Off-ramp in Iran is disappearing but US remains averse to prolonged conflict
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Fire after air strike at an oil storage facility in Tehran
Less than three weeks into the aggression against Iran since February 28, which the US President Donald Trump called a “little excursion”, the war is assuming a scenario that is the exact opposite of what he visualised.
On Tuesday, Trump declared, “We will leave in the near future—pretty much in the very near future.” Indeed, Axios reported on the previous day citing a US official and “a source with knowledge of the matter” that a “direct communications channel between US envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has been reactivated in recent days.” [Araghchi of course issued a swift denial.]
On the contrary, Israel is pulling all stops to make sure that the war will not end ‘prematurely’. Trump’s preference would have been to have an equivalent to Delcy Rodríguez, the erstwhile deputy to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, emerging in Tehran — a highly pragmatic leader. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has other ideas.
He sees the war as a crusade to realise the Zionist dream of hegemony over the Muslim Middle East. The objectives Trump pursued were never really transparent or congruent with Netanyahu’s.
Israel’s mission is far from complete. The ruthless decapitation strategy is a means to an end. In the Israeli expectation, in the aftermath of the killing of the top echelons of Iranian leadership at one stroke, the regime would simply collapse. But things didn’t work out that way.
Whereas, Trump measures the war’s success on the scale of physical destruction the US air strikes caused to the state buildings, parks, schools, bridges, culverts, hospitals, military bases, etc. And he has reason to feel satisfied. He says there are no more any targets left to hit in Iran, and he could disrupt electricity supply all over Iran in an hour if he wanted.
But Netanyahu’s is an altogether different matrix. His discontent is that Tehran is still in possession of over 400 kgs highly enriched uranium and a massive stockpile of missiles and drones; Iranian regime is still intact and there are no signs of any insurrection; in fact, Iranians are already dictating the terms of peace — enrichment rights, war reparations, security guarantee, lifting of sanctions, etc.
Unlike Trump who is under growing pressure domestically to end the war, Netanyahu draws satisfaction that the war in Iran is ‘popular’ with the Israeli public, which even helps him secure a renewed mandate in the upcoming election to the Knesset. In sum, from Netanyahu’s perspective, this war cannot be called off yet while so much unfinished business remaining unaddressed still. And, Netanyahu is habitually used to having his way.
Two events this week message that Netanyahu is now focused on blocking Trump’s pathways for a ceasefire and follow-up talks with Iran. The first move on Tuesday was the killing in Tehran of Ali Larijani, a top security official, which was followed the very next day by the bombing of Iran’s South Pars gas field.
The removal of Larijani from the centre stage virtually guarantees that no top Iranian official will now dare to be seen as an interlocutor at the negotiating table lest he found himself in Mossad’s crosshairs. On the other hand, the attack on South Pars gas fields creates a new dimension to the war with a momentum of its own and profound global implications.
The diplomatic editor of Guardian newspaper Patrick Wintour described Larijani in a poignant obituary as a ‘linchpin’ of Iranian politics who straddled so many levels of politics and wielded such huge personal influence within Iran and internationally that he’s virtually irreplaceable. In the Pandora’s box that the war opened, Larijani had the unique credentials of being “an alternative leader for Iran in the event of the government breaking up, or in effect surrendering,” Wintour wrote.
As Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations told Wintour, “Netanyahu is now focused on blocking Trump’s pathways for a ceasefire and follow-up talks with Iran. Larijani would have been the man to get that job done.”
Now, when it comes to the Israeli attack on South Pars gas fields on Wednesday, Trump claims Netanyahu kept him in the dark about what he was upto. It is impossible to do any fact-checking. But Trump wrote a nuanced post in Truth Social wherein he maintained that the US or Qatar or he himself had no prior knowledge of the Israeli operation, and went on to declare there will be no such Israeli attacks in future. Trump concluded demanding that Iran should not retaliate. Iran, however, retaliated by targeting Qatar’s Ras Laffan, one of the most critical liquefied natural gas hubs globally.
Israel may have kickstarted a multilayered regional crisis that was waiting to erupt, which will no longer be confined to military assets alone but also directly affecting the systems that underpin economic stability across the entire Gulf with broader regional implications of regime stability that cannot be addressed through bilateral channels alone.
Riyadh convened a high-level ministerial meeting uniting Arab and Muslim nations, including Gulf states, plus Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and others, which in a joint statement, signalled a shift toward legitimising potential responses while maintaining a formal commitment to de-escalation and stressing that respect for sovereignty and noninterference would be central to any future engagement with Tehran.
Saudi Arabia separately signalled a shift toward legitimising potential responses while adhering to a formal commitment to de-escalation and emphasising continued coordination and consultation among participating countries.
The bottom line is that the Gulf states’ core position toward Iran has not fundamentally changed — maintaining dialogue while strengthening deterrence — but the conditions under which it operates are shifting rapidly. Clearly, the Gulf region’s serious collective action problem needs to be overcome first before making a quantum leap toward developing a ‘NATO-like force’ as an alternative deterrent to the US security umbrella, which the war exposed to be to no purpose.
The significance of Pakistan’s participation remains unclear and lends itself to interpretation as the nascent thinking apropos a formal military alliance riveted on ‘Islamic partnership’ that takes strategic coordination beyond the Gulf region to contain Iran. Suffice it to say, Israel’s focus on energy and infrastructure as a new template of the war was anything but incidental.
Nonetheless, in such a fraught scenario, in what can only be seen as a conciliatory gesture towards Tehran, the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gently put forward yesterday (with Trump’s approval, of course) an explosive idea that “In the coming days, we may un-sanction the Iranian oil that’s on the water. It’s about 140m barrels. That’s about 10 days to two weeks of supply that the Iranians had been pushing out that would have all gone to China. In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against the Iranians to keep the price down for the next 10 to 14 days.”
The move is likely to have a limited effect on prices but if put into action, marks a stunning reversal of longstanding American policy, as the US will be allowing Iran to sell oil at market prices knowing fully well Tehran will profit from these sales. This is a defining moment.