After the Mutual Strikes: The Limits of Israeli Power and Iran’s Rise as a Negotiating Actor
Policy Assessment by Hamza Ali, Progress Center for Policies – London
Introduction
The mutual strikes between Iran and Israel reveal that the regional conflict has entered a qualitatively different phase. The confrontation has shifted from a limited military exchange between two traditional adversaries into a comprehensive test of the balance of power, political will, and international alliances across the Middle East. Where Israel gambled that military escalation would rewrite the region’s strategic rules, the accumulated evidence suggests the results have been more complex — and in some respects contrary to Israel’s stated objectives.
This phase matters because it exposes, for the first time in years, the limits of Israeli military power when deployed without a clear political horizon. Simultaneously, it reveals Iran’s capacity to convert geopolitical, economic, and military resilience into a negotiating and strategic instrument.
I. Iran: From a Defensive Posture to Setting Conditions
Most recent Western analyses agree that Iran is not behaving as a defeated party compelled to make fundamental concessions. Despite sustained sanctions and significant economic pressure, the Iranian leadership continues to approach ongoing negotiations from the premise that time works in its favor more than in its adversaries’.
This assessment rests on several factors. First, Tehran has maintained the cohesion of state institutions and its political system despite war and sanctions. Second, it retains multiple regional leverage tools extending from Iraq and Lebanon to Yemen and the Arabian Gulf. Third — and most significantly — it holds the energy card and control over maritime corridors, particularly the Strait of Hormuz, which gives it an exceptional capacity to affect the global economy.
Strategically, Tehran calculates that Western economies are less capable of absorbing prolonged energy market disruptions than the Iranian system is of enduring further economic pressure. The Iranian leadership therefore appears more willing to bet on time and mutual attrition, convinced that its adversaries face greater political, economic, and electoral constraints than it does.
In this sense, Iran is not negotiating from weakness. It is negotiating from a position that seeks to establish new regional facts and compel the United States and Israel to recognize it as an actor that cannot be bypassed in any future security arrangements.
II. A Widening Fracture in the American–Israeli Vision
One of the most significant shifts the crisis has exposed is the growing gap between Washington and Tel Aviv over how the war should be managed and what its ultimate objectives should be.
While Benjamin Netanyahu’s government continues to regard military force as the primary instrument for achieving Israeli security, the Trump administration appears far more concerned with preventing the war from expanding and with containing its effects on the global economy, energy markets, and regional stability.
This does not mean a rupture between the two allies — military and security coordination remains intact — but the disagreement now turns on a fundamental question: what comes after the war?
Israel seeks to press its military campaign in hopes of achieving a radical transformation of its surrounding strategic environment. Washington, by contrast, appears more inclined toward a settlement that stops the bleeding and prevents the region from sliding into an open-ended confrontation whose consequences cannot be controlled.
Iran reads this divergence clearly, and appears to be building part of its current strategy on exploiting and widening it. The greater the gap between Washington’s priorities and Tel Aviv’s, the greater Tehran’s room for political and diplomatic maneuver.
III. Netanyahu’s Strategic Impasse
Perhaps the most striking shift among Western observers is the growing reassessment of Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance. After years of successfully marketing himself as Israel’s primary security guarantor, he now faces mounting accusations that he has led Israel into a series of wars that failed to achieve their declared objectives.
In Gaza, the war did not end Hamas. In Lebanon, military operations did not terminate Hezbollah’s influence. In Iran, the principal objective — weakening the regime or undermining its strategic capabilities — was not achieved.
Netanyahu thus finds himself in a compound dilemma: he cannot credibly declare victory, and he cannot sustain the war indefinitely without escalating political, economic, and military costs.
This dilemma grows more acute as Israeli electoral deadlines approach, forcing him to defend a strategic record that is difficult to present to the Israeli public as an unambiguous success.
IV. Shifts in the Regional Balance of Deterrence
Perhaps the most consequential outcome of this round of conflict is the gradual transformation of the prevailing concept of deterrence in the region.
For many years, Israel relied on the assumption of absolute military superiority and the ability to set the rules of engagement unilaterally. The current confrontation has shown that its adversaries are now more capable of absorbing strikes and responding to them, and more willing to bear the costs of prolonged confrontation.
This does not mean Iran or its allies have achieved a decisive victory. It does mean that Israel’s ability to convert military superiority into political and strategic results has become a subject of growing doubt — even within Western and Israeli circles themselves.
Conclusions
The broad sweep of Western analysis suggests the region is entering a transitional phase in which purely military solutions are losing effectiveness, giving way to more complex equations built on mutual attrition and the management of political and economic balances of power.
Iran today appears more confident in its capacity to endure and negotiate. Israel confronts a strategic crisis centered on the gap between military accomplishment and political outcome. The United States finds itself facing a compounding dilemma: maintaining its alliance with Israel on one hand, while preventing the region from sliding into a broad regional war on the other.
Whatever course the confrontation takes in the coming weeks, the most salient lesson this phase reveals is that military force alone is no longer sufficient to reshape the Middle East or impose stable security arrangements. After years of wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and against Iran, the targeted forces remain standing, the sources of threat persist, and the cost of war mounts for all parties.
In this context, Israel appears further than ever from delivering on the central promise its successive governments have made: that security is achieved through military superiority alone.
