Five weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the outlines of a negotiated end are becoming visible, and the commentary surrounding them has already settled into a familiar knee-jerk ideas, if they can be called that, of liberal experts. The cataloging of American costs, the questions of authorization, the implication that a wiser administration might have avoided this moment: all of this proceeds from the assumption that American decisions are the primary causal variable in regional instability, which presents itself as self-criticism but is in fact analytical solipsism.
The United States finds itself in a position that has historically accompanied military success without political resolution.
The Islamic Republic of Iran entered 2026 with four hundred and forty kilograms of uranium enriched to sixty percent purity, a ballistic missile arsenal numbering in the thousands, an active proxy network running from Lebanon through Iraq to Yemen, and a fresh record of massacring its own citizens by the thousands. The military results of the campaign that addressed this reality are already substantial. Iran’s ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than ninety percent from their opening-day salvo. Its navy has been neutralized. Its air defense systems are degraded to the point of near-irrelevance, and the nuclear infrastructure has now been struck twice in fourteen months. Khamenei is dead. The Iran that entered 2026 — the menacing threat of the Middle East — has been fundamentally altered as a military actor. What it is becoming as a political entity is the harder and less tractable question, and it is one that the dominant commentary is least equipped to answer, because answering it requires taking the Islamic Republic’s ideological character seriously, which unserious people can not do.
The United States finds itself in a position that has historically accompanied military success without political resolution: it has destroyed the adversary’s capacity to project power without yet determining the terms on which that adversary will accept a new arrangement. The Islamic Republic has not collapsed. A statement attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei, read on state television, vowed that the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed. The regime’s survival instinct is still operating at full intensity. Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi told Al Jazeera that Tehran is not seeking a ceasefire but seeking to end the war, a distinction that is not merely semantic from the Iranian side. A ceasefire implies a pause in hostilities that the other party might resume at will; an end to the war implies a political settlement in which the Islamic Republic retains some recognizable claim to sovereignty and survival. The gap between those two is the terrain on which the uncertainty stands.
The United States holds a decisive military advantage and retains the capacity to continue inflicting damage on Iran. Trump’s address made clear the threat to strike Iran’s power generation facilities simultaneously if no deal is reached within two to three weeks. But the one thing the United States urgently needs, and that only Iran can provide, is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The regime has demonstrated its hopeless willingness to use collective economic harm as a political weapon. Oil prices have now crossed one hundred dollars per barrel and briefly reached one hundred fourteen, the highest level since the COVID-era supply shocks. Gas in the United States has surpassed four dollars per gallon for the first time since 2022. The International Energy Agency, which has described the current disruption as the greatest global energy security challenge in history, has authorized the release of four hundred million barrels of strategic reserves. The longer the Strait remains effectively closed, the more the economic costs of the campaign accumulate at home and among the American-aligned states whose cooperation the United States requires for the next phase of regional order. Iran understands this dynamic and is actively betting on it. It’s their last and only card.
What Iran requires from the United States is a credible commitment, which I’m not sure we should provide, that the campaign’s stated disavowal of regime change as a formal objective will be honored in practice. Trump’s repeated claim that “full regime change has already occurred” because the original leadership is dead is convenient but largely and deliberately ambiguous. It allows the administration to claim success for domestic audiences while leaving open the question of whether continued strikes are intended to unseat the successor government — a question that any Iranian interlocutor willing to negotiate must resolve before committing to terms. Back-channel signals suggest such interlocutors exist and are probing the question. A senior Iranian source told Reuters that Iran demands a guaranteed ceasefire to end the war permanently, not a temporary cessation of hostilities. That framing is the demand of a state that has concluded it cannot win militarily but believes it can extract sufficient political guarantees to survive.
A senior Iranian source told Reuters that Iran demands a guaranteed ceasefire to end the war permanently, not a temporary cessation of hostilities.
