For years, Iran’s leaders believed time was on their aspect.
After the USA withdrew from the 2015 nuclear settlement, referred to as the Joint Complete Plan of Motion (JCPOA), Tehran successfully adopted what later got here to be described as a “strategic persistence” method. Moderately than instantly counter-escalating, Iran selected to endure financial strain whereas ready to see whether or not diplomacy could possibly be revived.
The logic behind the technique was easy: ultimately, Washington would recognise that confrontation with Iran was towards its personal pursuits.
Right now, that assumption lies shattered.
The collapse of diplomacy and the outbreak of warfare have pressured Iran’s management to confront a painful actuality: their perception that the US would finally act rationally might have been a profound miscalculation.
If Iran survives the present battle, the teachings Iranian leaders draw from this second might inspire them to pursue a nuclear deterrent.
The technique of ready
After the primary Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA and launched its “most strain” marketing campaign in 2018, Tehran initially prevented main counter-escalation. For practically a yr, it largely remained throughout the deal’s limits, hoping the opposite signatories, notably Europeans, might protect the settlement and ship on the promised financial advantages regardless of US sanctions.
When that failed, Tehran started regularly rising its nuclear actions by increasing enrichment and lowering compliance step-by-step whereas nonetheless avoiding a decisive break.
The tempo accelerated after Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament handed a regulation mandating a big enhance in nuclear actions, within the wake of the assassination of prime nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. The shift was strengthened additional by the 2021 election of conservative President Ebrahim Raisi.
The final word aim was to rebuild negotiating leverage, as Tehran believed that broader geopolitical and regional developments have been regularly shifting in its favour. From its perspective, China’s rise, Russia’s rising assertiveness, and widening fractures throughout the Western alliance steered that Washington’s means to isolate Iran indefinitely may weaken over time.
On the similar time, Iran pursued a technique of lowering tensions with its neighbours, looking for improved relations with Gulf states that had beforehand supported the US “most strain” marketing campaign. By the early 2020s, many Gulf Cooperation Council nations had begun prioritising engagement and de-escalation with Iran, culminating in strikes such because the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by China.
In opposition to this backdrop, at the same time as tensions rose, Tehran continued to pursue diplomacy. Years of negotiations with the Biden administration geared toward restoring the JCPOA finally produced no settlement. Subsequent diplomatic efforts beneath Trump’s second presidency additionally collapsed.
Underlying this method was a elementary assumption: that the US finally most popular stability to warfare. Iranian officers believed Washington would ultimately conclude that diplomacy, reasonably than countless strain or a significant warfare, was essentially the most life like and least expensive path ahead.
The joint US-Israeli assault on Iran has now uncovered how deeply flawed that assumption was.
The return of deterrence
Whereas Tehran based mostly its technique on mistaken beliefs concerning the rationality of US overseas coverage, Washington, too, is misreading the scenario.
For years, advocates of the utmost strain marketing campaign argued that sustained financial and army strain would ultimately fracture Iran internally. Some predicted that warfare would set off widespread unrest and even the collapse of the regime.
To date, none of these predictions has materialised.
Regardless of the big pressure on Iranian society, there have been no indicators of regime disintegration. As an alternative, Iran’s political base — and in lots of circumstances broader segments of society — has rallied within the face of exterior assault.
Moreover, Iran spent years reinforcing its deterrence capabilities. This concerned increasing and diversifying its ballistic missile, cruise missile and drone programmes and growing a number of supply methods designed to penetrate refined air defences. Iranian planners additionally drew classes from the direct exchanges with Israel in 2024 and the June 2025 warfare, enhancing concentrating on accuracy and coordination throughout completely different weapons methods.
The main focus shifted in direction of making ready for a protracted warfare of attrition: firing fewer however extra exact strikes over time whereas trying to degrade enemy radar and air defence methods.
We now see the outcomes of this work. Iran has been capable of inflict vital injury on its adversaries. Retaliatory assaults have killed seven Individuals and 11 Israelis, inserting a rising pressure on US and Israeli missile defence methods, as interceptors are steadily depleted.
Iranian missile and drone strikes have hit targets throughout the area, together with high-value army infrastructure resembling radar installations. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has despatched world power markets into turmoil.
Other than the immense value of warfare, the US choice to launch the assault on Iran might have one other unintended consequence: a radical shift in Iranian technique.
For many years, Supreme Chief Ali Khamenei maintained a longstanding spiritual prohibition on nuclear weapons. His assassination on the primary day of the warfare might now inspire the brand new civilian and army management of the nation to rethink its nuclear technique.
There might now be fewer ideological reservations about pursuing nuclear weapons. The logic is straightforward: if diplomacy can not ship sanctions reduction or completely take away the specter of warfare, nuclear deterrence might seem like the one viable different.
Iran’s actions on this battle recommend that many leaders now see persistence and diplomacy as strategic errors. These embody the unprecedented scale of Iranian missile and drone assaults throughout the area, the concentrating on of US companions and demanding infrastructure, and political selections at dwelling that sign a more durable line, most notably the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme chief.
The selection of Khamenei’s son breaks a longstanding taboo in a system based on the rejection of hereditary rule and displays a management more and more ready to desert earlier restraints.
If a extra zero-sum logic of deterrence takes maintain throughout the area, changing dialogue because the organising precept of safety, the Center East might enter a much more harmful period during which nuclear weapons are considered as the last word type of deterrence and nuclear proliferation can now not be stopped.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
