For years, Iran’s leaders believed time was on their facet.
After the US withdrew from the 2015 nuclear settlement, generally known as the Joint Complete Plan of Motion (JCPOA), Tehran successfully adopted what later got here to be described as a “strategic persistence” method. Relatively than instantly counter-escalating, Iran selected to endure financial stress whereas ready to see whether or not diplomacy may very well be revived.
The logic behind the technique was easy: ultimately, Washington would recognise that confrontation with Iran was towards its personal pursuits.
At this time, that assumption lies shattered.
The collapse of diplomacy and the outbreak of conflict have pressured Iran’s management to confront a painful actuality: their perception that the US would in the end act rationally could have been a profound miscalculation.
If Iran survives the present battle, the teachings Iranian leaders draw from this second could encourage them to pursue a nuclear deterrent.
The technique of ready
After the primary Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA and launched its “most stress” marketing campaign in 2018, Tehran initially averted main counter-escalation. For almost a 12 months, it largely remained inside the deal’s limits, hoping the opposite signatories, notably Europeans, may protect the settlement and ship on the promised financial advantages regardless of US sanctions.
When that failed, Tehran started progressively growing its nuclear actions by increasing enrichment and decreasing compliance step-by-step whereas nonetheless avoiding a decisive break.
The tempo accelerated after Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament handed a legislation mandating a big improve in nuclear actions, within the wake of the assassination of high nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. The shift was strengthened additional by the 2021 election of conservative President Ebrahim Raisi.
The last word purpose was to rebuild negotiating leverage, as Tehran believed that broader geopolitical and regional developments had been progressively shifting in its favour. From its perspective, China’s rise, Russia’s rising assertiveness, and widening fractures inside the Western alliance recommended that Washington’s capability to isolate Iran indefinitely would possibly weaken over time.
On the similar time, Iran pursued a technique of decreasing tensions with its neighbours, in search of improved relations with Gulf states that had beforehand supported the US “most stress” 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, whilst tensions rose, Tehran continued to pursue diplomacy. Years of negotiations with the Biden administration aimed toward restoring the JCPOA in the end produced no settlement. Subsequent diplomatic efforts below Trump’s second presidency additionally collapsed.
Underlying this method was a elementary assumption: that the US in the end most popular stability to conflict. Iranian officers believed Washington would ultimately conclude that diplomacy, reasonably than countless stress or a significant conflict, was probably the most lifelike 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 international coverage, Washington, too, is misreading the scenario.
For years, advocates of the utmost stress marketing campaign argued that sustained financial and army stress would ultimately fracture Iran internally. Some predicted that conflict would set off widespread unrest and even the collapse of the regime.
Thus far, none of these predictions has materialised.
Regardless of the large pressure on Iranian society, there have been no indicators of regime disintegration. As an alternative, Iran’s political base — and in lots of instances 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 conflict, bettering focusing on accuracy and coordination throughout totally different weapons methods.
The main target shifted in the direction of making ready for a protracted conflict of attrition: firing fewer however extra exact strikes over time whereas making an attempt to degrade enemy radar and air defence methods.
We now see the outcomes of this work. Iran has been capable of inflict important injury on its adversaries. Retaliatory assaults have killed seven People 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 comparable to radar installations. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has despatched international vitality markets into turmoil.
Other than the immense value of conflict, the US choice to launch the assault on Iran could 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 conflict could now encourage the brand new civilian and army management of the nation to rethink its nuclear technique.
There could now be fewer ideological reservations about pursuing nuclear weapons. The logic is straightforward: if diplomacy can’t ship sanctions reduction or completely take away the specter of conflict, nuclear deterrence could look like the one viable various.
Iran’s actions on this battle counsel 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 focusing on of US companions and significant infrastructure, and political choices at house 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 could enter a much more harmful period through which nuclear weapons are seen 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.
