By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 3/10/26
Introduction
The markets yesterday and today have been quite volatile. Markets ended with a positive reversal yesterday and a mixed finish today. “Mr. Market” seems to believe everything will be fine. The market reversal yesterday was quite dramatic with oil going up 31% only to reverse and come back down 31%. The headline in the Wall Street Journal tells the tale: The 24 Hours When Oil Markets Went Wild. The stock market also experienced a dramatic positive reversal. The Trump Administration used messaging to calm the market combining a press conference by President Trump where he announced the war was close to ending, with announcements from Lloyds of London on insuring oil tankers, with pledges to release oil reserves, with the removal of sanctions on Russian oil; all to engineer a market reversal. Today the Secretary of Defense maintained that the US/Israel is “winning” the war against the “barbarian” Iranians and that the US would not relent until the enemy is “totally and entirely defeated”. Meanwhile, Reuters announced that at least 150 US soldiers had been wounded. We do not know how badly.
Question: has the military and economic crisis that created all this uncertainty and volatility been resolved? It has not and we will see more market volatility unless this war is ended soon.
The kind of market action we have seen over the last few days is not unusual in a budding crisis. Similar market action unfolded at the onset of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). In 2007 and 2008, the GFC went through three acute phases, spaced about six months apart, before the Lehman collapse finally triggered the crisis. Each time, the authorities pulled together some emergency facilities, convinced investors the crisis was contained, and the panic receded. The pattern continued until the failure of Lehman Brothers made containment impossible.
Here’s Yves Smith: “We sincerely doubt that it will take anywhere near as long as six months for investors to recognize that this situation is not like financial upheaval, where a Greenspan-Bernanke-Yellen-presumed Powell put to bail them out. This is an accelerating real economy crisis, with downsides far vaster and more comprehensive than even in the 2008 global crisis. That crisis merely threatened the critical payment system but would have left productive capacity intact. As we have explained previously, the exposure here is not merely an energy price shock, as bad as that is. Nor is the risk even just that of energy shortages. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz also risks food supplies, chemicals, apparel, chips, and other key sectors which depend not simply on affordable but also on petrochemicals as a key production input or the Strait for transit.”
So, the world is now “on the clock” can the war be ended, can the flow of energy through the Strait of Hormuz be restored, can the Gulf states resume oil and gas production and sales? If not, a serious crisis will become unavoidable.
This War is Censored–Accurate Information Difficult to Find
A level of censorship has been imposed on this war that can only be called draconian. This makes accurate information difficult to obtain. A great deal of the analysis and videos are fake, and misinformation and disinformation are being released on all sides. Some high-level people have been killed 2 or 3 times, including during the 12 Day War! Videos from all sorts of wars are recycled, along with AI generated fakes.
Censorship is necessary because Trump and Netanyahu began this war without public support. Surveys show that almost 80% of the American people are opposed to this war of choice. Contrast this with “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in 2003 which was, unfortunately, supported by 93% of the public. The coverage Iraqi Freedom was through “embedded reporters” but at least there was coverage. The current war on Iran is being conducted in a deliberate, intentionally imposed information vacuum. If the war is going badly, and many knowledgeable people are saying that it is, when the public finds that out, it will create a huge negative shock.
What Are Some of the Markers of Success
First are the Tipping points such as whether the Gulf States will have to close oil and gas production. Some states have already announced that they have closed production others that they will have to close production in the next few days unless inventory starts to move. If production closes and stays closed it could take billions and several years to return to the levels before February 28th.
Second is whether the Strait of Hormuz can be opened so that oil and gas can move out of the Gulf. Right now, the Strait of Hormuz is not closed but it is also not open. The issue initially was insurance, but now it’s safety. Iran could mine the Strait. Iran has underwater torpedo bombs, along with fast boats equipped with missiles, all of which could threaten traffic.
Then there’s the topography of the Strait. All along the north shore of the Strait, in Iranian territory, is a natural barrier—an extensive mountain range 160 kilometers long. Inside those mountains, Iranians have stationed missiles. Under these conditions, does anyone think a shipping company will risk trying to transit the Strait? What would it take to destroy the missile bases in this mountain chain? Tactical nukes? Is it really feasible to use nukes to open the Strait? This would make the entire Gulf uninhabitable. Conclusion: in all probability the Strait cannot be opened without Iran’s consent.
