Riffat Masood

Iran's strategy can now be summed up in three words: enough is enough. For three decades, Iran has been hounded over a civilian enrichment programme it once submitted to the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated. Governments that tremble before their own voters at every rise in petrol prices set out, coldly and methodically, to wreck the economy of a nation of ninety million, to push its young people into despair and bury their dreams. Then they gloated. America's Treasury Secretary vowed to "Make Iran Broke Again." He told the Senate, with unconcealed pride, "We created a dollar shortage in the country," and paraded the rial's fall from 800,000 to 2.4 million to the dollar like a hunting trophy. Few governments have ever turned the deliberate impoverishment of a civilian population into a slide in a briefing deck. The economy was only one front. They cut Iran out of the world's banking system, choked its access to medicine and seized its assets abroad. They loosed Stuxnet on its centrifuges. From London and Washington, they beamed psychological warfare into Iranian living rooms through Persian-language satellite channels, hoping to turn a nation against itself. They vilified it in every forum, then asked why it would not trust them. They gunned down its nuclear scientists in the streets of Tehran and assassinated its war hero at Baghdad airport. Three times in little more than a year, they left the negotiating table for the bomb bay. They killed its commanders and its leaders. And they killed its children: the schoolgirls of Minab, the families in the sports hall at Lamerd, just as in 1988 they killed sixty-six children aboard Iran Air Flight 655. They signed agreements and shredded them. The JCPOA was abandoned in 2018 despite repeated IAEA certification of Iran's compliance; the Islamabad Memorandum was violated within weeks of its signing. They bent international institutions into instruments of coercion: an IAEA Board resolution passed on the eve of the June 2025 bombardment, a "snapback" triggered by European states that had long since stopped honouring their own commitments. All of it in the service of a genocidal apartheid regime that has wanted this war for thirty years, and of a lobby in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin that has spent lavishly to deliver it. They have circled Iran like jackals, waiting for it to fall. It has not fallen. So Iran has reached its verdict. It will no longer negotiate under bombardment, honour agreements the other side treats as optional, or accept the killing of its children and the penury of its people as routine instruments of policy. It will put an end to this cycle, and it will do so by all necessary means. They began this war on their own timetable. It will end on Iran's.

It would be a huge miscalculation to assume that Iran will just stand idle and watch the United States and Israel target its infrastructure and attempt to topple its political establishment. Both Washington and Tel Aviv are driven by electoral and political motives, not genuine strategic calculation: Israelis vote in six days, Americans in thirteen. Iran will deploy all its means to make any attack prohibitively costly. A third wave of war would not stay contained. Power grids, desalination plants, refineries and ports across the region would burn. Tens of millions would be left without water or electricity, and a massive wave of refugees would move from Arab countries towards Europe. Hormuz would close completely, oil would spike, and the global economy would tip into recession. Israel's economy, already bled by mobilisation and missile fire, would not survive a prolonged war of attrition. And Trump would be trapped in a crisis that consumes the rest of his presidency and leaves a wreck for his successors. A state facing an existential threat knows no boundaries. Even the ICJ's 1996 Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion affirmed "the fundamental right of every State to survival." The Court also could not declare even the most extreme means unlawful where "the very survival of a State would be at stake."