Summary

  • The 40-day U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign launched February 28 failed to achieve its reported objectives of regime overthrow or major Iranian concessions, killing much of Iran’s senior leadership—including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—while the regime survived and consolidated under new commanders.
  • Iran gained control of the Strait of Hormuz during the conflict, acquiring direct leverage over global energy markets and Gulf security that analysts characterize as more consequential than the conventional military assets destroyed.
  • The campaign consumed a large part of U.S. precision munitions and damaged key U.S. military facilities in the region, materially and psychologically diminishing Washington’s threat of renewed force as a negotiating instrument.
  • Iran returns to talks emboldened by strategic endurance—Meir Javedanfar of Reichman University described a “sense of euphoria” because “they are managing the Strait of Hormuz, nobody was able to force them to back down militarily”—while retaining an economic need for sanctions relief that Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation called essential to reconstruction.
  • The planned memorandum of understanding, negotiated with Pakistani and Qatari mediation and without Israel, reportedly commits Israel not to fight Hezbollah and effectively recognizes Iran’s right to retaliate in the Gulf if Israel does so, altering the regional security architecture in ways that remain incompletely understood because neither side has published the text.

The U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign that consumed 40 days of strikes beginning February 28 was intended, according to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, to overthrow Iran’s theocratic regime or force major concessions. Neither outcome was achieved. The strikes killed much of Iran’s senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and destroyed the country’s navy, air force, and other military assets. Despite those losses, the regime survived and consolidated under new commanders, and Iran returns to nuclear negotiations from what analysts describe as an emboldened position—while the military instrument that was supposed to produce leverage has been substantially spent.

The failure of coercive logic

The campaign’s design rested on a premise that the scholarship of Alexander George and others has termed coercive diplomacy: the assumption that military pain, applied at sufficient intensity, translates into political concessions. Robert Pape’s research on the limits of strategic bombing has frequently challenged that assumption, and the Iran case appears to follow the pattern. The bombing killed Iran’s most senior leaders and eliminated most of its conventional military capacity. Yet the regime’s political system reconstituted itself. The logic that decapitation would fragment the state, or that destruction would produce a leadership willing to trade its nuclear program for relief, did not hold.

Daniel Shapiro, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Biden administration and as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017, described Iran as having demonstrated the ability to “take the United States’ and Israel’s best punch, survive, and land some very effective counterstrikes, imposing global economic chaos and economic and political harm to President Trump and the United States.” That assessment points to the central analytical problem: once a military campaign of this scale has been executed and its maximum coercive effect absorbed without producing the desired result, the residual threat of force carries less weight in negotiations.

Whether U.S. planners formally adopted a coercive-diplomacy framework is not publicly documented; the mapping is an interpretive reconstruction. But the operational sequence—massive strikes followed by a return to talks on terms no better and arguably worse for Washington—matches what the coercion-failure literature predicts.

The Hormuz inversion

During the conflict, Iran gained control of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a significant share of global oil shipments pass. That control represents what the consolidated analytical record identifies as a leverage inversion: the campaign destroyed Iran’s conventional military assets but enabled an asymmetric capability more consequential than what was lost. Iran’s Hormuz position gives it a credible threat to disrupt global energy markets—a threat it exercised during the fighting—and whether it will collect transit fees remains an unresolved issue in the planned memorandum of understanding.

The inversion has both a material and a psychological dimension. Materially, the campaign consumed a large part of U.S. precision munitions and damaged key U.S. military facilities in the region, reducing Washington’s capacity to credibly threaten renewed strikes. Psychologically, Iran’s survival under the maximum available punishment undermines the credibility of future threats. Dania Thafer, director of the Gulf International Forum, captured the dynamic: “Pandora’s box has already been opened, everything has been tested, and Iran feels it doesn’t have much more to lose or to fear. The worst has already happened, from the Iranian perspective, and they have survived it.”

Meir Javedanfar, an Iran expert at Israel’s Reichman University, predicted that Iran will now see the Persian Gulf’s oil-rich monarchies as its sphere of influence—a projection that, if it reflects actual Iranian strategic thinking, would represent a durable shift in regional power dynamics. Whether it is durable or reflects an overestimation that becomes a source of miscalculation cannot be determined from available evidence.

