Shafaq News
President
Donald Trump launched a war to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and
nine weeks later, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could not enter
Iran to verify whether the nuclear program still exists. The inspectors were
blocked from the sites where the bombs were supposed to destroy the program.
Washington is currently blockading a country whose nuclear status it cannot
confirm— while negotiating a deal premised on dismantling a program it cannot
see.
Two sides
are now blockading each other in the same strait, with the US Navy preventing
ships from entering or leaving Iranian ports, and Iran restricting commercial
traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. 20% of the world’s oil supply is caught
between them. Washington launched “Project Freedom” —a military
operation to escort stranded ships through the strait— then suspended it within
48 hours, citing progress toward a deal with Tehran, while maintaining its
blockade of Iranian ports. Trump announced the pause based on “the
request” of Pakistan and other countries and “the fact that Great
Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement” with Iran.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reaffirmed that navigation in the Strait
of Hormuz would return to normal if the war is permanently resolved, the
maritime blockade is lifted, and sanctions imposed on Iran are removed.
Three
pillars held the strategy together: economic pressure to change Iran’s
behavior, controlled escalation to manage the cost of confrontation, and Gulf
state alignment to provide regional legitimacy and strategic depth. What the
past nine weeks revealed is that each pillar, by its own logic, destroyed the
conditions the next one needed to function —the pressure radicalized Tehran
enough to justify escalation, the escalation exhausted the Gulf states, and the
Gulf fracture removed the regional legitimacy needed to convert military
advantage into a negotiated settlement.
Pain Without
Surrender
The economic
campaign against Iran produced numbers that, read in isolation, resemble
success. Iran’s GDP contracted from around $600 billion in 2010 to an estimated
$356 billion in 2025, with per capita income falling from $8,000 to $5,000 over
the same period, according to World Bank data.
By March
2025, the rial had passed one million to the dollar —the least valuable
currency in the world— with inflation exceeding 48% by October 2025, and
between 22 and 50% of Iranians estimated to be living below the poverty line.
Food inflation reached 105% by February 2026, and the IMF projects a further
contraction of 6.1% across 2026.
Political
analyst Mujashaa al-Tamimi, speaking to Shafaq News, identified what the
pressure campaign was actually calibrated to do: keep both sides short of
confrontation by making the cost of escalation visible and mutual, managing a
conflict through economic tools, cyberattacks, and proxy pressure rather than
resolving it. A campaign calibrated to stop short of war is, by the same logic,
calibrated to stop short of resolution —producing suffering without surrender
on the question that mattered most.
The ceiling
was nowhere more visible than on the nuclear file. Despite years of sanctions,
Tehran stabilized oil exports at roughly 1.5 million barrels per day through a
covert black-market network routing oil to China via ship-to-ship transfers in
grey zones near Malaysia. The sanctions degraded Iran’s revenue without
severing it, and on the central demand —enrichment— Iran never moved.
Before
departing for talks in Rome, Foreign Minister Araghchi posted his government’s
position publicly: “Figuring out the path to a deal is not rocket science:
Zero nuclear weapons = we DO have a deal. Zero enrichment = we do NOT have a
deal.” The line had not shifted across five rounds of talks, a twelve-day
war, and maximum pressure sanctions —which meant that when the pressure
campaign exhausted its tools short of its objective, war presented itself as
the sequence’s next instrument rather than its alternative.
Read more: US-Iran talks collapse; Analysts warn of high escalation risk as ceasefire deadline nears
Logic That
Ran Past Its Limits
Al-Tamimi
warned that the real danger in managed confrontation is not the tools
themselves but the moment miscalculation converts a limited exchange into
something neither side chose. “That moment came not as a single event but as a
sequence in which each step made the next harder to avoid.”
Five rounds
of nuclear talks between April and June 2025 were halted on the eve of a
planned sixth round when Israel launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities,
with both sides subsequently signaling willingness to resume negotiations while
taking no practical step toward doing so. The US-Israeli strikes on Fordow,
Natanz, and Isfahan in June 2025, the February 2026 campaign that killed
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s closure of Hormuz —each decision was
presented as discrete, and together they form the terminal logic of a pressure
strategy that ran out of gradations between coercion and war.
