When the Pentagon presented Donald Trump with options to handle rising tensions with Iran, military planners threw in a radical outlier. They suggested assassinating Major General Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force. It was a classic bureaucratic tactic. You include an extreme option so the leader picks the sensible middle ground.
Trump picked the extreme.
On January 3, 2020, an American MQ-9 Reaper drone fired missiles at a convoy leaving Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani was dead. The world held its breath, bracing for a massive regional war. That full-scale war didn't happen. Instead, we got a complex, asymmetric struggle that rewritten the rules of Middle Eastern geopolitics. Looking back at the fallout, the standard talking points fall flat. Trump claimed total victory. Tehran claimed they humbled the American empire.
Both narratives are wrong.
To understand who actually won and who lost, you have to look past the empty rhetoric and focus on the cold realities of leverage, nuclear enrichment, and strategic positioning.
The Illusion of Maximum Pressure
The strike on Soleimani wasn't an isolated event. It was the explosive peak of the Trump administration's "Maximum Pressure" campaign. After pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, Washington aimed to squeeze Tehran into submission.
On paper, the economic damage to Iran was staggering. The International Monetary Fund reported that Iran's gross official reserves plummeted from an average of $70 billion in 2017 to just $4 billion by 2020. Oil exports dropped significantly. The Iranian rial tanked, making life miserable for ordinary citizens who suddenly couldn't afford imported medicines or basic goods.
If the goal was punishing the Iranian economy, Trump won. But if the goal was changing the behavior of the Iranian regime, the strategy was a total failure.
Iran's Official Reserves (2017 vs. 2020)
2017: $70 Billion ====================================
2020: $4 Billion ==
