On February 27th, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al-Busaidi stated that “peace is within reach” in reference to U.S-Iran bilateral negotiations. He claims Iran agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium—an unprecedented breakthrough— and that the nuclear problem was essentially solved: “if the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem…The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb.”
The next day, the US and Israel carried out joint strikes against Tehran, assassinating the Supreme Leader and swaths of Iran’s political and military leadership.
As of March 11, 2026, the United States may be sleepwalking into a worst-case scenario with Iran, leaving us in a position I call “the middle ground of doom.”
The strikes were too severe to preserve any form of diplomacy, but too limited to fully destroy Iran’s nuclear program or topple the regime, all while depleting core munitions stockpiles. Hard-liners are seizing institutional control and consolidating around a figure with deep connections to the IRGC and no fatwa against the bomb. The domestic opposition has been systematically slaughtered and weakened. And the United States is six days into a war with no strategically coherent endgame, while simultaneously at odds with Israel’s endgame of total chaos and facing an adversary whose strategy is to exploit this very incoherence and outlast America’s political will.
The Iranian regime has a forty-year track record of proxy terrorism and anti-Western jihad; its militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, it backed and trained Hezbollah terrorists who murdered 241 American service members in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, supplied improvised explosive devices which killed or maimed hundreds of U.S. troops during the Iraq War. America does not lack a casus belli.
But the pivotal misstep of Operation Epic Fury is that it represents a structurally incoherent security strategy that may ultimately accelerate the very outcome it was meant to prevent — a more aggressive, hard-line, and nuclear-armed Iran.
We’ve Been Going Down This Path For a While
The public should not view this war as a spontaneous event— it is exactly the opposite. Operation Epic Fury (the current conflict) and last summer’s joint U.S-Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities have been inevitable since 2018 because of the geopolitical environment. The first Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the JCPOA destroyed the only long-term, functional constraint on Iran’s nuclear program.
Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to restrict its uranium enrichment to 3.67%, keep its uranium stockpile under 300kg, and submit to comprehensive compliance checks by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for sanctions relief and billions in U.S-controlled frozen assets. After Trump withdrew, Iran blew through these constraints, enriching uranium to 60% purity—near weapons-grade levels of 90%—and fortified its nuclear sites.
In this light, the recent strikes should not be viewed as an independent, one-off event. The current moment is the product of structural incentives on all sides to escalate the conflict. From Iran’s perspective, the credibility of the diplomatic instrument was entirely eroded after Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, Biden’s refusal to reenter the deal because of political reasons, and then ultimately last summer’s 12-Day-War that failed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
From the US/Israeli perspective, the structural incentive to escalate is equally clear: every round of diplomacy appeared to buy Iran time to advance its program. The JCPOA’s sunset clauses meant constraints were temporary, Iranian enrichment advances were alarming, their ballistic missile arsenal growing stronger, and their proxy network was stable (until October 7th and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2024). And domestically, no US president pays a price for being “tough on Iran” — the only cost is on the side of restraint.
From Israel’s perspective, the threat is most acute: Iran’s threshold status represented a closing window for military action, and every diplomatic process risks normalizing this. Israel actively sabotaged U.S-Iran negotiations: The 2021 negotiations with their covert operation on Iran’s Natanz facility, leading to Iran upping enrichment to 60%, constant pressure throughout Biden’s presidency not to reenter the deal, and in 2025 by lobbying against them.
Each military action that degrades but does not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program creates the justification for the next, while simultaneously hardening Iran’s resolve and posture. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle where each actor’s most rational response to the other makes the overall situation worse; a classic collective action problem.
Iran hedges toward weaponization because diplomacy has been repeatedly betrayed. Israel undermines diplomacy and pursues military action because any deal preserving enrichment capability is unacceptable and a nuclear Iran is an existential threat. The US, sharing Israel’s nonproliferation concerns but also needing regional stability, finds itself pulled between a diplomatic approach it won’t fully commit to and a military approach it can’t fully execute. Each actor’s logic is internally coherent, but the outcome it produces is not.
The elimination of the only diplomatic framework—the JCPOA—made military confrontation highly likely. The case for this confrontation was real: a regime enriching uranium to near weapons-grade levels, massacring thousands of its own citizens, sponsoring the world’s largest terrorism network, and stonewalling international inspectors.
