New U.S. Strikes on
#Iran: Coercive Diplomacy or A New Round of War?
🔹By now, it has become clear that coercive diplomacy is not the reason – or at least not the only reason – behind the repeated U.S. strikes on southern Iran. The choice of the targets, together with the political signaling accompanying them, suggests that there is an attempt to erode Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and open the strait through military means.
🔹On the one hand, the strikes over the past week, especially in the past two days, have been concentrated on Iranian air defense systems, command-and-control centers, facilities related to the Iranian Navy’s drone operations, and radar systems.
🔹On the other hand, Donald Trump admitted openly for the first time that the United States has been helping ships pass through the strait over the past month and has thereby contributed to increasing the flow of oil to global markets.
🔹Taken together, these developments suggest that the Trump administration wants, on the one hand, to operationally weaken Iran’s ability to target shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and, on the other hand, to signal at the highest political level that the security situation around the strait is improving, thereby reassuring shipping companies.
🔹At the same time, it has become clear that the Iranian responses, in the form of targeting U.S. bases around the Persian Gulf, have not had any meaningful deterrent effect vis-à-vis the United States. Rather, the United States appears to have calculated that the benefits of continuing these strikes outweigh the costs.
🔹This has led to different conclusions and proposals within Iran’s strategic community. On the one hand, there are criticisms that Tehran has become too cautious and too predictable in its response to the United States. This, critics argue, has allowed the adversary to make a reliable assessment of the costs and benefits of escalation and to confidently plan its targeting of Iranian territory.
🔹The suggestion is that Iran needs to become more risk-taking and less predictable in its responses by, on the one hand, acting directly against the U.S. naval presence in the region and its warships and, on the other hand, targeting energy infrastructure in the region so that Trump’s strategy of reassuring the energy markets will not succeed.
🔹 On the other hand, there are warnings that these developments may be part of a broader pattern of preparations for a new large-scale war coordinated between the United States and Israel. The argument is that, just as the United States has concentrated on targeting Iranian air defense systems and radar installations in the south, Israel, in its latest strikes, targeted the same types of facilities in central Iran. Together, they may be weakening Iran’s defenses in order to secure a free hand in a new round of large-scale war.
🔹Overall, this is why the ceasefire, which has now been reduced to little more than a name, appears not to have brought any meaningful benefits for Tehran, and the process of rethinking the country’s strategic options seems already to be underway.