On the morning of February 27, Oman's Foreign Minister flew directly to Washington for an unscheduled meeting with Vice President JD Vance. He carried what mediators believed was a genuine opening: after months of deadlock, US-Iran nuclear talks had quietly produced the outline of a deal. He left empty-handed. Less than 24 hours later, American and Israeli forces were conducting coordinated strikes across Iran.
The speed of that reversal — from apparent diplomatic progress to open war in a single day — has led many observers to conclude that conflict was always inevitable, that the negotiations were theater. That reading is too simple, and too convenient. What happened was not fate. It was a decision, shaped by incomplete intelligence, broken trust accumulated over decades, and the lobbying of two allies who each, for their own reasons, needed the United States to act.
Understanding how that decision was made — and what it has set in motion — requires looking honestly at each actor's strategic logic. None of them wanted exactly the war they got. All of them helped produce it. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
How the War Was Chosen
Trump had issued his "March 6" ultimatum on February 19, but few believed he would actually pull the trigger while negotiations were still moving. Bloomberg reported that his team remained divided even during the February 24 State of the Union address. The internal debate turned on a single intelligence disagreement: American analysts assessed Iran's nuclear progress as limited and manageable; Israeli intelligence considered the threat urgent and the window for action closing fast. Some senior US officials cautioned explicitly against outsourcing threat assessments to Jerusalem.
What broke the deadlock was not intelligence — it was impatience. After the third round of nuclear talks on February 26, Trump was briefed that a short-term agreement was within reach but would leave Iran's missile program and its regional proxy network entirely untouched. That framing — a deal that solved the least dangerous part of the problem while leaving the rest intact — was politically toxic for an administration already being pulled rightward on Iran by its most hawkish advisers. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
Saudi Arabia appeared to discourage action publicly while privately encouraging it. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly warned that if America did not act now, Iran would only grow stronger.
The Washington Post has since reported that the decisive factor was not American intelligence at all, but parallel lobbying from Israel and Saudi Arabia over the preceding weeks. Israel's pressure was public and relentless. Saudi Arabia's was more carefully calibrated — discouraging action in official channels while privately signaling support. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly warned American interlocutors that a nuclear-armed or further emboldened Iran would be a far greater threat to regional stability than the costs of acting now. When the leader of the Arab world's largest economy quietly tells Washington the same thing Netanyahu has been saying loudly for years, it moves the needle.
The result was a war that no single actor fully designed but that multiple actors actively enabled — each calculating that someone else would bear the largest share of the costs.
Israel: When Security Becomes Non-Negotiable
For Israel, the Gaza war did not end the threat from Iran — it clarified it. Two years of costly urban warfare, a military campaign in Lebanon, the Twelve-Day War against Iran itself in June 2025: all of it, in Israel's strategic assessment, had degraded but not broken the architecture of encirclement that Tehran had spent decades building.
Iran's nuclear knowledge survived the Twelve-Day War intact. Its uranium stockpile remains opaque. Even after strikes on missile manufacturing facilities, Israeli estimates put Iran's usable missile inventory at over 1,000. Hezbollah, gutted at the leadership level and driven from the center of Lebanese politics, continues to appoint new commanders and rebuild its arsenal — and can still fire rockets into northern Israel. Hamas, having lost roughly half of Gaza's territory and two successive leaders, still governs most of Gaza's population and has demonstrated an almost biological capacity to reconstitute itself. If Trump's peace framework remains deadlocked, Hamas can plausibly declare its survival a victory, and mean it. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
The Gaza war also produced a profound psychological and political shift inside Israel that Western commentary has been slow to absorb. Before October 7, 2023, Israeli security doctrine rested on a quietly shared assumption: the threats were manageable, the borders containable, the next conflict a matter of when rather than whether. "Mowing the grass" — periodic airstrikes to degrade Hamas's capabilities, supplemented by Iron Dome — was not a solution but it was, at least, sustainable.
"Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" shattered that assumption completely. Over 1,000 Hamas fighters crossed the border in a single morning, under Iranian coordination, while Hezbollah pinned down Israel's northern flank and the Houthis fired missiles from Yemen. The image of Israel not as a regional military superpower but as a besieged state — encircled, surprised, vulnerable — burned itself into Israeli public consciousness in ways that no subsequent military success has fully erased. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
The shift in Israeli public opinion reflects a single underlying conviction: self-restraint and territorial concessions do not produce peace. They invite further aggression.
The political consequences have been systematic and durable. In July 2024, the Knesset passed a resolution explicitly rejecting Palestinian statehood on any land west of the Jordan River. In November 2025, centrist opposition leader Benny Gantz — not a figure from the nationalist fringe — called for a return to what he termed "1948 thinking": shifting from conflict management to preemptive elimination of threats. After nationwide protests erupted in Iran in January 2026, Netanyahu's security cabinet approved "Operation Iron Strike" — a plan for future strikes on Iran that appears to have been the blueprint for the current campaign.
