Despite facing its regime’s most serious threat to date, Iran has demonstrated a willingness to prolong its conflicts with the United States and Israel in order to ultimately reshape the region in its favor.
The Iranian regime has endured devastating losses over the past few weeks, with near-daily attacks by the United States and Israel destroying its leadership and entire military chain of command. The Iranian people, already worn down by years of economic hardship, sanctions, and mismanagement, now face the added burden of wartime shortages, damaged infrastructure, and an increasingly militarized domestic environment.
However, amid the real risk of regime collapse, the Islamic Republic’s surviving leaders continue to project escalating rhetoric.
They have repeatedly touted Iran’s ability to withstand suffering, its indifference to further loss of leadership, and its clear intention to prolong the war, even as it wreaks havoc regionally and globally.
Despite US President Donald Trump’s calls for “total surrender,” the surviving Iranian leadership is instead feigning victory, offering a maximalist price for peace. It calls for a new regional “status quo,” war reparations, and a shift in the decades-old alliance between Gulf Arab states and the United States.
“A cease-fire is logical only if it guarantees that the war will not be resumed. It is not the time to give the enemy a chance to resolve its problems, such as repairing destroyed radars or addressing the shortage of interceptor missiles, and then attack us again,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of parliament and one of Iran’s highest-ranking surviving officials.
“We will continue to fight until the enemy truly regrets its aggression and until an appropriate political and security situation is established in the world and region,” he told Al Arabi Al Jadeed news agency on Monday.
After the war, Iran called for a “new protocol” in the Strait of Hormuz to take into account “Iran’s interests” and insisted that safe passage of ships should take place under “certain conditions,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragushi told Al Jazeera on Tuesday.
Analysts say Iran could require the unfreezing of sanctioned assets abroad or even impose tolls on countries using the narrow maritime corridor in international waters off the coast of Iran.
“The situation in the Strait of Hormuz will not return to its pre-war status,” Ghalibaf wrote on Tuesday.
After more than two decades of negotiations between Western powers and the Islamic Republic, the United States and Israel attacked Iran late last month, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and severely weakening the country’s military and civilian command.
Iran’s retaliation was swift and ferocious. It has continuously launched hundreds of missiles and drones against U.S. allies across the region, strained relations with neighboring Arab states, and disrupted global energy markets through repeated attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
“The goal is to turn that pressure into ‘next day’ results,” said Sina Tusi, senior adjunct fellow at the Center for International Policy.
“Iran is seeking a horizon where it is no longer isolated or a target for collapse, but becomes part of a new regional equilibrium in which Iranian stability is seen as tied to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the global economy,” Tusi told CNN.
Over the past few weeks, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has repeatedly asserted that Iran is losing the war. President Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday that Iran’s military is “decimated” and leaderless at “virtually every level.”
“It will never again threaten us, our allies in the Middle East, or the world,” he wrote.
Hours later, Iran launched its 61st wave of attacks in the Middle East, killing an Israeli couple.
“In traditional military terms,[Iran]hasn’t won, but it doesn’t need to win that way,” Narges Bajoghli, an associate professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, told CNN, adding that Iran’s “entire strategy is based on asymmetric warfare, and continuing the war is costly.”
Bajoghli said the United States and Gulf Arab states cannot “tolerate indefinitely” oil trade disruptions and price increases. “When are they going to say, ‘Enough is enough’? Those are the levers that Iran is pushing.”
Anticipating the attack after decades of hostility between Israel and the United States, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) had developed contingency plans to activate decentralized forces in the event of a conflict, Iranian officials said.
“We were preparing for a long war because we knew we would be attacked and based on the experience of the previous wars, we knew how they were going to neutralize our operational capabilities. Therefore, we devised countermeasures against all of them,” Ghalibaf told Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed.
Despite professing to target only U.S. interests in the region, the Revolutionary Guards carried out unprecedented and deadly attacks on civilian and economic infrastructure, hitting hotels, international airports, skyscrapers, and energy facilities in Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
After Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field on Wednesday, the Revolutionary Guards published a target list and publicly threatened energy facilities that were once considered off-limits, signaling an escalation that Arab countries are working hard to avoid.
In response, Saudi Arabia vowed to take military action against Iran if necessary, warning that Iran’s actions would “backfire”.
“It’s clear that the Gulf states are caught between the United States, Israel and Iran, none of which have any regard for their own security or economic health,” Hasan Alhassan, senior fellow for Middle East policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain, told CNN’s Becky Anderson. “And they have little control over these escalating dynamics.”
Iran’s strategy now focuses on tying its destiny to the wider region, Toosi said.
“If Iran cannot remain stable and economically viable, the broader Persian Gulf system will not be stable either. Recent turmoil in shipping and energy markets highlights just how powerful that lever is.”
Iranian military spokesman Amir Akraminia said on Wednesday that the 50-year-old US-led regional order in the Middle East “collapsed today.”
It remains unclear whether Iran’s regional strategy will succeed. So far, most neighboring Arab states have not been involved in the war, despite facing a barrage of attacks from Tehran.
But at least two Gulf officials said the Gulf state would double down on ties with the United States and even Israel.
“I think Iran is seen as a major threat in the Gulf, and I don’t think that’s going to change over the next few decades,” Anwar Gargash, a foreign affairs adviser to the UAE president, told the Council on Foreign Relations think tank on Tuesday.
Gargash said the UAE was open to joining the coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, adding that there was a “misunderstanding” in Iran’s war strategy and that the aftermath of the war could push Gulf states closer to Israel.
The country’s Minister for International Cooperation, Reem Al Hashimi, told the Australian ABC network that Iran’s attacks on his country would not change the dynamics of Abu Dhabi’s agreements with the United States and Israel.
“Our relationship with the United States is a long-standing strategic partnership, one that is resilient in moments of crisis, but built on decades of trust and mutual respect,” Al-Hashimy said.
But for Iran’s current regime, the ultimate goal is not victory but survival, restoring deterrence and attempting to regain power to determine post-war terms.
“The endgame is not about escalation per se; it’s about using escalation as a means to force conformity,” Tusi said. “Iran doesn’t need to win this war militarily. It needs to make continuing the war come at great cost to other countries.”