Mahdi Azizi,
director of the New Vision Center for Studies and Media in Tehran, told Shafaq
News that the United States had concluded that toppling the Iranian regime was
“beyond reach” given the “cohesion of its leadership” and the difficulty of its
geography, shifting the objective from regime change to attrition, degrading
capabilities, shrinking economic space, raising costs across every domain
without a defined endpoint. Attrition sustained indefinitely does not produce
surrender; it adapts, and Iran’s adaptation took forms the strategy had not
priced.
Iran’s proxy
network had already entered structural degradation before the war began, with
Bashar al-Assad’s fall in December 2024 severing the Syrian land corridor to
Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah killed, and Iraqi factions fracturing
over their posture toward Washington. Rather than collapsing, the proxies
adapted —reports emerged, which Tehran denied, of Iraqi armed faction members
being deployed inside Iran to help suppress the 2025–26 protests.
The Carnegie
Endowment noted that US officials engaged in “verbal gymnastics” to
explain how a program they had just “obliterated” also presented an
imminent threat. The IAEA has been unable to resume inspections at sites struck
during the June 2025 conflict and has not verified the extent of damage to
Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, meaning the war’s primary objective cannot be
confirmed as achieved by the only institution authorized to make that
determination.
The Price
Washington Paid
The costs of
the US strategy are concrete, measurable, and in some cases are still being
counted. Thirteen American service members were killed, and approximately 373
were wounded in the weeks following the February 28 strikes, with most wounded
having returned to duty, but five remaining seriously injured as of early
April. The Pentagon’s own accounting of those figures has been disputed.
The War
Department altered its tally of American casualties by scrubbing 15
wounded-in-action troops from the count without public explanation, prompting
one US government official to describe the practice as a “casualty
cover-up.”
The
equipment losses tell a parallel story. Iran’s missiles and drones, and one
instance of friendly fire, destroyed US military equipment worth between $2.3
billion and $2.8 billion, according to the first detailed tabulation by the
Center for Strategic and International Studies —a figure that does not include
losses incurred at US bases across the Gulf region or specialized naval assets.
Among the
most significant losses: at least one THAAD missile defense radar, with some
reports suggesting two were destroyed, at a combined cost of between $485
million and $970 million, and three F-15 jets shot down in a friendly fire
incident in Kuwait in early March.
The day
after War Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that “never in recorded history
has a nation’s military been so quickly and so effectively neutralized,”
Iran fired missiles and drones that struck a US base in Saudi Arabia, wounding
several soldiers and destroying a radar surveillance plane that cost $700
million.
Beyond the
equipment, the war exposed the structural vulnerability of the US military’s
regional posture. With bases across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and
the UAE all targeted, troops were transferred to hotels and office buildings as
conventional bases became too exposed.
Read more: Opinion:Washington pursues regional de-escalation through fragile frameworks
Front That
Was Never There
Hazem Ayyad,
professor of political science at the University of Amman, stated to Shafaq
News that the weight of regional forces —popular sentiment, economic exposure,
institutional pressure— tilts decisively against full-scale war and toward
de-escalation. Gulf states, facing sustained Iranian strikes on their energy
infrastructure, airports, and residential areas, consistently prioritized
damage control and an end to hostilities over alignment with Washington’s
military objectives, a position that held even as projections showed potential
GDP contractions of up to 14% for Qatar and Kuwait if the conflict continued.
Ahmed Fouad,
professor of Israeli studies at Alexandria University, also speaking to Shafaq
News, cut to the structural problem Washington’s regional strategy never
resolved: “the Gulf has been steered toward objectives that serve Israeli
strategic interests rather than Arab ones, producing not a unified regional
front but a collection of individual states each recalculating its own exposure
at a different speed and toward a different conclusion.”
The Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) has rarely functioned as a cohesive strategic bloc,
and the war clarified rather than created those differences, with the UAE
calling publicly for Washington to finish the job after absorbing the heaviest
volume of Iranian strikes, Saudi Arabia condemning the attacks as
“treacherous” while backing ceasefire talks and protecting Vision
2030 investment flows, and Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait pushing consistently for
de-escalation.
