Mark Owen is pleased to welcome Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow at the Simpson Center. She frames the war in the Persian Gulf as a mutually damaging stalemate in which neither Washington nor Tehran has found a politically sustainable exit: “There are no winners in this war”. Her central argument is that the conflict has created a problem of face-saving as much as military strategy. The US faces rising economic and electoral costs, while Iran confronts shortages, inflation, domestic dissent and intensified repression. Neither side, in her assessment, can plausibly claim success.​