Iran shifted the debate from its nuclear program to the Strait of Hormuz: Indian Analyst

Vijay Prashad says decades of resistance defined Iran's response, a pattern US failed to anticipate

TEHRAN – Months after the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, its consequences are still being weighed: a war that may have exposed the limits of American power rather than confirmed it, and one that appears to have accelerated the very regional realignment it was meant to prevent.

Tehran Times spoke with Vijay Prashad, historian and executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, about the strategic miscalculations behind the US-Israeli campaign, the credibility of the nuclear pretext used to justify it, and the emerging security architecture — from the Strait of Hormuz to the new Mecca Agreement among Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan — now taking shape in Washington's absence.

Below is the full text of the interview:

You have described the US-Israeli campaign as a major strategic miscalculation. Looking back at the course of the war, what was the deepest flaw in their strategic thinking, and what did they fundamentally misunderstand about Iran?

Had they studied the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, they would have understood something essential about the nature of Iranian society. Iranian society rests on an old foundation of patriotism and dignity — a sense of dignity that colonial occupation never managed to destroy. Across much of Asia and Africa, colonialism badly damaged national and social dignity. Iran was never fully colonized in that sense. Even though multinational corporations once dominated its oil sector, Iran retains a deep understanding of its own history, and its population is largely resolved to preserve a dignified sense of itself. Surrender, in other words, is not an easy option for Iran.

During the war with Iraq, Baghdad used chemical weapons — mustard gas and other agents — against Iranian forces, and still Iran did not surrender. This was despite Iraq's much smaller population and its backing from the West and the Gulf Arab states — indeed, from nearly every quarter against Iran. It bears remembering that in 1980, Iranian society had not yet fully taken shape: the revolution had just occurred, and the Islamic Republic had barely established itself when the attack came. Washington and Tel Aviv had much to learn from that war — chiefly, that Iran does not capitulate easily. That was the first miscalculation.

The second was Washington and Tel Aviv's assumption that the killing of Qasem Soleimani had compromised Iran's forward posture — its capacity to defend itself beyond its own borders. Soleimani was killed. Palestinian resistance factions had been devastated. Hezbollah had been weakened, and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah killed. In Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad was overthrown, and Ahmad al-Sharaa, a figure with past ties to al-Qaeda, came to power. Taken together, these developments convinced Washington and Tel Aviv that Iran no longer had the means to retaliate if attacked — that its regional line of defense, the network through which Hezbollah and Palestinian resistance groups would strike Israel on Iran's behalf, had been dismantled. Having, in their view, taken apart Iran's forward defenses, US planners assumed a direct confrontation would now be manageable.

That assumption proved to be a serious miscalculation, because Iran did two things Washington did not anticipate. First, it struck US military targets in the Gulf Arab states with precision — strikes that found their mark because those targets were inadequately defended. The radar installation in Kuwait, for example, was eliminated almost instantly. Second, Washington did not believe Iran capable of restricting passage through the Strait of Hormuz — and it was.

So there were two central miscalculations: one concerning Iran's willingness to surrender, and another concerning Iran's options beyond defending its own borders. There remains, notably, a third option Iran has not yet exercised — signaling to armed groups in Iraq to strike US bases there. That option has not been activated, which means Iran still retains room on the escalation ladder. It is striking that Iraq, despite having a government broadly sympathetic to Tehran, has remained largely silent throughout this crisis. Baghdad could, for instance, tell Washington tomorrow to withdraw its bases from Iraqi territory. That has not happened — but I believe it remains part of the escalation still to come. Both Israel and the United States made a series of miscalculations in this campaign, but these two, I believe, were the most consequential.

The US has obvious technological and air-power superiority, yet Iran was able to impose significant costs. Does this war reveal a fundamental limit of conventional military superiority in asymmetric conflicts, or is Iran an exceptional case?

I don't think Iran is a wholly exceptional case. There are exceptions, certainly, but not in an extreme sense. The United States has suffered military defeats before — in Vietnam, and in Iraq, from which it was ultimately forced to withdraw, and in Afghanistan five years ago. The US does not, in fact, have a strong track record of military victories. It has the capacity to inflict enormous damage, and it has done so against Iran — heavy civilian casualties, extensive infrastructure damage. That capacity is real. But Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and to some extent Libya, all demonstrate that a country can be destroyed without a war being won. The United States can be savage, but it cannot win the war. I would ask: name an example where it won a war decisively. I don't see one. There have been surrenders, because the scale of US violence has at times been so extreme that adversaries capitulated beforehand — but that is not the same as winning a war. Washington has not defeated Russia either.

