Two months after brokering a ceasefire, the United States struck Iran again after an American Apache helicopter went down near the Strait of Hormuz.
US President Donald Trump had promised a “very strong” response. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has described the logic bluntly: if Washington has “to negotiate with bombs,” it “will negotiate with bombs.”
Iran answered with fire on targets tied to the American military presence across the Gulf. And through all of it, the talk of an imminent deal never stopped.
Commentators called this a return to gunboat diplomacy. Tehran hears something else. If this is diplomacy, it can be bargained over. Therefore, Iran does not yield; it bargains.
Balance of damage
That is the starting point that most analyses miss. Iran is not merely absorbing blows; it is a negotiator. With every strike, it asks not whether the blow hurts but what its purpose is: to decide the war or to drag Tehran back to the table.
America and Israel control the balance of damage. Iran is trying to control the balance of closure, and there the rules differ.
The West has images of flattened facilities and shattered systems. But an image of damage is not an event of closure. A closure event is the only thing Iran cannot spin as survival, and one of three would suffice: enriched uranium brought out of the country or being destroyed under inspection; the Strait of Hormuz reopening without Iran extracting a price; or the Revolutionary Guard’s machinery breaking.
None of this has happened. Hundreds of kilograms of enriched uranium are believed to remain inside Iran, with no inspector able to verify where. Shipping through Hormuz has not returned to normal, and the regime stands. Until even one closure event occurs, every image of rubble remains proof of a hit, not of defeat.
Decoding the pattern
This is how Iran has decoded the pattern. It understands that Washington does not truly seek to topple the regime; it seeks an agreement. As a result, Tehran interprets every use of force, whether American or Israeli, as a tool for improving negotiating terms rather than threatening the regime’s survival.
Strike, threat, limited response, restraint imposed on Israel, return to the table. As long as that remains the pattern, Iran does not panic. It calculates. It absorbs pressure, responds, raises the cost, and arrives at the negotiating table from a position of strength.
Lebanon is where Iran learned that Israel could be restrained. There, it watched Israel absorb losses, watched Hezbollah wear it down with fiber-optic-guided drones, and watched Washington push to prevent escalation that might jeopardize its arrangement with Tehran.
The lesson was precise and unsettling: pressure on Israel does not necessarily produce greater Israeli freedom of action; it can produce American restraint on Israel. If Iran raises the cost in the Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz, or against American bases, it is betting that Washington will rein Israel in to protect the deal.
The Gulf, therefore, is not a secondary theater. It is collateral posted against the negotiation. The attacks on American-linked targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, the drone strikes, Iran’s hold over the Hormuz card, and the downed helicopter are not intended to defeat the American military.
Instead, they turn the Gulf into a guarantee: as long as pressure continues, Iran increases America’s costs for defending its bases, its Gulf partners, its shipping lanes, its energy interests, and its public standing. Every additional day of crisis becomes more expensive for a president who promised to end wars, not start them.
No longer a deterrent
The American-Israeli unity that once projected an unbreakable front no longer serves as a deterrent. With Trump talking about a deal while Israel emphasizes where it will not strike, Tehran interprets coordinated displays as managed pressure rather than a genuine threat.
What, then, could break the pattern? Only two developments would force a genuine reassessment. The first would be clear evidence that American intentions have moved beyond securing a deal and toward crippling the regime’s ability to function.
The second would be an Iranian perception that Israel can no longer be restrained. The first scenario appears unlikely as long as Trump defines success in terms of reaching an agreement. That makes the second the more consequential path.
That perception can emerge only through Israeli actions that demonstrate genuine freedom of maneuver: sustained operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, including in areas Tehran assumed Washington would keep off-limits, combined with a credible willingness to strike strategic assets inside Iran if Tehran escalates in defense of Hezbollah.
The objective is not escalation for its own sake. It is to shatter Iran’s assumption that pressure on America will automatically translate into restraint on Israel. An unrestrained Israel is not a closure event; it is a course-changing event. It introduces the one variable that a negotiator who has decoded the pattern cannot price: genuine unpredictability.
Avoiding surrender
Yet all of this depends on Trump’s willingness to tolerate Israeli action outside his preferred timetable. A president who has declared that he, not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, holds the wheel will find that difficult. As long as he remains unwilling, Iran will continue to see a number it can call.
Iran, therefore, will not concede simply because it has been hurt. It knows how to absorb pain. It will concede only when the pattern it has decoded is broken.
As long as it believes force is being used to bring it back to the negotiating table, it will continue raising the price. Only if it comes to believe that force could overturn the table itself will it begin thinking in terms of limiting its losses.
Iran does not need to emerge unscathed. It needs only to avoid the appearance of surrender. As long as it retains control over Hormuz, preserves ambiguity surrounding its enriched uranium, and maintains a Revolutionary Guard that remains the one institution capable of functioning under sustained attack, it can absorb blow after blow and still shape the final narrative.
In the end, it can deliver the line that matters most to the regime: they did not defeat us, and therefore we won.■
Aviram Bellaishe, an expert in regional geopolitics, Middle Eastern affairs, and Arabic language and culture, who served for 27 years in Israel’s security apparatus, is vice president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.