Force without a finish line: Iran is losing the war, the US is losing the endgame
Shafaq News
President Donald Trump launched a war to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and nine weeks later, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could not enter Iran to verify whether the nuclear program still exists. The inspectors were blocked from the sites where the bombs were supposed to destroy the program. Washington is currently blockading a country whose nuclear status it cannot confirm— while negotiating a deal premised on dismantling a program it cannot see.
Two sides are now blockading each other in the same strait, with the US Navy preventing ships from entering or leaving Iranian ports, and Iran restricting commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. 20% of the world's oil supply is caught between them. Washington launched "Project Freedom" —a military operation to escort stranded ships through the strait— then suspended it within 48 hours, citing progress toward a deal with Tehran, while maintaining its blockade of Iranian ports. Trump announced the pause based on "the request" of Pakistan and other countries and "the fact that Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement" with Iran. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reaffirmed that navigation in the Strait of Hormuz would return to normal if the war is permanently resolved, the maritime blockade is lifted, and sanctions imposed on Iran are removed.
Three pillars held the strategy together: economic pressure to change Iran's behavior, controlled escalation to manage the cost of confrontation, and Gulf state alignment to provide regional legitimacy and strategic depth. What the past nine weeks revealed is that each pillar, by its own logic, destroyed the conditions the next one needed to function —the pressure radicalized Tehran enough to justify escalation, the escalation exhausted the Gulf states, and the Gulf fracture removed the regional legitimacy needed to convert military advantage into a negotiated settlement.
Pain Without Surrender
The economic campaign against Iran produced numbers that, read in isolation, resemble success. 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 over the same period, according to World Bank data.
By March 2025, the rial had passed one million to the dollar —the least valuable currency in the world— with inflation exceeding 48% by October 2025, and between 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 further contraction of 6.1% across 2026.
Political analyst Mujashaa al-Tamimi, speaking to Shafaq News, identified what the pressure campaign was actually calibrated to do: keep both sides short of confrontation by making the cost of escalation visible and mutual, managing a conflict through economic tools, cyberattacks, and proxy pressure rather than resolving it. A campaign calibrated to stop short of war is, by the same logic, calibrated to stop short of resolution —producing suffering without surrender on the question that mattered most.
The ceiling was 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 a covert black-market network routing oil to China via ship-to-ship transfers in grey zones near Malaysia. The sanctions degraded Iran's revenue without severing it, and on the central demand —enrichment— Iran never moved.
Before departing for talks in Rome, Foreign Minister Araghchi posted his government's position 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 a deal." The line had not shifted across five rounds of talks, a twelve-day war, and maximum pressure sanctions —which meant that when the pressure campaign exhausted its tools short of its objective, war presented itself as the sequence's next instrument rather than its alternative.
Read more: US-Iran talks collapse; Analysts warn of high escalation risk as ceasefire deadline nears
Logic That Ran Past Its Limits
Al-Tamimi warned that the real danger in managed confrontation is not the tools themselves but the moment miscalculation converts a limited exchange into something neither side chose. “That moment came not as a single event but as a sequence in which each step made the next harder to avoid.”
Five rounds of nuclear talks between April and June 2025 were halted on the eve of a planned sixth round when Israel launched strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, with both sides subsequently signaling willingness to resume negotiations while taking no practical step toward doing so. The US-Israeli strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in June 2025, the February 2026 campaign that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran's closure of Hormuz —each decision was presented as discrete, and together they form the terminal logic of a pressure strategy that ran out of gradations between coercion and war.
Mahdi Azizi, director of the New Vision Center for Studies and Media in Tehran, told Shafaq News that the United States had concluded that toppling the Iranian regime was “beyond reach” given the “cohesion of its leadership” and the difficulty of its geography, shifting the objective from regime change to attrition, degrading capabilities, shrinking economic space, raising costs across every domain without a defined endpoint. Attrition sustained indefinitely does not produce surrender; it adapts, and Iran's adaptation took forms the strategy had not priced.
Iran's proxy network had already entered structural degradation before the war began, with Bashar al-Assad's fall in December 2024 severing the Syrian land corridor to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah killed, and Iraqi factions fracturing over their posture toward Washington. Rather than collapsing, the proxies adapted —reports emerged, which Tehran denied, of Iraqi armed faction members being deployed inside Iran to help suppress the 2025–26 protests.
The Carnegie Endowment noted that US officials engaged in "verbal gymnastics" to explain how a program they had just "obliterated" also presented an imminent threat. The IAEA has been unable to resume inspections at sites struck during the June 2025 conflict and has not verified the extent of damage to Iran's nuclear infrastructure, meaning the war's primary objective cannot be confirmed as achieved by the only institution authorized to make that determination.
The Price Washington Paid
The costs of the US strategy are concrete, measurable, and in some cases are still being counted. Thirteen American service members were killed, and approximately 373 were wounded in the weeks following the February 28 strikes, with most wounded having returned to duty, but five remaining seriously injured as of early April. The Pentagon's own accounting of those figures has been disputed.
The War Department altered its tally of American casualties by scrubbing 15 wounded-in-action troops from the count without public explanation, prompting one US government official to describe the practice as a "casualty cover-up."
The equipment losses tell a parallel story. Iran's missiles and drones, and one instance of friendly fire, destroyed US military equipment worth between $2.3 billion and $2.8 billion, according to the first detailed tabulation by the Center for Strategic and International Studies —a figure that does not include losses incurred at US bases across the Gulf region or specialized naval assets.
