Surprise strikes signal Iran is digging in for a long war

In recent weeks, Iran has gone on the offensive, striking commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz and launching a surprise attack on U.S. forces in Jordan. From a distance, these moves look like self-defeating escalation. Why should a badly damaged state, under severe economic pressure, lash out at the U.S. instead of pushing for a ceasefire?

The answer, simply put, is that Iran is digging in for a long war. Whatever Washington's intentions, Tehran increasingly interprets sanctions, negotiations, temporary ceasefires and military strikes as different instruments aimed at a single objective: regime change.

As long as this primary objective remains, Iran expects no sanctions relief or meaningful de-escalation. My conversations with Iranian foreign policy analysts suggest that Tehran now believes the war will continue in different forms until the end of Donald Trump's presidency.

There is no doubt that the war has punished Iran’s economy. Over 23,000 U.S. and Israeli strikes heavily damaged the country's energy, industrial, transportation, and civil infrastructure, which had kept the country functioning despite decades of onerous sanctions. The country is experiencing the largest contraction in its labor market, along with the highest inflation rate, in its modern history.

Beyond economic costs, the war has profoundly changed Iran’s perception of costs and its decision-making logic. The February 28 decapitation strike did not replace old, conservative political leaders and military commanders with more hard-line ones dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as mainstream U.S. media has suggested. Instead, it formed a shadow decision-making system that is more confident, less patient, less predictable, and guided by a different calculation of risk.

Iran's experience of failed negotiations with the U.S. before the two major airstrikes in 2025 and 2026 intensified this new perception. In Tehran's view, a comprehensive agreement with the Trump administration is virtually unachievable. Trump either cannot deliver a durable settlement because he cannot afford its domestic political cost, or he does not want to. Even if the administration wants to change course, Israel, which clearly maintains substantial influence within Trump’s inner circle despite the recent rhetoric of Vice President JD Vance, will do what it can to disrupt it.

The debate over the June Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is illustrative. Under the MoU, bombing stopped, and the blockade was lifted despite some violations of the Lebanon ceasefire. But the promised economic incentives were never realized. Tehran exported $6 billion in oil but did not receive the $12 billion in foreign assets it had expected. This limited implementation of the deal hurt Iran’s negotiating team at home.

Sources told me that Iranians were also deeply dissatisfied with the Qatari-administered mechanism for allocating Iran’s frozen assets to import essential foods and medicine, and blamed Doha for misleading them.

Altogether, these deepened the suspicion that the United States had paused its attacks in order to rebuild its defenses, update its military targets, bring oil prices down, and manage domestic grievances before returning to war. Ironically, hawks in the U.S. complained that the MoU had allowed the Iranians to rebuild their military capabilities in the interim.

In Iran, a fragile MoU with no clear economic benefit was seen as a one-sided pause that exposed the Islamic Republic to societal and political pressures that had eased during wartime. While inflation, unemployment, poverty, and mismanagement fueled public anger, power struggles among political and security factions intensified.

On one hand, Tehran could wait, ignoring some of Washington’s violations of the MoU while taking advantage of its limited economic benefits, and retaliating if the U.S. resumed the war. A factor weighing on the minds of leaders was that a renewed full-scale war would target Iran’s remaining energy, industrial, and civilian infrastructure, on which the state still depends.

However, the leadership in Tehran came to believe that the relative benefits of waiting flowed overwhelmingly in favor of the United States and Israel. In particular, as long as Washington controlled the tempo of the war and decided when the war began, paused, and resumed, Tehran would lack agency.

Seeking to break the deadlock, Tehran has thus adopted a strategy of managed confrontation, a form of active deterrence to raise the cost for the United States. Such a confrontation is limited enough to avoid full-scale war but would still increase political pressure on the Trump administration. Even limited attacks can disrupt the U.S. military’s focus, spread out its forces, engage its defensive systems, and force it to spend more on defensive operations than on preparing for a resumption of the war.

At the same time, Tehran could keep negotiation channels open and demonstrate its desire for diplomatic solutions.

Iran’s economic experience reinforces a confidence that Iran can win this gamble. Iran has absorbed enormous damage without collapsing. As the government allows inflation and currency depreciation to rise, goods keep moving; shelves are not empty, although fewer people can afford what is on them. Iran’s diverse geography helps to bypass the blockade and meet its essential needs. Its privileged welfare system has protected public employees on whom the effective functioning of the state relies, but much of the burden falls on informal workers and small firms. In contrast, a fragile MoU without economic benefits, combined with high uncertainty, will not ease the war’s economic burdens but will lower the cost of a new U.S. attack. As such, a controlled confrontation is more worthwhile.

Iran's military and geographic leverage over the Strait of Hormuz helps the country raise the costs of war in a way that could exhaust Trump, perhaps forcing him to abandon the confrontation and change his Iran policy. The pressure is growing: as public support in the U.S. has declined, Trump’s popular approval has fallen to an unprecedented low.

Of course, Tehran may underestimate Trump’s tolerance for a prolonged conflict. Another risk is that, while Tehran might be able to calibrate the targets and scale of its own attacks, it cannot control how Washington responds. In addition, Iran's neighbors may lose patience with Iran’s retaliatory attacks on them and join the U.S. in the attack.

Finally, domestic discontent over the destruction wrought by the war (on top of a collapsing economy and increased repression) remains a persistent possibility that would fracture wartime solidarity. Still, Iranian leaders appear determined to continue down a path of extended, low-grade war.

For Washington, the upshot of this change in Iranian thinking is straightforward. If the U.S. is truly interested in ending the war rather than engaging in endless military confrontation, it must recognize the limits of military pressure. The military campaign might be effective in damaging Iran’s military and economic infrastructure, but, until now, it has been politically counterproductive. It has heightened Iran’s economic crisis and increased poverty, but failed to force Iran's capitulation. More military strikes are most unlikely to alter this seeming paradox.

What may yet change this state of affairs is a U.S. effort to incentivize de-escalation. If even part of the $12 billion promised by the MoU had actually reached Iran, its leadership would have been much less likely to take the military initiative. That is the lesson of the broken memorandum: Washington has put enormous effort into making escalation costly, but far too little into making restraint worthwhile. Until that changes, more pressure is unlikely to end Iran's resistance; instead, it may reinforce the lesson Tehran least wants to hear: that resistance is still the only option that pays.