The US and Iran pulled back from the brink of returning to all-out war on June 11. Hours after saying the US military would launch strikes against Iran for the third night in a row, Donald Trump postponed the strike. The Iranian military had said the US would “get a tougher response than before” if it followed through on its threats.
Trump claimed he called off the attacks because of progress in negotiations between the two countries. In one STATEMENT posted on social media, Trump said: “The discussions and final points have been approved, both in concept and in great detail, by all parties involved.” it later added that the deal is set to be signed in the “coming days”.
Whether that will happen remains to be seen. On multiple occasions, Trump has stated that a deal between the US and Iran is imminent only to have no deal signed. Iran’s Foreign Ministry also called claims a speculative deal has been reached, insisting that “nothing has been finalised”.
And, even if signed, the deal Trump is talking about is far from a final peace deal. It appears to be a memorandum of understanding, creating a framework for both countries to talk about outstanding issues. These include Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and nuclear program.
Rather than the supposed diplomatic breakthrough, perhaps more important in persuading Trump to back away from renewing an all-out war with Iran was that a return to conflict simply would not have been in the US interest.
War, as the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz observed in his 1832 book On the Warit is the continuation of politics by other means. Its huge costs can only be justified when they are linked to a coherent strategy and when there is a clearly defined political objective that has a reasonable prospect of being achieved.
Measured against this standard, there was no argument for returning to war with Iran. The difficulty begins with the lack of any discernible plan in Washington. Trump has articulated no strategy and no definition of victory beyond a vague aspiration to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
He was drawn to the prosecution of an intelligence-based war — on the fragility of the regime in Tehran — that resulted in flaws and scenarios that were too certain not to have happened. These scenarios suggested that the beheading of Iran’s leadership would lead to the sudden collapse of the regime and a popular uprising that would see the country transition to democracy.
There is also very little of a return to the all-out war it could have achieved. The reason for this is that the Iranian regime is not a conventional state that can be brought down by overwhelming firepower. The regime, now dominated by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, can best be described as a militia with state.
It is operating through a distributed network of air, land, and sea forces that were designed as an asymmetric instrument of power capable of absorbing, distributing, and extending precisely the kind of concentrated military pressure that the U.S. military was built to deliver.
Weeks of intense bombing early in the war did not break the regime’s center of gravity. On the contrary, it consolidated the regime and left it more cohesive and determined than before.
Unlike the more cautious regime of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which tended to wait and respond, the new regime has become confident.
It has been quick to retaliate against US and Israeli attacks with severity and set the pace for escalation. On June 8, for example, Iran began barrage of rockets to Israel in protest of the Israeli army’s escalating campaign in Lebanon.
The costs of war
Iran also retains the capacity to impose intolerable costs on all while maintaining a high pain threshold. If an all-out war were to return, there was a very real danger that Iran would move to close the Bab al-Mandab strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa by mobilizing its ally, the Houthis.
it the threat is already there on the table. The Houthis stopped their attacks on ships in the region after a ceasefire was signed in Gaza in October 2025, but have warned they will resume if the war in Iran escalates. Bab al-Mandab strait serves as main bypass road for Saudi oil and for most of the Gulf’s maritime trade, both of which are currently unable to transit through the closed Strait of Hormuz.
Iran would also likely have resumed direct attacks on the Gulf states with greater scope and intensity than before, which could have turned an already severe global energy crisis into something much worse. Perhaps the most important impact of the return to all-out war was the prospect that it would have cost the US its valuable Gulf partners.
Any Iranian strikes draw US installations to the region reinforces a lesson Gulf monarchies are increasingly inclined to withdraw, which is that the presence of US bases on their soil makes them targets rather than providing protection.
Faced with the closed Strait of Hormuz, the global economy in Falling and a near defeat for his Republican party in November US midterm electionsTrump is clinging to the hope that he can pressure Iran to accept a deal. The chances of this strategy proving a success are slim.
Andreas Krieg is Associate Professor, Department of Defense Studies, King’s College London.
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