How Israel Sells Conflicts It Cannot Win Alone - Seyed Mohammad Marandi

Middle East

How Israel Sells Conflicts - Seyed Marandi

Marandi analyzes how Israel internationalizes conflicts it cannot win alone—drawing the U.S. toward escalation while Iran strengthens deterrence.

By PUN-Global

22 January 2026, 11:01 am

By PUN-Global

22 January 2026, 11:01 am

The Insider and His Judgment

After years of direct insight, Marandi does not offer a prediction, but a structural judgment.

Seyed Mohammad Marandi is an Iranian political scientist, university professor, and former advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team. He teaches at the University of Tehran and is widely regarded as one of Iran’s most prominent academic voices on international security, U.S. foreign policy, and regional power projection in the Middle East.

Educated in the United States, Marandi has first-hand familiarity with Western political, media, and strategic frameworks. His analyses combine institutional knowledge of Iran with a critical examination of Western narratives, particularly in the context of sanctions, deterrence policy, and information warfare.

💬 “Time is not working in favor of the Israeli regime.”

He regularly appears in international media, academic forums, and political discussion formats, and is known for a sober, structured mode of argumentation that consistently prioritizes power relations, material capabilities, and geopolitical logic over moralrhetoric or public-relations narratives.

Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Tehran University advisor and former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, dismantles the logic behind Netanyahu’s Washington lobbying tour – exposing a regime dependent on perpetual crisis, a weakening patron increasingly reluctant to pay the bill, a deterrent being rebuilt faster than it was degraded, and a military calculus that points toward catastrophe for everyone involved except the man who needs the war to stay out of prison.

The Salesman Arrives – Netanyahu in Washington

Netanyahu needs crises. He needs them the way a drowning man needs something to grab. Without crisis, there is no coalition, no immunity, no power – and the courtroom is always waiting.

Glenn Diesen frames the visit with surgical precision: Netanyahu has arrived in Washington to sell. Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran – the entire menu of conflicts is on the table. And the common denominator running through every item on that menu is always the same. The solution is war. Not negotiation. Not compromise. Not a political settlement that might require acknowledging Palestinian agency or Iranian security interests. War – or the credible threat of it – is the only product Netanyahu has ever reliably delivered, and it is the only product that keeps his governing coalition from disintegrating overnight.

Marandi is blunt about what this visit structurally reveals: “The very fact that he has to go to Washington shows that it’s a needy regime.” A genuine regional superpower – the kind that Western think tanks and newspaper editorial boards describe Israel as being – does not dispatch its leader to a foreign capital every few months to request permission for its own military operations. Israel, we are constantly told, is the dominant military force in the Middle East, an advanced democracy surrounded by enemies it has repeatedly defeated. And yet here is its prime minister, once again, standing before another American president, making his case, requiring authorization, needing the patron’s blessing before anything can move.

What Netanyahu needs from Trump, and why it matters:

Backing for continued operations in Gaza and Lebanon, framed as counterterrorism rather than collective punishment
Diplomatic cover for a potential strike on Iran’s military infrastructure
The reframing of war as peacemaking – Trump as the decisive president who “finished the job” his predecessors were too timid to complete
A narrative that transforms Israeli strategic dependency into American strategic necessity, making the relationship appear symmetrical when it is not

The manipulation is almost elegant in its construction. According to Israeli media reporting on the visit, Netanyahu’s message to Trump was characteristically binary: you can be remembered as the president who rescued the hostages and destroyed Hamas, or you can be remembered as the one who was outsmarted by Hamas and set the stage for future bloodshed. There is no third option in this framing. There is no space for a negotiated outcome that leaves Hamas weakened but intact, or a political process that addresses the conditions that produced Hamas in the first place. The choice, as Netanyahu presents it, is between his preferred war and humiliation.

What makes this framing so durable is that it requires no evidence, no strategy, and no defined endpoint. Victory is always just one more escalation away. The goalposts move with every ceasefire proposal rejected, every negotiation collapsed, every photogenic moment of devastation that the Israeli government presents as proof that the enemy is not yet sufficiently defeated. The binary holds precisely because it forecloses the question of what comes after.

