to the surface. Six months on, neither outcome has materialised. Instead, a tight inner circle of senior military commanders and veteran clerics — figures who have spent decades inside the architecture of the theocracy — has consolidated its grip on decision-making in Tehran. Analysts who monitor the Islamic Republic's internal politics describe a hardening, not a fracturing.

The war appears to have performed the same function that external crises often do for authoritarian systems: it has given the leadership a legitimising narrative, framing survival as resistance and dissent as treachery. Any officials who might have been inclined toward compromise have been sidelined or silenced. Mr Trump's public suggestion that "regime change" had elevated more pragmatic voices was, by most independent assessments, a misreading of the evidence — or, at minimum, a considerable overstatement. The cost of this standoff is being measured in more than geopolitical terms.

According to Philip Turle, France 24's analyst covering the conflict, the war has already cost roughly $1,100 for every American taxpayer — a figure that underlines how quickly a confrontation of this kind transforms from a foreign-policy decision into a domestic fiscal burden. For ordinary Iranians, the economic weight is heavier still, compounded by sanctions that were already squeezing household incomes before the first missile was fired.