Why a weakened Iran is insisting on prolonging the war

Even as Iran confronts the gravest threat to its regime yet, it is signaling a willingness to prolong its conflict with the United States and Israel in a bid to finally reshape the region in its favor. Iran’s regime has endured devastating losses over the past few weeks, with near daily US-Israeli strikes eliminating entire tiers of its leadership and military command structure. The Iranian population, already worn down by years of economic hardship, sanctions and mismanagement, now faces the added burdens of wartime shortages, infrastructure damage and an increasingly militarized domestic environment. Yet amid a real risk of regime collapse, the Islamic Republic’s surviving leaders have continued projecting an escalatory rhetoric. They have repeatedly touted Iran’s capacity to endure pain, its indifference to further leadership losses and an explicit intent to drag out the war – all while wreaking havoc regionally and globally. Despite demands by US President Donald Trump for “total surrender,” Iran’s surviving leadership has instead cast itself as having prevailed, laying out a maximalist price for peace. It has demanded a new regional “status quo,” war reparations and a shift in the decades-old alliances between Gulf Arab states and the US. “A ceasefire only becomes logical if it guarantees that the war will not resume, not if it gives the enemy an opportunity to fix its problems, such as repairing destroyed radars or addressing shortages in interceptor missiles, only to attack us again,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker and one of Iran’s highest-ranking surviving officials. “We will continue fighting until the enemy truly regrets its aggression, and until the appropriate political and security conditions are established in the world and the region,” he told Al Araby Al-Jadeed news outlet on Monday. Iran has demanded that after the war there must be a “new protocol” for the Strait of Hormuz with consideration to “Iran’s interest” and insisted that safe passage for ships should take place under “specific conditions,” the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera on Tuesday. Tehran may even go as far as demanding the unfreezing of sanctioned assets abroad or charging a toll for countries using the narrow maritime corridor that lies off the coast of Iran in international waters, analysts say. “The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status,” Ghalibaf wrote on X Tuesday.

Pressure for the ‘day after’

After more than two decades of negotiations between the West and the Islamic Republic, the US and Israel attacked Iran late last month, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and severely degrading the country’s military and civilian command. Tehran’s retaliation was swift and ferocious. It continuously unleashed hundreds of missiles and drones against US allies across the region – straining ties with its Arab neighbors – and disrupted global energy markets through repeated attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. “The goal is to translate that pressure into a ‘day after’ outcome,” said Sina Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy. “Iran is seeking a horizon in which it is no longer isolated or targeted for collapse, but instead part of a new regional equilibrium where its stability is seen as tied to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the global economy,” Toossi told CNN. Over the past weeks, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has repeatedly maintained that Iran is losing the war. Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday that Iran’s military is “decimated” and their leaders at “virtually every level” are gone. “Never to threaten us, our Middle Eastern Allies, or the World, again,” he wrote. Hours later, Iran launched its 61st wave of strikes on the Middle East, killing a couple in Israel. “In conventional military terms, (Iran) is not winning, but they don’t have to win that way,” Narges Bajoghli, associate professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University told CNN, adding that Iran’s “entire strategy is based on asymmetrical warfare where they make it costly to continue the war.” The US and Gulf Arab countries cannot “indefinitely tolerate” disrupted oil trade and rising prices, Bajoghli said. “At what point are they going to say ‘enough’? Those are the levers that Iran is pushing on.”

Contingency plans

Anticipating an attack after decades of hostility with Israel and the US, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had developed contingency plans to activate decentralized units during times of conflict, according to senior Iranian officials. “We prepared ourselves for a long war because we knew we were going to be attacked, and based on the experience of the previous war, we knew how they intended to neutralize our operational capabilities. Therefore, we devised countermeasures for all of them,” Ghalibaf told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. Despite publicly claiming to target only US interests in the region, the IRGC carried out unprecedented deadly strikes on civilian and economic infrastructure, hitting hotels, international airports, high-rise buildings and energy facilities in Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Iran’s rapid and unprecedented escalation against Arab states signaled an aggressive bid to impose a transformed regional reality built on future deterrence. “There is a whole new generation of IRGC commanders that have come up because of the US and Israel’s decapitation strikes against the former guard,” Bajoghli said, noting that the new generation has seen Iran “deploy real regional power” in Iraq and Syria and “that shapes everything about how they calculate risk and confrontation.” Iran’s strategy now centers around tying its fate to the wider region, Toossi said. “If Iran cannot be stable and economically viable, it is signaling that the wider Persian Gulf system will not be stable either. Recent disruptions to shipping and energy markets underscore just how powerful that lever is.”

‘Collapse’ of the American regional order?

Iran’s army spokesperson Amir Akraminia said on Wednesday that five decades of an American-led regional order in the Middle East has “collapsed today.” Whether Iran’s regional strategy will succeed remains unclear. So far, most of its Arab neighbors have stayed out of the war despite facing a barrage of attacks from Tehran. But at least two Gulf officials have said that their country will double down on its relationship with the US, and even Israel. “I think in the circle of the Gulf, Iran is being seen as the main threat. And I think nothing is going to change that for decades to come,” Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, told the Council on Foreign Relations think tank on Tuesday. Gargash said the UAE is open to joining a coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, adding that Iran’s war strategy has “misconceptions,” and in the aftermath of the war, Gulf states may grow closer to Israel. Reem Al-Hashimy, the country’s minister for international cooperation, told Australia’s ABC network that Iran’s attack on her country will not change the dynamics of Abu Dhabi’s agreements with the US and Israel. “Our relationship with the US is a longstanding strategic partnership. It’s a partnership that doesn’t falter in moments of crisis, but has been built on decades of trust and mutual respect,” Al-Hashimy said, adding that “this doesn’t deter us, because we’re also a resilient bunch, and we don’t take to being bullied around, either.” Yet for Iran’s current regime, its endgame is not victory but survival, restoring deterrence and attempting to regain power to dictate terms of what comes after the war. “The endgame is not escalation for its own sake. It is using escalation as a means to force accommodation,” Toossi said. “Iran does not need to win this war militarily. It needs to ensure that continuing it becomes too costly for everyone else.” SOURCE: CNN