A woman stands next to Iranian-made Zolfaghar missiles displayed in Azadi Square in Tehran on July 24. Photo by AFP via Getty Images

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For decades, Western governments feared the consequences of confronting Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Today, they should be equally concerned about the consequences of failing to capitalize on the significant damage inflicted on the Islamic Republic.

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Honest Reporting Canada has spent years documenting how Iran’s malign influence is too often ignored, not only through its terrorist proxies and human rights abuses, but through their insidious efforts at spreading propaganda in the West.

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Our work monitoring Canadian media has given us a front-row view of how easily the Islamic Republic’s activities can disappear from Western public discourse, even as their consequences reach directly into our own communities.

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The United States and Israel have severely degraded Iran’s military capabilities in recent months. Its nuclear infrastructure has been decimated, its ballistic missile arsenal degraded, its strategic air defence systems destroyed and 52 senior regime figures have been eliminated. Hezbollah and other members of Tehran’s terrorist network, including Hamas and the Houthis, have been weakened.

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More important, the premise underlying Iran’s strategy for three decades has been shattered. Tehran believed it could attack Israel through proxies and would therefore be immune from attack while simultaneously advancing its atomic program as a nuclear threshold state and threatening Western interests, all while serving to insulate Iran from the consequences of its nefarious actions.

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That calculation no longer holds.

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But military setbacks do not necessarily translate into lasting strategic defeat. Iran’s immediate objective is no longer victory, but outlasting the United States.

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If the regime can withstand the current pressure and eventually persuade Western governments to exchange sanctions relief for another diplomatic agreement, it may acquire the two things it needs most: money and time, both of which serve as patient pathways to acquiring atomic weapons and mitigating the regime’s existential concerns.

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That would be a serious mistake.

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Iran built its power painstakingly over decades: nuclear facilities, ballistic missiles and drones, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Together, they gave Tehran strategic depth and geographic spread.

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Much of that architecture has now been damaged, degraded or destroyed. The challenge is ensuring it stays that way.

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Iran will almost certainly try to reconstruct nuclear facilities in harder-to-reach locations. For example, Pickaxe mountain, a site widely believed to possess Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Iran will also likely endeavour to disperse missile production sites and rebuild its regional terrorist networks.