Mushtaq Ul Haq Ahmad
In early 2026, as Washington and Tehran cautiously circled a possible diplomatic thaw, another, quieter drama was unfolding in the corridors of power in Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Brussels, and the White House. On television and in international forums, Saudi Arabia projected the language of de‑escalation and regional stability. Behind closed doors, however, key Saudi figures were urging the United States to wield the stick of military force against Iran, amplifying Israeli pressure and feeding into an emerging Western consensus that Tehran had to be confronted, not accommodated.
Riyadh’s Double Game
In public, Saudi Arabia continued to speak the language of peace, regional dialogue, and the need to avoid another catastrophic Middle Eastern war. Saudi diplomats repeatedly stressed that the Gulf could not afford a repeat of the 2003 Iraq invasion, a conflict that had reshaped the region’s balance of power in Iran’s favor and left a trail of broken states.
Yet in private, the kingdom was playing a more hawkish hand. In a confidential briefing in Washington in early 2026, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman told senior officials in the Trump administration that failure to act militarily against Iran would only embolden the Islamic Republic. This was not framed as a mere option; it was conveyed as a strategic necessity. The implicit argument was clear: restraint does not moderate Tehran—it strengthens it.
This private push for a U.S. strike stood in sharp contrast to the public posture of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Later that year, MBS reportedly warned President Donald Trump about the catastrophic consequences a U.S. attack on Iran could unleash. The warning emphasized the risks of a regional firestorm: attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure, missile and drone strikes on cities, the targeting of shipping lanes like the Strait of Hormuz, and the possible activation of pro‑Iranian militias from Iraq to Yemen. This intervention was widely credited with persuading Washington, at least temporarily, to shelve active war planning.
Taken together, Riyadh’s behavior reflected a carefully calibrated duality: publicly advocating caution to preserve its regional image and economic ambitions, while privately urging Washington to maintain credible military pressure, and even flirt with the idea of limited strikes, to keep Iran off balance.
Europe’s Terror Designation and Tehran’s Retort
While Saudi Arabia was playing its double game, Europe was making a landmark break with its own traditional caution. In late January 2026, the European Union formally designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, placing it alongside groups such as ISIL and Al‑Qaida on its terror list. This move carried immediate legal and financial consequences: asset freezes, travel bans for IRGC members, and broad prohibitions on providing funding or material support.
Symbolically, the designation signalled that European capitals no longer viewed the IRGC as a conventional arm of a sovereign state, but as a transnational apparatus of repression and violence. It represented a major shift from the EU’s earlier posture of preserving engagement space with Tehran even at the cost of strategic ambiguity.
Tehran’s response was swift and defiant. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf—himself a former IRGC commander and a powerful conservative—announced that the Islamic Republic now considered all EU militaries to be terrorist groups. This was more than rhetorical symmetry. It was a declaration that Iran no longer recognized the moral and legal distinction European governments sought to draw between “state actors” and “terrorists.” In Tehran’s narrative, Europe had weaponized legal designations as tools of geopolitical pressure; Iran would answer in kind.
The tit‑for‑tat labeling escalated the confrontation into the realm of total delegitimization. When one side calls the other’s armed forces “terrorists,” the space for traditional diplomacy narrows dramatically. It becomes easier to justify covert action, targeted killings, cyber operations, and even overt strikes. The EU’s move, hailed in some Western circles as overdue realism, thus contributed to a legal and political environment in which military action against Iran could be narrated as enforcement, not aggression.
A Reformist President, Negotiations, and the Thin Veneer of Diplomacy
Against this background, Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, appeared determined to reclaim the language of negotiation. A cardiac surgeon turned reformist politician, Pezeshkian had campaigned on easing Iran’s international isolation and reviving economic life at home. On February 3, 2026, he instructed his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, to pursue fair and equitable negotiations with the United States. The timing was not accidental: with EU sanctions intensifying and the IRGC branded a terrorist entity, Tehran needed to show both its own public and the broader world that it was not the side slamming the door.
In Washington, President Trump echoed the talking points of diplomacy, publicly stating that the United States was negotiating with Iran. For a brief moment, it appeared as though the script of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) era might be re‑enacted in some revised form, with talk of phased sanctions relief, nuclear restraints, and regional de‑escalation.
But beneath the veneer, the structure was much shakier than the speeches suggested. The EU’s IRGC designation had significantly narrowed Iran’s room for maneuver, and Tehran’s own hardliners viewed any engagement with Washington now not merely as a political compromise but as a concession made under conditions of humiliation. Meanwhile, U.S. domestic politics remained polarized around Iran policy, with hawkish voices in Congress and influential think tanks arguing that negotiations only bought Tehran time.
Israeli Pressure and the War Lobby
If Saudi Arabia’s pressure on Trump was discreet and deniable, Israel’s lobbying was overt, sustained, and strategically choreographed. In the last week of January and again in February, high‑ranking Israeli officials traveled to Washington to press their case that Iran’s nuclear and regional activities had crossed intolerable red lines. Among them were the Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, General Eyal Zamir, and Mossad Director David Barnea, both carrying intelligence dossiers and contingency plans.
From Israel’s perspective, the window for stopping Iran’s nuclear program through sabotage and sanctions alone was closing rapidly. Its security establishment argued that Tehran had mastered much of the technical know‑how necessary to produce a nuclear weapon, even if it had not yet made the political decision to do so. The message to Washington was blunt: if the United States would not act decisively, Israel reserved the right to do so itself—unilaterally if necessary.
