In recent days there have been reports that Washington, and perhaps also Tel Aviv, is seeking an off-ramp from the current war with Iran. What options might such an exit involve? And how realistic do you think the prospect is?
I’m not sure that the Israelis are looking for an off-ramp. I think Trump definitely is. But Trump wants to make sure that the off-ramp leaves him in a position from which he can declare victory. The problem he has is that in the Yemeni case he could just withdraw, because there was an offer on the table from day one from the Houthi side, which seven weeks later he accepted. In this case, I don’t think the Iranians will accept an end to the war. They have a say in this, and they’re not going to accept unless they get something out of it as well, because their fear is that otherwise the US will just come back and bomb them again in a couple of months. This is the conclusion they drew from accepting the ceasefire last June. They believe that the US has to suffer much more before there is a ceasefire, so that it really doesn’t feel tempted to do this again. But they also want to get something out of this so that their trajectory after the war is positive. If they don’t, Iran will be not only in a weaker state after this war, but in a steadily weakening state, because it’s not going to get any sanctions relief if the war is ended unilaterally. Much of the country is destroyed. It’s not going to be able to rebuild it. It’s not going to be able to export oil. It will be in a much worse situation, on a negative trajectory. So I think they will, if they can – I don’t know if they fully can – try to prolong the war until there is an agreement that also gives them a win.
What would such an agreement look like, given that it’s hard to imagine any credible commitment on the Israeli side to not simply go back and start again?
The Israelis wouldn’t be part of it; they would probably try to sabotage it. But I think the Iranians might want to get an agreement in which the US and Iran both sign some sort of non-aggression pact, committing not to do this again. Not that it would be worth the paper it’s written on, but nevertheless. There will be either publicly or quietly an agreement that GCC states are exempted from US sanctions on Iran. Now, whether they want to go into Iran and invest under these new circumstances, when they’re very upset with Iran, is a different story. But the reason I think this is important for the Iranians is that if Iran ends up in a state of steady weakening after the war, that only increases the likelihood of them getting bombed again, because it was the perception of Iranian weakness that provided the opportunity to attack. So I think they are incentivized to continue even though they’re taking huge hits.
There are certain things they can do. Perhaps they will not be able to shoot missiles at Israel indefinitely, but they will be able to shoot one missile a day. That might force the United States back into the war, which would be very costly for Trump. He may also choose to stay out of it, which would then create a rift between Israel and the United States. The Iranians certainly seem to have the capability to shoot short-range missiles at ships in the Strait of Hormuz. That would continue to impose a significant cost on the global economy. Again, to stop that the US would have to step in, or there would have to be a coalition of countries. So I think Iran does have an ability to prolong the war, at least for some time. They will use this as leverage to make sure that they get something out of a potential ceasefire.
Airpower alone has never been sufficient to defeat an enemy state. If Washington remains unwilling to commit ground forces, what military options remain open to it?
The US can continue to try to destabilize Iran – support militias, ethnic groups, separatists, create problems on that end. They could continue to try to foment unrest. There are a lot of things that the US has done in the past, the Israelis even more so, that the US could do now. It would be lower intensity, but it would be a problem for the Iranians, obviously.
But it’s not as if the two sides are lacking the ability to hurt each other. It’s just that the US thought that by really ramping it up they would be able to crush the Iranians and force them to surrender. That has proved to be a massive miscalculation. It was obvious beforehand that it was a miscalculation, because it was based on an assumption that simply was not true. But Trump was lulled by the Israelis into believing he could compel the Iranians to surrender, and he was susceptible to believing it because of his success in Venezuela.
To what extent do you see US policy as driven not only by fears of humiliation, but also by concern over tangible damage to American strategic interests? For example, the risk of signalling to Asian allies that Washington can’t defend them in the event of anything short of ‘unconditional surrender’, as Trump has said.
I don’t think unconditional surrender in any way, shape or form has ever been on the table. I don’t think the Iranian system is capable of surrendering. Surrender is a death knell for the system as a whole. They will lose the little support they have in Iranian society. That support is crucial. It’s the only thing that keeps them alive. And that base is completely unaccepting of any surrender.
Some in the US point to the 1988 decision by Khomeini to drink the poisoned chalice. But there is a massive discrepancy between agreeing to end the war with Iraq and agreeing to end the war today. Yes, the Iranians did not want to end the war then either. And yes, after a tremendous amount of pressure and in a devastating situation, Khomeini eventually agreed to the resolution. But what was the decision? The decision was a ceasefire. The decision was not surrender. Absolutely not. Accepting a ceasefire was already that hard to get them to do, and now they’re supposed to surrender?
This was one of the main mistakes on the American side. They believed that the Iranians feared war more than surrender. In reality, they fear surrender far more than they fear war. They believe they can survive the war. They believe they can survive even if they lose the war. They cannot survive surrender.
How do things look from the Israelis’ perspective at this point?
I think by and large the Israelis have been very successful and are probably quite content. The Israelis don’t care if the name of the Supreme Leader is Mojtaba, Hassan or Ali. That’s of no importance to them. What’s important is that Iran’s capabilities are dramatically degraded. The country is set back years, perhaps two decades. If they can degrade the state apparatus as a whole, if they can get regime change, I don’t think they would be opposed to it. But that’s still not the key objective.