Third, how long can President Trump tolerate his poll numbers sinking. The Hill broke this story yesterday, Trump job approval sinks in new poll, showing a further 3 point fall to a net negative of ten points. The sample period was February 27 to March 3 and so would not capture the impact of energy price volatility on voter views.
Fourth, the future of the war is not only in the hands of Trump and Netanyahu, Iran also has a say. Iran claims they have the weapons they need and are prepared to fight for another 6 months. Six months!! If the Iranians hold out for another 3 weeks the political and economic consequences would be catastrophic.
Fifth, below are some of the markers of strategic victory, defeat, or the establishment of deterrence:
–if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, this would constitute a strategic defeat for the US and Israel and a strategic victory for Iran.
— if Iran can survive and continue to attack the US and her allies, this would constitute a strategic defeat for the US and a strategic victory for Iran.
— if the US cannot suppress Iranian attacks on her own assets or those of her allies this would constitute a strategic defeat for the US and a strategic victory for Iran.
–if Iran can both continue attacks and keep Hormuz closed until the US offers a unilateral ceasefire, Iran would have succeeded in establishing deterrence.
Sixth, the above markers depend on two factors, how quickly the US runs out of interceptors and standoff weapons, and whether Iran can replace and repair her drones and missiles faster than the US and Israel can destroy and degrade them. A Substack constructed an arithmetic model and concluded that it would be difficult for the US to degrade Iranian strike capabilities fast enough. The implications are quite astonishing. Policy Tensor concludes: “If Iranian capabilities cannot be degraded for at least four months, the costs to the world economy and the United States would be intolerable. We will see a global inflation shock, global monetary tightening, a food crisis as the fertilizer shock cuts the next crop in half, and almost certainly a global recession. It will destroy the Trump presidency; it will destroy the GOP for a generation; and it would finally end the entrapment of the United States by its junior geopolitical ally.”
Seventh, Hezbollah has not been vanquished. Israel is apparently now involved in a two-front war with Iran and Hezbollah. According to Thomas Kieth, media in Israel reports that Hezbollah continues to launch weapons toward Tel Aviv and central regions, to strike strategic communications infrastructure, and has engaged in sustained bombardment of the Galilee. The same outlet now warns that any attempt to dismantle Hezbollah would require preparing the public for a long war that could last months or years and potentially involve the occupation of large areas of southern Lebanon, while admitting that even such a campaign offers no guarantee of eliminating the resistance.
According to Thomas Kieth: “Hezbollah has destroyed the SES satellite station in Beit Shemesh, sitting in the middle of Emek HaEla, is one of the oldest and most sensitive teleport hubs in the region, a 1970s-era backbone site built to push and pull international satellite traffic into the entity’s networks. Those huge parabolic dishes were the uplink and downlink arteries for space communications, broadcast routing, and high-capacity data transfer.”
Below is a picture of the destruction.
According to Phillip Plikington Israel is now panicking. There appear to be attempts to steer Israel into focusing on Hezbollah and letting the Iran War go. According to sources within Israel, the IDF is preparing for a long campaign against Hezbollah. “We are not looking for a long war with Iran.” Oh really–then why did Israel assassinate the Ayatollah and start the war on Iran?
Mark Wauck reports on daily interviews, including one with Chas Freeman who apparently believes the new Supreme Leader is unlikely to back down. Wauck also reports: “Hezbollah is coordinating some of its actions with Iran and is probably receiving intel via Iran as well. This is important, as it signals the difference a regime change can make. It’s another example of the Jewish Nationalist inability to understand the old maxim about being careful what you wish for.”
“Think back to the days when Israel bombed Iran’s embassy in Damascus and assassinated Hezbollah’s Nasrallah using the pretext of US negotiating with Nasrallah to geo-locate him. The then Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, declined to respond militarily. He also failed to get involved militarily in support of Hezbollah when it was attacked by Israel or in support of Gaza or Yemen. Reports at the time suggested that many in the (Republican Guard) IRGC regarded these failures to act as betrayals of allies. Nevertheless, Israeli insisted on assassinating Khamenei in another sneak attack facilitated by Trump’s negotiation charade.”
