Iran wants to turn Donald Trump‘s war into a global and domestic nightmare by inflicting such huge military, political and economic pain that it forces the President to abandon his campaign.
The conflict, now in its second week, is becoming a battle of wills and pain thresholds as missiles and drones rain down across the Middle East and beyond.
The Islamic Republic, facing an existential threat, is focused on endurance and survival – banking on Trump’s fear of a forever war and a rising backlash from his own supporters.
Iran knows it cannot defeat the combined military might of the US and Israel. However, the regime is using every lever at its disposal to expand and extend the conflict in the hope of making the cost too high for its enemies.
Israel has said the war is entering a more intense “next phase”, and the bellicose US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth promised “firepower over Iran and over Tehran is about to surge dramatically”.
Trump has demanded “unconditional surrender”.
But that follows days of changing messages from the administration that suggest the US has no coherent war plan. And as speculation builds that ground troops could be sent into Iran, the shadows of Iraq and Afghanistan will loom large in Trump’s mind.
US President Donald Trump is overseeing Operation Epic Fury against Iran from Mar-a-Lago (Photo: Daniel Torok / The White House / AFP via Getty Images)Iran will use Trump’s domestic weakness
Iran understands that Trump fears another forever war.
After railing against foreign wars and campaigning on a pledge to be a “peace president”, his Iran campaign looks like a betrayal to many of his “America First” supporters.
Already, Iran has denied Trump the shock-and-awe victory picture he craves and achieved with the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year.
Iran has expanded the conflict to America’s Gulf allies and even further afield: in Turkey, Cyprus and Azerbaijan. At least six US soldiers have been killed, and the White House is struggling to land on a convincing case for the attack.
Five of the US service members killed in Iranian strikes (Photo: Brent Newton / US ARMY / AFP via Getty Images)Some 59 per cent of Americans disapprove of the decision to strike Iran and 60 per cent oppose sending US ground troops – compared with just 12 per cent who approve, according to a CNN poll.
“This is already a domestic problem,” Lewis Galvin, lead Americas analyst at the intelligence consultancy Sibylline, told The i Paper. “It hasn’t really been popular at any point… There’s an already large narrative circulating that the US was pushed into this by Israel, and to an extent Saudi.”
If Iran can make the conflict another deadly quagmire, Trump could be forced to retreat, leaving the regime intact.
“Tehran wants to extend and expand this conflict because it knows that Trump may not have the patience for a long conflict. Nor does the President’s domestic constituency, which opposes open-ended American interventions abroad,” said Bilal Saab, associate fellow of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House.
A banner of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who was killed in a joint operation, is posted on a building facade in Revolution Square in Tehran this week (Photo: Kaveh Kazemi/ Getty Images)Iran will make Trump’s war as painful as possible
Iran’s tactics are clear: inflict maximum chaos and damage as widely as possible.
For the Iranian regime, this war is existential. Wounded and humiliated by the bombings and assassination of its Supreme Leader, it appears to want to regionalise and even internationalise the conflict.
“[Iran’s] view is that this is the last war. Either they will completely go down, or they will change Washington and Israel’s calculation,” said Vali Nasr, a former senior US presidential adviser and now Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
After the 12-day war last June, Iran retaliated with carefully coordinated strikes that failed to deter the US and Israel from coming back for another round.
Aftermath of an Israeli strike in Tehran during the 12-day war in June 2025 (Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty)“It appears that the Iranians don’t want to stop now because there’s no gain in a quick ceasefire,” said Nasr. “Iran thinks that a short war in which the US does not pay much of a price and in which it can claim it got a big scalp in Ayatollah Khamenei, would only lead Trump to think war with Iran is easy and he can go back to it.”
The regime appears to believe its only chance of survival is to hit back so hard that no one tries again. “If this war got longer, bloodier and more complicated, it would establish a deterrence against further American aggression down the road,” said Nasr.
Hezbollah in Lebanon has already joined action against Israel, but Iran could still unleash the rest of its “axis of resistance”, including the Houthis and Iraqi militias, to inflict more havoc against Western targets.
Already, deaths and injuries are rising, shipping is paralysed and devastation is spreading.
Iran has fired missiles and drones across the region, at military as well as civilian targets across the Arabian Peninsula. Hotels, apartment blocks and airports have been hit, as well as oil and gas sites. Three deaths have been reported in both the UAE and in Kuwait, with one in both Bahrain and Oman, four in Syria and 13 in Iraq.
