By Omid Souresrafil
The smoke has barely cleared from the latest round of American and Israeli strikes on Iran, and already the narrative managers in Washington and Tel Aviv are scrambling to declare something short of disaster. They speak of “degraded capabilities,” “message sent,” and the usual fog of self-congratulation that follows every failed imperial adventure. The reality, as Turkish political scientist Hasan Ünal lays out with clinical precision, is far more damning. Iran did not merely survive. Iran won. And that victory constitutes a strategic defeat for Israel and, more importantly, for the United States.
Ünal, professor of political science and international relations at Başkent University in Ankara, does not traffic in the breathless optimism of resistance rhetoric or the apocalyptic language preferred by some Western analysts. He deals in cold power calculations. In a recent extended discussion, he makes the case that Tehran’s ability to absorb the blows, retaliate on an unprecedented scale, and force the attackers into panic and improvisation has accelerated the transformation of the world order itself. The multipolar world is no longer a slogan for academic conferences or BRICS communiqués. It is becoming a concrete fact, and the institutions of the old order—NATO first among them—will not survive the transition intact.
This is not abstract theory. It is the lived geography of the recent roughly 40-day war, the intelligence plays along the Turkish-Iranian border, the quiet refusal of key bases, the public mood in a NATO country that has grown deeply allergic to American and Israeli adventurism, and the slow realization in Western capitals that the old methods of coercion no longer produce the old results. For those of us who have watched the empire’s successive failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, the pattern is grimly familiar. What is new is the speed with which the costs are becoming visible and the willingness of regional actors to impose them.
The Dual Track in Ankara
Turkish foreign policy during the conflict revealed the familiar dual track that has defined Ankara’s approach for years. On one side stood Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and the institutional reflexes of a NATO member state. Early in the fighting, Fidan appeared to expect a rapid Iranian collapse. He publicly questioned how Tehran could “bully” the United States and Israel without certain advanced technologies. More significantly, he signed declarations with Gulf states that labeled Iran the aggressor. The language was careful, the alignment temporary, and the domestic reaction immediate and harsh.
On the other side stood President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s deliberate distancing. Ünal describes this as the more sensible line: refuse to take sides openly while preserving maximum room for maneuver. The Turkish public, he notes, has been anti-American and anti-Israeli for decades across a wide range of issues. This is not a temporary spike driven by the latest images from Gaza or the latest missiles over Iranian skies. It is structural, rooted in successive wars, sanctions that hurt Turkish interests, the memory of coups and interventions, and a deep popular suspicion of Israeli power in the region. Any Turkish government that appears to facilitate another American or Israeli war of choice against a neighbor pays a heavy political price at home.
That public pressure created space for quieter, more consequential actions. The most important of them involved the Kurds—long the preferred American proxy instrument in the region.
The Kurdish Trap That Collapsed
Washington’s regime-change playbook has always included proxies. In the run-up to the recent fighting, American operatives reportedly assembled roughly thirteen Kurdish groups—affiliates of the PKK, elements tied to the Barzani and Talabani networks in northern Iraq—and prepared them as ground forces to cross into Iran. The concept was classic: decapitate the Iranian leadership from the air, then use local proxies to exploit the chaos, seize territory, and force a collapse from within. It was the same logic that had been tried, with varying degrees of failure, in previous campaigns.
In December, Turkish intelligence shared precise information with Iran about these groups and their positions. Iranian forces, working with that intelligence, allowed the fighters to enter Iranian territory, then surrounded and destroyed them. Ünal’s phrasing is matter-of-fact and devastating: they were “encircled and presumably annihilated.” The operation demonstrated both the quality of Turkish intelligence on Kurdish movements and the depth of quiet coordination that can exist even between states with long histories of rivalry when their interests align against a common external threat.
The Americans and Israelis tried again during the 40-day war itself. The Kurdish forces this time were far less willing. They had seen what happened to the first wave. At that point, according to reports cited by Ünal, Erdoğan called Trump directly. The message was unambiguous: do not proceed with the Kurdish ground option. If you force the issue, you will compel Türkiye to collaborate openly with Iran. And you do not want that outcome.
Trump, Ünal observes, then dropped the Kurds “like hot potatoes.” The desperation move was abandoned. The regime-change ground component evaporated. What had been presented as a sophisticated multi-domain strategy revealed itself as improvisation once the preferred proxies refused to die on schedule.
This episode is more than a tactical footnote. It reveals the limits of American power projection in a region where local actors can no longer be treated as disposable assets. The Kurds had been useful against Assad, useful against ISIS, useful as a permanent lever against both Ankara and Tehran. When asked to die for an American and Israeli strategic objective that offered them little in return beyond the usual promises of future recognition and protection, the calculus changed. Turkish intelligence made sure Iran knew the coordinates. Iran finished the job. The message to other potential proxies across the region is clear: the Americans will use you until the costs rise, then discard you.
Incirlik, Kürecik, and the Quiet Constraints
The American public still hears “Incirlik Air Base” and imagines a fully operational platform for strikes against Iran. The reality, as Ünal describes it, is different. Since the failed coup of July 15, 2016, the base has been almost closed for combat purposes. No American combat troops and no U.S. Air Force combat aircraft were deployed against Iran from Incirlik. Limited logistical use remained possible—refueling, transit flights—but the base was not a launchpad for the war. Turkish control over the facility has tightened in the years since the coup attempt, and domestic political reality makes large-scale American combat operations from Turkish soil increasingly difficult to sustain.
