TEHRAN— The United States has been forced to abandon its original objectives in the war against Iran and has effectively accepted defeat, Iranian Revolution Guard Corps spokesman Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi said Sunday, describing the Strait of Hormuz as a new “geography of battle” that Tehran will continue to hold until Washington accepts Iran’s conditions.

“The recent war was the only war in which America, without achieving anything, has accepted its defeat,” Mohebbi said, arguing that the United States had been compelled to rapidly scale back the objectives it had initially set for the conflict.

He said Washington had moved from pursuing broader military and political goals to concentrating primarily on securing the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which has remained largely closed to commercial shipping amid the conflict.

“The enemy has been forced to rapidly retreat from all the objectives it had imagined and set for itself, and is now on a trajectory of declining aims,” Mohebbi said.

“This strategy will continue until the enemy accepts all our conditions,” he said.

His assessment echoes arguments made by a few prominent American analysts, although the interpretation of the war remains deeply contested in the United States.

In a May analysis published by the Brookings Institution, American scholars Robert Kagan, Michael O’Hanlon and Melanie Sisson argued that the United States was in a worse position after the war than it had been before the conflict began. They pointed specifically to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes, as a source of significant leverage for Tehran. 

Kagan went further in a discussion of the analysis, saying that a US defeat was “not only possible but likely.” 

American political scientist John Mearsheimer has been even more explicit. In a July assessment, he said the United States had already lost the war, arguing that Washington’s earlier strategic bombing campaign and subsequent naval blockade had failed to achieve their objectives.

Mearsheimer also described the June memorandum of understanding between the two sides as evidence that Washington had been compelled to accept an unfavorable outcome.