Syria is an instructive case in this context. What occurred there was, in effect, an extreme moral collapse of Syrian society — its morale had already broken down. The president fled the country rather than stay and fight, which is itself telling of how far morale had fallen.

Iran presented a very different picture. The Supreme Leader went to his office knowing full well that he could be bombed. He went to work. A few months earlier, he had visited the mausoleum of his old friend, Ayatollah Khomeini — there are photographs of that visit. He then returned to his office and, in effect, said: come and get me.

That is a high-morale society. Syria, by contrast, saw social collapse — the country scarcely fought, because its morale had already given way. It was an altogether different scenario.

Consider Afghanistan: the Taliban fought with surface-to-air rockets that could not even reach US military aircraft, let alone strike them — and still defeated the United States. Morale was high. It is a complicated society, and not everyone there is satisfied with the outcome, but scientifically speaking, its social morale was never close to collapse. China today is likewise a high-morale society, refusing to yield even slightly under US pressure — Xi Jinping has simply stated that China will not alter its currency policy. What this shows is that superior weaponry does not guarantee victory. What is required is high morale, and a leadership willing to pay the ultimate price.

The US and Israel presented Iran's nuclear program as the central justification for military action. After the war, do you think that justification has become more or less credible?

It depends on whom you ask. In Europe and the United States, large sections of the establishment know perfectly well that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons agenda. They know Iran was enriching uranium — perhaps at a level some found uncomfortable — but within legal parameters, without violating its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty or International Atomic Energy Agency rules. The facts bear this out, and they know it. Yet the nuclear issue is being used, in effect, as a pretext to undermine Iran's independence.

It is not unlike the argument that Cuba poses a threat to the United States. Cuba, a country of eleven million people, is not a military threat to Washington, and Washington knows this perfectly well — yet it continues to suffocate Cuba regardless, because the pretext serves its purpose. Iran does not have a nuclear weapons policy. Had it pursued one, it might well not have faced this kind of attack. Consider North Korea against Libya: Libya surrendered its nuclear weapons program, and the state was subsequently destroyed. North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, and no attack against it has proven possible, since doing so would devastate South Korea. Had Iran possessed a nuclear weapon, it is unlikely it would be facing this scale of bombardment. But Iran, for ethical and moral reasons, has chosen not to pursue weapons of mass destruction — a deliberate choice on the part of Iranians themselves. One might frame the logical choice as being between the paths of Libya and North Korea, but Iran has rejected that framing altogether. It does not want such weapons, on ethical grounds. Iran's leaders, Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei among them, have said so publicly and repeatedly: these weapons are immoral, and Iran opposes them. That is the choice this society has made — and it has been bombed regardless.

Washington and its allies know Iran has no nuclear weapon. This is a fabrication, deployed as a pretext to insist that Iran must be "prevented." Israel, by contrast, does possess a nuclear weapons program — conclusively established by Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower whose evidence confirmed Israel's possession of nuclear weapons. If the genuine goal were to halt nuclear proliferation, the logical step would be to press Israel to abandon its program and join a Middle East nuclear-weapon-free zone — an agreement Iran itself has promoted. Everyone informed on the matter knows this pretext is false, yet the media has amplified it as though it were fact, and many ordinary people, without access to the IAEA's inspection reports, have come to believe Iran poses a nuclear threat. It does not, because it does not have the weapon. Had it possessed one, there would have been no bombardment. It is that simple.

Trump shifted several times between threats, military action, ceasefire proposals, and negotiation. Do you think this is deliberate unpredictability, or does Washington lack a clear endgame for the Iran war?

I believe the United States has genuinely been caught off guard, because there are developments it did not anticipate. The greatest loss for Washington, I would argue, has been a loss of confidence in its own ability to continue providing a security shield for the Persian Gulf Arab states, particularly the GCC.

Consider that in 2025, following the first, illegal bombing of Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a defense agreement. This war did not begin in 2026 — the Trump administration's first illegal bombing run, targeting what it described as nuclear facilities, came in 2025. The Pakistan-Saudi defense agreement that followed went largely unnoticed at the time; it appeared to unfold on the margins. It is, in fact, a highly significant agreement.