Among the most significant losses: at least one THAAD missile defense radar, with some reports suggesting two were destroyed, at a combined cost of between $485 million and $970 million, and three F-15 jets shot down in a friendly fire incident in Kuwait in early March.
The day after War Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that "never in recorded history has a nation's military been so quickly and so effectively neutralized," Iran fired missiles and drones that struck a US base in Saudi Arabia, wounding several soldiers and destroying a radar surveillance plane that cost $700 million.
Beyond the equipment, the war exposed the structural vulnerability of the US military's regional posture. With bases across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE all targeted, troops were transferred to hotels and office buildings as conventional bases became too exposed.
Read more: Opinion:Washington pursues regional de-escalation through fragile frameworks
Front That Was Never There
Hazem Ayyad, professor of political science at the University of Amman, stated to Shafaq News that the weight of regional forces —popular sentiment, economic exposure, institutional pressure— tilts decisively against full-scale war and toward de-escalation. Gulf states, facing sustained Iranian strikes on their energy infrastructure, airports, and residential areas, consistently prioritized damage control and an end to hostilities over alignment with Washington's military objectives, a position that held even as projections showed potential GDP 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 Shafaq News, cut to the structural problem Washington's regional strategy never resolved: “the Gulf has been steered toward objectives that serve Israeli strategic interests rather than Arab ones, producing not a unified regional front but a collection of individual states each recalculating its own exposure at a different speed and toward a different conclusion.”
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has rarely functioned as a cohesive strategic bloc, and the war clarified rather than created those differences, with the UAE calling publicly for Washington to finish the job after absorbing the heaviest volume of Iranian strikes, Saudi Arabia condemning the attacks as "treacherous" while backing ceasefire talks and protecting Vision 2030 investment flows, and Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait pushing consistently for de-escalation.
Saudi Arabia's hostility toward Israel —rooted in domestic opinion and the economic logic of Vision 2030— means that proximity to Washington, while it backs Israeli regional policy, carries costs that proximity to Washington against Iran alone never did. The Abraham Accords architecture, which was supposed to absorb that tension, revealed under fire the depth of the contradictions it had papered over rather than resolved.
Political neutrality has become operationally impossible for all of them, with the US maintaining bases, naval facilities, and forward operating sites across at least 19 locations in the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, leaving Iranian targeting to treat those states as participants in the conflict regardless of their official positions.
Oman —which kept its diplomatic channels with Tehran open and hosted the nuclear mediation rounds— was the only Gulf state Iran chose not to strike, a deliberate signal the Gulf read with precision: alignment with Washington carries a cost, and so does the neutrality Washington's presence makes impossible.
Iran's strikes alienated states that had spent years pursuing rapprochement, with the March 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran normalization agreement failing to survive the war's first weeks. That alienation has not translated into the strategic alignment Washington needed —Saudi Arabia and Qatar, recently at odds, are now coordinating with Egypt, Jordan, Turkiye, Pakistan, and Indonesia, forming a coalition defined not by support for the American campaign but by shared resistance to the trajectory it has created, the architecture of a regional order Washington did not design and is not positioned to lead.
Force Without a Finish Line
The strategy produced devastation without resolution, and across every pillar on which it rested, the same pattern holds: force sufficient to destroy the existing condition, insufficient to dictate what replaces it.
Senior Iranian economic officials warned President Masoud Pezeshkian that reconstruction may take more than a decade, with the Central Bank Governor urging an immediate peace deal to stabilize the economy. Iran is weaker than at any point since the revolution —its supreme leader killed, its nuclear infrastructure struck, its proxy network dispersed, its currency in freefall. And yet the regime holds, which is why the most significant development of the past 48 hours is not a military one.
A one-page, 14-point memorandum of understanding is being negotiated between Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and several Iranian officials, both directly and through mediators. In its current form, the MOU would declare an end to the war and the start of 30 days of negotiations on a detailed agreement to open the strait, limit Iran's nuclear program, and lift US sanctions. Under the proposed terms, Iran would commit to a moratorium on uranium enrichment lasting at least 12 years —with some sources suggesting 15 years as a likely compromise between the US demand of 20 years and Iran's initial offer of five— and would pledge never to seek a nuclear weapon or conduct weaponization-related activities, submitting to an enhanced inspections regime including snap inspections by UN monitors.
In exchange, the United States would agree to gradually lift sanctions and release billions of dollars in frozen Iranian funds.
American officials have described this as the closest the two sides have agreed since the war began, even as Iranian officials have publicly offered a more pessimistic 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 contours of the emerging deal reveal what the strategy ultimately achieved and where it fell short. Araghchi's red line —zero enrichment means no deal— appears to have bent: a moratorium is not elimination, but it is a significant concession from a government that refused any enrichment limits. Washington, for its part, is accepting a time-limited freeze rather than the permanent dismantlement it launched a war to achieve.
The suspension of Project Freedom after less than 48 hours —described by Araghchi himself as "Project Deadlock"— captures the dynamic precisely: an operation 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 terms laid 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 hot war has stopped but nothing is truly resolved.
In the strait, hundreds of loaded oil tankers wait. The IAEA sits outside the facilities that the war was launched to destroy. And the nuclear dilemma that started all of this is moving toward an answer, not the one Washington went to war for, and not the one Tehran swore it would never accept, but something negotiated in the space between two positions that neither side could hold indefinitely.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
