Trump Readies a New Iran Strike That Cannot Win the War

The letter Vance sent, carried by Qatari mediators, proposed direct talks led by the vice president, with Iran’s nuclear programme on the table from the start. Vance also offered to meet Mohsen Rezaei in person to negotiate an end to the war, and told him that Iran’s interest lies in rebuilding its economy and keeping its sovereignty. Iranian news agencies have since confirmed that Iran received the letter and has not responded. Trump, for his part, said the communication concerned medical supplies. Silent Dossier set out what is known about Vance’s letter to Rezaei when it surfaced.

The recipient is the detail most Arab coverage has missed. Vance did not write to Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, or to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker, the men Washington faced across the table in Pakistan. He wrote to Rezaei, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who led it for 16 years, an adviser to the supreme leader, and now secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. The White House reportedly regards him as the one person in Iran able to build a consensus behind a deal.

There is an old rule of negotiation behind that choice: only a hardliner can sign a deal with a hardliner and make it stick. Washington appears to have concluded from the last round that neither Araghchi, nor Ghalibaf, nor anyone else in Tehran who wants a deal can deliver one, and that only the Revolutionary Guard and its commanders can. Talking to anyone else is a waste of time. This time Vance went straight to the centre of power.

The timing matters too. The letter followed the visit to Tehran on 26 October by a Mecca Pact delegation: Saudi Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman, Pakistan’s army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin, who met President Masoud Pezeshkian and Rezaei. If those three governments heard something useful from Rezaei, it makes sense that Washington wrote to the same man.

And the sender was Vance, not Trump. Vance is the administration’s strongest advocate of a settlement with Iran, and he has his own reasons. The Pentagon now estimates the war has cost American taxpayers more than $47 billion, petrol and diesel prices are high, and voters are tired of the war. A politician who expects to run for president wants to be the man who ended it.

None of this means Trump has chosen peace. He is using both tracks so that Tehran cannot later claim Washington never offered talks. The other track is clearing too. Israel voted this week: Netanyahu’s Likud won 27 seats and remains the largest party, but his bloc won 53 seats, short of the 61 needed to govern, and weeks of coalition bargaining lie ahead. Netanyahu stays prime minister through that period. With the Israeli election behind it and the American one days away, the war is set to return.

The sharpest case this week came from Marc Lynch, a political scientist at George Washington University, who argued on 29 October that a new US and Israeli war on Iran would be the final blow not to the Iranian regime but to American leadership in the Middle East. In his reading the conflict has become a protracted war in which decisive victory is close to impossible, and the blockade and episodic strikes reinforce the regime’s control instead of weakening it.

The war’s own record shows why. The heaviest blows came in the first wave in February: the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and strikes on infrastructure that hurt Iran badly. That was the moment when Iran might have bent. Every round since has hit similar targets with similar results. Iran sees each new round coming, prepares for the pain and absorbs it.

Iran can bear what the Gulf cannot: a long war with no end date. It fought Iraq for eight years in the 1980s. Its leaders can accept a country battered on the surface while their forces keep fighting from bases underground, and they have shown they can absorb heavy losses. The Gulf states are built on trade, finance and investment, not on military endurance. Lynch makes the same point: Iran can live with a permanent state of potential war, and the Gulf cannot. Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar have no export route that avoids Hormuz.

Lynch goes further and argues that Iran has long thrived in exactly this environment. The proof is the guest list in Tehran. Before the war, when Khalid bin Salman went to Tehran in April 2025, the visit was a ceremonial occasion. Today the Saudi defence minister arrives with Pakistan’s army chief and Turkey’s spymaster to look for a way out. Iran also extends its reach through the Houthis, whose attacks on Saudi Arabia work in Tehran’s favour. Iran does not need to win this war. It only needs not to lose, and that is the easier task.

Iran is also not simply absorbing blows. It has struck back at American targets far from American soil, with outside help: US officials said in March that Russia was giving Iran the locations of US warships and aircraft, and China has stood behind Tehran. That makes a long campaign far harder for Washington to sustain.

When an American president promises a compressed campaign of a few days, that is not a choice made from strength. Washington wants a short war because it cannot fight a long one from where it stands.

First, it has lost much of its access. Saudi Arabia has assured Tehran that it will not open its airspace to American strike aircraft, which takes Prince Sultan Air Base out of a long campaign. In Britain, the US Air Force pulled all of its bombers out of RAF Fairford in early October after an investigation into a planned terror attack on the base. Without those two bases, the bombs have to come from somewhere else. Israel now hosts the extra Patriot and THAAD batteries, but one country cannot carry a long war against Iran for the United States.

Second, Washington knows that every target it hits in Iran will be answered in the Gulf, not in America. That is why it has so far been careful about what it strikes. It has largely held back from the targets that would hurt Iran most, its power plants and the Kharg Island oil terminal, for fear that Iran would hit power, water and oil facilities across the Gulf in return. Strikes on anything else have not been decisive. If this round does reach Iran’s energy sector, as the reported target list suggests, the Gulf’s own infrastructure is next in line.

Third, there is no single blow that will make Iran issue a statement asking for talks. The only weapon that could change that is nuclear, and its use is out of the question: fallout and contamination of the Gulf’s waters would poison the desalination plants that supply drinking water to the Gulf states themselves.

So the new round will look like the old ones: heavy strikes, no surrender, and Iran still standing. A war with no crushing victory is, for the United States, a defeat.

If Washington keeps striking without a decisive result while Iran keeps standing, the balance in the Middle East will shift through the Gulf states, not through Iran.

Look again at the Tehran meeting. Whatever positive signals Rezaei gave, he gave them to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, not to the Americans. Iran gains by improving relations with Riyadh and by offering calm on the Houthi front. Lynch reads it the same way: Tehran may prefer Saudi-led outreach as a way to lock in its gains and shield itself from American escalation. Any agreement between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis now would favour the Houthis, whatever its terms. Iran wins either way.

That also corners Israel. A Saudi Arabia left under fire would have to build a broad coalition of its own, with Egypt, Türkiye and Pakistan alongside it and the European powers in support. A Saudi Arabia that secures calm from Tehran no longer needs Israel at all. Israel would lose its opening in the region and carry the blame for starting the war. Lynch argues that this, a new regional order in which Iran reconciles with a Saudi-led bloc, is what Netanyahu fears most.

The Gulf state most exposed is the United Arab Emirates. In early October Rezaei warned the UAE that hosting Netanyahu would have unpleasant consequences, and told it to stop fuelling conflicts and to drop its claims to the disputed islands. That warning came after Iran’s own president had spoken of putting past disputes with the UAE behind them.