Greg Priddy
It would be a mistake to assume that Israel’s “Friday the 13” strikes on Iran will not trigger further escalation.
It has finally happened. Israel struck Iran’s nuclear sites and military leadership and is carrying out an air campaign to degrade their capabilities further. As one might expect from Israeli military operations, they appear to have been meticulously planned and startlingly effective. After two decades in which policymakers, analysts, and pundits have continuously opined on what would happen—from a democratic uprising in Tehran to utter devastation and an oil-led recession—we will now get to see these assumptions put to the test over the coming weeks.
In all of this, the top tier of the Trump administration, perhaps excluding Steven Witkoff at the beginning of negotiations, has seemed woefully disconnected from reality. The first theory that has fallen by the wayside is that Iran would give up uranium enrichment completely if it faced a credible and immediate threat of massive force. The Trump team publicly spun the early rounds of talks in a positive direction.
Still, there was never any real movement from either side on the core question of whether Iran would be permitted to keep enrichment in the long term. Trump seems to have genuinely thought that because he is perceived as a “stronger” leader than his predecessors, he could secure concessions from Iran that had eluded President Barack Obama.
Another assumption Trump is making, and which is being tested now, is that Iran may be open to coming back to the negotiating table. Trump’s posts on Truth Social today have more or less invited Iran’s leaders to crawl back to the table to capitulate “before there is nothing left.” Trump even told Axios that the Israeli strikes could “help [him] make a deal with Iran.” It is true, of course, that in history, many negotiations have taken place after a limited amount of warfare had clarified the power relationship between the belligerents and forced one side to calculate that it would be better to negotiate rather than fight on.
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