Marandi’s reading of Trump is equally unsparing: “He has a weak personality – he’s easily persuaded to move in different directions.” This is not a casual insult. It is an analytical observation about why the visit is happening and why it may work. A more confident president, one with a settled strategic worldview and the institutional backing to implement it, would not be susceptible to this kind of binary pressure. Trump is susceptible precisely because his foreign policy is driven by personal narrative and brand management rather than doctrine.

Trump the Peacemaker – A Brand Without a Product

He claims to have ended eight wars. The weapons are American, the intelligence is American, the war planning is American – but the branding says peacemaker. At some point, the gap between the brand and the product becomes impossible to maintain.

The contradiction at the heart of the Trump foreign policy position is not subtle, and it is not accidental. He ran on ending wars. He campaigned on the exhaustion of American voters with endless foreign entanglements. He styles himself a dealmaker, a man of peace, a Nobel Prize candidate in his own frequent imagination. And yet, as Diesen observes, a year into the administration, U.S. involvement in Ukraine has not meaningfully diminished. The weapons are American. The intelligence is American. The financing is American. Americans are engaged in war planning at every level of the conflict.

Marandi draws the diagnostic thread back to the very beginning of the second term: “When he first returned to office, he had an opportunity to end the Ukraine war. He could have ended it immediately. He spoke about it during the campaign. He had a mandate, popular support, backed by a strong majority of Americans. In the swing states, he had an absolute majority. But he failed.” That failure, Marandi argues, was not incidental to Trump’s character. It was revelatory of it. A man who cannot execute the signature foreign policy promise of his campaign, even when he holds every political advantage required to do so, is not a man whose resolve will hold when the pressure comes from the other direction.

The marketing architecture of American war policy under Trump:

“Peace” is defined as victory, not compromise or mutual accommodation
The adversary must be defeated, humiliated, or forced to capitulate – not accommodated
Threats are framed as low-hanging fruit – apply sufficient pressure and the enemy will fold
When the enemy does not fold, the rhetorical trap closes: you look weak, or you escalate
The escalation is then presented not as a failure of the original strategy but as its necessary completion

This is precisely the trap Netanyahu is setting for Trump on Iran. Issue the threats publicly. Demand that Iran dismantle its missile program – a deterrent it spent two decades building precisely because of prior Western betrayals and the demonstrated willingness of the United States to attack countries that lack adequate defense. When Iran refuses, as it will, the framing shifts automatically: are you the president who let Iran become untouchable? The logic of the next escalation is already embedded in the architecture of the first threat.

Diesen identifies the mechanism with uncomfortable clarity: Netanyahu is telling Trump that he can either be remembered for winning or for losing. If Trump accepts this framing, he has already lost control of his own foreign policy. He has handed the decision-making authority to the man who constructed the binary. And that man’s interests – personal survival, coalition maintenance, the avoidance of a criminal conviction – have nothing to do with American national interest, Israeli long-term security, or regional stability.

Iran’s Deterrent – What the Israelis Actually Hit, and What They Didn’t

They struck the gates. Not the missiles. And the Iranians spent the following months redesigning those gates, adding new exits, moving the arsenal further east, and making everything harder to reach.

The Israeli strike on Iran was presented in Western media as a significant demonstration of Israeli military reach and a meaningful blow to Iranian military capability. The coverage emphasized the audacity of the operation, the distance covered, the surprise achieved. Marandi provides the technical correction with the patience of someone who has watched this particular misrepresentation circulating for months.

The Israelis hit a few missiles on their surface launchers. They managed to damage entry points – gates – to a handful of underground facilities. They did not damage a single missile stored underground. The underground program, which represents the overwhelming bulk of Iran’s actual deterrent capacity, was untouched. “The Israelis weren’t able to damage a single missile that was underground,” Marandi states. “They only hit a few missiles on their launchers.”

“The Iranians are now building new underground bases and redesigning their current ones so they have more ways to come out,” he explains. The lesson Iran took from the Israeli strike was not that its deterrent was inadequate. The lesson was specific and actionable: the entry points needed redesigning, the geographic distribution of the arsenal needed extending, the eastern deployment needed expanding.

Iran is now developing longer-range missile capacity further east – deeper into the country, further from Israeli strike range, requiring any attacking force to penetrate far deeper into Iranian airspace before reaching anything worth hitting.