I attended a lecture in Israel in May 2025 by Robert Aumann, the Nobel economics laureate, on applying game theory to the Israeli-Hamas conflict. His argument was a precise articulation of what has become Israeli mainstream thinking: Israel's past restraint — withdrawing from Gaza settlements under international pressure, agreeing to lopsided prisoner exchanges — taught Hamas exactly the wrong lessons. It learned that sustained pressure would eventually force Israeli concessions, and that hostages had enormous leverage. October 7 was the logical conclusion of those signals.
Israel's strategic problem is that it cannot solve the Iran problem alone. In both the Gaza war and the Twelve-Day War, Israel ultimately stood down under American pressure before achieving its stated objectives. This is precisely why Netanyahu lobbied Trump so aggressively during the negotiations: even without American ground forces, joint airstrikes bind the United States to the conflict and delay its transition from combatant to mediator — extending the window in which Israeli military objectives might be achieved. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
America: The Gamble Behind the Gamble
The United States and Israel share a threat assessment but not a strategic priority. For Israel, eliminating the Iranian threat is existential and non-negotiable. For Washington, Iran is one challenge among many — real, but not necessarily urgent enough to warrant a war whose costs would reverberate across every other theater of American foreign policy. This is why Trump 2.0 began with relative restraint: restarting nuclear negotiations in March 2025, quickly declaring victory after the June bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, hesitating repeatedly before February 28.
What ultimately tipped the balance was not a new intelligence finding or a change in Iranian behavior. It was the convergence of two longstanding American pathologies around
Iran: commitment problems and incomplete information.
The commitment problem has a long history. American hawks have argued for decades that any agreement with Iran is strategically worthless — that Tehran will pocket concessions, continue its nuclear and proxy programs, and exploit diplomatic cover to buy time. That argument was suppressed during the Obama years, long enough to produce the 2015 nuclear deal, but it was never defeated. Under Trump 1.0 it became policy: unilateral withdrawal from the deal in 2018, maximum pressure, and the killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
The paradox is that maximum pressure did not produce Iranian capitulation. It produced Iran's mirror-image conviction: that agreements with the United States are worthless, that showing restraint only invites more pressure, and that the only protection is a nuclear deterrent and a regional proxy network capable of threatening American interests. Biden inherited this deadlock and could not break it. The October 2023 attacks then destroyed whatever remaining domestic political space existed for a softer approach.
The gamble rests on a chain of assumptions, each one requiring the next to be true. Avoiding ground forces might prevent an Iraq-style quagmire, but it also means the US cannot replicate what it actually achieved in Iraq — however imperfectly.
Trump's bet is built on incomplete information about what military action can actually achieve. The core of the strategy is a leadership decapitation gamble: kill Khamenei and enough of the succession, and Iran may descend into the kind of chaos that produces regime change or at least a fundamental policy shift — without requiring American ground forces, and without the endless occupation that destroyed the political case for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
This is not an implausible scenario. It is simply one that rests on a chain of assumptions, each requiring the next to be true. Avoiding ground forces might prevent an Iraq-style quagmire, but it also means the US cannot replicate what it actually achieved in Iraq — however imperfectly — which was direct control over the successor political arrangement. The relationship between military investment and political return is not linear; minimizing the former tends to minimize the latter. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
The domestic political arithmetic is also working against Trump with unusual speed. A Reuters-Ipsos poll ending March 1 showed only 27% of Americans supporting airstrikes on Iran, with 43% opposed. Among Republican voters — Trump's base — 55% support the strikes, but 42% say they would withdraw support if it led to US military casualties, and 45% if it drove up gasoline prices. Most significantly, Trump's approval rating has fallen since the war began, dropping to 39%. Preemptive military action may boost Israeli approval ratings; it does not work the same way in American domestic politics.
With midterm elections approaching, Democrats will not miss this opening. Even within the Republican establishment, figures who view China and Russia as the primary strategic threats will struggle to accept being drawn back into a Middle Eastern war on Israel's and Saudi Arabia's behalf. As the conflict lengthens, Trump's central challenge will not be logistics or ammunition stockpiles. It will be the politics of a war whose costs are becoming visible faster than its benefits.
This creates a brutal time constraint. Whatever the original objectives were — regime change, a reformed Iranian government, meaningful new concessions — Trump now needs to be able to claim some version of success before domestic political pressure forces a withdrawal. The gap between what military action can realistically deliver and what Trump needs to be able to announce may prove to be the war's defining problem.
Iran: Defiance Built on a Crumbling Foundation
Tehran did not stumble into this war in a single misjudgment. It walked into it across 2 years of accumulated miscalculations, the most consequential of which was its reading of the regional chessboard before October 2023. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
Iran's greatest diplomatic achievement in the years preceding the Gaza war was its reconciliation with Saudi Arabia. But this was less a genuine rapprochement than a Saudi strategic retreat — Riyadh, under pressure from Iran's Axis of Resistance and eager to focus on Vision 2030, had opted to reduce tensions rather than contest them. Tehran appears to have read this as a sign that Arab solidarity, or at least Arab neutrality, was available if Israel's retaliation against Gaza became severe enough. The strategy behind "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" was partly about derailing Saudi-Israeli normalization talks, but it also seems to have rested on the assumption that the Arab world would not actively side with Israel and America against Iran.
