When US and Israeli aircraft struck Iran on 28 February, President Donald Trump immediately cast the campaign in sweeping terms — from crippling Tehran’s missile forces to ensuring it could never obtain a nuclear weapon. With a preliminary peace deal now in place more than three months later, the results are mixed and, in several areas, still contested.
So what, exactly, has Mr Trump achieved?
Missiles and drones
Heading into the war, Iran was widely assessed to possess the Middle East’s largest ballistic missile stockpile, estimated at between 2,500 and 6,000 missiles across multiple types. Some had ranges reaching 2,000 km — enough to hit Israel — and some were fitted with cluster munition warheads, which can complicate air-defence efforts.
Iran has also been a major producer of long-range drones, particularly the one-way Shahed model that has been used by Russia in attacks on Ukraine, and deployed by Tehran as well.
About a month after the conflict began, US sources told Reuters that roughly one-third of Iran’s missile arsenal had been destroyed, while another third was believed to be damaged, destroyed or buried.
In testimony to Congress on 14 May, US Admiral Brad Cooper said Iran’s ability to manufacture and stockpile missiles and long-range drones had been pushed back by years. He also said US forces and their allies intercepted more than 1,500 missiles and 6,000 drones during the war.
Even so, the exact size of Iran’s remaining missile inventory is unknown, and Tehran has continued to show it can strike at US allies. On 6 June it launched salvos at Kuwait and Bahrain, and on 7 June it fired missiles at Israel. Those countries said the attacks caused no significant damage.
Conventional military
Washington says the war has significantly weakened Iran’s conventional military capacity to project force across the region and to threaten US operations.
Mr Cooper told Congress that US military action destroyed 161 Iranian naval ships and disabled 82% of Iran’s air defence systems. He said Iran’s air force — which had flown up to 100 sorties per day before the war — has now stopped flying missions entirely.
Still, Iran demonstrated it could exert pressure on maritime traffic by effectively shutting the Strait of Hormuz for the duration of the conflict, trapping merchant vessels that carry one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas supply. It did so using speedboats, mines, drones and missile boats.
Nuclear programme
Mr Trump has repeatedly argued that stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is his central objective. Tehran, for its part, has consistently maintained it does not intend to build a bomb and says its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes.
Yet the war does not appear to have materially altered Iran’s nuclear capability. US intelligence last month assessed that Iran would need less than a year to produce a nuclear weapon — the same estimate given after the June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iran’s nuclear programme is set to dominate talks once the framework deal is formally signed on Friday. Mr Trump has said Iran’s enriched uranium must be removed from the country, while sources say Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei insists it must not be sent abroad.
Proxies
At the White House on 2 March, Mr Trump said Iran must not be allowed to keep arming and financing proxy groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen — a network Tehran has relied on for decades to extend influence and pressure adversaries.
Iran has not shown any readiness to cut off that support since the war began. Even so, US military and independent assessments say Tehran’s proxy network is significantly less effective than in the past.
Much of that decline pre-dated the current conflict. After the 7 October, 2023, attack on its territory, Israel killed many senior Hamas leaders and thousands of its fighters in Gaza. Israel also killed many of Hezbollah’s top leadership in Lebanon. Iran further lost a key route for resupplying Hezbollah when former President Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria collapsed in 2024. Meanwhile, sanctions and Iran’s economic troubles have also reduced Tehran’s ability to bankroll these groups.
During this war, the proxies have played a limited role. Hamas has not attacked Israel from Gaza, and the Houthis have not significantly disrupted Red Sea shipping from Yemen.
Hezbollah entered the conflict on 2 March by launching missiles and drones into Israel. Israel responded with airstrikes and a ground invasion that have killed nearly 3,700 people and displaced 1.2 million in Lebanon. The conflict has also killed 28 Israeli soldiers and four civilians so far.
Mr Cooper told Congress in May that Iran no longer has the ability to reliably supply those groups with advanced weapons, though he did not elaborate.
Regime change
Before the war, Mr Trump urged Iranian protesters to topple their leaders, and said Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death on 28 February represented their “single greatest chance” to take power. On 6 March, he declared the fighting would end only with “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” from Iran, alongside the emergence of a new, “acceptable” leader.
The conflict did not remove Iran’s theocratic government. However, Mr Trump has argued he achieved his broader aim because Mr Khamenei has been succeeded by his son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. On 29 March, Mr Trump described the new leadership as “a new, and more reasonable, regime”.
In recent weeks, Mr Trump has largely stopped repeating his earlier calls for Iran’s leaders to be overthrown.
