The United States military launched a second consecutive day of airstrikes against “multiple targets” inside Iran on June 10, as Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth described the campaign as a strategy to “negotiate with bombs.” The day also brought a parallel crisis: a US military strike in the Gulf of Oman hit a tanker, leaving three Indian sailors missing and prompting India to summon the US ambassador. Tehran declared it would “not hesitate” to defend itself while analysis from both BBC and Al Jazeera suggested Tehran’s sense of resilience — and its negotiating leverage — may paradoxically be growing.
The received wisdom
The mainstream defence-and-foreign-policy community largely regards US airstrikes on Iran as a high-risk but potentially rational gambit. The argument runs like this: Iran’s nuclear programme and its support for proxy militias across the region have destabilised the Middle East for decades. Diplomacy alone — including the 2015 JCPOA, which the Trump administration abandoned in 2018 — failed to halt Iranian enrichment. Military pressure, the argument holds, is the only remaining coercive tool that can credibly bring Tehran to the table. Hegseth’s framing of “negotiate with bombs” is blunt, but it captures a logic that stretches back to Nixon’s “madman theory” of deliberate unpredictability as a bargaining instrument. The liberal internationalist critique of this view — that strikes merely harden Iranian resolve and alienate allies — is, in this telling, the counsel of a class of experts who have been consistently wrong about Iran for thirty years.
A different read
There is something to that critique of the expert class. But the problem with the current approach is not that it is too aggressive; it is that it is neither aggressive enough to be decisive nor restrained enough to leave a diplomatic off-ramp clean. Day two of strikes without a clear strategic objective is not deterrence — it is attrition without an endgame, and attrition without an endgame has a tendency to produce outcomes nobody chose.
The Indian tanker incident illustrates the problem with uncommon clarity. Three sailors are missing not because of Iranian action but because of US military fire in the Gulf of Oman. India, a country Washington has spent two decades cultivating as a strategic counterweight to China, has now been handed a domestic political crisis by an American ally action. New Delhi’s summoning of the US ambassador is not a diplomatic formality; it is a signal that the costs of American military operations in a heavily trafficked waterway are falling on third parties who did not sign up for this war.
The BBC’s analysis suggesting that Iran’s strike capability may be strengthening Tehran’s negotiating hand is worth sitting with. There is a recurring dynamic in Middle Eastern conflicts where the side absorbing strikes — if it can demonstrate resilience and extract a price — emerges from the exchange with enhanced credibility among its regional audience. Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel is the template: Israel won every tactical engagement and achieved nothing strategic because Hezbollah survived and claimed victory on those terms alone.
The historical analogy that haunts this moment is the air campaign against Serbia in 1999. That was also sold as a “negotiate with bombs” strategy, and it did eventually work — but only because NATO was willing to escalate to a level that made the alternative (capitulation) less costly than continued resistance, and because there was a genuine political settlement on offer. The current US-Iran confrontation has neither element in place. The administration has not defined what “winning” looks like in terms Iran could actually accept, and the strikes on a Gulf shipping lane now implicate Indian interests in ways that complicate any broader coalition.
There is a further irony embedded in Hegseth’s rhetoric. The phrase “negotiate with bombs” implies that bombing is an instrument of negotiation — that it creates leverage for a deal. But leverage only works if the other side believes the bombing will stop if they concede. The pattern of Day One followed by Day Two, with no visible diplomatic channel and no articulated outcome short of Iranian capitulation, does not look like a negotiating posture. It looks like a war that has not yet decided what it wants to be.
Trump told BBC that Netanyahu had not defied him — a remark that only makes sense if the question of Israeli autonomy within this campaign is already live enough to require denial. The degree to which this is a jointly managed campaign versus a set of parallel operations with shared enemies but different objectives remains unclear. That ambiguity is itself a strategic liability.
What to watch
- Whether India formally protests at a multilateral forum (UN Security Council, G20 working groups) over the tanker strike, and whether that opens a broader debate about freedom of navigation liability.
- Whether the administration presents a formal statement of war aims — a specific, negotiable demand that could constitute an off-ramp — or whether the campaign continues as open-ended pressure.
- Iran’s next move: the BBC notes a growing sense of resilience in Tehran; a retaliatory strike calibrated to embarrass rather than escalate (as in the 2024 drone swarm model) could shift international sympathy rapidly.
- Oil price response: a conflict in the Gulf of Oman that has already struck a tanker is one incident away from a shipping insurance crisis that would drive energy costs to a level that scrambles Western domestic politics simultaneously.
— J