The arithmetic of Iranian deterrence that Western coverage consistently ignores:

Hundreds of underground missile bases, distributed across an enormous geographic area
Medium- and short-range missiles specifically targeting Gulf infrastructure and U.S. forward operating bases
Drone capabilities developed and tested over years of proxy conflict across the region
The assets deployed against Israel represent a carefully selected fraction of Iran’s actual arsenal
Iran’s primary deterrent was always designed for a confrontation with the United States, not Israel – Israel is the secondary threat, not the primary one

The point Marandi drives home with particular force is structural: Iran’s underground missile network was not constructed to deter Israeli jets. It was built specifically to make any American military campaign against Iran synonymous with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the destruction of Gulf oil infrastructure, and the effective paralysis of global energy markets. “If there’s a war with the United States,” he states flatly, “that’s the end of the global economy.” This is not hyperbole. It is a description of what Iran’s arsenal is designed to achieve and what the geography of the Persian Gulf makes operationally possible.

The Persian Gulf is not wide. Iran controls half of it. Any planner in Washington who seriously runs the numbers on a sustained air campaign against Iranian underground facilities must simultaneously run the numbers on what happens to global oil supply when the response arrives – not if it arrives, but when. That calculation does not appear to be driving the public conversation in Washington. Netanyahu is certainly not raising it at the meeting he requested.

The First Strike’s Unintended Lesson – You Cannot Bomb Away a Deterrent

You strike Iran. Iran rebuilds. Iran builds better, deeper, further east. You then demand Iran surrender the deterrent it built in direct response to your strike. This is not a strategy. It is a self-reinforcing cycle with no exit.

Diesen raises what he calls the predictable and obvious consequence of the initial attack: hitting Iran and then demanding it abandon its missile program is logically incoherent. Any rational actor, confronted with military aggression from a technologically superior opponent, strengthens its defensive and offensive capabilities in direct proportion to the demonstrated threat.

The political forces within Iran that had always argued for maximum deterrence – deeper underground facilities, longer-range missiles, wider geographic distribution of the arsenal – were vindicated, not weakened, by the Israeli strike. The strike did not discredit the hardliners. It handed them the argument they had been making for years.

Marandi confirms the internal effect with specificity: Iran used the war as a live operational test of its systems. Some capabilities performed better than expected. Others revealed weaknesses that had not been apparent in theoretical planning. The military spent the months after the strike systematically correcting both, building on what worked, redesigning what didn’t. “The Iranians now are much more prepared for a missile war, a drone war, air combat, than they were a few months ago.”

What the war taught Iran about its own capabilities:

Theoretical weapons programs were stress-tested against real conditions for the first time in decades
Israel’s interceptor stockpile was nearly exhausted by the end of the exchange
Iran was approximately three days from launching a massive barrage of older, less precise missiles against Tel Aviv when the conflict paused
Those missiles were deliberately held back – not because the capacity was absent, but because Iran’s leadership did not want to strike civilian areas
The discipline of that restraint is itself strategically significant information about how Iran calculates escalation

The restraint, Marandi emphasizes, was a political decision by Iran’s leadership – not a reflection of any military limitation. The capacity existed. It was not used. The next time the question arises, the capacity will be larger, more precise, and deployed from positions that are harder to pre-empt. The people designing Israeli and American strike options for a second round are not working with the same target set they had before the first one.

This is the lesson that the architects of the first strike appear to have been either unable or unwilling to draw. Military pressure on Iran does not produce a weakened, compliant adversary. It produces a more capable, more motivated, and more politically unified one. The Iranians who argued before the first strike that accommodation was possible have been systematically discredited. The ones who argued for deeper bunkers and longer-range missiles have been proven right.

The Manufactured Nuclear Crisis – A History of Negotiations Nobody Ever Meant

Obama gave the Brazilians and Turks a mandate to negotiate with Iran within a specific framework. Iran accepted the terms. Obama then announced he was going for sanctions anyway. This is the pattern. Every time.

Marandi’s weekly analytical program on Al Mayadeen television, titled A Manufactured Crisis, works through the documented history of Western engagement with Iran’s nuclear program – from its origins under the Shah, when the Americans and Europeans were not only aware of the program but actively enabling it, through the succession of negotiations that were visibly pursued and invisibly sabotaged across three decades.

