Iran published a 14,390-word letter to Americans this week proclaiming the regime’s victory over the US, suggesting the two sides were no closer to resolving their seven-month war through diplomatic means.
Iran claimed it “decimated America’s military bases across the Gulf, forced the US Navy into retreat and destroyed billions of dollars-worth of high-end radar and aircraft,” a Bloomberg columnist wrote, which is all “partly true, though overstated, just as the letter wildly understates the IRGC’s own losses.”
Tehran is preparing a more forceful response if Washington resumes large-scale strikes, Reuters reported. Iran’s leaders “never had much faith in American negotiators; now, they have virtually none,” an Iranian-American expert wrote in Foreign Affairs, and are preparing “a strategy… defined by escalation and continuous offense.”