This War Has Increased The Chance Iran Builds a Nuke
Yet, the military action that resulted will not solve the problem it was supposed to. These strikes degraded Iran’s infrastructure, but did not eliminate its capability and knowledge, and likely strengthened its motivation.
We know the strikes hit Natanz—one of Iran’s main nuclear facilities—but did not destroy its underground facility. The New York Times reported on March 7 that American intelligence agencies have determined Iran could retrieve its primary store of highly enriched uranium at Isfahan, which was entombed by US strikes last year but remains accessible through a narrow access point.
The bulk of Iran’s roughly 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium sits there — enough for multiple weapons if further enriched, a step officials acknowledge is relatively easy if Iran’s centrifuges are operational. And the backup enrichment site tunneled into the Zagros Mountains is still under construction and difficult to reach even with conventional U.S bunker-busters.
The head of the IAEA publicly confirmed 3 years ago what we’ve known for years: Iran has enough highly enriched uranium to build “several” nuclear weapons if it chooses to. The question is no longer “can we prevent them from acquiring the capability.” The question is what arrangement can we get Iran to agree to that meaningfully constrains their nuclear program, which is fundamentally a political and diplomatic issue. It cannot be solved by brute force.
This cycle of striking, then Iran rebuilding their program deeper and more dispersed, and striking again does not end without either a full-scale occupation of the country or a negotiated settlement. But Operation Epic Fury is distinctly not that, and the challenges that come with the U.S occupying a country of 90 million people are countless. The United States is not going to occupy Iran, and no serious person is proposing that it should.
Iran is Now Rallying Around Its Most Extreme Leaders, Making a Nuclear Bomb More Likely
The strikes likely will not solve the nuclear problem because they only prove what the most extreme factions of Iran’s leadership have been saying for years: the only reliable deterrent against American military action is possession of a nuclear weapon.
Ali Larijani, Iran’s Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council who is known internationally as a pragmatist who clashed with hardliners throughout his political career, said before the strikes that Iran would have “no choice” but to build a nuclear weapon if the US and Israel attacked them.
He stated on Iranian state TV that Iran is “not moving towards (nuclear) weapons, but if you do something wrong in the Iranian nuclear issue, you will force Iran to move towards that because it has to defend itself…Iran does not want to do this, but … (it) will have no choice.” This sort of rhetoric coming from a career pragmatist indicates that even Iran’s more moderate figures are feeling the pressure to cave to the hard-liners and build the bomb.
Keep in mind, Larijani said this before the strikes. Now the pragmatist position—demonstrated by statements from figures like Larijani— is publicly that Iran will sprint for a bomb in response to these attacks. The strikes demonstrated that threshold status does not protect you, that diplomatic engagement does not protect you, and that offering concessions does not protect you.
We are seeing this radicalization unfold in real-time, with Mojtaba Khamenei, son of former Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, officially emerging as the next Supreme Leader of Iran. Experts explain how the appointment of Mojtaba, who has fostered close ties with the IRGC throughout the years, would signal that the regime is embracing the position of hard-liners.
Meaning, the power of the group that begged former Ali Khamenei to revoke his religious prohibition against nuclear weapons and build the bomb is growing.
It is not as if this is some unforeseen scenario. Before the strikes, the CIA internally assessed that the death of Ayatollah Khameinei could lead to a replacement more aligned with the hard-liners in the IRGC.
Ali Khamenei was notably willing to compromise his religious convictions for the greater goal of regime survival: he defended the concept of nuclear concessions to the IRGC and famously issued a fatwa against the development of a nuclear bomb, despite IRGC commanders urging him to revoke it out of fear for the regime’s long-term survival. Khamenei’s reluctance to build a bomb was one of the few internal brakes on Iran’s nuclear program. Now he’s dead.
Countries that have abandoned their nuclear programs—Libya, Iraq, Ukraine—suffered catastrophic consequences, while the one state that kept them—North Korea—has never been invaded. Why wouldn’t Iran sprint for the bomb now? It’s not like there is much more realistic damage to be done by the U.N with the recent reimposition of the snapback sanctions further crippling Iran’s economy. Make no mistake, this is the lesson every Iranian decision-maker is internalizing right now.
Meanwhile, the strikes have also likely destroyed the best organic path to political change inside Iran. Weeks ago, the country experienced its largest protests since 1979 — a genuine domestic opposition was emerging. The bombing campaign handed the regime exactly what it lacked: a unifying external threat that transforms internal dissent into national betrayal.