That assumption proved catastrophically wrong. Without meaningful American red lines, Israeli retaliation in Gaza had no effective ceiling — each supposed limit became the floor for the next escalation. Gulf states, constrained by domestic public sympathy for Palestinians but unwilling to court Iranian favor at the expense of their American security relationships, kept their distance from Tehran. As the three-way competition between the US, Israel, and Iran intensified, the Gulf states made their alignment choice — privately providing military intelligence during the Twelve-Day War, supporting Trump's peace framework, and now, following Iran's indiscriminate retaliation, jointly condemning Tehran rather than Washington. The Washington Post's report that Saudi Arabia actively lobbied for strikes is consistent with everything else we know about Riyadh's calculus. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
Iran's current response — sweeping strikes against Gulf state infrastructure, direct attacks on US bases, aggressive Strait of Hormuz interference — has the appearance of strength. It is, in reality, a high-risk gamble driven by necessity. The assassination of the Supreme Leader demands a response that can restore some semblance of deterrence and national honor. But the tools Iran is using to make that response are the same tools it will need for any prolonged confrontation, and they are not unlimited.
Iran's banking system has effectively become a nationwide Ponzi scheme. The financial storm was already brewing before the first missile fell on February 28.
The deeper problem is that Iran enters this conflict with its domestic foundations already cracking. A decade of compounding crises — sanctions erosion of oil revenues, endemic corruption entrenched by Revolutionary Guard commercial networks, massive government debt, capital flight, and a banking system that has evolved into something close to a nationwide Ponzi scheme — has produced a state of chronic economic fragility. The rial has been in freefall. In late 2025, frozen overseas assets triggered a financial storm that ignited bazaar protests, which followed the now-familiar Iranian escalation pattern: street unrest, student mobilization, urban middle class, demands for regime change. The government suppressed it. It did not resolve it. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
Negotiating for sanctions relief is therefore not a matter of ideological preference for Iranian governments — it is an economic imperative, differing across administrations only in how much Tehran is willing to concede. This is why, even through the Gaza war and the Twelve-Day War, Iran never fully closed the nuclear negotiation window. Military force alone cannot defeat Iran; but repeated economic pressure combined with internal political instability gives the US and Israel tools that do not require boots on the ground.
The bitter irony of Iran's current position is that its most aggressive response may worsen its long-term strategic standing. The reconciliation with Saudi Arabia — years in the making — is now in retreat. The UAE has closed its Tehran embassy. If the conflict continues, the Gulf may return to the full-throated "Iranian threat" consensus of a decade ago, except that the Iran facing that consensus is now war-damaged, economically strained, and diplomatically isolated in ways it was not before. Even if Tehran successfully weathers this assault, what it will likely inherit is a more intractable version of the same crisis: heavier sanctions, frozen negotiations, a domestic economy pushed closer to the edge, and an opposition movement that knows the regime's vulnerability better than ever.
A Chain Predicament With No Clear Exit
What is striking about this conflict, viewed in full, is how thoroughly each actor's strategic logic — individually coherent, even rational — has combined to produce an outcome that serves none of them well. （Related： US-Israel Strategic Misalignment Could Shape Trajectory of Iran Conflict, Experts Warn ｜ Latest ）
Israel needed to eliminate the Iranian threat but cannot do so alone, and has now bound an increasingly reluctant America to a war with unpredictable endpoints. The United States needed either a durable diplomatic framework or a decisive military result, and may get neither — risking the worst of both worlds: the costs of war without the strategic clarity that would justify them. Saudi Arabia wanted Iran weakened without being directly involved in the fighting, but now finds its infrastructure targeted and its regional stability at risk. And Iran, having spent years building a network of proxies and a nuclear program as instruments of deterrence and leverage, has watched those instruments used as justifications for the very assault it was trying to deter.
The academic literature on war termination would describe this as a situation shaped by commitment problems and issue indivisibility — neither side able to credibly promise compliance with any agreement, and the core issues too entangled with national identity and regime survival to be traded away at a negotiating table. That analysis is correct as far as it goes. But it understates the role of human agency: the lobbyists who worked the phones, the intelligence assessment that was selectively credited, the foreign minister who flew to Washington and was turned away, the president who chose a gamble over a compromise.
Wars that emerge from this kind of multi-actor entanglement tend to end not in clean victories but in exhausted truces — pauses that allow each side to claim enough to survive politically, while leaving the underlying dynamics intact. The Middle East has seen this pattern before. The question now is not whether the current conflict will eventually de-escalate. It will. The question is what the landscape looks like when it does, and whether anyone will be in a position to build something more durable on the rubble.
The answer, at the moment, is not obvious. What is clear is that the chain of decisions that produced this war has not been broken — only extended.
*The author is International Commentary Chief Writer at HK01. This article was originally published in HK01 and is republished with authorization.
