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Iran looks at North Korea and want that kind of regime stability, at least from outside threats.
US wouldn't go into such a war against Russia, because of their nuclear program. They wouldn't have attacked Iran if they already had a standing nuclear program with strategic nuclear weaponary.
What are their options now? Strategically focus on rebuilding their defense capabilities with most likely the same result in 10-25 years or strategically focus on nuclear weapons so that adversaries won't rage war against them like that again in 10-25 years?
As Putin once quipped, "having the desire to do something is very different from having the ability to do something" ..
Iran can desire as much as they like to "want" and "have" a nuclear program .. but the objective truth is that US just crushed the intellectual and philosophical source of this desire by eliminating their rolodex of ayatollahs ... whether you agree or not with this approach is a different matter but US has been successful in scrubbing the source of that desire so aggressively that the new hopefuls are simply exhausted to play the nuclear long game ..
Now at a personal note, I live between Dubai and London (previously Hamburg) and all these places have a significant Iranian diaspore and not a single one of those people in my circle is against what the US did and is doing in Iran ..
What hilarious though is that some HN folks have such vitriolic hate for Trump (based on the comments of the OP's post) that they'd rather see Iran have a nuclear capability than admitting that the defanging of Iran's nuclear program has been a good thing for the world ...
Interestingly the Iranians I've talked to (Eg: a married couple both with nuclear physics degrees from Iran who bailed out long long ago) would prefer to see Iran still being monitored and kept in check - they are concerned that Trump has not defanged the HEU program, merely scattered and set it back somewhat, while at the same time increasing the likelihood of rogue use of HEU and or those cache's being fed into an actual unchecked weapons program elsewhere.
A big issue, not so much discussed, is where exactly has the HEU ended up, in how many parts, and under whose control. Was it buried under rubble? Is it secure in a void? Was it moved and sequestered into multiple parts before Trump went loco?
"Practically" speaking, this deal is not any more potent than the JCPOA pinkie-promise. It returns us to the status quo of hoping that Iran doesn't develop a nuclear weapon, which was the exact same flimsy flypaper logic that failed to stop South Africa and North Korea from making their nukes.
If the goal of this war is to denuclearize Iran, then it has failed on both accounts. Justified or not, the US air campaign eg. Midnight Hammer failed to prevent escalation and deprive Iran of access to their nuclear material. The domestic uranium mines, centrifuge factories, nuclear equipment stockpiles and underground missile cities all appear to have survived the strikes. Desire it or not, Iran has nuclear research within their reach, and Israel will continue to use it to manufacture support for a bloody land invasion.
> they'd rather see Iran have a nuclear capability than admitting that the defanging of Iran's nuclear program has been a good thing for the world
Again, this argument is disconnected. Nuclear proliferation is widely detested, which is why this war has been so seriously criticized. America's air campaign would not defang Iran's nuclear program, officers knew this going into the conflict and warned that the collateral damage would not be worth the outcome.
Even if this conflict did succeed in deterring Iran from a nuclear bomb, then it's a return to the 2017-era status quo that Trump disrupted by ripping up the JCPOA. From a nonproliferation standpoint, this was a bloody and pointless war.
* regular checks kept HEU processing in Iran under agreed limits,
* tunnels were traversed and inertially mapped,
* leaders were known, and communicated with
* tunnels have been expanded, unmapped
* locations of and numbers of HEU caches are no longer known,
* "leadership" has devolved into a mosaic of cells such that, at best, one or two people know where all HEU caches are, more probably no single person knows where the caches are.
The DoD under Trump has literally made a poor situation far far worse and greatly increased the likelihood of rogue nuclear weapons.
How do they still have any cards ?
The USA functionally lost this war on the 20th of March when the threat to Kuwait was demonstrated. Everything that has happened since was just delaying the inevitable. It was a mistake.