No. of Recommendations: 12
Yep. The other Gulf states know that Iran retains a sizable portion of its missile and drone capabilities. Which means that if the U.S. renews the "kinetic action" part of the war, Iran doesn't just have to sit back and take it. They can respond by lighting on fire the energy infrastructure of all the other Gulf states. They still have escalatory cards to play. Last time they knocked out almost 20% of Qatari natgas production for the next 3-5 years. Rather than just sit back and let the U.S. destroy the regime, they can take out even more. So, the other Gulf states have to keep pushing the U.S. to find a way out that
doesn't involve starting the bombing again.
We're now in a quagm....oh, wait, we can't call it that. Perhaps a morass. The two week ceasefire began on April 8th, and that phase has now lasted longer than the hot phase of the war that preceded it. We're stuck. And Iran very much wants us to stay stuck:
What they're saying: "We are really not making a lot of progress. We are at a very serious place today. The pressure is on them to be responsive in the right way," the senior U.S. official said.
"It's time for the Iranians to throw a bit of candy out. We need some real, sturdy and granular conversation [regarding the nuclear program]. If that's not gonna happen, we will have a conversation through bombs, which will be a shame."https://www.axios.com/2026/05/18/iran-peace-deal-o...It's hardly surprising that Iran isn't offering us any candy. Not even a bit. Because Iran's self-interest requires that the U.S.
really come out of this badly. If they give the U.S. a face-saving deal, a deal with enough candy that it's at all plausible for us to declare it a win, that's an
enormously dangerous outcome for Iran's future security. They can't have us come out of this saying to ourselves, "well, that was worth it." Because if that's what happens, it won't dissuade us from doing this again. We'll
always be massively stronger than Iran; we'll
always be able to damage Iran as much as we want to. So the only rational thing for them to do is to try to make sure we won't
want to anymore.
It worked with Iraq. No, it didn't work out for Hussein - but the U.S. sure learned our lesson that big "nation change" ground troop invasions aren't worth the price. Iran's going to sure try to teach that same lesson about aerial campaigns to try to overthrow the regime; that there's no quick Venezuela-like wins on offer, just a very long qua...stalemate with high energy prices and a frustrated President.