The Shah spent enormous sums developing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure with direct American, German, and French participation. When the revolution came, the Western partners walked away and imposed sanctions, leaving Iran with half-built infrastructure and thousands of trained nuclear engineers with nowhere to apply their training. The West then spent the next four decades treating the program it had helped create as an existential threat requiring military options.

Under Khatami, Iran fulfilled all its obligations under an agreed negotiating framework. The Europeans fulfilled none of theirs. Obama dispatched Lula of Brazil and Erdoğan of Turkey to Tehran with a limited negotiating mandate, calculating that the Iranians would reject the terms. Iran accepted. Obama proceeded with sanctions regardless.

The parallel to the Minsk Accords is one that Marandi draws explicitly – Merkel and Hollande later confirmed in separate interviews that Minsk I and II were never intended to produce a genuine settlement. They were instruments of time-buying, allowing Ukrainian rearmament to continue while Russian trust in diplomatic process was systematically exhausted. The pattern is not coincidental. It is policy.

The documented architecture of manufactured crises:

Construct the accusation – weapons program, imminent threat, violations of commitments
Negotiate with visible seriousness and invisible bad faith
When agreement approaches, shift the goalposts or simply walk away without explanation
Present the failure of negotiations as evidence of the adversary’s intransigence rather than Western sabotage
Use the diplomatic failure to justify the next round of sanctions or the next military option
Repeat until the adversary either capitulates or builds the deterrent that makes capitulation unnecessary

The accusation now circulating – that Iran is placing chemical and biological weapons in its missiles, promoted through what Marandi describes as an Israeli-controlled media outlet – follows, he notes with cold precision, an identical script to the one run against Saddam Hussein before 2003. The playbook has not changed because it has not needed to. It continues to work on audiences who do not remember, or choose not to remember, the last time it was deployed.

What is striking is not that the accusation is being made. It is that it is being made at this particular moment, in the weeks before a lobbying visit designed to secure American backing for military escalation. The timing is not coincidental. The accusation is not intelligence. It is scheduling.

Public Opinion Turns – The Regime That Cannot Function Without Washington

People across the world have watched more than two years of documented operations in Gaza. They’ve come to see it as genocide. That is not a public relations problem you solve with a lobbying visit to a golf club.

Marandi’s assessment of Israel’s strategic position is not confined to military hardware and deterrence calculations. It extends to something more fundamental and, for any serious long-term analysis, more consequential: legitimacy. Two years of highly visible military operations in Gaza – documented in real time, shared globally through platforms Western governments have been unable to suppress, formally adjudicated at the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide – have produced a shift in Western public opinion that no amount of lobbying in Washington can reverse.

“Popular opinion, even in the West, has turned against the regime, especially in the United States,” Marandi observes. This matters not as an abstract moral observation but as a concrete political constraint on what Washington can authorize and sustain domestically. The constituencies that gave Trump his electoral margin – many of whom came to him on an explicit America First, end-the-wars, take-care-of-our-own-people platform – are not natural supporters of a new and potentially catastrophic Middle East war launched at Israeli initiative, paid for by American taxpayers, and fought largely by American military assets.

The structural weakness behind the sustained appearance of strength:

Israel is described across Western policy circles as a regional superpower, but a genuine regional superpower does not require its leader to make constant pilgrimages to Washington to secure permission and resources
The South African ICJ filing documented genocidal intent in the direct public statements of Israeli officials – not allegations, but recorded words spoken by the prime minister, defense minister, president, parliamentarians, and senior government ministers, entered into the court record
A regime that defines one-fifth of its own citizens as a demographic problem cannot indefinitely sustain the liberal democratic framing that justifies Western political and military support
The gap between the stated values of the alliance and the observable conduct of its most heavily subsidized member has become visible to audiences the alliance cannot afford to lose

Marandi’s conclusion on this point is stark and deliberately unhedged: “As long as you have Palestinians in the West Bank, Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians who’ve accepted Israeli citizenship – about 20% of the population of the regime itself – I don’t see how there can be peace.” This is not a radical position. It is a demographic and political observation that any honest analyst, working from the same facts, would arrive at independently.

The deeper problem is that the Western political class has built an entire architecture of diplomatic language designed to avoid stating this plainly. “Two-state solution,” “path to peace,” “regional stability” – these phrases have been in circulation for thirty years without producing any of the things they describe. They function not as policy goals but as rhetorical holding patterns, allowing politicians to signal concern without incurring the costs of acting on it. Netanyahu has understood this for his entire career. The phrases continue; the settlements expand; the emergency never ends.