The trust deficit and the economic imperative

Iran’s negotiating posture is shaped by two forces that pull in opposite directions. The first is emboldened leverage: survival, Hormuz control, and diminished U.S. military credibility all strengthen Tehran’s bargaining position. The second is economic fragility: the Iranian economy was already struggling with runaway inflation and a water crisis before the conflict, and the bombing destroyed important industrial sites.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, chief executive of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, noted that “Iran cannot undergo a full reconstruction after this war without broad sanctions relief.” That economic imperative brings Iran to the table; it does not mean Iran will accept terms that its leadership considers inadequate.

The trust deficit complicates the economic logic. Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who has been involved in informal contacts with Iran, said key figures in the regime “do not believe the U.S. will ever relax or remove sanctions,” which is why Tehran sought upfront payment in the deal due to be signed Friday. Nasr referenced the risk of another “January uprising” in Iran if economic improvement does not materialize, framing the negotiating window as partly a domestic political calculation.

Zohar Palti, a former head of the Mossad intelligence directorate now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned that once Iran receives billions of dollars in cash, it may create new obstacles to delay progress in nuclear talks. “From their perspective, the Americans gave them what they wanted, and perhaps even asked for too little,” he said. “Therefore, they see no reason to offer anything meaningful in return.” Palti’s assessment identifies an incentive structure in which the recipient has maximal reason to stall after receiving payment—an agency problem that the MoU’s unpublished terms may or may not address.

The frail ceasefire and its ambiguities

The memorandum of understanding was negotiated with Pakistani and Qatari mediation and without Israel. Neither side has published its text, and conflicting accounts remain on key issues: the amount of money Iran would receive, when and under what conditions, and whether Iran will collect fees for maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The agreement reportedly commits Israel not to fight Lebanon’s pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and effectively establishes Iran’s right to target the Gulf if Israel does so. Ksenia Svetlova, a former Israeli lawmaker from the center-left opposition and a Middle East analyst, said the “whole pro-Iranian axis is emboldened now.” She acknowledged that this posture could be “hubris” or “a false sense of superiority,” but said “for the time being we will suffer from the consequences.”

Alex Vatanka, a Tehran-born senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, described the planned agreement as “an extremely frail ceasefire.” He said many in Iran “don’t think this is a done deal yet” because they believe regime change remains on the agenda for the U.S. and especially for Israel. That hedging—against both the maximal reading of Iranian confidence and the minimal reading of the agreement’s durability—reflects the unresolved state of a negotiation in which neither side has demonstrated trust in the other’s commitments.

Shapiro assessed “a high likelihood that these talks will be inconclusive.” The combination of incomplete information, mutual trust deficits, and unresolved terms creates a high probability of future disputes over interpretation. Iran’s Hormuz leverage gives it tempo advantage—it can disrupt energy markets rapidly—while sanctions operate through slow economic deterioration, creating an asymmetry that favors Iran in crisis scenarios even if long-term structural leverage favors the United States.

What would change the picture

The analytical uncertainty is substantial. Three pieces of evidence would materially alter the assessment. The first is publication of the MoU text, which would resolve conflicting accounts about payment terms, conditions, and the Hormuz transit-fee question. The second is data on Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile and its willingness to accept renewed international inspections—the core nuclear issue that neither the bombing nor the preliminary agreement has addressed. The third is the trajectory of domestic stability in both countries: Iranian regime cohesion under new leadership, and the political cost to President Trump of a campaign whose stated objectives were not achieved.

Until those uncertainties resolve, the picture remains one of a military operation that consumed significant American leverage without producing a diplomatic dividend, while granting Iran both a narrative of resilience and a strategic position—control of the Strait of Hormuz—that it did not hold before the campaign began.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Argument Audit
A full structural audit of an argument’s premises, inferences, and load-bearing assumptions.
Process Tracing
Reconstructs the step-by-step causal pathway of a specific historical event.
Strategic Interaction (Game Theory)
Models a situation as a game — players, moves, payoffs, and likely equilibria.
BATNA
Your best alternative to a negotiated deal — the walk-away that sets your leverage (Fisher & Ury).
Mutually Assured Destruction
Deterrence by guaranteeing that any attack is suicidal for the attacker.