The commander of United States Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, told a Senate hearing this week that American military operations had reduced Iran’s ability to launch large-scale attacks by at least ninety per cent, describing the forty-day campaign as a strategic success. In testimony that sought to cement a narrative of decisive victory, Cooper claimed that Iran’s missile arsenal, naval forces, and drone-manufacturing base had been devastated, and that Tehran would not recover for at least a generation. The assessment, delivered under the banner of Operation Epic Fury, was the most emphatic official assertion yet that the Trump administration’s military pressure on Iran had achieved its stated aim of crippling the Islamic Republic’s offensive reach.

Viewed from Washington, however, the hearing exposed sharp divisions over the campaign’s broader costs. Lawmakers from both parties pressed the admiral on the economic and regional risks stemming from the sustained bombing, while analysts in the Gulf noted that the claim of a ninety percent degradation sits uneasily alongside reports — which Cooper declined to address directly — that Iran has preserved substantial missile and drone stocks in underground facilities. Russian state media, citing the same testimony, highlighted Cooper’s refusal to corroborate suggestions that Tehran retained more than seventy percent of its arsenal, a sign that the intelligence picture remains contested. In the Gulf capitals that would be the first to suffer any Iranian retaliation, the admiral’s insistence that Iran “no longer threatens regional partners” was received with cautious relief tempered by a knowledge of past miscalculations.

Yet the most revealing moment of the hearing, from Tehran’s perspective, came when Cooper acknowledged that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still wields “considerable authority” inside Iran. The admission, reported prominently by Iranian media, undercuts any suggestion that the military campaign has destabilised the regime itself. Cooper declined to say whether the IRGC would be part of future peace talks, deferring to diplomats — a silence that underscores the central dilemma of the post-war moment: how to negotiate with a state whose coercive institutions remain intact even as its conventional military capacity lies in ruins.

Looking ahead, the strategic picture is one of tactical achievement married to profound political uncertainty. The dismantling of Iran’s offensive infrastructure and the severing of arms supply lines to proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen represent tangible gains for the United States and its allies. But the durability of those gains hinges on a diplomatic process that the Senate hearing left wholly undefined. As long as the IRGC retains its grip on the levers of domestic power, any settlement will require engagement with the very institution the campaign was designed to weaken. For the region, the question is no longer whether Iran can launch a mass assault, but whether a crippled but still coherent theocracy can be persuaded to accept a new strategic equilibrium — or whether it will simply wait for the chance to rebuild its arsenal from the ground up.