The Gulf states’ current position complicates this calculus in ways that American policymakers would be very unwise to underestimate. Six weeks ago, the GCC’s dominant instinct was caution bordering on opposition; multiple Gulf governments had privately warned the Trump administration against launching the campaign, and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others stated publicly that they would not allow the United States to use their territory to strike Iran. Iran’s retaliatory campaign altered that calculus with its indiscriminate assaults. Iranian missiles and drones fell across all six GCC member states — targeting airports in Kuwait, energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, civilian districts in Abu Dhabi, and strategic facilities in Qatar and Bahrain. The attacks killed Gulf civilians and soldiers indiscriminately, trying to impose regional costs broad enough to force a ceasefire by making the war unbearable for everyone.
The effect, paradoxically, was the opposite of what Tehran intended. Saudi Arabia has reportedly granted the US access to King Fahd Air Base in Taif. The UAE has assessed its own capabilities to assist in reopening the Strait by force and has been lobbying for a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a multilateral maritime operation. Gulf officials — most urgently in Abu Dhabi — are now pressing Washington to continue military operations until Iran’s missile and drone manufacturing capacity suffers what one official described to the Times of Israel as “generational damage.” They believe the current correlation of forces is unlikely to recur, and that accepting a ceasefire that leaves Iran with a reconstitutable military-industrial base would be a strategic error whose costs would fall primarily on Gulf populations. And they are right. Reports that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has privately urged Trump to maintain military pressure, and Emirati Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba’s WSJ op-ed calling for the campaign to succeed, suggest that the elite-level shift is more than rhetorical.
Yet the Gulf states are still not unified on this question. Oman, the only Gulf state that Trump remarkably didn’t mention during his speech, has consistently called for the earliest possible end to hostilities. Muscat has historically served as the indispensable back-channel between Washington and Tehran; its foreign minister’s public call for diplomacy reflects their concern for preserving the mediating function on which Omani influence depends. Qatar expelled Iranian military and security attachés after strikes on its energy infrastructure, but has maintained diplomatic presence and continued its role as a potential mediator — the usual calibrated ambiguity that speaks to the limits of Gulf hawkishness, and ruthless pragamatism, even among the states most directly harmed by Iran’s retaliation. Kuwait and Bahrain, which have suffered military casualties, have condemned Iran’s actions in unusually harsh terms while stopping short of endorsing offensive operations from their territory.
What will ultimately determine whether the endgame is coherently managed or allowed to drift toward an outcome that dissipates the campaign’s military gains is whether Washington can identify the minimum political settlement that satisfies its core objectives that Iran can be trusted to accept. Those objectives, as articulated across the administration’s statements, reduce to three: permanent denial of an Iranian nuclear weapon, sustained degradation of Iran’s ballistic missile capacity, and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping. The third of these is the most time-sensitive and also the most tractable, because it is the one point at which American and Iranian interests, however adversarially structured, converge. Iran cannot rebuild or recapitalize a devastated economy with the Strait closed any more than the United States can sustain political support for continued operations while gas prices inch towards five dollars and global oil markets remain in crisis.
The suggestion that Iranian diplomacy might be able to finally present a genuine concession rather than another time-buying maneuver requires a considerable act of faith in the face of a long and substantial historical record that points otherwise.
The question the administration must answer honestly, before it can negotiate seriously and effectively, is what level of Iranian degradation is sufficient to produce a settlement that does not simply reconstitute the threat within a generation. The Gulf states’ answer — generational damage to manufacturing and delivery capacity and not merely depletion of current stockpiles — reflects a sober assessment of Iranian behavior across four decades. A settlement that accepts Iranian commitments on paper while leaving the organizational and industrial capacity to reverse those commitments intact would be, by the historical record, a settlement that buys time rather than changes facts. The administration’s willingness to strike Iran’s power generation infrastructure if no deal is reached within two to three weeks suggests it understands this dynamic to some degree. Whether it has the strategic patience and political capital to see that logic through, against the considerable pressure of global oil markets and the ceasefire-now chorus in Western capitals, is the genuinely open question as this campaign enters its final phase.
Whatever one concludes about the decision to strike, the suggestion that Iranian diplomacy might be able to finally present a genuine concession rather than another time-buying maneuver requires a considerable act of faith in the face of a long and substantial historical record that points otherwise. I’m not sure I’m capable of such faith.