Negotiations with Iran, therefore, were increasingly seen in Tel Aviv not as a pathway to a sustainable settlement, but as a dangerous stalling mechanism that allowed Tehran to fortify its capabilities under the cover of diplomacy. Israeli officials framed the talks as a “facade,” designed to reassure Western publics while Iran inched closer to nuclear threshold status. Against this backdrop, pressure on Trump intensified: the White House, they argued, had to shift from deterrent rhetoric to meaningful military action—strikes on nuclear sites, missile facilities, IRGC bases, and command‑and‑control nodes.
This narrative gained traction in parts of the U.S. policy establishment that had long opposed the JCPOA and saw Iran as the keystone of a hostile axis that included Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and, more recently, networks in Syria and Yemen. It also dovetailed with the views of some Sunni monarchies who regarded Iran as an existential sectarian and geopolitical rival.
Trump’s Threats and Friedman’s Warning
As diplomatic choreography continued, Trump sharpened his public language. He warned that “probably bad things will happen” to Iran if nuclear talks failed—a formulation that, while characteristically vague, was widely interpreted as signaling that military options were not only on the table but actively under review.
In the media, debate intensified over whether the president was being guided or manipulated. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, long an observer—and sometimes critic—of both U.S. and Israeli policy, issued his own warning: that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“Bibi”) was playing Trump and pushing him toward a war with Iran that would serve Israel’s short‑term anxieties but potentially embroil the United States in another open‑ended Middle Eastern conflict. Friedman suggested that the Israeli leadership saw in Trump a uniquely susceptible counterpart—a man flattered by praise, moved by dramatic intelligence briefings, and eager for moments of presidential “decisiveness.”
The implication was stark: the combination of Israeli fear, Saudi hedging, European hardening, and American political volatility was creating a combustible environment in which rational cost–benefit analysis could easily be crowded out by emotion, miscalculation, and elite manipulation.
The Sunni Calculus and the American Archipelago of Bases
Across much of the Sunni Arab world, the prospect of a U.S.–Iran confrontation produced a mix of anxiety and quiet hope. Many Sunni monarchies, particularly in the Gulf, calculated that a weakened Iran would indirectly secure their own regimes, dampen the appeal of Shi’a political movements, and reduce the reach of pro‑Iranian militias. They also believed that as long as the United States remained militarily entrenched in the region, it would have strong incentives to protect its partners from retaliation.
The map of American power in the Middle East reinforced this sense of security. By mid‑2020s estimates, the United States maintained a network of at least nineteen military sites across the region, eight of them widely considered permanent: bases and facilities in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. These installations host tens of thousands of U.S. troops, advanced air and missile defense systems, logistical hubs, and command centers.
For Sunni rulers, this archipelago of American bases functioned as both shield and insurance policy. It reassured them that Washington could not easily disengage from the region without jeopardizing its own assets, and that, in a crisis, U.S. forces would be compelled to respond, if only to protect American lives and infrastructure. Within this mental framework, an attack on Iran was not a catastrophe to be avoided at all costs, but a high‑risk gamble that might deliver long‑sought strategic benefits—if the United States bore the brunt of the fighting.
Iran’s Nuclear Posture and the Shadow of Iraq
In Tehran’s telling, all of this was unfolding against a backdrop of asymmetric narrative power. Iranian officials pointed out that the Islamic Republic is a signatory to the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and, for years, had accepted intrusive inspections as part of the JCPOA framework. Iranian leaders repeatedly stated that they did not seek a nuclear weapon, both on strategic grounds and as a matter of religious doctrine.
Yet, from Tehran’s perspective, Washington and its allies seemed determined to replay the script of Iraq: inflating threat assessments, weaponizing intelligence, and transforming worst‑case scenarios into near‑certain predictions. The memory of the 2003 invasion loomed large. Then, too, a combination of Israeli warnings, American hawks, and European equivocation had culminated in a war justified by weapons that did not exist.
This time, Iranian officials argued, the stakes were even higher. Iran was larger, more populous, more politically mobilized, and more deeply enmeshed in regional networks than Iraq had ever been. A strike on Iran—especially one aimed at decapitating its leadership—risked reverberations from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush.
As negotiations faltered and pressure mounted, the unthinkable became thinkable: that hawkish forces in the United States and Israel would contemplate leadership targeting, not just infrastructure strikes, as a way to break the Iranian state’s will. In that emerging scenario, the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, would function as the ultimate escalation—a blow designed to shatter the Islamic Republic’s command structure and force a historic capitulation.
A Prelude Written in Contradictions
By early 2026, the stage was set for a confrontation whose contours were visible even if its precise trigger was not. Saudi Arabia publicly spoke the language of peace while privately urging force. The European Union, once a cautious mediator, had crossed a Rubicon by branding the IRGC a terrorist organization and accepting the risks of reciprocal delegitimization. Iran’s reformist president sought fair negotiations, yet found himself hemmed in by Western sanctions and domestic hardliners. Israel lobbied relentlessly for a decisive blow, warning that time was running out, while prominent commentators in the United States cautioned that its prime minister was exploiting a volatile American president.
Meanwhile, the Sunni monarchies of the region calculated that they would be safer, not more vulnerable, if Iran were struck—even as they depended on U.S. bases scattered across their own soil. And in Washington, Trump alternated between the language of negotiation and threats that “bad things” would happen if talks failed, encapsulating the fundamental ambiguity at the heart of U.S. policy.
All of these contradictions—between public and private messaging, law and force, diplomacy and covert action—constituted the real prelude to any future attack on Iran. Long before the first missile was launched or the first radar blip appeared over the Persian Gulf, wars are prepared in language, in legal designations, in lobbying campaigns, and in the rehearsed moral justifications of states convinced that they are acting in defense, not aggression. In the case of Iran, that prelude was already being written, line by line, in Riyadh, Brussels, Tel Aviv, Tehran, and Washington.
M. H. A. Sikander is Writer-Activist based in Srinagar, Kashmir.
First published in www.newageislam.com