Iranians who were chanting “death to the dictator” are now watching foreign bombs fall on their cities during Ramadan and mourning over 100 children killed by a U.S strike on a girls’ school in Minab. The regime’s legitimacy crisis has been temporarily rescued by the very operation supposedly conducted on behalf of the Iranian people.
The Geopolitical Opportunity Cost Is Too High
We are also not going to achieve regime change through a campaign of prolonged aerial warfare alone. Such an operation will further deplete our already limited stockpile of munitions and defense industrial base , which is especially costly while Beijing is eyeing an invasion of Taiwan and Moscow continues its assault on Ukraine.
The current operation, if prolonged, creates real constraints on our inventory. Bloomberg reported that the U.S stockpile of interceptors is already “dangerously low” after last year’s war on Iran, and Qatar and the UAE’s stock of U.S interceptors have been depleted, causing significant strategic vulnerabilities. Iran, on the other hand, can produce nearly 6,000 of its Shahed-136 “suicide drones” for a cost of $50,000 per unit, while the U.S faces much higher costs for its equipment: our Tomahawk missiles, for example, cost $2.2 million per piece.
Brynn Tannehill summarizes the issues with this cost asymmetry in The Atlantic: “Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing his military to be ready to successfully invade Taiwan by 2027…The war in Iran is likely advancing that timeline and increasing the odds that China will invade… In choosing this conflict with Iran, the United States privileged likely ephemeral gains against an adversary that was a marginal threat over deterrence of peer and near-peer adversaries that have the will and the means to profoundly endanger global stability.”
Despite Signs of Progress, The White House Never Took Diplomacy Seriously
The tragedy is that this was not the only path for us to take; far from it, in fact. We would not be here if Steve Witkoff, Trump’s chief negotiator and Special Envoy to the Middle East, did not torpedo negotiations with the Iranians.
First, the US and Witkoff insisted on maximalist demands that they knew Iran would not agree to. They demanded Iran simultaneously accept zero enrichment, elimination of their missile program, and a complete halt to all proxy support. According to Axios, Iran rejected permanently abandoning enrichment and transferring stockpiles abroad, but agreed to reduce their stockpile to low enrichment levels and to have it monitored under IAEA supervision.
Oman’s Foreign Minister Al-Busaidi, as I previously mentioned, told CBS on February 27th that Iran agreed to zero stockpiling, full IAEA verification, and an irreversible conversion of their existing uranium stockpiles into fuel with a political framework that could be finalized immediately and implemented within 90 days.
Al-Busaidi also publicly stated that Iran was willing to reduce uranium enrichment to levels even lower than what was required under the JCPOA — a more significant concession than anything Iran offered in 2015 or 2021. He claims they also put economic incentives on the table for the US, potentially opening Iranian rare earth, oil, and gas markets to American companies. Oman’s foreign ministry released a statement claiming the progress in the talks was “substantial, momentous, and unparalleled.”
Witkoff claims that Iranian negotiators “boasted” about 460kg of 60% enriched uranium and said they could make 11 bombs, and rejected a US proposal for zero enrichment for a decade with Washington paying for fuel. He claims that by the second meeting it was “very, very clear that it was going to be impossible.”
MS NOW, however, reported on March 3rd that a Persian Gulf diplomat with direct access to the talks stated that this was false: “‘I can categorically state that this is inaccurate,’ said the diplomat, referring to Witkoff’s account. ‘He was explaining that all of this material can all go away should we have a deal and Iran can be relieved from sanctions.’”
The talks between the Iranians and Americans face-to-face were also barely real – the first round in Muscat, the delegations met in person for around 5 minutes. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Aragchi, offered to stay in Oman for weeks to reach a deal, but Witkoff and Kushner insisted on leaving.
Witkoff’s account is irreconcilable with every other source. Al-Busaidi was speaking publicly, on the record, with Oman’s credibility as a neutral mediator at stake. Witkoff was speaking on Fox News after the strikes had already happened, serving the political function of justifying an operation already underway.
If Iran was really just boasting and stonewalling, why did Araghchi offer to stay in Muscat for one to two weeks to keep talking? Why did the Omani foreign ministry issue an official statement calling the progress “substantial, momentous, and unparalleled”? Why did al-Busaidi fly directly to Washington to brief Vance? Why were technical talks at the IAEA in Vienna scheduled for Monday?
None of that behavior is consistent with talks that were “impossible” by the second meeting. Yet, the U.S response to these overtures was still to bomb Tehran the next morning.
