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July 07, 2026

Washington Examiner - Iran’s gaslighting kills: Declaring ‘victory’ in utter humiliation

ByJoseph Epstein

Washington Examiner - Iran’s gaslighting kills: Declaring ‘victory’ in utter humiliation

Iran’s leaders call survival a victory. After a year in which the United States and Israel dismantled the Islamic Republic’s military, gutted its nuclear program, and killed its supreme leader, the regime’s surviving officials insist that merely enduring is triumph enough.

But surviving is not the same as living, and what Tehran has preserved is a ruin. The tragedy, and the thing its rulers refuse to see, is that they had a choice and still do. A small nation on Iran’s northern border confronted a version of the same choice and answered it the opposite way. Armenia is the standing rebuttal to everything the Islamic Republic tells itself about why it cannot change.

Read the full article on the Washington Examiner.

Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.