Transcription
Iran has just made one of the most brilliant and calculated moves that we have seen from them in years. They succeeded in trapping Netanyahu in testing Trump and are trying to rewrite the rules of this conflict in their favor.
So, we all know by now that on Sunday Iran decided to fire ballistic missiles at Israel and to understand why they decided to do this at peak negotiation season, you need about 90 seconds of context and then we can get to the part that really matters.
Hezbollah, Iran's own proxy that controls a lot of the parts of Lebanon, essentially a tentacle of the Iranian state operating with a Lebanese address, agreed in November 2024 to pull back from the Israeli border and disarm as part of a US brokered ceasefire. Hezbollah kept rebuilding, kept firing drones and rockets across the border and when the border war with Iran started in late February and Khamenei was killed, Hezbollah did exactly what it was built to do and opened a second front attacking Israel extensively.
Israel, of course, kept retaliating. Because of these ongoing changes in Israel's escalation of war with Hezbollah, the US decides to intervene. Trump called Netanyahu in terms that one official paraphrases considerably more colorful than any public statement suggested and told him he needs to stop.
On Sunday morning, Hezbollah decides to fire rockets into northern Israel. Israel, as it had promised, struck the command center in Dahiya. Iran, which had publicly warned that any strike in Beirut would trigger retaliation, followed through and took this whole thing to another level entirely. 11 ballistic missiles in multiple waves towards a northern Israeli airbase.
So, what's actually happening underneath all of that hullabaloo because that exchange, the rockets, the Beirut strike, the Iranian missiles, looked from the outside like an escalation that kind of got out of hand. However, it was actually Iran executing a strategy that it has been building towards for years. The table, as one advisor to the supreme leader put it after Israel struck Beirut, had now been set on fire for the third time, but that's not really the case. The table never really existed to begin because Iran aren't properly interested in a nuclear deal.
And to understand these negotiations, you will also have to understand that Iran has a much more urgent and more existential concern. And that concern is Hezbollah's survival. Think of it like one of those fairground hammer games where you hit one target and the next one pops up somewhere else.
As Iran itself faces crushing financial sanctions and the possibility of having to accept a deal, they understand that they need to be quiet for a while. But they're not particularly worried about that because they have all the time in the world. They believe in their prophecies and they're waiting for their moment. During any period of enforced quiet, however, they want to know that their proxies are building, compensating, and expanding because, of course, terror must reign.