The US is building a new pressure architecture against Iran

Summary

Was Trump’s presence at the NATO summit in Turkiye, amid escalating anti-Iranian rhetoric and orders to attack Iran, simply participation in a diplomatic meeting on European security? This question is of paramount importance because recent developments cannot be understood at the surface level alone. At a deeper level, Trump’s presence signals a recalibration of the United States’s strategic calculations regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran and the “axis of resistance”. This recalibration is based on the premise that direct military, political and economic pressure, despite imposing costs, has failed to produce the desired shift in Iran’s behaviour, power configuration or strategic orientation. Accordingly, Washington is gradually moving from a paradigm of direct pressure to a hybrid and multilayered model, in which domestic pressure, the transformation of Iran’s peripheral environment, extra-regional coalition-building and the simultaneous reorganisation of regional dossiers form part of a single strategic architecture. The logic underpinning this strategic shift is that Iran should be pressured not through a single decisive blow, but through simultaneous trajectories of attrition across multiple levels. The objective is not merely to increase the external costs imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran, but to create conditions in which the country’s decision-making apparatus is compelled to devote a greater share of its capacity to managing overlapping domestic, border and regional pressures. In other words, the new US strategy is based on generating simultaneous pressure within Iran, across its geopolitical periphery and throughout its network of regional connections. The first is to engage Iran within its border ring by activating pockets of insecurity in the west, northwest, southeast or northeast. The border, ethnic and security dynamics surrounding Iran, particularly in the west and northwest, could assume an active role in such a strategy.