Tehran’s perspective

Washington appears to be continuing to misread the Iran it is confronting. The wars of 2025 and 2026 accelerated a fundamental shift in Tehran’s strategic thinking, away from years of relative restraint and toward a determination to impose sustained costs on the United States and its allies. Iranian leaders increasingly believe that their earlier restraint invited further attacks rather than deterring them, and that absorbing more punishment without retaliating forcefully would only encourage additional aggression.

A failure to understand this changed posture makes another round of American or Israeli strikes particularly dangerous: Rather than compelling Iran to surrender, it would likely provoke an even more damaging Iranian response. Tehran’s growing willingness to escalate does not mean it has abandoned diplomacy. The challenge for President Donald Trump is that the Iran emerging from this war is one less willing to yield to coercion, which remains open to a settlement based on meaningful reciprocal concessions.

Washington’s Options – and Their Limits: The central question is whether Washington is preparing to break the stalemate militarily. But as Carl von Clausewitz famously argued, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Whether Trump chooses to escalate therefore depends on his assessment of the political objectives at stake and whether further military force can advance them. The buildup of American forces alone tells us little about that calculation, particularly after months of warfare and economic coercion have failed to compel Tehran to yield.

How Washington perceives the war will determine what it believes it can do to break the current stalemate. If Washington sees continued economic hardship as eventually forcing Tehran to accept its demands, it can maintain the blockade and continue the war of attrition. But if the United States and Israel launch another major attack, it would suggest at least one of them no longer believes the current balance of pressure is working in their favor, or that they can afford to wait for Iran to buckle. Such an escalation would presumably seek to shift that balance by inflicting enough additional damage to compel Iranian concessions, particularly on the nuclear issue, where Tehran has resisted demands to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium upfront, and over the future of the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran is seeking a new arrangement that preserves its leverage over maritime traffic.

Further attacks are likely to backfire, particularly given Tehran’s growing conviction that restraint has only invited further aggression. Iran has considerable scope to intensify its own pressure through Hormuz and strikes on regional energy infrastructure, driving up oil prices more, further disrupting global markets, and making the war even more costly for Washington to sustain. Tehran may also escalate on its own if it concludes that the existing level of disruption is insufficient to force American concessions.