A confidential CIA analysis delivered to administration policymakers this week concludes that Iran can survive the U.S. naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship, four people familiar with the document said, a finding that appears to raise new questions about President Donald Trump’s optimism on ending the war.
The analysis by the U.S. intelligence community, whose secret assessments on Iran have often been more sober than the administration’s public statements, also found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense U.S. and Israeli bombardment, three of the people familiar with it said.
Iran retains about 75 percent of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, a U.S. official said. The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began.
Trump painted a rosier picture in Oval Office remarks on Wednesday, saying of Iran: “Their missiles are mostly decimated, they have probably 18, 19 percent, but not a lot by comparison to what they had.”
Three current and one former U.S. official confirmed the outlines of the intelligence analysis, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Asked for comment, a senior U.S. intelligence official emphasized the blockade’s impact. “The President’s blockade is inflicting real, compounding damage — severing trade, crushing revenue, and accelerating systemic economic collapse. Iran’s military has been badly degraded, its navy destroyed, and its leaders are in hiding,” the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said in a statement. “What’s left is the regime’s appetite for civilian suffering — starving its own people to prolong a war it has already lost.”
Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials have consistently presented the war as an overwhelming U.S. military victory, despite Iran’s rejection of Washington’s demands that it abandon nuclear enrichment, surrender its uranium stockpiles, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and take other steps.
Trump called the blockade “unbelievable” on Wednesday. “The Navy has been incredible. The job they did … it’s like a wall of steel. Nobody goes through,” he said.
A day prior, he said Iran’s economy “is crashing,” its currency is “worthless,” and it “can’t pay” its troops.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, touting the president’s sanctions regime, dubbed “Economic Fury,” noted in late April that Iran’s main oil terminal would soon reach capacity, “causing permanent damage to Iran’s oil infrastructure.”
But Iran has proved resilient, despite losing its supreme leader and many other top officials to missile strikes, as well as much of its military hardware.
One of the U.S. officials who spoke to The Washington Post said they thought Iran’s capacity to endure prolonged economic hardship is far greater than even the CIA estimate. “The leadership has gotten more radical, determined and increasingly confident they can outlast U.S. political will and sustain domestic repression to check any resistance” inside Iran, the official said. “Comparatively, you see similar regimes lasting years under sustained embargoes and airpower-only wars.”
Since the war began Feb. 28, Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital channel for shipping oil from the Persian Gulf.
A week after the ceasefire was reached April 7, Trump imposed a blockade on Iran, applying it to all ships entering or leaving Iranian ports. His move followed the collapse of U.S.-Iran peace talks in Pakistan. “I think Iran is in very bad shape. I think they’re pretty desperate,” he said at the time. “I don’t care if they come back [to negotiations] or not. If they don’t come back, I’m fine.”
On Sunday, Trump launched a mission he called “Project Freedom” with a goal to help commercial vessels transit the strait, including with U.S. Navy escorts, only to say Tuesday that the operation had been paused because of “Great Progress” in peace talks.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry confirmed Wednesday that it was reviewing a U.S. proposal to end the war and would relay its response via Pakistani mediators.
Iran’s economy is reeling from the effects of the war, as well as from persistent inflation and economic mismanagement.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Iran is losing half a billion dollars daily because of the blockade. “During Operation Epic Fury, Iran was crushed militarily,” Kelly said in a statement. “Now, they are being strangled economically by Operation Economic Fury and losing $500 million per day thanks to the United States Military’s successful blockade of Iranian ports. The Iranian regime knows full well their current reality is not sustainable, and President Trump holds all the cards as negotiators work to make a deal.”
But the CIA estimate says Iran can survive the U.S. blockade for 90 to 120 days — and maybe longer — before facing more severe economic hardship, the four people familiar with it said.
Tehran is storing some of its oil aboard tanker ships that otherwise would be empty because of the blockade, one of the people said. It is also decreasing the flows in its oil fields to ensure the wells remain functional. “It’s nowhere near as dire as some have claimed,” this person said of Iran’s economic situation.
The CIA analysis might even be underestimating Iran’s economic resilience if Tehran is able to smuggle oil via overland routes. Truck and rail convoys can’t replace the volume of ships and open sea lanes but might provide an economic cushion, one of the U.S. officials said. “There’s a belief they could begin moving some oil via rail through Central Asia,” the official said.
On the matter of Iranian weapons, the confidential intelligence assessment says that Iran’s inventory of missiles and mobile launchers remains formidable.
Iran is thought to have had roughly 2,500 ballistic missiles before the war began, as well as thousands more unmanned drones. Iran has used those weapons to launch retaliatory strikes against U.S. allies in the Gulf as well as U.S. military sites across the region. A Post visual investigation found that Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites in the Middle East, a level of destruction far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government.
The timeline for when Iran can again start producing ballistic missiles in substantial quantities has shortened, one of the U.S. officials said.
To control traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, however, the missiles matter less than the lower-cost drones, analysts inside and outside the government say. And unlike medium-range missiles that can strike, say, Israel, these drones can be built in small warehouses and easily concealable facilities, another U.S. official said.
“All it takes is one drone to hit a ship and no one will give insurance” to the oil tankers, said Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies.
In early April, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that more than half of Iran’s missile launchers were still intact and that it had thousands of one-way attack drones in its arsenal, The Post and CNN reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch in Israeli military intelligence, said that even if the blockade lasted several months, it would not force the regime to bend to Washington’s demands. “The problem is they don’t think they need to capitulate,” he said.
In the end, he said, despite U.S.-Israeli military successes in Iran, the war’s outcome still could be strategic failure.
“What started as a war supposedly aimed at toppling the regime and dismantling its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities,” Citrinowicz posted Wednesday on X, “may instead leave Iran’s regime stronger than before — empowered by sanctions relief, still retaining significant missile capabilities, continuing support for its proxies, and almost certainly preserving uranium enrichment on its own soil.’’
correction:An earlier version of this article said that Iran still possesses thousands of unarmed drones. The drones are unmanned, not unarmed.
