Iran and the United States' strategic drag with Israel

The motivations that could support a negotiation between the United States, Israel, and Iran are blocked by a profoundly asymmetric structural dynamic: Israel acts out of existential hatred towards Iran, while the United States lacks strategic vision and allows itself to be dragged along by its ally without defining its own objectives. Instead of the international community creating frameworks that incentivize negotiation, Washington ends up legitimizing Israeli military objectives without having made them its own, ceding its autonomy to Tel Aviv's emotional urgency. The need for security is subordinated to the Israeli logic of eliminating the adversary. The United States, without an articulated doctrine, does not lead but accompanies, becoming complicit in an escalation whose consequences it has not rigorously calculated. This absence of a possible area of agreement is in itself an indicator that neither side has made the necessary mental transition from the logic of military victory to the logic of political compromise.

This dynamic becomes particularly clear when observing the conduct of the central actors. Israel operates from a deliberate rigidity and a "win at all costs" mentality, which admits no concession and recognizes no legitimacy in the Iranian adversary, combining strategic narcissism, the pursuit of symbolic control, and recognition as the dominant power in the Middle East. When one party defines the adversary not as an interlocutor but as an ontological threat to be eliminated, negotiation loses its basic substratum: the minimal reciprocity without which no peace process can take root. Iran, for its part, maintains a deep distrust in any external mechanism, reinforced by years of sanctions and what it perceives as Western double standards, which leads it to interpret any offer of dialogue as a trap or a sign of weakness to be avoided. The United States, caught between its dependence on the Israeli agenda and its inability to articulate its own strategy, responds reactively and impulsively to each escalation.

What this war reveals is the systematic destruction of the three conditions that make any lasting peace possible. The first axis, the termination of violence as a political prerequisite, is deliberately avoided, as actors opt for sustained escalation without credible ceasefires; without this condition, any diplomatic effort is built on ground that continually breaks. The second axis, the construction of institutional frameworks that articulate rights and resources for affected populations, is conspicuous by its absence, as no actor has presented a political project for post-conflict Iran that goes beyond the collapse of the regime as an end in itself, without a transition architecture. The third axis, the international legitimation of the process, is deeply fractured, as much of the Global South and growing sectors of Europe do not recognize the legitimacy of this military campaign, depriving the United States and Israel of the support necessary to sustain any long-term political outcome. Without this legitimacy, any eventual agreement would be politically fragile and structurally unstable.

In short, this war not only has no route to peace, but it has no intention of building it. Dominant actors have not realistically identified their best alternatives to a negotiated settlement, and act as if military victory were achievable at an acceptable cost, something the history of Middle Eastern conflicts consistently disproves. The United States, dragged along by Israel's existential imperatives without having made them its own, assumes the strategic, moral, and geopolitical costs of a confrontation with a final horizon that no one has been able to clearly define. In the vacuum of this ambiguity, it is not peace that gains ground, but the inertia of war.