The Russian Variable – How Ukraine’s Endgame Reshapes Every Other Calculation

A Russian victory in Ukraine is not good news for Israel. It weakens the West. And the West – its military guarantees, its diplomatic cover, its financial transfers – is the only thing that has made Israel’s current strategic position sustainable for seven decades.

The connections that Western political commentary keeps carefully separated – Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, Venezuela, the domestic American political economy – are not separate in Marandi’s analysis. They form a single coherent picture of an overextended power facing simultaneous strategic commitments it cannot fulfill at the same time, at a moment when the domestic political will to fund those commitments is visibly eroding.

“The U.S. has deployed a big segment of its navy off the coast of Venezuela,” he notes. There are the existing commitments in West Asia. There is the question of Taiwan, where Chinese military exercises are becoming less ambiguously preparatory with each passing year. There is Ukraine, heading toward what Marandi describes as “a sort of climax” as Russian forces advance with a consistency and tactical effectiveness that is, as he observes, unrecognizable from the first two years of the war. “The Russians are making great headway, and at some point, if the defenses in Ukraine collapse, that could get very messy.”

The converging pressures on American strategic capacity that Netanyahu’s lobbying ignores entirely:

The American economy is deteriorating, and a new major conflict will accelerate that deterioration in ways that register immediately in domestic politics
Trump’s political base, which gave him his mandate and whose continued loyalty he requires, was explicitly sold America First – a posture incompatible with a new Middle East war launched at Israeli initiative
A Russian victory in Ukraine fundamentally weakens the NATO alliance structure and the Western political consensus that Israel’s current regional position has always depended upon
Each additional strategic commitment reduces American capacity for every other commitment, creating an arithmetic of imperial overextension that Washington has refused to calculate honestly for thirty years

Marandi’s framing strips the regional analysis of diplomatic euphemism: “A Russian victory is going to be good for Iran because it weakens the West.” This is not ideological cheerleading. It is cold geopolitical arithmetic – the same arithmetic that any serious strategic planner in Washington should be running and that very few appear willing to state publicly.

The refusal to state it publicly does not make it less true. It simply means that policy decisions are being made in a conceptual environment that excludes the most important variable. A Washington that cannot say aloud that American strategic capacity is finite, that simultaneous commitments compete with each other, and that a defeat in one theater reshapes every other theater, is a Washington that will keep making the same category of error until the consequences become impossible to deny.

The Nuclear Red Line – What Happens to Global Order When You Erase It

Once you use nuclear weapons in a regional conflict, the Russians and the Chinese understand that all remaining red lines are gone. That is not a regional war anymore. That is the beginning of something for which no plan exists.

Diesen raises the question that most Western analysts approach through euphemism or avoid entirely: given the trajectory of escalation, given the scale of Iranian deterrent capability, could Israel or the United States contemplate nuclear weapons against Iran? Marandi addresses it without the diplomatic hedging that characterizes most public discussion of this question.

Senior Iranian officials have addressed the nuclear question explicitly and on the record. Dr. Kharazi has stated on two separate occasions that if Iran faces an existential nuclear threat, it would change its nuclear posture. Dr. Larijani – who served as Foreign Minister under Khatami and now chairs the Supreme National Security Council – made the same statement.

Iran has consistently maintained it does not seek nuclear weapons. That position is conditional. If the condition changes, the position changes. These are not offhand remarks. They are policy statements made by officials with the authority to make them, and they have been made publicly, repeatedly, and in explicit terms.

The escalation ladder and what each rung actually leads to:

A conventional Israeli or American strike on Iranian nuclear or military infrastructure triggers a missile and drone response targeting Gulf energy infrastructure, U.S. forward bases across the region, and the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean
Iran’s arsenal specifically designed for this scenario is geographically distributed, deeply underground, enormous in scale, and was largely untouched by the previous exchange
Any attempt to neutralize that arsenal requires not a single strike but a sustained air campaign across an enormous country with advanced air defenses that have been upgraded since the last exchange
Escalation to the nuclear threshold changes the strategic calculus for Russia and China in ways that cannot be controlled from Washington or Tel Aviv
The elimination of red lines in one theater invites responses in other theaters that no one has the simultaneous capacity to manage

“The very fact that it’s something people can imagine them doing,” Marandi says of Israeli nuclear use, “says a lot about who they are.” He is not speculating about probabilities. He is making a structural point about what it means for global order when a threshold that was previously unthinkable has been made thinkable – and about who bears responsibility for moving it.

