War or no war?
Containment through possible negotiations, or open confrontation by force?
All scenarios are equally on the table.
No single scenario can be favoured, nor can any be ruled out.
Possible outcomes shift from one moment to the next.
This reflects the nature of US President Donald Trump’s personality in managing international crises. He is known for sending contradictory signals, advancing a position and its opposite at the same time, either as deliberate confusion or without clear planning or intent.
He ruled out war, describing the decision to halt executions against 800 protesters as “wise”. Hours later, he again hinted at toppling the rule of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, declaring that “Iran under his leadership is the worst place in the world to live”.
In these two contradictory statements, the US president appeared as a man governed by impulse. In the first, he sought to credit himself with a major success in forcing the Iranian leadership to comply with his wishes, under the pretext of protecting protesters.
In the second, it appeared as a reaction to Khamenei’s description of him as a “criminal responsible for direct incitement of unrest that caused Iran enormous human and material damage”. According to Khamenei’s own words, he did not want to drag his country into war, but he was not prepared to accept accusations without response, so that the entire system would not appear fragile.
Between evasive de-escalation and the possibility of war, conflicting scenarios converged around a single objective: dismantling the Iranian system.
It was striking that Iranian officials completely denied that any death sentences had been issued against those involved in nationwide popular protests. Casualty figures remain the subject of intense dispute domestically and internationally. Protesters place them at unprecedented levels to underscore the severity and brutality of the repression.
The authorities, in turn, focus on the large number of security personnel killed by armed groups, drawing a clear distinction between legitimate popular protests and armed gangs allegedly driven, funded, and armed by US and Israeli intelligence services.
By Trump’s own admission, he lacks precise information regarding casualty numbers, yet he appeared eager for war before any verification. At the same time, reports emerged of Gulf, European, and Israeli interventions, driven by conflicting calculations, calling for the postponement of the war.
Gulf states fear that flames of conflict would spill into neighbouring countries. The lowering of security alert levels at the US Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar was an indication that the spectre of war was receding.
Europeans tend towards tightening diplomatic and commercial isolation of Tehran without sliding into war, which could harm their strategic and energy interests. Israelis are seeking additional time for defensive military preparedness before any new confrontation with Iran’s more advanced and destructive ballistic missiles.
The prevailing assessment suggests that Trump does not want to become entangled in a long-term war, though he does not entirely rule it out. He leans towards limited but painful strikes so that he is not seen as having retreated under pressure. Meanwhile, his ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, presses for a comprehensive war whose outcome would be the overthrow of the system. In other words, he wants a proxy war to rid himself of the headache posed by Iran’s regional role.
The war option is opposed by the majority of Americans, while Trump’s central concern is losing the upcoming midterm elections for both houses of Congress in the coming autumn.
If the Republican Party loses the imminent elections, its control over the Senate and House of Representatives would erode, bringing political consequences and heavy constraints on Trump’s actions and his near-unilateral policies in a country that is supposed to be governed by institutional processes rather than presidential whims.
His core dilemma remains the failure of his economic policies to reduce inflation and curb rising prices. Instead of revising these policies, he seeks solutions through control of natural resources in other countries. Iranian oil is a direct target.
It is difficult to justify entering three simultaneous wars before the American public: a potential ground war with Venezuela to secure control over its oil wealth, another type of conflict with European allies over Greenland, and this latter is the most dangerous and costly, without a single shot fired, as it would end the Western alliance and undermine NATO.
If a full scale war with Iran were to erupt, it would threaten major collapses across the entire Middle East, not Iran alone. Dismantling Iran would mean, precisely, dragging the region into sweeping ethnic, sectarian, and doctrinal chaos. This would be the new Middle East under near absolute Israeli leadership.
The issue is not Iran itself, but the entire set of geostrategic realities of the region: its nature, balances of power, and future. Iran is a battlefield for the struggle over the region, not the struggle itself.
Supporting protests and popular demonstrations was never a genuine American objective. It was merely a pretext for intervention aimed at dismantling Iran. Against the backdrop of a suffocating economic crisis hitting Iranians with extreme severity, unprecedented declines in the value of the local currency gave protest demands their legitimacy and momentum.
Power outages in a country with vast oil and gas reserves raised questions about neglect, corruption, and the necessity of reform within the structure of the system itself. Within the crucible of protests, legitimate anger merged with political and intelligence-driven exploitation aimed at overthrowing the system, against the backdrop of Iran’s role in supporting the Palestinian cause.
Trump has never been known to support popular movements. What matters to him in the escalating Iranian crisis is exploiting it to serve his true oil-driven and strategic objectives. Israel, for its part, continually incites strikes against Iran at every opportunity.
In a recent meeting between Trump and Netanyahu at the Mar-a-Lago resort, the former responded to the latter’s demand to deliver a decisive blow to Iran, instead of pressuring him to meet his obligations under the so-called peace plan in Gaza. The point of convergence was clear: detonating the region and redrawing its maps with iron and fire, without any political horizon that takes into account the rights of the region’s peoples, not Palestinians alone.
“Assistance is on the way.”
This was a Trumpian pledge of some form of intervention to help protesters, without specifying its nature, scale, scope, or aftermath. What is the alternative? Everything was left open to speculation and conflicting scenarios.
His call on angry protesters to seize state institutions, or more explicitly to dismantle them, marked a fundamental turning point in attempts to contain the escalating Iranian crisis. Excessive intervention produced the opposite of its intended outcomes.
What is happening now, precisely, is postponement, not cancellation, of war scenarios.
Postponement until further notice, dictated by the force of realities alone.