Last month in Mecca, Turkey — a NATO member — joined that agreement alongside Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, in what has become known as the Mecca Agreement. Tehran was clearly informed beforehand, which is why it was understood in Iran that this was not an anti-Iran arrangement. Egypt is unlikely to join, though Turkey has expressed a wish to bring Egypt into the process eventually. Given how close relations already are between Pakistan and Iran, the purpose behind this arrangement is to build an alternative to the US-backed security architecture in the region. It is another signal that Washington is, in effect, being asked to withdraw: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan — three countries that were once pillars of the US intervention structure — are now pursuing a regional security arrangement of their own, one that may eventually include Iran once this conflict ends. Iran is already engaged in a China-brokered dialogue with Saudi Arabia that could lead toward a broader regional security arrangement, and it may well join this one too.

It would be wrong to call this a "Sunni NATO" — that framing is orientalist and inaccurate. It is a regional security arrangement premised on the assumption that the United States is leaving: Qatar is set to remove the US base on its territory, as is Kuwait. Where, then, does that leave the US security umbrella? It is effectively gone. The trajectory of this conflict isolates Israel and pushes the US out of the region. Washington does not know how to exit this war, because withdrawing now may mean losing any path back into the region. The United States is, in that sense, stuck: it can continue pummeling Iran, but toward what political end? I see nothing favorable for Washington in this outcome. The Mecca Agreement isolates the United States, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan — possibly joined by other GCC members as observers — are likely to build a regional dialogue with Iran, having concluded that Iran will retaliate if attacked and is prepared to fight to the end. The United States can keep bombing — drones will keep coming, striking Qatar's desalination plants, fertilizer factories, oil-processing and natural-gas facilities. Qatar has industrialized considerably; it is no longer merely a raw-materials exporter but an exporter of processed petroleum products, fertilizer, and other high-value industrial goods. Qatar has no interest in being de-industrialized in this way. That is the miscalculation.

You connect the war to a broader struggle over the international order. To what extent was the attack an attempt not only to constrain Iran, but also to preserve a declining US-led regional order?

Had I been in Washington — and I know real anxiety existed there over this — the moment China began doing two distinct things in the region, the situation became, in Washington's eyes, unacceptable. When China arrived with the Belt and Road Initiative, running through Central Asia into Iran — with a rail line crossing northern Iran to Lake Van on the Turkish border and onward into Eastern Europe — and when the Belt and Road subsequently extended into Saudi Arabia, with Riyadh's vision of its own future beginning to tilt toward the Chinese economy rather than the American one, that was still tolerable to Washington. In that role, China was merely an economic partner.

What Washington found genuinely unacceptable was China's subsequent, substantial entry into the diplomatic arena. China's first major diplomatic breakthrough in the region — again, poorly covered internationally — was brokering a high-level meeting between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Beijing. Through Chinese mediation, the highest officials in Tehran and Riyadh began speaking directly by telephone. That, for Washington, crossed a line, because the US security architecture in the region has long depended on sustained tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Mohammed bin Salman, for all his limitations, is notably concerned with what becomes of Saudi Arabia once oil ceases to matter. His interest in diversifying the Saudi economy through Vision 2030 reflects an understanding that the West's interest in the Gulf Arab states will fade once oil becomes irrelevant — and he is asking what happens to those states then. Qatar and Dubai are already pivoting away from carbon-based fuels. China's position, in essence, was that Saudi Arabia and Iran were exhausting enormous effort and resources on their rivalry — including the war in Yemen, which Beijing regarded as pointless and in need of resolution. Mohammed bin Salman, who had launched that war, was eventually forced to reconsider it once it proved costly and unwinnable.

This culminated in a sequence of meetings — in Beijing, then Tehran, then Riyadh — as Saudi Arabia and Iran drew closer together. A full grand bargain between them would have been catastrophic for Washington. I would argue, in fact, that the US-Israeli war against Iran may end up accelerating that bargain rather than preventing it — particularly given the Turkey-Saudi-Iran-Pakistan arrangement now developing alongside the closest ties Iran and Pakistan have ever had. It is worth recalling that Iran and Pakistan exchanged fire along their border near Baluchistan only around a year to eighteen months ago; Islamabad and Tehran are now close partners. This represents an enormous diplomatic setback for the United States. The Mecca Agreement, I would argue, should be understood not as a response to anxiety over Iran, but as a response to anxiety over the departure of the United States from the region.

You've connected the Iran war to Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and the wider Global South. Do you see these as components of one regional struggle, or does treating them as a single confrontation risk overlooking their different interests and calculations?

