In Iranian political discourse, large-scale conflicts are often described as “imposed wars,” meaning wars that Iran did not choose but believe were imposed on it by outside forces. Iranian leaders refer to three conflicts in these terms: the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the 12-day war started by Israel in June 2025 and later joined by the United States, and the current war, which began on February 28, 2026, when Israel and the United States launched attacks on Iran.
The 45-year gap between the first and second conflicts reflects an important feature of Iran’s strategic landscape. Despite the rhetoric and displays of military preparation, the country’s political and military leadership has historically sought to avoid direct war because of the high political and economic costs.
This pattern also reflects deeper trends within leaders. It means that you don’t like situations where you’re caught off guard or where you feel unprepared. For example, Iran’s response to the Arab Spring was marked by chaos as the uprising caught the leadership by surprise. A similar sense of surprise shaped the reaction to Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th.
This strategic culture helps explain Iran’s response to the current war. Rather than seeking outright victory, the Iranian government’s priority is to ensure that any attempt to overthrow Iran comes with prohibitive costs regionally and globally.
Iran’s preference to avoid direct military conflict is also evident in its relations with the West. Concerns about Iran’s nuclear program grew in August 2002, when the first images of the Natanz nuclear facility were released. Over the next few years, Iranian authorities held multiple rounds of negotiations, first with the European powers of Britain, France and Germany, and later with the P5+1 group of the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. These negotiations reflected Tehran’s long-standing desire to manage the conflict through diplomacy rather than direct military conflict.
The situation changed dramatically when the United States under President Donald Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018. From that point on, the United States took a much more aggressive stance toward Iran, while Israel strongly supported this hard line and continued to advocate military options against Iran’s nuclear program.
Tensions escalated further in January 2020 with the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, who was widely seen as the architect of Iran’s regional strategy and its relationship with the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” The attack marked a dramatic escalation in the conflict between Washington and Tehran and raised concerns of a broader regional war.
The assassination was accompanied by an intensification of the economic campaign against Iran under a policy known as “maximum pressure.” This campaign did not only target Iran externally. It also reshaped the domestic political and economic landscape. Economic pressures have deepened instability within Iran, sparked protests, and intensified tensions between the country and its people.
These developments have strengthened Tehran’s belief that the United States and Israel are preparing the ground for military conflict with Iran.
The acceleration of military options can be traced primarily to the events of October 7th. After that day’s attacks on Israel, Israeli leaders claimed that Iran’s support for Hamas made them indirectly responsible and therefore liable. Since that point, Iran has increasingly appeared on Israel’s list of major strategic objectives.
Israel began pushing for an escalation of the conflict that would directly involve Iran, first weakening Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful ally in the region. This was followed by a series of conflicts between Israeli and Iranian regional networks.
Direct tensions escalated in April 2024 after the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which was widely seen as a direct Israeli attack on Iranians.
These clashes resembled preparatory operations until June 2025, when Israel, with US support, launched what Iran considered a full-scale war against Israel. From Tehran’s perspective, the war represents Israel’s attempt to impose new rules of engagement based on the belief that Iran and its regional allies have been weakened. The conflict ended with Israeli attacks on three of Iran’s main nuclear facilities: Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz.
The fighting stopped, but tensions persisted. Israel and the United States continued to hint at the possibility of another confrontation, and the Israeli side increased its preparations for such a scenario. Meanwhile, Iran also appears to be preparing for the second round.
At the same time, international pressure against Iran’s nuclear program increased. There were calls for an end to uranium enrichment, the removal of enriched uranium, and the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program similar to the 2003 Libyan model. Negotiations continued, but many in Tehran believed that these negotiations were unlikely to yield meaningful results and were instead buying time for a possible military arrangement.
By the time the third imposed war began, Israel and the United States’ objectives appeared broader than during their previous confrontation. Iranian leaders are increasingly coming to the conclusion that a future war will ultimately be aimed not only at damaging the country’s nuclear program, but also at weakening or overthrowing the political system itself.
As a result, Iranian leaders have begun preparing for such a scenario through a series of military and security measures. For Tehran’s leadership, survival was tied not only to political power but also to maintaining a political system rooted in Shiite Islamic ideology. So officials tried to make concessions during negotiations in hopes of averting broader conflict, even though many doubted whether diplomacy would succeed.
This calculation shaped Tehran’s preparations for the upcoming confrontation. When war eventually broke out and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated along with several senior military commanders, Iran’s reaction revealed a different approach to the conflict.
Iran’s actions in this war have been shaped by its belief that the conflict is existential. Therefore, the core of the Iranian government’s strategy is to raise the cost of war, not only for Iran itself, but for all actors involved.
In effect, Iran is demonstrating that the broader region, and potentially the international system, will be destabilized if the goal of conflict is to disrupt governance systems. This logic explains Iran’s targeting of oil resources, gas supplies, and economic and energy infrastructure, including the Strait of Hormuz. Disruption in this corridor has already contributed to sharp swings in global markets, and further disruption could cause prices to rise significantly.
Through this strategy, Iran is trying to show that the collapse of the Tehran regime will not be easy. At the same time, Iranian leaders believe that the United States and Israel are pursuing a second strategy aimed at weakening the state from within.
According to military doctrine, overthrowing a political regime usually requires ground troops, as seen in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but such a scenario is unlikely in the case of Iran.
Rather, Israel and the United States could seek to destabilize Iran by fostering political divisions and weakening Iran’s security institutions. The aim would be to drain the leaders politically and militarily so that they are unable to sustain themselves.
As a result, attention has focused on the possibility of arming rebel groups, including Kurdish groups and movements, operating in Iran’s eastern border areas near Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Iranian government responded by strengthening its domestic security system and increasing its military forces in these areas.
Therefore, a February 2026 war appears to be on a clear path to either overthrowing Iran’s political system or pushing it to the brink of collapse. While the United States may not necessarily agree with Israel on every tactical detail, both countries appear to share the view that the current leadership should not remain unchanged.
The rest of Iran’s leadership clearly understands this. Therefore, it adopted a strategy of increasing war costs both economically and in terms of regional security.
At the same time, Israel appears concerned that Donald Trump could unexpectedly halt the conflict. This prompted Israel to accelerate its offensive aimed at weakening Iran’s leadership as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the Iranian government is still using available military power to ramp up its own response.
As a result, cycles of escalation risk intensifying and turning regional conflicts into sources of global economic and strategic instability.
In this sense, Iran’s strategy is not aimed at winning the war outright, but at ensuring that the costs of regime change become unbearably high for its adversaries.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