The notion that Iran would be willing to agree to a nuclear deal that severely restricts its nuclear activities, uranium stockpile, and actually comply with these conditions sounds far-fetched, until you realize we literally had this exact thing in place with the JCPOA. All of the public evidence indicates that the U.S abandoned the diplomatic option far too early, if it ever seriously believed in one at all.
How Iranian Resiliency Is Preventing the Development of a Real Endgame
Setting aside the remarkable diplomatic failure, the strikes themselves lack any coherent strategic endgame. There is an array of evidence supporting this point.
First, the coalition does not share an objective. Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert and senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, explained to the Financial Times that Israel’s strategy is to maximize chaos in Iranian society: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran.” He explains that this is a core asymmetry between the Israeli and American strategy: “That is a point of difference between us and the US. I think [Washington is] are more concerned about nation-building and threats to their regional partners.”
While the Israelis are pursuing total state death in Iran through the dissolution of its government, Trump has already raised the prospects of reviving the diplomatic process, publicly stating he is willing to play ball with the mullahs even after the strikes. Trump is weighing whether or not to pursue diplomatic off-ramp with the counterparty; Israel’s preferred outcome eliminates the counterparty. These visions are incompatible and reflect a lack of strategic coherence.
Second, even if there was unity in the objective of “destroy the IRGC and topple the clerical government,” this “objective” is not really an objective at all. It is wishcasting.
Arta Moeini, one of the premier scholars of Iran, makes this point eloquently: “Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic evolved from a crude revolutionary state into a highly resilient political system… a decentralized, hyper-institutionalized, horizontally organized state with multiple redundancies, overlapping factions, and a pervasive security apparatus. The IRGC branches and offshoots expanded into the civilian space, while religious foundations and quasi-governmental trusts mushroomed to create a parallel economy… The system wasn’t designed for efficiency, but to guarantee survival under relentless domestic and foreign pressure.”
Iran is not a personalist dictatorship like Russia, China, or North Korea. Moeini explains how just like the IRGC, the institution of the Supreme Leader itself is uniquely resilient, especially to decapitation strikes like we just saw: “The Islamic Republic is neither a monolith nor personality-driven. The regime treats individuals — leaders included — as expendable in service of its long-term survival. Indeed, the system is expressly designed to absorb loss… Quasi-totalitarian Iran is not Saddam’s Iraq in 2003, or Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, or even Chavist Venezuela under Maduro”
So when we say our goal is to “destroy the IRGC,” what do we mean? The IRGC is not just a military organization we can bomb out of existence. It runs businesses, banks, construction companies, universities, media outlets; it is woven into the social and economic fabric of the country. You can kill commanders and hit headquarters, but the institution regenerates because it is the state. Destroying the IRGC means destroying the state, and destroying the state of 90 million people without a ground invasion or any transition plan is fantasy.
Sen. Mark Warner, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, explained how the White House’s public justifications for the strikes keep shifting: “You know, the president a week ago said this was about Iran’s nuclear activities, which he had claimed had been obliterated seven months ago. He then switched to saying this is about Iran’s ballistic missile capacity. And now, in the last 36 hours, he says it’s about regime change. You know, why are these sons and daughters now casualties – some of them – in harm’s way? What is the essential criteria for America being in this war?”
The difficulty in formulating a White House endgame lies in the IRGC’s ability to absorb tactical losses. Whether it is the nuclear infrastructure in Isfahan and uranium Iran may still have access to, the replenishable stock of ballistic missiles, or the survival of the clerical leadership, each U.S. objective faces a hard ceiling. Sinking warships or hitting launchers provides a high short-term return on investment, but since air power cannot achieve regime change, these actions remain untethered to a long-term political solution
Sen. Ruben Gallego hit the nail on the head: “We don’t actually have a concept of victory. Our justification for going into the war is entirely different from what we’re hearing from the president right now… if we don’t know how we can get out of this war, if we don’t know what the actual victory is, we’re seeing potentially a long-term war.”
The American public’s appetite for this war will only decrease with rising oil and gas prices, more American casualties, and another prolonged entanglement in a foreign conflict. It does not help that the White House has not presented the case for this war to the public or Congress in the traditional manner. With midterms approaching and a growing segment of the electorate weary of unconditional support for regional escalations, especially in partnership with Israel, the political capital required to sustain “Operation Epic Fury” is evaporating just as the mission becomes most dangerous.