Eighth, the Gulf states are not happy. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar are reviewing EVERY financial agreement with Washington. The GCC invested over $1 trillion in its defense by buying US military hardware only to learn that it benefits Israel This represents a historic and potentially seismic shift in the “Petrodollar” relationship that has anchored global finance for decades. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar are indeed conducting an unprecedented internal review of their financial agreements with Washington. The Gulf states are navigating a “perfect storm” of fiscal and security challenges that make their current financial commitments to the U.S. difficult to sustain: This move is primarily a defensive response to the extreme economic pressures of the ongoing conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran.
The New Ayatollah lengthy piece appeared in the New York Times. “New Supreme Leader Inherits Sprawling, Secretive Office That Dominates Iran.” The conclusion; the new Ayatollah is deeply entwined with the Republican Guards especially since he served in the guards and has been involved in vetting the current leadership. This makes the history and structure of the Republican Guards important.
A Substack, KAUTILYA THE CONTEMPLATOR, published a long essay on the history and structure of the guards today: Inside Iran’s Revolutionary Guard: The Organization Built to Outlast War His conclusion: “The IRGC is not merely Iran’s military but a political-. military system designed to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic in war.”
Since his appointment the new Ayatollah has not issued any statements, and he has not appeared in public. This has led to a great deal of speculation about what his silence could mean. Here’s Jeff Childers at Coffee and Covid: “In other words, Mojtaba Khamenei is Schrödinger’s Ayatollah. He’s the Persian cat in the lead box. He might be alive, he might be dead, he might be wounded— and nobody can know until somebody opens the lid. That’s no way to rally a nation around a new wartime leader. He’s a quantum enigma. Science.”
On the other hand, the new Ayatollah might be busy dealing with a war that is existential to the survival for his nation. His Father, Mother, Wife, Son, Brother-in-Law and niece just got wiped out by Israel, and Lindsey Graham has announced: We’re going to make a tonne of money’: US Senator Graham on US war on Iran. Without passing judgment on whether he’s a good or bad man, he will not be able to do his new job if he also gets assassinated. It may be a while before we get to know Schrödinger’s Ayatollah, if ever.
Insider Trading?
According to the Kobeissi Letter: By 2:10 PM ET on March 9th, the S&P 500, $SPY, $675 strike calls had fallen to a low of $0.02 per contract, effectively worthless. Then, at 3:20 PM ET, President Trump said the Iran war is “very complete.” This statement sent the S&P 500 soaring. By 3:30 PM ET, 10 minutes later, these same calls were trading at $4.95 per contract, up +24,650%. In other words, $1,000 invested in these calls at 2:10 PM ET was worth $247,500 just 80 minutes later.
This level of volatility is obviously historic, but it has happened repeatedly over the last year. The Trump Administration is filled with traders from Wall Street, hedge funds, and Private Equity. Scott Bessett worked for George Soros and was part of the “trade that broke the pound” in September of 1992. They have friends. We know that some of these traders made billions during the volatility associated with Trump’s tariff announcement. We could also be witnessing historic and shameless levels of insider trading. If someone knew what Trump was going to say, and they understood how markets work, shorting oil and going long on out of the money calls was a no brainer.
Conclusion
I hope these essays have been helpful. As you read them, please remember the words Yogi Berra “Predictions are very difficult, especially about the future”.
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Trump Might Want to End the War. Iran Won’t Do It on His Terms.
By Jeremy Scahill, Drop Site News, 3/10/26
As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran stretches into its second week, President Donald Trump has been floating the idea that he wants to declare Mission Accomplished. “We will. We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” Trump declared on Monday afternoon in a speech before Republican lawmakers in Florida.
Iran, however, has shown no sign of ceasing its attacks. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is steadily launching missiles at cities across Israel and continues to strike U.S. military assets and outposts in the Persian Gulf. “The Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran are capable of continuing at least a six-month intense war at the current pace of operations,” IRGC spokesperson Ali Mohammad Naini said Sunday in video remarks broadcast on state media. “Iran will determine when the war ends.”
Iranian military officials have said that in the first days of the war, they overwhelmingly used missiles developed between 2010 and 2014, while holding some of Iran’s more sophisticated, modern missiles for future use as the war stretches on. “In the last ten years, what’s been produced, we haven’t used at all,” Naini said. The IRGC announced Monday that it was going to begin deploying more of its advanced 1,000 kg ballistic missiles and, in the first series of retaliatory strikes launched since the naming of a new Supreme Leader, fired dozens of missiles at Tel Aviv and at the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet infrastructure in Bahrain.