But that threatens to spill over to the rest of the world. Drones have already struck a British military base on Cyprus, Nato-member Turkey intercepted a drone near its airspace and Azerbaijan threatened retaliatory measures after drones flew across its border.
The UK is sending extra jets to Qatar and deploying a warship and drone-fighting helicopters to Cyprus, while France, Spain and Greece are sending warships.
A warehouse at the industrial area of Sharjah City in the UAE was targeted following reports of Iranian strikes in Dubai (Photo: Altaf Qadri/ AP)Although more than 1,045 people have been killed in Iran so far, Tehran is banking on its higher tolerance for casualties and economic pain.
“This is a contest of will more than anything else,” Saab said. “The core element of Iran’s response is political and psychological in nature, not military. Its ultimate weapon is its much greater tolerance for casualties. This is where it holds a clear, and possibly the only, advantage over the US.”
Iran’s war of attrition
Tehran understands that it cannot defeat Israel or the US in a conventional, high-intensity war. Instead, the regime seems to be deploying an asymmetric and attritional response designed not for decisive battlefield victory, but rather endurance and survival, according to the Soufan Center think-tank in New York.
Iran’s use of lower-cost munitions looks like a tactical move to exhaust missile defence inventories in Israel, the US and its Gulf allies. Every cheap drone requires missile interceptors. By keeping up steady salvos of drones and missiles, Iran can force these countries to burn through their interceptors, which are far more expensive.
A Shahed drone on display in Tehran last month (Photo: Majid Asgaripour/ WANA)The US and its Gulf allies use systems including Patriot, Aegis (SM-3/SM-6) and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).
Each Shahed drone is estimated to cost in the tens of thousands of pounds, while Iranian ballistic missiles cost up to £1.5m. THAAD missile interceptors cost around $12m (£9m) and US defence contractors produce only 96 a year.
Drone production is diffused and cheap, so Iran will likely retain long-range strike capabilities for the foreseeable future, said Benedict Manzin, lead Middle East analyst at Sibylline. “If they are able to maintain the current frequency of strikes within the Gulf for a period of two weeks, this will both cause really substantial economic damage across the region and possibly exhaust interceptor supplies, allowing Iran to strike with greater impunity.”
At some point, however, when air defences have been depleted, Iran might switch to higher-grade missiles. “We haven’t seen the worst of the war,” said Nasr. “This war has become a test of stamina and who can knock out whom first.”
An unexploded Iranian missile on the outskirts of Qamishli, eastern Syria, on 5 March (Photo: Delil Souleiman / AFP via Getty Images)Iran is crossing red lines to inflict pain
The Iranian regime’s targeting of oil and gas – the lifeblood of the Gulf and global economies – is a demonstration to Washington and the world that any attempts to topple it will lead to chaos and serious economic suffering.
One Gulf minister has warned that the war could bring down world economies after Iran targeted sites across the region and blocked the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s location on the strategic waterway is perhaps its most significant leverage. Some 20 per cent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through the waters from wealthy Gulf producers including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq and Qatar.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has claimed “complete control” over the Strait and warned they would “set ablaze” any Western tanker that approached.
Commercial ships anchor off the coast of the UAE due to navigation disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz (Photo: Waleed Zein/Anadolu via Getty Images)Oil traffic has plunged. The US has suggested using warships to escort tankers, but they would be easy targets for missiles and drones or other means, including mines, attack boats and submarines.
Iran’s most likely move is to continue to pursue its strategy of maximising regional economic disruption, said Manzin. In Iran’s calculus, if it can sufficiently disrupt the economies of the region and unsettle international energy markets, Gulf states will maximise pressure on Trump to stop.
In the US, the stock market is already in turmoil, and gas prices are rising, endangering Trump’s midterm prospects as US voters demand action on the cost of living.
Although Iran itself will suffer if it cannot export its oil, further wrecking its already shattered economy, it is betting on causing so much economic misery that Trump will blink first.
If Iran can destabilise energy markets, increase global inflation and make US costs high enough to drive domestic anger, it hopes that domestic US opposition, as well as global pressure from the Gulf and other allies, will compel the Trump administration to end the war before the regime falls.
“The regime is operating from the principle that if it goes down, it will bring down others with it,” said Saab.
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