Citrinowicz explains how Iran is capitalizing on our serial short-termism: “there is a coherent strategic perception that places the idea of long-term resilience at the center…the leadership in Tehran assesses that its capacity for absorption and persistence is higher than that of its adversaries…In this sense, the Iranian strategy relies less on a swift military decision and more on the cumulative attrition of the other side, based on the assumption that time ultimately works in its favor.”
The result of all that I have described is the “middle ground of doom”: a strategic twilight where our strikes were too severe to permit a diplomatic return to the status quo, yet too shallow to uproot the regime or its nuclear ambitions. The question was never whether force against Iran is morally or legally justified. It is whether force employed in this specific, indecisive manner does anything other than accelerate our own strategic exhaustion. It does not seem so.
There is Still A Way Out, If Policymakers Choose It
Where does this leave us? I do not believe Operation Epic Fury is necessarily all for naught. There is a politically and strategically feasible off-ramp that exists, albeit with some costs.
First, the priority for US policymakers now must be pursuing an immediate cessation of all hostilities through a negotiated settlement. This war is producing a variety of moral, financial, strategic, and geopolitical costs that are compounding daily — munitions depletion, Gulf State infrastructure damage, disruptions to the global energy market, and the deaths of civilians and American soldiers. Most importantly, every second we are still at war empowers the hardliners we least want in power. The window for any diplomatic outcome is closing as fast as Mojtaba Khamenei’s succession consolidates.
Second, The Economist’s point that an American withdrawal at this point in the war legitimizes Iran’s strategy of attacking the Gulf States to deter American action against their government is legitimate. Signaling to Tehran that they have the ability to bombard its neighbors to get America to stop attacking them is a terrible precedent that deeply threatens the stability of West Asia. I anticipate that this will be one of the most consequential changes to Iran’s security doctrine.
But at the same time, America continuing a costly war with no endgame is also a risky gamble, for all the reasons I’ve articulated here. The US may simply need to eat this cost and compensate for it through increased Gulf security commitment and integrated air defense architecture; the unfortunate thing about poorly executed wars of attrition are that no exit options are perfect.
Third, the US must leverage our demonstrated military supremacy into an internally consistent negotiating position; essentially apply the textbook definition of coercive diplomacy. America has done significant damage to its conventional military infrastructure — sinking Iranian warships, degrading its ballistic missile and air defense systems, damaging its nuclear facilities — and systematically eliminated swaths of its political leadership in one of the most impressive displays of intelligence warfare in human history.
Despite not solving the underlying political problems, these capabilities do not simply go away once the bombing stops. America’s capability for force is not in question and may even be stronger than previously conceived. The message to Tehran, then, must be that the U.S has this force, is willing to use it, and you are condemned to repeat this cycle if you refuse to negotiate. Iran’s leadership may publicly signal an unwillingness to negotiate, but the threat of death, national destabilization, and armed Kurdish militias in Western Iran are things they’d wish to avoid.
The U.S can use the fact that this is looking like a war of attrition to its advantage as long as it commits to reviving the diplomatic instrument. Nobody wants a genuinely destructive and prolonged regional war, making it a solid starting point for a renewed negotiation process.
Fourth, the terms of any new deal have to be realistic and built with an international architecture. Witkoff and American negotiators need to drop the maximalist demands and actually come to the table: a JCPOA-style agreement that secures limited enrichment, international inspection, and calm to the region is significantly better than the alternative. To restore Iranian trust in the process, the talks should be multilateral: include European co-signatories and restore JCPOA-era Security Council enforcement mechanisms. This deal should be negotiated so it is structurally harder for any U.S president to tear it up on a whim.
Conclusion
Leverage, however, is finite. If we continue this war and wear out our military’s bandwidth but the Iranian regime proves to be resilient, our negotiating position greatly weakens. If we refuse to take the diplomatic route, the evidence suggests Iran will take this time to consolidate, rebuild, and finally learn the lesson that only the bomb can deter Epic Fury-like attacks from taking place.
Farah Jan, a senior I.R. lecturer at UPenn, notes that while every coercive step since 2018 was framed as restoring leverage, each has produced the opposite: “eliminating diplomatic off-ramps and accelerating the very threats it aimed to contain.” There is no choice but to break this cycle, or we risk condemning ourselves, our allies, and the 90 million people inhabiting Iran to a less secure and prosperous future.