Iran’s latest round of strikes began as Trump was addressing a press conference in Florida, assuring reporters that Iran’s drone and missile capacity had been “utterly demolished.”
“Their missile capability is down to about 10 percent, maybe less. We’re also hitting where they make missiles and where they deliver missiles,” Trump said. “We’re knocking them out. We know where they all are. We’re knocking them out very quickly. We’re ahead of our initial timeline by a lot.”
Despite these claims, Iranian forces have continued to conduct counterstrikes across the region and inside Israel, and Iranian leaders have asserted they have the ability to continue the war. “Let them continue lingering in these illusions,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei at a press briefing Monday in Tehran. “They started this war and now realize they are caught in a quagmire.”
While U.S. and Israeli leaders have loudly proclaimed that the use of overwhelming force is evidence that they are winning the war, political and military analysts say this rhetoric obscures the reality that in asymmetrical warfare, the less powerful force does not need to militarily defeat an adversary, but rather force it to a point where it determines the costs of continuing the war is too high.
“Iran’s goal is to impose such a great cost that the war ends and their ‘win condition’ is the war has ended and they are still the guys you have to talk to,” said Amir Husain, author of “Hyperwar: Conflict and Competition in the AI Century,” in an interview with Drop Site. Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks in the region are not aimed at causing random widespread damage or defeating the U.S. and Israel militarily, he said, but rather at inflicting economic damage that forces Trump to cease the war and deters future attacks. “The U.S. is the biggest military machine in the world. Nothing that the U.S. has lost is irreplaceable in time. The question is economic costs and that is really the big driver.”
Iranian officials told Drop Site that after being attacked on February 28 they moved swiftly to implement a series of planned retaliatory strikes that had been war-gamed extensively in the months following the 12-Day War in June 2025. Iran, they said, anticipated that the U.S. and Israel would conduct a systematic assassination campaign against the country’s leaders so Tehran’s military planners preemptively constructed a “mosaic” system where command authority was delegated further down the chain. This allowed commanders from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aerospace division to launch ballistic missile and drone attacks within hours of the war beginning and to strike at predetermined targets even if communications were disabled or senior leaders killed or incapacitated.
“This is the war that Iran has been preparing for for a generation. And the question was always when this existential war was going to take place. And it seems that they believe that that time is now,” said Jon Elmer, an analyst on weapons and military tactics of Palestinian and regional resistance groups for Electronic Intifada. “The Trump administration was treating Iran as if you just come back every few months and destroy and attempt to overthrow the country, overthrow the regime. Iran’s preparation for this war is generational and there’s strategic depth, both within their hardware capacity, but also within their human capacity.”
Since the war began, Iran’s drone and ballistic missile attacks have hit major U.S. airbases, naval headquarters, logistics sites, and missile-defense radar systems across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Iran also struck a CIA station in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the most significant strikes have been Iran’s attacks on U.S. advanced warning radar systems, the nerve center for the military’s defensive missile apparatus.
Satellite imagery has shown that Iranian attacks have damaged or destroyed advanced AN/TPY-2 and PAC-3 missile defense radars for the THAAD and Patriot systems as well as other radar domes at U.S. bases in the Gulf. In addition to reducing ballistic missile defense effectiveness for the entire region, the disabling of defensive facilities at airbases may force operations to be carried out farther from Iran, further reducing the number of sorties that the U.S. can carry out on a daily basis. On March 9 the satellite imagery provider Planet Labs announced that it would restrict access to its commercial imagery over the region for security reasons.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. had begun relocating components from its THAAD missile defense system in South Korea to the Middle East, as well as more Patriot interceptors that had been deployed to East Asia. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung said that Seoul had “expressed opposition,” to the decision, which would increase its own exposure to the threat of war. “The reality is that we cannot fully push through our position” and block the transfers, he added.
In addition to ballistic missile strikes, U.S. officials on Tuesday confirmed the downing of at least 11 MQ-9 Reaper drones over Iran, with another reportedly shot down on Wednesday. Iran claims to have shot down over 80 drones, and the officially confirmed U.S. losses come in addition to significant numbers of downed Israeli drones verified by OSINT researchers and independent monitors. The loss of drones over Iran further degrades the ability to stop Iran from firing by adding a limitation to the intelligence the U.S. can gather on ballistic missile launches.
