🇮🇱🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 Let's take a step back and consider the bigger picture.

Strategic goals on day one of the war:
• Israel: eliminate Iran and Hezbollah as threats to Israel
• Iran: survive, deter future aggression

Fast forward to today, six weeks in, and it's obvious the Israeli war effort has failed. Their ideal state for Iran is Balkanization, or a second Syria, unable to mount any cohesive efforts against Israel. But the Iranian state remains stable, the regime change attempts failed. The IDF again failed to do more than push a few miles into Lebanon. Whatever the Israelis were attempting to do to destroy Hezbollah with the cooperation of the Lebanese government also seems to have failed. And Hezbollah seems much stronger than anyone assumed before this conflict.

The Israeli ability to achieve these goals hinged on sucking the US into maximal commitment in war against Iran. A second GWOT would have been ideal, with the US bogged down in Iran for years or even decades. At the moment, this too seems to have failed.

While Iran has suffered substantial damage to its infrastructure, its government has survived. But what about its second goal, deterrence? Here's how things have changed since the start of this conflict:

• US bases in the Gulf region have been largely abandoned, many have suffered heavy damage ("uninhabitable" according to the NYT). The US has completely withdrawn from Syria and mostly withdrawn from Iraq. This is an unprecedented retreat.
• The US radar network that protects Israel and the Gulf states has been mostly destroyed
• Iran has demonstrated that it's both able and willing to light the region on fire and blockade it if threatened
• They've also demonstrated that their state is strong enough to withstand a major air US campaign
• The passage for ships through the Strait of Hormuz has been reduced from a 21mi wide corridor to one that's only ~3mi wide, between Larak and Qeshm. This makes future closures of the strait trivial. Even a small team of a few dozen IRGC personnel can now shut off 20% of global oil flows
• The broader political balance in the region is now up in the air. The GCC has suffered enormous economic damage. A new security architecture may emerge in response to this, possibly one that favors Iran

This is an improved position for Iran as compared to before the conflict, which is remarkable. They've made it clear that there's no reasonable path to the US/Israeli strategic goals. Continuing the air campaign or some kind of limited land invasion won't move the needle. If the air campaign didn't work before, it's even less likely to work now.

Now that we're in a period of diplomacy, the Iranians are attempting to secure the long-term consolidation of their gains. They also stand a chance of extracting some incredible concessions:

• International acceptance of a toll regime on the strait
• The lifting of (some) sanctions
• Unfreezing of billions in Iranian funds (most of which are currently stored in Qatar)
• Normalization of relations with various states in Europe and Asia

If the Iranians play this game correctly, they can achieve some or all of these things while suffering no casualties (this is the power of diplomacy). The key to this is driving a wedge, no matter how minor, between the US and Israel. By refusing to compromise on a ceasefire in Lebanon and linking the status of the strait to that ceasefire, the Iranians seem to have done this. They need to make it clear that an Israeli violation of the ceasefire will result in the closure of the strait. This will ensure that the US continues to exert pressure on Israel to maintain the ceasefire.

Exploiting this wedge is Iran's path to the long-term attrition of Israel. This conflict has brought the contradictions in the US/Israeli relationship to a head in an unprecedented way.

🔗 Amerikanets