The son of the elderly Iranian ruler, aligned politically with his father, took over. The war prompted Iran to operate one of the world's largest economic pressure levers, to great effect. The U.S.'s unilateralism, leadership rhetoric, and war crimes (like bombing a school) have lost it a significant amount of global goodwill.

None of that seems like it jibes with your description.

Success or failure isn’t judged by how many explosions or dead bodies each side racks up. Def Sec McNamara admits he made that mistake during the Vietnam war when he repeatedly asserted the US was winning with all sorts of statistics and charts with steep lines pointing up.

The real question is whether political objectives are achieved. In Iran, those were vaguely defined to begin with, but depending on the moment and mood of the President they were:

1. Prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon now or in the foreseeable future (Not Achieved)

2. Remove Iran’s theocratic anti-American regime (Not Achieved)

3. Maintain international access to key shipping routes (Negative Achieved, much worse than pre-war status quo)

So after spending billions of dollars, depleting stockpiles of our most modern precision weapons against a vastly inferior military technologically, losing 18 American lives and resulting in both global economic disruption and to our Gulf allies, the war has failed to accomplish any objectives and left everyone in a worse position than before the war except the IRGC.

You don’t know the difference between tactics and strategy.

The US has been consistently tactically excellent. Strategically this is a blundering loss.

If you strategically aim your awesome unmatched powers the wrong way you can still lose.

I'd argue that seriously upending global energy markets (and perhaps the entire economy) is quite a high cost.

Minimal cost? We’re at about a billion dollars per primary target and rising. Not to mention north of 250 US casualties. I’d hardly call that minimal cost.

Our ability to defend our allies in the region is non existent, and we lost almost all of our radar capabilities which will take a decade minimum to rebuild. That’s assuming hostilities end tomorrow.

“With minimal cost”

Are you trolling

And then what happened?

tactical win - they achieved that quite easily.

strategic failure - iran shrugged it off and now are causing massive damage to world economy with no end in sight.

A very cursory investigation suggests the Iran war has cost the US approximately 100 billion dollars. About half in hardware and half in increased costs for citizens.

These costs are continuing since there is no end in sight and it seems the US is running out of some of the equipment it has used.

Congrats, now even more hardline leadership got power. And it was conclusively proven that US trears accomodating or measured responses as weakness, so the new leadership wont makr the same mistake.

Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power

The US fully achieved its objective of distracting attention away from the Trump-Epstein files.