There is a certain logic to the escalation that is worth naming plainly. A state that has decided the rules do not apply to it in Gaza, that has dismissed ICJ rulings, that has continued operations while facing genocide proceedings at the world’s highest court – that state has already demonstrated its relationship to international constraint. The question of whether it might use nuclear weapons is, in that context, simply the outermost point on a line that has been moving consistently in one direction for years.

The Timing Problem – Why Netanyahu May Move Precisely Because the Window Is Closing

Time is not on Netanyahu’s side. That is also a compelling argument for acting now, before public opinion hardens further, before the American patron loses the domestic capacity to authorize anything, before the deterrent becomes truly unreachable.

The deepest irony of Marandi’s analysis is that the very factors making Israeli military action inadvisable on strategic grounds simultaneously create the political incentive to move quickly, before those factors become even more unfavorable. Public opinion in the West is turning and will continue to turn as the conflict’s documented consequences accumulate.

Russia is winning in Ukraine and the consequences of that will ripple through every Western alliance calculation. Iran is rearming, rebuilding, extending its underground networks, and pushing its longer-range assets further east into positions that are progressively harder to strike.

“I don’t think time is on Netanyahu’s side,” Marandi acknowledges. “But that, of course, could also be an incentive to do something now.” The logic of the diminishing window is a classic driver of preemptive military action. Strike while you still have political cover. Strike while the patron is still persuadable. Strike before the deterrent becomes operationally impossible to meaningfully degrade. The rational analysis that argues against military action is, paradoxically, also the analysis that argues for moving before that case against action becomes even more overwhelming.

Why the worst option may still be the option that gets chosen:

Netanyahu’s domestic political survival requires the maintenance of a permanent state of emergency
A genuine and durable ceasefire in Gaza removes the emergency justification for his fragile governing coalition
The criminal legal proceedings against him do not pause during peacetime, and a political settlement ending the war may simultaneously end his government and his immunity
War is not an aberration in Netanyahu’s political system. It is the system’s operating condition.
Every ceasefire is a threat to his position. Every diplomatic opening is a potential path to his prosecution.

Diesen’s framing of the broader dysfunction exposes what lies beneath the strategic calculations: there is no serious push for peace in any of the active theaters. Not in Gaza. Not in Lebanon. Not in the discourse surrounding Iran. Peace, in the operational logic of this system, means “when evil has been defeated.” This is, as Diesen identifies it, a “war is peace” mindset. And it drives decisions that will be paid for, in blood and in the long-term degradation of whatever remains of the international order, by populations who had no meaningful vote in making them.

The Wider Picture – American Decline and the Shrinking Room for Error

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine – a consistent pattern of military commitments that could not be sustained, against adversaries that were consistently underestimated, at costs that were consistently undercounted. The margin for error is not what it was.

The Netanyahu visit does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs at a specific moment in the trajectory of American power that Marandi describes with a clarity Washington’s political class consistently refuses to apply to itself. The United States of 2025 is not the United States of 2001, which was itself not the United States of 1991. The margin for strategic error has contracted sharply. The domestic political tolerance for new foreign commitments is not what it was. The international credibility that made American security guarantees meaningful and deterrence credible has been substantially depleted.

“The problems the United States faces today are very different from what they were facing 20 or 30 years ago,” Marandi observes. “This is a country whose fortunes have been going downhill for a very long time. That’s exactly why Trump came to power in the first place. And from what we can see, things are only getting worse.” Trump’s rise was not a cause of American decline.

It was a symptom – a political expression of domestic frustration with an establishment that presided over thirty years of failed wars, deindustrialization, declining living standards, and a foreign policy that enriched the defense sector while delivering nothing to the voters asked to fund it.

