After six months of war with Donald Trump, Iran can claim to have seized one significant advantage: Washington is increasingly fighting at a pace set by Tehran.
Over the past two weeks, Tehran has taken the initiative, launching pre-emptive attacks designed to exhaust the US and frighten its Arab allies into acquiescing to Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
It struck against an American military installation in Jordan, breaking a lull in the fighting last week with a surprise attack. Iran and its regional proxies have widened the theatre of conflict, disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, striking Syria for the first time and being suspected of a drone attack on Egypt.
“What we have seen in the last week is a much higher risk appetite to pre-emptively up the ante rather than always be reactionary,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, who argues that Iran views a return to full-scale fighting with Israel and the US as increasingly inevitable.
Tehran’s gamble is that it can either deter the American president Trump from resuming major combat operations — by indicating how Iran could escalate the conflict — or outlast the US in a lengthy war of attrition.
“It is a taste of the regional ramifications that would come,” said Geranmayeh, adding Iran was using its attacks “as a signal to the Americans that while the US and Israel started this war, they are not going to be the decisive party in how it ends”.
Trump has been considering the resumption of a major bombing campaign in recent days while mediators worked to prevent a return to full-blown war. On Saturday night Trump said that the US, despite being “locked and loaded and ready to go”, would cancel its planned attack at the request of Middle Eastern allies. He said a deal with Iran was potentially close.
Tehran and Washington had appeared to be pulling back from all-out war in June when they signed a memorandum to cease fighting, negotiate a peace settlement and reopen the strategic Strait of Hormuz seized by Iran during fighting that followed strikes by Israel and the US in February.
But the settlement collapsed after Iran struck several ships seeking to sneak through the waterway, with both sides disputing how to interpret the ceasefire terms. Trump ordered a wave of retaliatory strikes, prompting cycles of fighting with Iran peppering the region with missile and drone fire and the US bombarding southern Iran.
Analysts said Iran, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the ascendant, had decided to go on the offensive to underline that continued fighting would be costly in both military and economic terms for Trump and the rest of the Middle East.
“There is consensus within Iran that, in the current circumstances, negotiating with the Americans is futile,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Iran analyst with Israeli military intelligence. “They are not going to capitulate and they are highlighting the price that everybody will pay, if they are attacked.”
But the emboldened Iranian approach reflects deeper changes in Tehran after the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “This is the new Iran,” Citrinowicz added. “They believe that this is the time to use the capabilities that they have.”
Having gained the initiative, Iran is now seeking to reshape the conflict to its advantage, according to observers of the regime.
“They escalate with an end result in mind, which is to control American behaviour and force the US to recalculate its options,” said Vali Nasr, an expert on Iranian strategic thinking at Johns Hopkins University. “This will be a regional war and the US will not have the luxury of choosing its battlefields.”
Iran’s military commanders also arguably saw a window of opportunity to again demonstrate control over the strait, addressing any uncertainty arising from the signing of the memorandum.
“They decided: ‘We have to be aggressive. If we are going to do this, then the best time is now,’” said Farzan Sabet, an analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute, adding that figures in Tehran saw worsening disruption on worldwide energy markets and the forthcoming US midterm elections as pressure points affecting White House wartime calculations.
The approach has not gone unnoticed in Washington. “Their strategy is to make the campaign so economically and politically untenable for the US that we back off,” said Karen Gibson, who formerly oversaw intelligence for American forces in the Middle East. She added that the tactic could work over the longer term.
One mark of this second phase of the war has been Iran’s willingness to broaden the battlefield even further across the Middle East, including through aligned militant groups in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.
“Iran and its clients see blood in the water and see a benefit for all of them in escalating and entering the fray,” said Afshon Ostovar, an expert on the IRGC. “This happens to benefit Iran, but it also benefits them individually,” he added.
Both militant groups have struck Saudi Arabia, a big energy exporter, with the Houthis also seeking to throttle Saudi shipping in the Red Sea and threatening the narrow passageway at the Bab el-Mandeb strait. This has sent energy prices surging as Iran extends its blockade of maritime chokepoints beyond the Strait of Hormuz.
On Thursday, in another sign that Iran could push the conflict further, a drone, whose source has not been identified, slammed into an American-owned vessel in northern Egypt. It had been on the dockside at Damietta, close to the Suez Canal.
“This is about strangling shipping,” said Michael Connell, an Iran analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses. “There are three critical maritime shipping lanes in the region: the Bab el-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. They have now expanded attacks on to or close to all three critical chokepoints.”
Analysts suggested Iran increasingly believed it could use escalation to achieve a wider sweep of wartime objectives.
“Iran is expecting a very long war,” said Nasr, adding Iran no longer viewed a negotiated settlement as feasible. “They are following a very methodological strategy of forcing the US as far away from Iran as possible: out of the Gulf, Syria, Iraq, and having them holed up in Israel and Jordan.”
Iran has intensified strikes against Kuwait and Bahrain in recent weeks. It has forced Washington to reposition soldiers and airmen, who once relied on a necklace of vulnerable bases across the Gulf, further afield to Jordan, Israel and beyond.
There has been anger and frustration in Jordan, a stalwart American partner under heavy fire in recent weeks, where hundreds of activists and public figures signed an open letter demanding an American withdrawal.
“The Iranians are selectively expanding this to try and shake down the region to get people to either bend the knee and break from the US, or pressure the US to bend the knee,” said Dana Stroul, a former senior Pentagon official who worked on the Middle East.
Iran may miscalculate how far it can push Washington and Trump without inviting massive retaliation. Tehran was also unlikely to match the intensity with which it waged war in late February or early March, Ostovar said.
“This escalation is more about prolonging the conflict rather than making it more damaging,” said Ostovar, adding the IRGC saw winning as a zero-sum calculation. “Iran sees its enemies as not having the political stomach for a long fight, and so the longer it continues, the weaker the resolve of their enemies will be. That is how they see it.”
But there are factors beyond the battlefield. “They are not invincible,” said Sabet, of the Geneva Graduate Institute, noting that Iranian confidence can begin to erode as its already catastrophic economic outlook worsens. “There might well be a point where their calculus is forced to change.”
Cartography by Steven Bernard
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