The United States has launched new airstrikes across Iran this week as President Donald Trump, losing patience over the protracted negotiations to end the war, has leaned into violence to ratchet up the pressure on the Iranian leadership.
The US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, made clear the airstrikes would likely continue if the peace deal continued to stall, saying:
If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs.
This came after Iran and Israel fired missiles at one another in recent days and Iran shot down a US helicopter.
Up to this point, both the US and the Iranian regime had respected the precarious ceasefire that had halted the war in early April. Both sides seemed to want it to continue. And Trump is still insisting a peace deal is imminent.
Why, then, are both sides firing on each other now, and where does this leave the negotiations? There are a few plausible explanations.
Escalate to deescalate
In conflicts, states often escalate to deescalate. This is when a country ramps up military action with the aim of intimidating the other side into submission.
Both the US and Iran want to show force to pressure the other side into accepting an agreement that meets their own core interests.
However, the two sides remain at an impasse because their most critical interests are at odds with one another.
The US wants Iran to capitulate on its nuclear program and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic, with no constraints. Iran wants its frozen assets released and a lasting ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Both sides remain far apart on the nuclear issue, with Iran unlikely to fully agree to US demands that it dismantle its nuclear infrastructure and cease uranium enrichment altogether.
Given the stalemate, both sides want to show they are willing to escalate through military action. Yet, neither wants the ceasefire to break completely.
Trump wants to move on from the war and shift the political agenda domestically in an election year. Fewer than one in six Americans think the US is winning the war. The Iranian regime remains standing, but it cannot ignore the mounting economic pressures of a full-scale war for much longer.
The problem is that escalating in hopes of intimidating an adversary into a deal only works if the other side is not pursuing the same tactic at the same time. Otherwise, both sides end up in an escalation trap, each ramping up the severity of attacks and unable to back down.
Accidental escalation
An alternate explanation is that these escalations are the unintended but inevitable consequence of a tense ceasefire that includes a live military blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.
It remains unclear if the Iranian drone that downed the US helicopter this week, precipitating the retaliatory airstrikes, was intentional or an accident.
An existential regional conflict
Making things more complex is the fact this isn’t just a fight between two protagonists – Israel is simultaneously launching military strikes on an Iranian ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.
Israel’s military operation deep into southern Lebanon has fundamentally shifted the regional geopolitics. And it may undermine the tenuous ceasefire between the US and Iran, despite Trump’s efforts to maintain regional calm.
What the Trump administration does not seem to have fully grasped is that in the eyes of the Israelis and Iranians, this conflict runs much deeper and has been going on far longer than the current war. For both sides, it is existential. The Islamic regime in Iran has long opposed Israel’s place in the region, and Israel has long viewed a nuclear-armed Iran as the chief threat to its survival.
As such, Iran will not abandon Hezbollah, which it has long funded and armed, and respect a ceasefire with the US, while Israel wages war in Lebanon. The reason: the regime see itself and Hezbollah as one front fighting the same battle.
Atef Safadi/EPA
And on the Israeli side, the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel fundamentally shifted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the region. Since then, his far-right government has adopted an offensive military strategy of capturing territory in Israel’s neighbours – Syria, Lebanon and Gaza – and establishing security buffer zones. Netanyahu has also vowed to eliminate any threat coming from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
However, the non-state actors of Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Houthis in Yemen cannot be eliminated with conventional military force. Militant groups like these can blend into civilian populations and reemerge, sometimes months or years later.
So, despite Israel’s significant use of military force and the widescale destruction of Gaza and now southern Lebanon, Israel will not succeed in eliminating Hamas or Hezbollah, and will keep fighting.
Trump’s approach to regional diplomacy has ignored these complexities. Trump leans heavily on bilateral and personal relationships to achieve his objectives. He has shown little interest or patience in addressing the underlying drivers motivating the multiple actors involved in the conflict.
Will the ceasefire hold?
The most important thing to understand here is how Trump views a “ceasefire”. In a news conference this week, he said in the Middle East, a ceasefire means “shooting in a more moderate manner”.
But we do know he doesn’t want to return to a full-scale war, which is why he demanded Israel and Iran stop striking one another earlier this week.
So, we could see more strikes between the three sides as they continue negotiating. And we may see a memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran in the coming days or weeks. However, this would likely be an agreement for both sides to continue talking. It is unlikely it will resolve the core issues.
Nor is Israel likely to withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon or halt its asymmetric war with Hezbollah.
As I’ve argued before, this has the making of a “frozen conflict”, or an unresolved war that continues at a low level, below the threshold of full-scale combat.
If the deeper roots of the conflict are not resolved, a “ceasefire” between the US, Israel and Iran can only ever be temporary.