Saudi
Arabia’s hostility toward Israel —rooted in domestic opinion and the economic
logic of Vision 2030— means that proximity to Washington, while it backs
Israeli regional policy, carries costs that proximity to Washington against
Iran alone never did. The Abraham Accords architecture, which was supposed to
absorb that tension, revealed under fire the depth of the contradictions it had
papered over rather than resolved.
Political
neutrality has become operationally impossible for all of them, with the US
maintaining bases, naval facilities, and forward operating sites across at
least 19 locations in the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, leaving Iranian targeting to treat those states as
participants in the conflict regardless of their official positions.
Oman —which
kept its diplomatic channels with Tehran open and hosted the nuclear mediation
rounds— was the only Gulf state Iran chose not to strike, a deliberate signal
the Gulf read with precision: alignment with Washington carries a cost, and so
does the neutrality Washington’s presence makes impossible.
Iran’s
strikes alienated states that had spent years pursuing rapprochement, with the
March 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran normalization agreement failing to
survive the war’s first weeks. That alienation has not translated into the
strategic alignment Washington needed —Saudi Arabia and Qatar, recently at
odds, are now coordinating with Egypt, Jordan, Turkiye, Pakistan, and
Indonesia, forming a coalition defined not by support for the American campaign
but by shared resistance to the trajectory it has created, the architecture of
a regional order Washington did not design and is not positioned to lead.
Force
Without a Finish Line
The strategy
produced devastation without resolution, and across every pillar on which it
rested, the same pattern holds: force sufficient to destroy the existing
condition, insufficient to dictate what replaces it.
Senior
Iranian economic officials warned President Masoud Pezeshkian that
reconstruction may take more than a decade, with the Central Bank Governor
urging an immediate peace deal to stabilize the economy. Iran is weaker than at
any point since the revolution —its supreme leader killed, its nuclear
infrastructure struck, its proxy network dispersed, its currency in freefall.
And yet the regime holds, which is why the most significant development of the
past 48 hours is not a military one.
A one-page,
14-point memorandum of understanding is being negotiated between Trump’s envoys
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and several Iranian officials, both directly
and through mediators. In its current form, the MOU would declare an end to the
war and the start of 30 days of negotiations on a detailed agreement to open
the strait, limit Iran’s nuclear program, and lift US sanctions. Under the
proposed terms, Iran would commit to a moratorium on uranium enrichment lasting
at least 12 years —with some sources suggesting 15 years as a likely compromise
between the US demand of 20 years and Iran’s initial offer of five— and would
pledge never to seek a nuclear weapon or conduct weaponization-related
activities, submitting to an enhanced inspections regime including snap
inspections by UN monitors.
In exchange,
the United States would agree to gradually lift sanctions and release billions
of dollars in frozen Iranian funds.
American
officials have described this as the closest the two sides have agreed since
the war began, even as Iranian officials have publicly offered a more
pessimistic view. Trump told Fox News that Iran has one week to respond,
adding: “If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly,
at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”
The contours
of the emerging deal reveal what the strategy ultimately achieved and where it
fell short. Araghchi’s red line —zero enrichment means no deal— appears to have
bent: a moratorium is not elimination, but it is a significant concession from
a government that refused any enrichment limits. Washington, for its part, is
accepting a time-limited freeze rather than the permanent dismantlement it
launched a war to achieve.
The
suspension of Project Freedom after less than 48 hours —described by Araghchi
himself as “Project Deadlock”— captures the dynamic precisely: an
operation launched as a show of force, abandoned as a concession to diplomacy,
with the blockade still in place and the strait still closed. Many of the terms
laid out in the memo would be contingent on a final agreement being reached,
leaving the possibility of renewed war or an extended limbo in which the hot
war has stopped but nothing is truly resolved.
In the
strait, hundreds of loaded oil tankers wait. The IAEA sits outside the
facilities that the war was launched to destroy. And the nuclear dilemma that
started all of this is moving toward an answer, not the one Washington went to
war for, and not the one Tehran swore it would never accept, but something
negotiated in the space between two positions that neither side could hold
indefinitely.
Written and
edited by Shafaq News staff.
