When President Donald Trump appeared to back down once again from a threatened military escalation against Tehran, he offered fresh fodder to the narrative Iranian officials are eager to promote: They are not the ones who fear war \u2014 Trump is. <\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s leadership believes it has found the world\u2019s Achilles\u2019 heel. With the help of regional militia allies, Tehran spent the past week underscoring its ability to threaten several of the world\u2019s most critical energy facilities and waterways. <\/p>\n
It has continued to up the ante in its faceoff with Washington over when and how to stop their renewed hostilities and return to a short-lived deal to start peace negotiations, which fell apart last month.<\/p>\n
When Trump signaled in recent days that a major escalation was imminent if no concessions were made, two former Iranian officials said Tehran\u2019s leadership told him to go right ahead.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are ready for the war, and they won\u2019t back down,\u201d said Amir al-Mousawi, a former Iranian diplomat, who said he had met over the weekend with the team surrounding Iran\u2019s head negotiator and speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf. Al-Mousawi described an exchange of messages between U.S. and Iranian officials sent over the weekend through Pakistani and Qatari officials, in which he said Trump vowed a severe attack on civilian infrastructure such as power plants if the Iranians did not restart negotiations.<\/p>\n
The Iranians refused, he said, unless Washington returned to the previously agreed \u201cmemorandum of understanding,\u201d which many experts say was in Iran\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018We have no problem with war at all, and we are ready for the big confrontation,\u2019\u201d al-Mousawi said the Iranians told the Americans. \u201cTrump told the Iranians: \u2018I will hit the power in Iran.\u2019 So, the Iranians said: \u2018If you strike, we strike.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
Iranian officials have spotted a pattern in Trump\u2019s attempts to shape negotiations, said Sasan Karimi, a former senior Iranian government official and a professor of Iranian studies at the University of Tehran.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever their messages are exchanged, Mr. Trump starts to pressurize the situation by threatening Iran, so he can try to get further concessions,\u201d he said. \u201cBut Iran is not so easily manipulated.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Sunday, Trump said he had relented from his planned escalation after Iran and other Middle Eastern countries requested a delay because the \u201cperimeters of a deal\u201d had been agreed to.<\/p>\n
Yet, there are no outward signs of any return to U.S.-Iranian negotiations. What does appear to have happened is that Saudi Arabia and Qatar expressed concerns over their ability to defend their oil and gas facilities adequately, according to two regional diplomats. <\/p>\n
The official Saudi news channel said Sunday that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had recently spoken with Trump to stress \u201cthe necessity of prioritizing dialogue to de-escalate tensions\u201d and \u201cprevent a wider conflict.\u201d <\/p>\n
Recent strikes in the region reflect the severity of those concerns.<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago, the Houthis, an Iran-aligned militia force in Yemen, blockaded Riyadh\u2019s use of the Bab el-Mandeb waterway in the Red Sea. The Saudis had been piping oil to their west coast port on the Red Sea in order to circumvent Iran\u2019s stranglehold on global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the primary route for oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf. <\/p>\n
Then last week, drones struck two major oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, in an attack Riyadh attributed to Iran-backed militias in Iraq. A day later, two ships caught fire in Damietta Port in Egypt, in what Egyptian authorities said appeared to have been a drone attack and was widely seen by regional analysts as yet another strike by Iran or its proxies. <\/p>\n
At its heart, the current struggle \u201cis about redesigning the regional security architecture,\u201d said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.<\/p>\n
The core of that struggle is the issue of who controls the Strait of Hormuz, he said. \u201cThe Iranians are very, very serious about not giving up control, and they\u2019re willing to bomb things to make sure that\u2019s the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond that dynamic, there was also the startling July 17 attack on U.S. military sites in Jordan that killed three American soldiers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe strike in Jordan was the game changer,\u201d said Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. It not only showed that Iran\u2019s missile arsenal remained well stocked, he said, but also that Tehran\u2019s intelligence capabilities were higher than previously believed. <\/p>\n
The attack also stirred rare dissent within Jordan, a crucial U.S. security ally in the region, as hundreds of prominent Jordanians, among them politicians and lawyers, challenged their country\u2019s limits on free speech to demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe entire Iranian strategy in this period has been aimed at making the United States understand that if there is another round of escalation, the scope and scale of Iranian response would be so much more devastating for the region and the global economy,\u201d Vaez said. <\/p>\n
Trump, he added, has never fully grasped the motivations of the Iranians, how they refuse to be bullied or cowed. Throughout both his current and previous term, Trump \u201cis reluctant to learn the lesson\u201d that aggressive tactics toward Iran have only hardened its position, Vaez said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s already eight years of his maximum pressure\u201d with economic sanctions, he said, now combined with military pressure \u201cthat has never produced what he has sought.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, Washington is grappling with depleted stores of munitions. Some military officials say their abilities to fight future conflicts \u2014 such as with a so-called great-power war against China \u2014 could be hobbled by shortages that might take years to reverse, particularly of defensive weapons like Patriot missiles.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe U.S. military options aren\u2019t great, and it\u2019s not simply reported munitions shortages,\u201d said Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne, it\u2019s not clear that the limited and time-bound military escalation Trump is willing to undertake at this point will be enough to change Iran\u2019s calculus,\u201d he said. \u201cTwo, it\u2019s hard to imagine these options can degrade Iran\u2019s missile and drone capacity, such that it cannot effectively close the Strait of Hormuz or further damage the Gulf\u2019s critical and energy infrastructure.\u201d <\/p>\n
Emboldened, some well-known Iranian hard-liners mocked the dilemma the Trump administration seems to find itself in.<\/p>\n
Ebrahim Rezaei, spokesperson of the Iranian parliament\u2019s national security and foreign policy committee, echoed a threat by Trump in April that he would bomb Iran \u201cback to the Stone Age.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf a strike is made on Iran,\u201d Rezaei wrote in a response on the social platform X to Trump\u2019s renewed threats in recent days, \u201cwe will return the entire region and its facilities to the Stone Age.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Trump said he was postponing an escalation, a prominent hard-line commentator, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, posted a picture of chicken tacos on his X account. It was a reference to a sarcastic acronym used by Trump\u2019s critics: TACO, or \u201cTrump Always Chickens Out.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cIran has not budged,\u201d he wrote above it.<\/p>\n
Far from being closer to talks, some regional experts feel the two sides are further away than ever.<\/p>\n
Karimi, the former Iranian official, said Iran should ready itself for another phase of war in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n
As long as both Tehran and Washington remain convinced they are the ones whose demands should be met, he said, the talks will not be meaningful.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo reach a deal, both sides must be politically humble and agree that their maximalist ambitions will not work,\u201d he said, adding that, for now, \u201cthose dynamics are not on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n