Iran faces tough choice: Drink from the poisoned chalice or risk more strikes
Iran has been squirming and kicking since its war with Israel – in which the IDF and the US air forces set its nuclear program back two years, took its ballistic missile program down several notches, and killed many of Iran's top military and intelligence officials – ended on June 24.
After the war, Iran expelled the IAEA and refused to re-engage them for over a month.
The Islamic Republic refused to talk to the US. It was willing to speak to the United Kingdom, Germany, and France (the E-3), but not in a real way that addressed its new dilemmas of losing much of its leverage. In fact, Tehran often seemed to bluff its way forward, pretending it had lost nothing and was not much weaker in the world's eyes, while demanding 'compensation' for the war.
But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is only the supreme leader in Iran. After years of playing nice with Khamenei out of fear that he might threaten them, the E-3 are now treating Tehran like the threat that it is – threatening it in return with a snapback of global sanctions by August 29 if it does not make some real concessions.
This is a sort of checkmate for Iran because it has no cards to play this time. Anytime the IAEA or E3 condemned or threatened it in the past, it would build more nuclear centrifuges and enrich more uranium, making the West pay a price for applying pressure.
But Israel has damaged its nuclear program so comprehensively, and Iran continues to be vulnerable in terms of lacking air defenses, meaning that it would take several months or maybe even a period of years for it to make any new meaningful nuclear progress.
Any progress Iran makes would be baby steps
Even then the progress would only constitute baby steps toward restoring what it had before Israel and the US set it back around two years – probably how long it would take to get fully back to where it was. And that is unlikely to happen because the Islamic Republic knows that Israel can and will strike again long before it gets close to the nuclear bomb threshold again.
It could pull out the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but that threat carries much less weight than it did before the June war because now its nuclear program lies in shambles. So it can either concede giving up uranium enrichment for some period of time upfront – the ultimate and more permanent concession – or jump at the E3's interim concessions offer.
The interim offer is: to extend the expiration of the global sanctions snapback mechanism by around six months from October 2025 until April 2026.
By that time, Khamenei can hope that US President Donald Trump's attention will have deflected to something else. Who knows? Maybe the snapback may be extended more than once, and Khamenei can hope that a new and less aggressive leadership may emerge in Israel – though Israel is rather united regarding Iran.
Iran's toughest hardliners will not like "rewarding" Israel
Of course, extending the snapback may mean agreeing to a kind of unsaid uranium enrichment freeze for the next 6-8 months, but right now Iran is still digging through rubble and cannot enrich uranium anyway. Also, Iran's toughest hardliners will not like 'rewarding' Israel and the West for their attacks and may be leery of agreeing to let the West hold the snapback threat over it for another round of negotiations – but what are its alternatives?
Of course, Khamenei faced a somewhat similar dilemma in June and decided to test Israeli and American resolve.
It would seem that since nearly all of the military and intelligence people who advised him to stand tough against the West are now dead, he is now more likely to listen to the still-alive 'pragmatic' camp of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, which is telling him that talks are his only option to avoid another war and to stay alive.
Either way, it seems that Khamenei can either 'drink from the poisoned chalice' of diplomatic concessions – a phrase coined by his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, when he cut a weak end-of-war deal with Iraq in 1988 – or face more airstrikes, possibly next time some targeting him directly.
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