Prior to the war, concerns over missile interceptor stockpiles, which are costly and time-consuming to replenish, were a major factor in arguments against launching the war. Figures on U.S. stockpiles are classified, but a significant number of interceptors are believed to have been employed in response to Iranian missile bombardments targeting Israel and the Gulf Arab states.
The continued firing of missiles nearly two weeks into the fighting will soon push against logistical limits for the forces deployed, Elmer told Drop Site. “There’s only so many missile interceptors on the [U.S.] destroyers. Once they expend those missiles, they have to go back down to Diego Garcia and reload the missiles. And reloading the missiles looks like offloading a ship. It involves a significant amount of labor. It’s not something that’s simple to do. It’s a multi-day process,” said Elmer. Iran is “using a defense that puts weight on the fact that there’s a distribution over the territory to different autonomous units that can continue the battle if one particular territory runs short or is depleted or is attacked.”
Economic shock waves
The war has sent economic shock waves through the region and the global economy. In an interview with Princeton Alumni Weekly on March 6, Sheikh Nawaf Al‑Sabah, the chief executive officer of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC)—the national oil company of the State of Kuwait and one of the largest oil companies in the world—discussed the impact of the war on oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. He explained that the company immediately activated a “contingency plan” once strikes on Kuwait began. “What I didn’t expect is, one, that Kuwait would be so consistently targeted, and two, that Iran would be effective in essentially closing down the Strait of Hormuz. Physically it’s not closed, but there’s nothing going through because they’ve threatened every ship that might go through,” Al-Sabah said. He added that while KPC has a strategic tanker fleet prepared to move through the Gulf, the company is still waiting for “some level of assurance on safe passage from the U.S. Navy, but that’s not there yet.”
Al-Sabah explained that KPC had prepared for such a disruption by storing oil outside the Gulf near Japan and Korea, and by loading its tanker fleet before the strikes and sending them out of the Gulf to provide cover for a limited period. However, he emphasized that these steps were only temporary. “There has been oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz for over 80 years, and not a single day of those 80 years has it ever been closed to traffic. After eight decades, we have now entered a new era of geopolitics in the region, where we now have five or six days of practically zero traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which is where you get 20% of the world’s oil supply.”
Major Persian Gulf oil producers have begun sharply reducing output as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has largely ground to a halt, with petroleum storage facilities filling up with unsold crude.
Anusar Farooqi, a geopolitical and defense analyst who authors the Policy Tensor newsletter, said that the sustained ability of the Iranian military to hold closed the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz has been the most revelatory development of the war to date, adding that a failure to coerce the strait open would mean a strategic defeat for the U.S. whose relationship with the Gulf oil monarchies has been built on protection of the waterway as well as their own security.
“There is a specific strategic problem that must be solved: unless the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened, the war cannot be brought to an end. If Hormuz remains closed, the vectors through which Iran can deliver economic pain are effectively unlimited,” Farooqi said. “The economic consequences of a three-month closure of the Strait of Hormuz have been modeled many times, and the results are catastrophic. Unless flows can be restored—even at reduced levels—the situation becomes extremely severe.”
The ability of Iran to hold the strait closed has been built largely on its deployment of large numbers of cheap and effective Shahed drones—a one-way attack UAV used to strike ships in the region as well as targets in the Gulf Arab states. The Shahed, which can be produced for tens of thousands of dollars a piece and deployed from low-cost mobile launch platforms, has transformed the security environment in the Gulf by allowing Iran to strike targets on a level that has effectively shut down the economically vital region.
“The big shock of this war is that Iran has adopted a highly effective defense strategy mixing both counterforce and countervalue targeting,” Farooqi said, referencing attacks that strike both military and infrastructure targets. “The original U.S. strategy for defending the region was based on the assumption that it could deny Iran the option of closing the strait. But the economics of modern warfare—cheap drones, missile proliferation, and technological diffusion—have changed that equation. The old strategy was not simply responsive enough to the spread of precision-strike capabilities to countries like Iran.”
Iranian missile and drone strikes have declined over the past two days. The U.S. has attributed this to the massive bombing and the decimation of its munitions and launch systems. Iranian officials say that the decrease is a result of the initial damage done to U.S. and Israeli defense systems and that they do not need to launch as many missiles or drones.
