By Tom Fowdy
After the past few days, Israel has dramatically increased its bombing of Iranian infrastructure and targeted assassinations of key officials in Tehran. Backed by the United States, Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested US forces could also become involved, but has so far refrained from doing so, seeking to leverage his threats as a negotiating hand to try and force Tehran to submit to a new deal that in his own words, described as "unconditional surrender."
While Iran has launched several missile attacks against targets in Israel, and admittedly damaged some critical infrastructure, this is strategically useless because it does not establish deterrence against the militarily superior Israel (which has overwhelming escalation dominance), and nor does it offer any logical pathway to an endgame in this conflict.
I must admit: Iran has been geopolitically checkmated here. In the space of a year, Israel and the US coordination have destroyed Tehran's entire "axis of resistance" across the Middle East. That has included militarily crippling Hezbollah through leadership decapitation, exploiting Russian preoccupation with Ukraine to topple the Assad regime in Syria (severing the supply lane between Hezbollah and Iran) and likewise demonstrating overwhelming force to pre-emptively crush Tehran's nuclear program. Iran can launch missiles at Tel Aviv, but does it have any negotiating hand left?
Numerous things have gone wrong for Iran: First of all, Tehran is poor at diplomacy and strategy. Although the United States showed overwhelming bad faith in tearing up the lawful treaty of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and placed massive sanctions on Tehran, the entire strategy of Iran had been built around a regional conquest which involved funding proxy militias in various countries, spanning from Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, exploiting Shi'ite sectarian fractures in these unstable state structures.
While these movements were "organic" in terms of its religious sentiment and support, it locked Tehran into a series of regional proxy conflicts against the US, Israel and the Gulf States, and subsequently empowered the worst Iran hawks, who precisely argued that the JCPOA itself was rewarding Tehran who continued to wage regional wars. Thus, American foreign policy in the Middle East shifted after 2018 from defeating Sunni-based Jihadist terrorist groups, such as ISIS, towards "containment" of Iran and attempting to reconstruct the regional security architecture around this. Thus, the US pushed normalisation of Israel with Arab states, and of course, it would naturally want confrontation with Tehran itself to block attempts at diplomacy between these states and Iran, such as the Saudi deal.
Iran did absolutely nothing to react to this change, and the wider structural shift in US foreign policy as a whole towards "great power competition" starting that same year. If Tehran was strategically smart, and recognising the US has no intent to negotiate in good faith, it should have released that the most astute window to develop a nuclear weapon would be 2022 at the peak of panic over Ukraine, and it should have taken it as a given that Israel would have attempted mass assassinations, and prepared accordingly. Yet Tehran seemed lethargic to these shifts, and instead of focusing on needless proxy wars and isolating itself, it should have fostered closer ties with China and Russia. Of course, it tried, but there's a good reason why, even despite talk of a "$400 billion strategic partnership between Beijing and Tehran" in 2021, China kept its distance, primarily because it did not want to be roped into Middle Eastern skirmishes and "take sides." To their credit, Beijing tried to mediate this, but by this point the conflict in Gaza had already broken out and Israel had begun the groundwork to rolling back the so-called "Axis of Resistance", knowing with US backing it could kill at scale, with impunity.
So what happens now? Iran has no good options left. This is what checkmate looks like: its allies have been defeated, and it cannot truly deter Israel. All I can say is while the state may be weakened in geopolitical terms, it is nonetheless naïve for the NeoCons of Washington to believe they can shape the future of a Middle East nation of 90 million people and as it has been with everything else Israel has been doing, they bleed credibility with the global south and Muslim world in as much as they continue this campaign.
They could terminate the Mullah revolutionary state, but history shows that they may not necessarily like what comes next, and the United States has a long and proven record of creating one quagmire in this region after another through needless interventionism. There is no guarantee what replaces it will necessarily be pro-West, and might even be more advantageous to Beijing economically if it isn't treated as a pariah state.
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