In 53 BC, Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man in the Roman Republic and a member of its ruling triumvirate, marched forty thousand heavy legionaries into Mesopotamia to crush the Parthian Empire, the Persian power that ruled much of modern-day Iran. Rome was the most powerful military force the world had ever known: disciplined, numerically superior, and accustomed to victory.
At Carrhae, a Parthian force of roughly ten thousand light cavalry, outnumbered four to one, annihilated his army. The Parthians refused to meet Rome on its own terms, using mounted archers, hit-and-run tactics, and the famous Parthian shot to encircle infantry built to fight in straight lines.
Crassus was killed. His legions were scattered. Rome fought the Parthians, and later the Sassanid dynasty, another Persian empire that ruled Iran between the third and seventh centuries, for centuries through shifting borders and exhausting sieges, without ever breaking the political structure that held the Iranian world together.
The Achaemenid dynasty had earlier fallen to Alexander, yet Persian political culture reconstituted itself within a generation under the Seleucids and later the Parthians. The civilisation adapted, absorbed, and endured.
Ali Larijani, speaking for the interim council that assumed power after the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, declared that Iran would fiercely defend itself and its six-thousand-year-old civilisation regardless of the costs.
The statement captures something the present campaign appears to underestimate: Iran understands itself not simply as a government defending territory, but as a civilisation that has outlasted every empire that has attempted to break it. That framing shapes the strategic calculus of those now directing the war from Tehran.
Operation Epic Fury can now be assessed against the objectives its architects set for it.
The United States launched this campaign with five expectations: that strikes of sufficient scale would produce regime change, that the nuclear threat would be permanently eliminated, that the conflict would be short, that the Iranian public would rise against its government, and that Iran’s retaliatory capacity would be neutralised early.
All five have failed.
President Trump called on Iranians to take back their country. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted this was not a regime change war but added that the regime had changed and the world was better for it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said regime change was not the objective, but that the administration would not be heartbroken if it occurred.
The Supreme Leader is dead, along with senior IRGC leadership and the defence minister, yet the governing structure was held intact. The interim council formed within hours, Larijani promised retaliation, and the system designed to survive this kind of decapitation has continued to function.
On Saturday, officials told reporters Iran was planning to strike American forces pre-emptively, but Pentagon briefers acknowledged the following day that Iran had no such plans unless attacked first.
The Persians have seen this before, and history suggests they understand the tempo of such confrontations better than those who expect rapid conclusions
Rubio then offered a revealing reformulation: the United States knew Israel intended to attack, knew Iran would retaliate against American assets, and chose to strike pre-emptively to reduce casualties from a retaliation triggered by an operation the United States had helped initiate.
The imminent threat was the consequence of a war that the United States chose to join. Hegseth claimed the United States was finishing a war Iran had started, while Rubio simultaneously explained that it struck because it knew Israel would attack.
Senator Angus King called the logic breathtaking, asking whether the United States had delegated the decision to go to war to another country.
The nuclear justification is equally unstable.
During Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, Trump declared Iran’s nuclear programme completely and totally obliterated. He now describes Operation Epic Fury as the last best chance to strike at the same programme he said no longer existed.
If the first operation succeeded, the nuclear rationale for this one collapses. If it failed, then the administration misrepresented its results for eight months, and there is no reason to assume the claims being made about this campaign’s effectiveness will prove more reliable.
Hegseth has already walked the justification back further, citing a conventional missile build-up meant to shield future nuclear ambitions rather than an active weapons programme, a rationale several steps removed from the imminent threat originally invoked.
Vice President JD Vance, who endorsed Trump in 2023 specifically because he would not recklessly send Americans to fight overseas, told the Washington Post two days before the strikes that there was no chance of a drawn-out conflict and that he preferred the diplomatic option.
Reports from the New York Times and CBS News indicate that he privately urged Trump to “go big and go fast”, arguing that limited strikes were a mistake.
He now appears on television insisting the war will not become a multi-year conflict, while Trump has acknowledged the campaign may last four to five weeks, has added the qualifier “whatever it takes”, and has not ruled out ground troops.
Six American service members are already dead.
Trump told the Iranian people their freedom was at hand. The Iranian public has rallied behind its government.
In Minab, an Israeli strike hit a girls’ elementary school, and Iran’s Health Ministry reports approximately 180 children killed.
Images of dead schoolchildren harden domestic resolve, narrow the space for dissent, and unify populations that might otherwise have remained divided.
Iranian ballistic missiles and drones continue to strike targets across the region, with retaliatory attacks reported in nine countries, drones hitting the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, and Hezbollah entering the war openly.
Israel has ordered troops deeper into Lebanon. The United States has closed its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The IRGC has confirmed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Ship-tracking data show a seventy per cent reduction in traffic.
Iran maintains an estimated stockpile of 5,000 naval mines whose threatened deployment alone has been sufficient to halt commercial transits.
Trump’s offer to have the Navy escort tankers through the strait is itself an admission that the waterway his campaign was supposed to secure is no longer open.
Diplomatic channels had not collapsed before the assault began.
Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi described negotiations as making significant progress and told CBS News that a deal stood within reach.
Larijani has since declared that Iran will not negotiate with the United States, and any future diplomatic attempt will begin from a position of diminished credibility.
The campaign set five objectives for itself, and by its own emerging metrics, it is failing all of them.
The regime has not changed. The nuclear rationale has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The war has not ended. The uprising has not come. The missiles have not stopped.
Iran claims six thousand years of civilisational continuity, and for at least the last two and a half millennia it has demonstrated an institutional capacity to outlast every military campaign waged against it.
Long before the rise of Islam, Rome and Persia fought each other for centuries across the same terrain, and neither empire succeeded in destroying the other.
The conflict between great powers in this region has never been reducible to religion alone; it has always been about power, geography, and endurance.
The Persians have seen this before, and history suggests they understand the tempo of such confrontations better than those who expect rapid conclusions.