Husain said that Iran recognizes the asymmetry of the conflict and has engaged in a strategic series of attacks aimed at maximizing the economic damage. Iran’s opening days of attacks degraded the defensive military infrastructure of Gulf states to a degree that Iran is able to more successfully strike. “Initially [Iran] expended 2,000 plus [missiles and drones] because they needed the ability to launch a few and have them get through. They needed to increase their penetration factor, they needed to take out early warning, they needed to take out counter batteries, and they needed to expend their opponents’ interceptors,” he said. “Once that’s done, the strategy shifts into economic cost maximization mode. Their goal is not to flatten a place. Their goal is to impose such a great cost that the war ends and their win condition is the war has ended and they are still the guys you have to talk to.”
Iran utilizes both mobile and fixed missile launch sites and has spent significant resources embedding many inside mountains, making them difficult for the U.S. to destroy. Within these sites are tunnels and other infrastructure with subterranean missile silos—what are known as “missile cities.” “There are reports that there might be between 70 and 100 Iranian underground launch facilities for ballistic missiles,” Husain said. “Many of these facilities have rail mounted ballistic missiles. We’ve seen video in the past of a rail infrastructure underground carrying multiple Iranian missiles that are almost like an automated magazine. A missile moves into position and then it can fire, then the next one moves into position and so on.” Some of these underground sites house bulldozers and other equipment that can clear debris at entrances that are struck by U.S. or Israeli missiles.
Husain also cited videos of Iranian missiles being launched from a fixed silo with a concealed exit. “It’s underground and suddenly the ground bursts open and this missile is launched,” he said. The U.S. and Israel would “need to launch extremely devastating repeat strikes with some of the largest bombs in the arsenal and maybe—maybe—then you can penetrate and that’s over 100 sites,” he added. “I haven’t really seen any devastating strikes on Iranian missile cities. It seems to me like a lot of that is being held in reserve. So, I haven’t seen anywhere near the evidence that would convince me that all of this is gone.”
Iran is now using long range drones that Husain, a specialist in artificial intelligence, said appear to utilize AI to guide their paths once they extend beyond the range of control and they employ antennas that are more challenging to jam. The Karrar drone also includes air-to-air infrared missiles, a technology that both Russia and Ukraine have used against the other’s drones.
“The drones are extremely precise. They’re able to pick off the particular installations inside the bases, the radar domes in particular. That has been something that they have hit at these bases all across the region. And when you do that, you knock out this multi-layered missile defense system,” said Elmer. “So the strategic outlook for Iran is the longer this battle goes on, the more it tilts in their favor because of the disruption that it causes in the Gulf countries even though the U.S. bases are the targets.”
The launch systems for Iran’s drones are highly mobile and easy to produce, making it much more difficult for the U.S. to target launch sites as it did in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq’s Scud missile launchers. “There are no complex launchers that are necessary,” said Husain. “In the Iraq war there were these complex transporter erector launchers that you could take out and then Iraq didn’t have the ability to launch a Scud. It’s not like that with Iranian drones.”
If Trump decides he wants to end the war, which he has begun referring to as a “short term excursion,” there is no indication Iran would accept a temporary ceasefire similar to the “12-Day War” in June 2025. Iran’s senior leaders have said they do not trust the U.S. and point out that Trump has twice claimed to be negotiating with Tehran only to launch massive attacks. Iran’s strategic position, as articulated by its leadership, is that the war must end on terms that make clear the costs of future attacks on their country. “We are absolutely not seeking a ceasefire,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of Iran’s Parliament, on Monday. “We believe the aggressor must be struck in the mouth so it learns a lesson and never again thinks of attacking our beloved Iran.”
There is speculation that Trump has begun speaking of wrapping up the war because of the response of global financial markets and increased pressure from U.S. allies, who fear even greater economic and security consequences. Iranian leaders have been clear they believe Trump underestimated the damage Iran could inflict and overestimated the ability of the U.S. and Israel to swiftly impose a state of collapse on the Iranian state. “They thought that, in a matter of two or three days, they can go for a regime change, they can go for a rapid, clean victory, but they failed. So I believe that the option plan A was a failure, and now they are trying other plans, but all of them have failed as well,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Monday. “I don’t think they have any realistic endgame in their mind,” he added. “I think they are aimless.”
Jawa Ahmad, Drop Site News’s Middle East Research Fellow, contributed to this report.