The Kürecik radar station, installed around 2009–2011 to monitor Iranian missile activity and feed data rapidly to NATO and Israel, proved equally limited in practical effect. Iran’s missile forces have grown sophisticated enough that early warning alone does not translate into effective interception. The volume, trajectory diversity, and saturation tactics used in the retaliation overwhelmed systems that had been designed for a different threat environment. Gulf bases hosting American forces performed little better against the scale of Iranian response.
The Empire’s Bloody Nose and the Pattern of Failure
The deeper pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched American policy in the Middle East for the past quarter century. Overconfidence born of technological superiority. Reliance on proxies who eventually refuse to die on the schedule required by American planners. Intelligence failures about the resilience of the target society and the coherence of its state structures. An inability to translate tactical military advantages into lasting political victory. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria—the list of expensive lessons that were never learned is long. Iran was supposed to be different because the air campaign would be decisive, the leadership would crack under pressure, and internal fractures would do the rest of the work. They did not.
Ünal’s account of the panic that set in after Iranian retaliation is telling. The expectation in Washington and Tel Aviv appears to have been that killing senior Iranian officials, including efforts against the highest levels of leadership, would cause the state structure to crumble within days or at most weeks. When that failed and the missiles and drones began landing in volume and with precision, the response was improvisation: activate the Kurds, pressure the Turks, look for any available lever. Each lever either snapped or was deliberately withheld by actors who had calculated their own interests more carefully than Washington had calculated them.
This is what strategic defeat looks like in the early twenty-first century. Not the destruction of the American or Israeli military. Not the collapse of their economies overnight. But the clear demonstration that the preferred method of imposing will—air power plus sanctions plus proxies plus information dominance—no longer produces the desired political results against a determined regional power that has prepared for exactly this contingency. The deterrent effect radiates outward. Future targets calculate differently. Future partners demand higher prices or refuse the role altogether. The cost of coercion rises. The benefits decline.
What Comes Next
Türkiye will continue its balancing act. It will remain inside NATO while limiting the practical utility of its territory for operations that its public rejects. It will trade with Russia while selling certain systems to Ukraine. It will manage the Kurdish question with a combination of military pressure, political negotiation, and intelligence cooperation with Iran when interests align. The dual track is not elegant, and it produces contradictions that critics on all sides can exploit. But it is rational given the constraints of geography, energy dependence, domestic politics, and the demonstrated limits of American power.
Iran will rebuild, harden, and expand the capabilities that just proved their worth. The underground facilities, the missile and drone forces, the intelligence penetration of proxy networks, the ability to operate under intense electronic and kinetic pressure—all of these will receive resources and attention. The narrative of resistance has been reinforced by results rather than by rhetoric alone. That is a significant difference.
The United States and Israel face a harder adjustment. The domestic political costs of another failed Middle Eastern war are rising in both countries. The financial costs of maintaining the current force posture across multiple theaters are not declining. The diplomatic costs of alienating partners who no longer believe American guarantees are ironclad continue to mount. The multipolar world does not require the formal dissolution of NATO to render it less relevant. It only requires that key members begin treating alliance obligations as optional when they conflict with core national interests. That process is already visible in Turkish behavior and is likely to spread.
Hasan Ünal’s analysis is valuable precisely because it comes from inside a NATO country that has spent decades managing the tension between formal alliance membership and regional reality. He is not a cheerleader for Tehran. He is a cold-eyed observer of power who has watched successive American administrations overpromise and underdeliver. When he says Iran’s victory is a strategic defeat for Israel and the United States, and that this defeat is accelerating the transformation of the world order, the claim deserves to be taken seriously by anyone still capable of distinguishing between official talking points and observable outcomes.
The empire still possesses enormous military capacity. It still prints the dominant reserve currency. It still fields the most sophisticated intelligence and surveillance apparatus on the planet. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute—and what the recent fighting has clarified in public—is whether that capacity can still compel outcomes against states that refuse to submit and that possess the means to make the costs of compulsion unbearable. On the evidence of the past months, the answer is increasingly no.
The bees’ nest has been poked. The bees are still flying. And the men who thought they could manage the hive from a safe distance are discovering that distance is an illusion. The world that emerges from this period will not be tidy. It will feature more friction, more hedging by middle powers, more local balances of power, and fewer opportunities for distant capitals to dictate terms without paying a price. That is not chaos. It is the return of history after a brief, arrogant interlude in which one capital imagined it could suspend the normal rules of power politics. Iran has just reminded everyone that the rules never left. They were only temporarily ignored. The bill for that ignorance is now coming due—and it will be paid in the currency of diminished influence, higher costs, and the slow, irreversible erosion of the unipolar moment.
That is the real meaning of the strategic defeat. Not a single battlefield loss measured in destroyed aircraft or empty missile tubes, but the exposure of a method of power that no longer works as advertised. The rest follows from there. The multipolar world is not waiting for permission. It is already arriving, one failed coercion campaign at a time.
