Make no mistake, Iran blinked. Tehran’s redlines have been almost entirely abandoned if the terms of this ceasefire – admittedly extremely fragile – are anything to go by.
The Strait of Hormuz is set to reopen, and Iran’s nuclear programme stands to be dismantled. In one fell swoop, Iran lost not only its economic joker card but also stands to lose its precious nuclear programme.
The regime’s decades-long dream of acquiring the ultimate weapon to destroy Israel and provide its ruthless terror proxies a nuclear umbrella is evaporating. Iran was left with little other choice.
The dramatic and highly irregular rhetoric of President Trump – the latest iteration of his Madman Theory - sent an unmistakable signal to Tehran earlier this week that they were in Last Chance Saloon.
There can be no underplaying the scale of the losses that the regime and its IRGC enforcers have suffered. It started with the elimination of the notorious leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and continued relentlessly from there.
A leadership with hundreds of years of combined experience in terrorising the world and their own civilians has fallen one after another.
Its military capabilities have been decimated, and its capacity to rebuild them any time soon has been spectacularly downgraded.
Its navy rests at the bottom of the sea, its air force smashed to pieces on its runways, and many of its ballistic missile facilities are in ruins.
Four days ago, the United States and Iran called time on the Islamic Republic’s destabilising expansionist policy and set about removing its ability to project a strategic-level threat to international peace and security.
By that metric, this war has proven extraordinarily successful. The UK will be an enormous benefactor of this, even if the Government fails to accept it.
In the months to come, we will discover whether the long-suffering people of Iran will seize the opportunity to overthrow this beleaguered regime – the circumstances have certainly never been more conducive.
Iran's ability to acquire the ultimate weapon is fading. This is a truly momentous moment
|Getty Images
During this war, Iran admittedly wrought chaos and damage across the region via its brazen use of explosive drones and missiles.
This, however, has achieved little more than further isolating Iran from its own neighbourhood and moving the Islamic Gulf states yet closer to Israel and the US.
The bloodshed and devastation that Iran has inflicted upon its own people, the entire Middle East and Gulf region, and even onto the streets of the UK, in the last few years has been unbearably painful.
Before us, at last, there is a historic opportunity for a different Middle East – one in which Arab, Israeli and Persian can coexist and prosper in peace.
In defiance of this overwhelming evidence, the UK’s ‘experts’ foolishly assert that this was no win of any sort. Indeed, some delusionally claim that Iran ‘won’.
The twin-headed hydra of Trump and Israel Derangement Syndrome is alive and well. I understand from a source in Tehran that a running joke doing the rounds there in recent weeks: we have lost our air force, our navy, and our army, but at least we haven’t lost the Western commentariat. It would be funny if it weren’t so serious.