It is tempting to describe all of this as a single struggle against US and Israeli aggression, but I don't think that framing is quite right. These are separate issues that are, at the same time, related to one another. Israel, for one, has long harbored an ambition to seize the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem — the occupied Palestinian territories — effectively annulling UN Security Council Resolution 242 and simply absorbing that territory. This is a long-standing project in Israeli politics. Even Gadi Eisenkot, a former general and potential political rival to Benjamin Netanyahu expected to contest the next election, has said the two-state solution, and the idea of a Palestinian state altogether, is no longer relevant. There is, at present, essentially no space left in Israeli politics for a two-state solution; the objective is to seize Gaza, the West Bank, and at least East Jerusalem.

Second, as the campaign to militarily crush Palestinian resistance intensified, Hezbollah's entry into the conflict followed naturally. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made clear that Hezbollah's mandate rests on two pillars: the defense of Lebanon, and solidarity with the Palestinians. Because the latter is core to its identity, Hezbollah entered the conflict, firing missiles into Israel. Israel then received US permission to devastate southern Lebanon — effectively to carpet-bomb it — a campaign directly connected to the genocide in Gaza. Had Hezbollah stayed out of the conflict, and had Israel been left to pursue the genocide unopposed, southern Lebanon might conceivably have been spared. Perhaps. But I don't accept that line of reasoning: Hezbollah had a political role to play in defending the Palestinians, and it paid a price for playing it.

Having paid that price, Hezbollah's weakening convinced Israel it could go further still — first killing Nasrallah, following the earlier US killing of Qasem Soleimani, and then moving to remove Bashar al-Assad. These events unfolded sequentially. Jordan was not going to act. Egypt's military stood by, doing nothing. Israel was secure on those fronts. The only force still militarily engaging Israel was Ansar Allah in Yemen, which Israel tried hard to destroy — even though Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Britain had all already attempted and failed to halt Yemen through missile strikes. No one has managed to stop them; I confess I have never fully understood that dynamic, but the point stands.

The sequence continued: the genocide against the Palestinians, then the weakening of Hezbollah. With Hezbollah diminished, Russia tied down in Ukraine, and Syrian morale already at a low ebb, Ahmad al-Sharaa was effectively handed an open door by Israeli airstrikes on Syrian military positions, after which the Syrian army simply disbanded, thoroughly demoralized. The road to Damascus opened, and Bashar al-Assad's decision not to stay and fight shows how far morale had collapsed. Compare that to Muammar Gaddafi, who died in his own country, or Saddam Hussein, who did the same — both stood and fought against impossible odds. Assad did not. He was unwilling to die alongside his people, and he did not even flee to Iraq, as some of his associates did by car — a departure that, to me, suggests an arrangement made with Israel, permitting certain figures to leave. All of this opened the door to a possible attack on Iran, as I explained earlier.

So I don't see this as a single, undifferentiated struggle — it is an attempt by the United States to reshape West Asia, and it did, ultimately, reshape the region, but against American interests. A great deal will now depend on the relationship between the Mecca Agreement and Iran. My own attention, though, is fixed on Iraq — I noted earlier that Iraq has remained relatively silent throughout this crisis. Where does Iraq go from here? The Turkish foreign minister described Egypt as a natural partner for the Mecca Agreement, but not Iraq — and that omission struck me as significant. Egypt's heavy reliance on Saudi Arabia may be part of the explanation, but I doubt it is the whole story. Iraq, for me, will be the real bellwether of how things shift going forward, and I am especially interested in the internal Iraqi debate around the Mecca Agreement.

** For the last question — in your article, you argue that Iran has changed the debate, shifting it from what Iran must give up to the wider security order in the region. How has Iran managed to change the terms of the debate?**

The debate Washington had long imposed on the region centered entirely on Iran's so-called nuclear weapons program: Does Iran have one? Should it be permitted to enrich uranium? What capacity of centrifuges should it be allowed? Should it be permitted to import certain metals, given their potential dual use? And so on. The question today has shifted to when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen to unimpeded passage. Even in the United States, the nuclear question has largely fallen out of the conversation — the discussion now centers on Hormuz: Should Iran be permitted to charge a toll for passage? Should there be surveillance? If a shipping company pays Iran such a toll, would that violate US sanctions? The entire framework of the debate has shifted.

That shift has come at an enormous price for Iran — it has not come free. Children have died. Countless lives that might have been lived will not be. This has not been without cost. Someone told me recently that they could no longer locate their family photo album — they had been searching for pictures from their childhood — and it left me thinking about writing something on how many families today no longer have a family album, because they no longer have the lives left to photograph. That is an enormous price to pay.