With peace talks stalled and US President Donald Trump offering no timeline for ending the war with Iran , the question on everyone’s lips is, who can withstand the pain inflicted by this war the longest? There is growing evidence that it’s Iran.
With no imminent threat of a return to a punishing bombing campaign, Iran is achieving its central war aim of driving up the price of oil, and with it pressuring Trump to accede to some of its demands.
For his part, Trump doesn’t acknowledge any disadvantage. “I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t — The clock is ticking!” he wrote Thursday on social media. “Time is not on their side!”
Meanwhile, Iranian state-linked media mused publicly about what Tehran could attack next. The semi-official state news agency Tasnim claimed that “at least seven” undersea data cables serving Persian Gulf countries are clustered along a narrow seabed pathway in the Strait of Hormuz.
As NATO has found in combating suspected Russian cable cutting in the Baltic Sea, such asymmetric warfare is costly and time consuming.
Iran’s military is also signaling a possible conventional escalation if Tehran’s demands are not met, threatening specific targets in the neighboring gulf states that are still repairing damage from the last round of attacks.
Targets listed included the Ruwais refinery in the United Arab Emirates and Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil processing plant.
Iranian trolling of its adversaries is not new. What is new, however, is a scenario in which Iran is emerging as the surprise leader in a game of chicken with the mighty US.
Most of Iran’s navy may be at the bottom of the ocean, as US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims. But its small naval boats with crews of two to six people are attacking cargo ships and tankers near the Strait of Hormuz with apparent impunity.
There’s no doubt the US military would crush Iran’s swarms of tiny speed boats over time, but time is a luxury Trump doesn’t have. And while Iran may be playing its B team, it appears for now to have the home advantage against the mightiest military in the world.
Trump, who typically prizes his ability to browbeat enemies with a mixture of bravado and bluster, is becoming a little less vocal on Iran. His volatile posts last week — claiming that a deal was close and that Iran would hand over “nuclear dust” and end uranium enrichment — blew up in his face.
Iran countered with a claim from Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the seemingly powerful parliament speaker, who posted on X that Trump was “lying.”
The rest has already become history. Iran failed to show up for talks in Islamabad, and tensions in the strait spiked again. The powerful US military has interdicted over 30 vessels since it began its blockade against Iranian ports and linked vessels.
Iran, seemingly at places and times of its own choosing, has shot up at least five ships around the contested maritime trade route.
As Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, said this week, the Iranians believe they have the upper hand. He has declared in recent speeches that the enemy has been “strategically defeated.”
Iranians are past masters at salami-slicing issues to get what they want. Obama administration negotiators witnessed this firsthand, as Iran whittled down resistance to some of its demands over years of talks that led to the 2015 nuclear deal.
This week, the Iranians exhibited some of the same diplomatic chicanery that worked for them in 2015, claiming they didn’t ask for the ceasefire extension that Trump announced late Monday. And they have pointedly refused to give an official response to it since.
The sequencing of some of the diplomacy in Islamabad suggests otherwise. But if they did make a request, it was never an overt public maneuver. Instead, it was covertly buried in the subtext of statements from their lead negotiator Ghalibaf, like this one on X: “We do not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats,” posted as Trump was refusing a ceasefire extension and Vice President JD Vance was prepping for the next round of talks.
It would have been clear to the Iranians that the expiration of the ceasefire would be used as pressure to potentially extract concessions from them at the negotiating table.
However decimated, even fractured, Iran’s leadership may be, it was never going to fall into that trap. Diplomacy and the pragmatic duplicity that sometimes accompanies it are ingrained at every level of Iran’s political class.
The Iranians’ diplomatic superpower is to be able to look around the corner, predict what comes next, and know how to position themselves to take advantage of it.
Knowing how to get something without being seen asking for it, then bagging it and moving on to the next slice of their demands has become an art form for them.
Lifting the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was the next prize they were positioning for, something Trump is publicly and steadfastly refusing to do.
In Islamabad, the almost indecipherable whisper of leaks has turned to crickets. So sensitive has this phase of behind-the-scenes mediation become that no one close to knowledge of it seems willing to risk whatever calculus is in play to calm tempers and restore confidence.
In the deafening diplomatic stillness here, it is the march of the global markets that fills the silence.