The pattern of American military failure that contextualizes every new commitment:

Vietnam: a decade of escalating engagement against an adversary the military consistently underestimated, ended in withdrawal and the fall of Saigon
Afghanistan: two decades of occupation, ended in a two-week collapse and a chaotic evacuation that the world watched in real time
Iraq: a war sold on fabricated evidence, which destabilized an entire region and produced the material and political conditions for ISIS
Ukraine: a proxy conflict framed as a cost-free mechanism for containing Russia, now heading toward a conclusion that validates everything Western policymakers insisted was impossible

Each failure was preceded by the same institutional confidence that the adversary was manageable, the commitment was affordable, and the outcome was predictable. Iran is a country of 90 million people, with decades of documented preparation for this specific confrontation, an economy that has survived forty years of comprehensive sanctions without producing the political collapse those sanctions were designed to trigger, and a military that has spent twenty years building the specific capabilities required to make any American campaign prohibitively costly.

Adding it to the ledger of manageable commitments is not a strategic calculation. It is the repetition of an error whose prior iterations are fully visible to anyone willing to look at them.

The institutional memory that should prevent this repetition has been systematically discredited. The analysts who were right about Iraq were sidelined. The officials who warned about Afghanistan were ignored. The diplomats who argued for engagement with Iran were overruled. What remains is a policy apparatus populated by people who have never been held accountable for being wrong, advising a president who has demonstrated that he responds to the most recent and most forceful voice in the room. Netanyahu knows this. That is precisely why he is in Washington.

The Final Reckoning – What Comes After the Bridge Too Far

Each of these wars would be a bridge too far. The bridges keep getting built. The question is not whether any of them will collapse but how many people are on them when they do – and who among the architects will be held to account.

Marandi’s closing assessment is not optimistic, but it is precise. He does not predict that war will be avoided. He does not claim that the combination of strategic inadvisability, deteriorating American capacity, and shifting public opinion will be sufficient to override the political incentives pushing toward escalation. What he predicts, clearly and without diplomatic softening, is that it will not go well – for Israel, for the United States, for any party operating on the assumption that the playbook that appeared to work in 2003 remains functional in a fundamentally different world.

The region has changed in ways that Western policymakers appear genuinely reluctant to register. Iran has spent twenty years preparing for the confrontation now being threatened. Hezbollah spent the past year upgrading its capabilities specifically for the next engagement after the last one. The Russian military, tested and recalibrated through three years of intensive warfare in Ukraine, is not the force that stumbled in the opening weeks of 2022.

The American military is deployed across commitments on four continents, with a domestic political base increasingly hostile to the costs of maintaining all of them simultaneously and a treasury that cannot indefinitely absorb the financial requirements of imperial maintenance.

The post-war landscape, whatever form the war takes:

Iran will not be more compliant after being struck. History and basic strategic logic both point in the opposite direction. It will be more capable, more determined, and politically immunized against any internal argument for accommodation with the powers that struck it.
The Gulf states hosting American forward operating bases will face impossible simultaneous pressure from Washington and Tehran, and the choices made in that pressure will define regional alignments for a generation
Global energy markets will register the consequences of any serious disruption to Gulf oil flows immediately and irreversibly in the short term, at a moment when Western economies are already navigating structural fragility
The domestic American political cost of another unsuccessful military intervention – the fifth in a series that has produced no decisive strategic victory since 1991 – may be terminal for the administration that authorizes it

What Netanyahu is selling in Washington is a war that Israel cannot fight alone, against an adversary that has spent two decades specifically preparing for it, at a moment when the patron being asked to co-sign the venture is facing its own structural decline and a domestic political base pointing in precisely the opposite direction. The product being sold does not work as advertised. The salesman understands this. The question before the buyer is whether he does too – and whether the answer will arrive before or after the commitment has been made.

Glenn Diesen’s summary of the entire situation is deliberately economical: he’ll be watching carefully, trying to cut through the marketing, the branding, and what he calls simply “the BS,” to see which direction things are actually heading. “Because it just seems, at this point in time – with the war pending now against Venezuela, the crisis about to unfold in Ukraine, the growing tensions with China – it would just be the worst idea to set the whole Middle East on fire.”

Marandi’s final word is quieter than you might expect from someone who has just walked systematically through the full architecture of potential catastrophe: “I actually think each of these would be a bridge too far. But this one would be another bridge too far.”

The bridges keep getting built. The question is not whether any of them will collapse. The question is how many people are standing on them when they do – and who, among the men who designed and sold the engineering, will ever be required to answer for it.

Thank You, Seyed Mohammad Marandi.