Shafaq News
PresidentDonald Trump launched a war to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, andnine weeks later, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could not enterIran to verify whether the nuclear program still exists. The inspectors wereblocked from the sites where the bombs were supposed to destroy the program. Washington is currently blockading a country whose nuclear status it cannotconfirm— while negotiating a deal premised on dismantling a program it cannotsee.
Two sidesare now blockading each other in the same strait, with the US Navy preventingships from entering or leaving Iranian ports, and Iran restricting commercialtraffic through the Strait of Hormuz. 20% of the world's oil supply is caughtbetween them. Washington launched "Project Freedom" —a militaryoperation to escort stranded ships through the strait— then suspended it within48 hours, citing progress toward a deal with Tehran, while maintaining itsblockade of Iranian ports. Trump announced the pause based on "therequest" of Pakistan and other countries and "the fact that GreatProgress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement" with Iran. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reaffirmed that navigation in the Straitof Hormuz would return to normal if the war is permanently resolved, themaritime blockade is lifted, and sanctions imposed on Iran are removed.
Threepillars held the strategy together: economic pressure to change Iran'sbehavior, controlled escalation to manage the cost of confrontation, and Gulfstate alignment to provide regional legitimacy and strategic depth. What thepast nine weeks revealed is that each pillar, by its own logic, destroyed theconditions the next one needed to function —the pressure radicalized Tehranenough to justify escalation, the escalation exhausted the Gulf states, and theGulf fracture removed the regional legitimacy needed to convert militaryadvantage into a negotiated settlement.
Pain WithoutSurrender
The economiccampaign against Iran produced numbers that, read in isolation, resemblesuccess. 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 overthe same period, according to World Bank data.
By March2025, the rial had passed one million to the dollar —the least valuablecurrency in the world— with inflation exceeding 48% by October 2025, andbetween 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 furthercontraction of 6.1% across 2026.
Politicalanalyst Mujashaa al-Tamimi, speaking to Shafaq News, identified what thepressure campaign was actually calibrated to do: keep both sides short ofconfrontation by making the cost of escalation visible and mutual, managing aconflict through economic tools, cyberattacks, and proxy pressure rather thanresolving it. A campaign calibrated to stop short of war is, by the same logic,calibrated to stop short of resolution —producing suffering without surrenderon the question that mattered most.
The ceilingwas 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 acovert black-market network routing oil to China via ship-to-ship transfers ingrey zones near Malaysia. The sanctions degraded Iran's revenue withoutsevering it, and on the central demand —enrichment— Iran never moved.
Beforedeparting for talks in Rome, Foreign Minister Araghchi posted his government'sposition 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 adeal." The line had not shifted across five rounds of talks, a twelve-daywar, and maximum pressure sanctions —which meant that when the pressurecampaign exhausted its tools short of its objective, war presented itself asthe sequence's next instrument rather than its alternative.
: US-Iran talks collapse; Analysts warn of high escalation risk as ceasefire deadline nears
Logic ThatRan Past Its Limits
Al-Tamimiwarned that the real danger in managed confrontation is not the toolsthemselves but the moment miscalculation converts a limited exchange intosomething neither side chose. “That moment came not as a single event but as asequence in which each step made the next harder to avoid.”
Five roundsof nuclear talks between April and June 2025 were halted on the eve of aplanned sixth round when Israel launched strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities,with both sides subsequently signaling willingness to resume negotiations whiletaking no practical step toward doing so. The US-Israeli strikes on Fordow,Natanz, and Isfahan in June 2025, the February 2026 campaign that killedSupreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran's closure of Hormuz —each decision waspresented as discrete, and together they form the terminal logic of a pressurestrategy that ran out of gradations between coercion and war.
Mahdi Azizi,director of the New Vision Center for Studies and Media in Tehran, told ShafaqNews that the United States had concluded that toppling the Iranian regime was“beyond reach” given the “cohesion of its leadership” and the difficulty of itsgeography, shifting the objective from regime change to attrition, degradingcapabilities, shrinking economic space, raising costs across every domainwithout a defined endpoint. Attrition sustained indefinitely does not producesurrender; it adapts, and Iran's adaptation took forms the strategy had notpriced.
Iran's proxynetwork had already entered structural degradation before the war began, withBashar al-Assad's fall in December 2024 severing the Syrian land corridor toLebanon’s Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah killed, and Iraqi factions fracturingover their posture toward Washington. Rather than collapsing, the proxiesadapted —reports emerged, which Tehran denied, of Iraqi armed faction membersbeing deployed inside Iran to help suppress the 2025–26 protests.
The CarnegieEndowment noted that US officials engaged in "verbal gymnastics" toexplain how a program they had just "obliterated" also presented animminent threat. The IAEA has been unable to resume inspections at sites struckduring the June 2025 conflict and has not verified the extent of damage toIran's nuclear infrastructure, meaning the war's primary objective cannot beconfirmed as achieved by the only institution authorized to make thatdetermination.
The PriceWashington Paid
The costs ofthe US strategy are concrete, measurable, and in some cases are still beingcounted. Thirteen American service members were killed, and approximately 373were wounded in the weeks following the February 28 strikes, with most woundedhaving returned to duty, but five remaining seriously injured as of earlyApril. The Pentagon's own accounting of those figures has been disputed.
The WarDepartment altered its tally of American casualties by scrubbing 15wounded-in-action troops from the count without public explanation, promptingone US government official to describe the practice as a "casualtycover-up."
Theequipment losses tell a parallel story. Iran's missiles and drones, and oneinstance of friendly fire, destroyed US military equipment worth between $2.3billion and $2.8 billion, according to the first detailed tabulation by theCenter for Strategic and International Studies —a figure that does not includelosses incurred at US bases across the Gulf region or specialized naval assets.
