Summary: The article analyzes Iran's strategic doctrine of treating major conflicts as "imposed wars" forced upon it by external powers, citing the Iran-Iraq War and hypothetical future wars with Israel and the US. It argues that Iran's leadership historically prioritizes avoiding direct military confrontation due to its costs and a deep aversion to strategic surprise, instead seeking to raise the regional and global costs for any attempt to overthrow its regime. This approach is reflected in its preference for diplomacy, as seen in nuclear negotiations, though tensions escalated significantly following the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, and the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.
Main Topics Covered:
1. Iran's concept of "imposed wars" and its strategic culture of avoiding direct conflict.
2. The historical and recent escalation of tensions with the US and Israel, including nuclear diplomacy and the "maximum pressure" campaign.
3. The impact of key events like the US JCPOA withdrawal, Soleimani's assassination, and the October 7 attacks on shaping the current confrontation.
How Iran fights an imposed war
Tehran’s strategy is not battlefield victory but raising the regional and global costs of any attempt to overthrow the regime.
In Iranian political discourse, major conflicts are often described as “imposed wars” – wars that Iran believes have been forced upon it by external powers rather than chosen by Tehran. Iranian leaders identify three conflicts in these terms: The Iran–Iraq War (1980-1988), the Twelve-Day War launched by Israel in June 2025 and later joined by the United States, and the current war that began on February 28, 2026, when Israel and the US launched attacks on Iran.
The 45-year gap between the first and second conflicts reflects an important feature of Iran’s strategic outlook. Despite its rhetoric and displays of military preparedness, the country’s political and military leadership has historically sought to avoid direct war because of its heavy political and economic costs.
This pattern also reflects a deeper tendency within the leadership: An aversion to situations that take them by surprise or for which they feel unprepared. Iran’s response to the Arab Spring, for example, was marked by confusion because the uprisings caught the leadership off guard. A similar sense of surprise shaped its reaction to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.
This strategic culture helps explain Iran’s response to the current war: Rather than seeking outright victory, Tehran’s priority is to ensure that any attempt to overthrow it carries prohibitive regional and global costs.
Iran’s preference for avoiding direct military confrontation has also been evident in its dealings with Western powers. Concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme intensified in August 2002, when the first images of the Natanz nuclear facility were published. In the years that followed, Iranian officials engaged in numerous rounds of negotiations – first with the European powers: The United Kingdom, France and Germany, and later with the P5+1 group: The US, Russia, China, the UK and France, together with Germany. These negotiations reflected Tehran’s longstanding preference to manage confrontation through diplomacy rather than direct military conflict.
The situation changed dramatically when the US, under Donald Trump’s first administration, withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018. From that point onward, Washington adopted a far more aggressive posture towards Iran, while Israel strongly supported this harder line and continued to advocate military options against Iran’s nuclear programme.
Tensions escalated further in January 2020 with the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, widely seen as the architect of Iran’s regional strategy and its relationships with the so-called “axis of resistance”. The strike marked a dramatic escalation in the confrontation between Washington and Tehran and raised fears of a broader regional war.
The assassination was accompanied by an intensified economic campaign against Iran under the policy known as “maximum pressure”. The campaign did not only target Iran externally; it also reshaped the country’s internal political and economic landscape. Economic pressures deepened Iran’s domestic instability, prompting protests and intensifying tensions between the state and the public.
Together, these developments reinforced Tehran’s belief that the US and Israel were preparing the ground for military confrontation with it.
The acceleration of the military option can largely be traced to the events of October 7. After the attacks on Israel that day, Israeli leaders argued that Iran’s support for Hamas made it indirectly responsible and therefore accountable. From that point onward, Iran increasingly appeared on Israel’s list of primary strategic targets.
Israel began pushing to expand the conflict to include Iran directly, first weakening Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful regional ally. This was followed by a series of confrontations between Israel and Iran’s regional network.
Direct tensions escalated in April 2024, after the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, widely seen as a direct Israeli strike on Iranian personnel.
These clashes resembled preparatory operations leading up to June 2025, when Israel, with US support, launched what Iran viewed as a real war against it. From Tehran’s perspective, the war represented an Israeli attempt to impose new rules of engagement based on the belief that Iran and its regional allies had weakened. The conflict ended with Israeli strikes on three key Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz.
Although the fighting stopped, tensions did not disappear. Israel and the US continued signalling that another round of confrontation was possible, and Israeli preparations for such a scenario intensified. Iran, for its part, also appeared to prepare for a second round.
At the same time, international pressure on Iran’s nuclear programme increased. Calls were raised for the elimination of uranium enrichment, the removal of enriched uranium, and the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear programme, similar to the Libyan model of 2003. Negotiations continued, but many in Tehran believed these talks were unlikely to produce meaningful results and were instead buying time for possible military arrangements.
By the time the third imposed war began, the objectives of Israel and the US appeared broader than in the previous confrontation. Iranian leaders increasingly concluded that any future war would ultimately aim not only to damage the nuclear programme but also to weaken or overthrow the political system itself.
As a result, Iranian leaders began preparing for such a scenario through a series of military and security measures. For the leadership in Tehran, survival was tied not only to political power but also to the preservation of a political system rooted in Shia Islamic ideology. Officials, therefore, attempted to make concessions during negotiations in the hope of avoiding a broader conflict, even as many doubted that diplomacy would succeed.
This calculation shaped Tehran’s preparations for the next confrontation. When the war eventually began, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated, along with several senior military commanders, Iran’s response made clear that it would approach this conflict differently.
Iran’s behaviour in this war is shaped by its belief that the conflict is existential. The core of Tehran’s strategy is therefore to raise the cost of war for all actors involved, not only for Iran itself.
In effect, Iran is signalling that if the objective of the conflict is to bring down the governing system, then the wider region – and potentially the international system – will not remain stable. This logic explains Iran’s targeting of economic and energy infrastructure, including oil resources, gas supplies and the Strait of Hormuz. Disruptions in this corridor have already contributed to sharp fluctuations in global markets, and further disruptions could push prices significantly higher.
Through this strategy, Iran seeks to demonstrate that the fall of the government in Tehran will not come easily. At the same time, Iranian leaders believe that the US and Israel are pursuing a second strategy aimed at weakening the state from within.
Military doctrine suggests that overthrowing a political system typically requires ground forces, as seen in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet such a scenario appears unlikely in the case of Iran.
Instead, Israel and the US may attempt to destabilise Iran internally by encouraging political fragmentation and weakening the country’s security institutions. The objective would be to exhaust the leadership politically and militarily until it can no longer sustain itself.
As a result, increasing attention has focused on the possibility of arming opposition groups, including Kurdish groups and movements operating in Iran’s eastern border regions near Pakistan and Afghanistan. Tehran has responded by tightening its internal security apparatus and deploying greater military capacity to these areas.
The February 2026 war, therefore, appears to be moving in a clear direction: Either the overthrow of the Iranian political system or pushing it to the brink of collapse. While the US may not necessarily agree with Israel on every tactical detail, both appear to share the view that the current leadership should not survive unchanged.
The remaining Iranian leadership understands this clearly. It has therefore adopted a strategy of raising the costs of war, both economically and in terms of regional security.
At the same time, Israel appears concerned that Donald Trump could unexpectedly halt the conflict. This has encouraged Israel to accelerate strikes designed to weaken Iran’s leadership as quickly as possible. In turn, Tehran has escalated its own response using the military capabilities still available to it.
The result is an intensifying cycle of escalation that risks transforming a regional confrontation into a source 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 too high for its adversaries to bear.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Meridiano