The key objective is to change the balance of power in the region, and nothing is more effective in doing that than to have the US involved in a war that bombs as much of Iran as possible. Then it doesn’t matter what the attitude of the next Supreme Leader is, because Iran won’t have the capability to pose a challenge to Israel’s designs for domination. And if the Israelis then have to go back twenty years later and do it again, twenty years is a pretty infrequent version of mowing the grass – the model the Israelis use on their neighbours.
Do they need the US to stay in the fight, by that logic?
They are worried that the US is going to end the war too soon. They’re willing to take a lot of hits themselves. Their pain tolerance is much higher than the American one, but it is particularly high when the US is in the war. If the US leaves the war, I think the pain tolerance of Israeli society will also change.
But if this goes on for another three or four weeks, Iran will have been very severely degraded, even if it’s not defeated, even if it keeps its missiles. It will simply not be the same Iran any longer. Is that the ideal situation? No. But it’s probably good enough for the Israelis. In the summer they only managed to get the US involved for forty minutes – that’s how long that attack took – and it was just against one target. This is a very different level of American involvement.
Moreover, I don’t think you would have to worry about US–Iran diplomacy for another decade. Any prospects of the US and Iran making up, becoming friends, or at least reducing their tensions – a nightmare scenario for the Israelis, which they have spent so much time trying to prevent or sabotage – are now automatically foreclosed, at least for another decade, if not longer. If he dies a natural death, this Supreme Leader is probably going to live for another three decades. And this is the Supreme Leader who came to his position as a result of Israel and the United States killing his father, his mother, his wife and his child. I don’t think he’s going to be in a reconciliatory mood for quite some time.
What do you see as the likeliest outcome?
It is very difficult to say. The most likely scenario is that the war will go on up an escalatory ladder for another two or three weeks. After that, depending on which pain threshold is reached first, we will see the direction. Will the will of the Iranians be broken, their military capabilities sufficiently degraded such that they cannot continue to conduct the war at the level they are doing right now, and as a result they decide that a ceasefire, however unattractive, is the better option? Or will the global economy, particularly the oil markets, suffer some sort of collapse that will ignite global inflation and then provoke massive opposition from within Trump’s base against his policy?
If that happens sooner, and Trump realizes that the situation is just too bad, he is going to have to bite the bullet, declare victory, perhaps give the Iranians something, and end this. We don’t know whose pain threshold will be reached first. The Iranians are confident that it won’t be theirs. Trump, I think, is not so confident. We’ve seen how oil prices went up and how he dramatically his messaging shifted to calm the markets by claiming that this will be over soon. ‘There’s hardly anything left to bomb’, he said yesterday. The previous messaging to the Iranians was: ‘Don’t think you can out-insane me. I’m way more insane than you are. Don’t think that time is on your side.’ But the more he said that, the more he rattled the markets and fuelled panic in certain quarters of the American public. Now he is shifting to: ‘We’re winning, we’re going to end this soon.’
I’m not seeing any change in strategy – they are simply continuing the bombing – but Trump is coupling it with a message designed to avoid the kind of backlash at home, or in the markets, that his previous remarks provoked. That suggests he is worried the markets may blow up faster than Iran is defeated.
If the conflict continues, what consequences is this likely to have for the Gulf monarchies?
Absolute disaster for them. This is part of that global economic pain threshold that the Iranians feel confident they will be able to reach before Trump can reach theirs. For these countries, the entire premise of their success is based on the idea that they are completely insulated from this type of instability – certainly from the sort of attacks that we have seen from the Iranians. The Iranians know this very well, and they have still not gone as far as they could have. Yesterday the Israelis started bombing banks in Tehran. The Iranians view this as an effort to collapse the state. The Iranians have not bombed banks in the GCC states, but they may yet.
There are still many steps left on the escalation ladder. The Iranians moved very fast up the ladder in the early phase of the war – faster than I expected, certainly faster than the Trump Administration expected. But they haven’t continued to accelerate. They are still holding off. They understand how risky it is in terms of their own relations with the GCC if they go too far, too fast. They want to see what the GCC can do in terms of pressuring Trump.
Even when it comes to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it is essentially a virtual closure. They are not actually sinking any ships. They are not even shooting at them yet. Once they do that, it will be a completely different scenario. The war itself, and the threats, have already shut down a majority of that traffic – more than a majority. Imagine what will happen if they start shooting. It is very clear that they have made sure they still have escalatory steps available to them and have not yet chosen to go in that direction, at least not yet. And frankly, at this point, I’m a bit surprised. I thought that perhaps after they saw that Trump managed to calm the markets, they would escalate further. But they haven’t so far, at least not in a very significant way.
Part of that, presumably, is that given they have de facto shut the strait down, or at least drastically diminished traffic through it – if they mine it, then Iran itself is no longer able to export, right?
Well, I don’t think much of the shutdown would be done with mines in the way it might have been done twenty years ago. They will do it the way the Houthis do it now. They just shoot rockets at ships. They don’t even have to hit the ships. They can hit fish. No ship is going to go through knowing that it might be shot at.
Is it your understanding that there are negotiations ongoing?
There is some de-escalatory diplomacy taking place, but it’s not with the United States. It’s between regional states and Iran. I don’t think the Iranians are talking about a ceasefire at this point, and I think they have rejected several US approaches.Clio the cat, ?July 1997-1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ??2010-3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ???-4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ?2006-4 December 2025 Toni the cat ?2005-25 March 2026
Re: Escalation Ladder: I don't always agree w/Trita but in this case he is spot on nm
Posted by t on March 13, 2026, 10:30 pm, in reply to "Escalation Ladder"
on March 13, 2026, 7:18 pm