Among themost significant losses: at least one THAAD missile defense radar, with somereports suggesting two were destroyed, at a combined cost of between $485million and $970 million, and three F-15 jets shot down in a friendly fireincident in Kuwait in early March.
The dayafter War Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that "never in recorded historyhas a nation's military been so quickly and so effectively neutralized,"Iran fired missiles and drones that struck a US base in Saudi Arabia, woundingseveral soldiers and destroying a radar surveillance plane that cost $700million.
Beyond theequipment, the war exposed the structural vulnerability of the US military'sregional posture. With bases across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, andthe UAE all targeted, troops were transferred to hotels and office buildings asconventional bases became too exposed.
: Opinion:Washington pursues regional de-escalation through fragile frameworks
Front ThatWas Never There
Hazem Ayyad,professor of political science at the University of Amman, stated to ShafaqNews that the weight of regional forces —popular sentiment, economic exposure,institutional pressure— tilts decisively against full-scale war and towardde-escalation. Gulf states, facing sustained Iranian strikes on their energyinfrastructure, airports, and residential areas, consistently prioritizeddamage control and an end to hostilities over alignment with Washington'smilitary objectives, a position that held even as projections showed potentialGDP 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 ShafaqNews, cut to the structural problem Washington's regional strategy neverresolved: “the Gulf has been steered toward objectives that serve Israelistrategic interests rather than Arab ones, producing not a unified regionalfront but a collection of individual states each recalculating its own exposureat a different speed and toward a different conclusion.”
The GulfCooperation Council (GCC) has rarely functioned as a cohesive strategic bloc,and the war clarified rather than created those differences, with the UAEcalling publicly for Washington to finish the job after absorbing the heaviestvolume of Iranian strikes, Saudi Arabia condemning the attacks as"treacherous" while backing ceasefire talks and protecting Vision2030 investment flows, and Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait pushing consistently forde-escalation.
SaudiArabia's hostility toward Israel —rooted in domestic opinion and the economiclogic of Vision 2030— means that proximity to Washington, while it backsIsraeli regional policy, carries costs that proximity to Washington againstIran alone never did. The Abraham Accords architecture, which was supposed toabsorb that tension, revealed under fire the depth of the contradictions it hadpapered over rather than resolved.
Politicalneutrality has become operationally impossible for all of them, with the USmaintaining bases, naval facilities, and forward operating sites across atleast 19 locations in the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar,Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, leaving Iranian targeting to treat those states asparticipants in the conflict regardless of their official positions.
Oman —whichkept its diplomatic channels with Tehran open and hosted the nuclear mediationrounds— was the only Gulf state Iran chose not to strike, a deliberate signalthe Gulf read with precision: alignment with Washington carries a cost, and sodoes the neutrality Washington's presence makes impossible.
Iran'sstrikes alienated states that had spent years pursuing rapprochement, with theMarch 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran normalization agreement failing tosurvive the war's first weeks. That alienation has not translated into thestrategic alignment Washington needed —Saudi Arabia and Qatar, recently atodds, are now coordinating with Egypt, Jordan, Turkiye, Pakistan, andIndonesia, forming a coalition defined not by support for the American campaignbut by shared resistance to the trajectory it has created, the architecture ofa regional order Washington did not design and is not positioned to lead.
ForceWithout a Finish Line
The strategyproduced devastation without resolution, and across every pillar on which itrested, the same pattern holds: force sufficient to destroy the existingcondition, insufficient to dictate what replaces it.
SeniorIranian economic officials warned President Masoud Pezeshkian thatreconstruction may take more than a decade, with the Central Bank Governorurging an immediate peace deal to stabilize the economy. Iran is weaker than atany point since the revolution —its supreme leader killed, its nuclearinfrastructure struck, its proxy network dispersed, its currency in freefall. And yet the regime holds, which is why the most significant development of thepast 48 hours is not a military one.
A one-page,14-point memorandum of understanding is being negotiated between Trump's envoysSteve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and several Iranian officials, both directlyand through mediators. In its current form, the MOU would declare an end to thewar and the start of 30 days of negotiations on a detailed agreement to openthe strait, limit Iran's nuclear program, and lift US sanctions. Under theproposed terms, Iran would commit to a moratorium on uranium enrichment lastingat least 12 years —with some sources suggesting 15 years as a likely compromisebetween the US demand of 20 years and Iran's initial offer of five— and wouldpledge never to seek a nuclear weapon or conduct weaponization-relatedactivities, submitting to an enhanced inspections regime including snapinspections by UN monitors.
In exchange,the United States would agree to gradually lift sanctions and release billionsof dollars in frozen Iranian funds.
Americanofficials have described this as the closest the two sides have agreed sincethe war began, even as Iranian officials have publicly offered a morepessimistic 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 contoursof the emerging deal reveal what the strategy ultimately achieved and where itfell short. Araghchi's red line —zero enrichment means no deal— appears to havebent: a moratorium is not elimination, but it is a significant concession froma government that refused any enrichment limits. Washington, for its part, isaccepting a time-limited freeze rather than the permanent dismantlement itlaunched a war to achieve.
Thesuspension of Project Freedom after less than 48 hours —described by Araghchihimself as "Project Deadlock"— captures the dynamic precisely: anoperation 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 termslaid 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 hotwar has stopped but nothing is truly resolved.
In thestrait, hundreds of loaded oil tankers wait. The IAEA sits outside thefacilities that the war was launched to destroy. And the nuclear dilemma thatstarted all of this is moving toward an answer, not the one Washington went towar for, and not the one Tehran swore it would never accept, but somethingnegotiated in the space between two positions that neither side could holdindefinitely.
Written andedited by Shafaq News staff.
