In February, Ali Larijani shuttled between Muscat and Doha as part of the diplomatic channel between Iran and the United States. On 18 March, Iran confirmed that he had been killed in an Israeli strike alongside his son and several aides. Between those two moments, the channel he had helped sustain was replaced by what officials in Washington and Tel Aviv have described as the most significant joint US-Israeli military operation ever conducted. His trajectory — from negotiating table to target — condenses the central problem of the Iran crisis: twice in nine months, war has arrived not after diplomacy failed, but while it was still producing enough movement to matter. That pattern does not explain everything. But it reveals a structural condition that now shapes both the war and the way it is likely to end.

On 26 February, after the third round of indirect US-Iran talks in Geneva, Oman reported “significant progress” and said another round would follow. Tehran had submitted a written proposal. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said a deal was “within reach.” The Guardian has since reported that Jonathan Powell, Britain’s national security adviser, was present at the Geneva talks in an advisory capacity and believed the Iranian proposal was sufficiently serious to sustain further negotiation. The two sides had scheduled technical talks in Vienna for 2 March. They never took place. On 28 February, Operation Epic Fury began. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening salvo alongside some 40 senior officials, including the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces.

The same broad sequence had already appeared nine months earlier. In June 2025, a sixth round of US-Iran talks was scheduled in Muscat for 15 June. Israel struck on 13 June, before that round could convene. President Donald Trump underscored the timing: “I gave them 60 days and today is day 61.” The two episodes were not identical. In 2025, Israel initiated the operation and the United States joined on the ninth day to strike deep nuclear facilities beyond Israel’s reach. In 2026, Washington was part of the opening blow, after a military buildup it had assembled publicly since January — initially framed around Trump’s threats of intervention over Iran’s violent suppression of nationwide protests. Yet in both cases, force overtook diplomacy while diplomacy still had visible movement.

READ: Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei rejects ceasefire proposals, source says

The threshold paradox

The deeper issue is architectural. In both episodes, diplomacy and military preparation advanced in parallel rather than in sequence. In early 2026, Trump set Iran a ten-to-fifteen-day deadline on 20 February even as the Geneva channel remained active. The attack came on 28 February — day eight, before even that compressed deadline had expired.

The military track did not follow a failed diplomatic process. It ran alongside it, overtook it and rendered it irrelevant before it could produce an outcome. The military horizon was not a late by-product of stalled talks. It was built into the environment in which diplomacy was taking place.

The military track did not follow a failed diplomatic process. It ran alongside it, overtook it and rendered it irrelevant before it could produce an outcome. The military horizon was not a late by-product of stalled talks. It was built into the environment in which diplomacy was taking place.

This is what might be called the threshold paradox: the closer diplomacy came to becoming operationally relevant, the more volatile its environment became — because movement at the table did not remove either the capability or the incentive for those who preferred force to act before negotiation hardened into fact. Concessions that do not buy time cease to function politically as concessions. They become signals sent inside a structure that cannot convert diplomatic movement into safety.

The endgame now taking shape

That structure now illuminates how the war is likely to end. Nineteen days into Operation Epic Fury, several assumptions still shape public commentary: that the war can be wrapped up on an attacker’s timetable; that sustained destruction will produce either regime collapse or a superior deal; that once the shooting eases, the region will largely return to its previous equilibrium. None looks strong from where the war stands today.

The expectation of a short and decisive finish runs against the texture of the conflict itself. Iran’s most consequential lever has not been its shrinking missile inventory alone, but its geography and its ability to distribute cost across the region. The Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed. The International Maritime Organisation has warned that naval escorts cannot guarantee safe passage. On 18 March, Araghchi signalled that Tehran intends to redesign the rules of navigation in the strait even after the war ends — rejecting a ceasefire in favour of what he called a “permanent end” to the conflict. If acted upon, this would make the pre-war energy architecture permanently irretrievable. Even where direct strike capacity declines, the infrastructure of disruption — mines, drones and fast boats operating from a coastline that cannot be bombed away — proves harder to neutralise quickly than launchers or air defences.

The expectation that decapitation will produce collapse is equally weak. The Islamic Republic is not a personalist regime resting on a single leader. It is a layered order spanning the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, clerical networks and a bureaucracy built to function under siege

The expectation that decapitation will produce collapse is equally weak. The Islamic Republic is not a personalist regime resting on a single leader. It is a layered order spanning the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, clerical networks and a bureaucracy built to function under siege

— reinforced by an ideological infrastructure that treats resistance to external attack as a foundational commitment, not merely a policy preference. The June 2025 war killed much of Iran’s senior military leadership. By February 2026, the system had replenished those positions sufficiently to fight again, only to absorb another round of leadership losses — many of them replacements for commanders killed nine months earlier — without disintegrating. Now, on day 19, the killing of Larijani and the Basij commander represents yet another layer of decapitation. Yet the pattern already visible suggests that the system’s response is not paralysis but reconstitution — slower, degraded, but persistent.

The assumption that destruction yields political opening should also be treated cautiously. Recent regional history offers little basis for the belief that heavy external violence naturally produces a stable post-war order. More often, what survives bombardment is the coercive core rather than the pluralist margin. In Iran, wartime succession has already moved in that direction. That makes the likeliest endgame not decisive transformation, but a coerced operational pause: one side deciding that further destruction is yielding diminishing returns, the other deciding that survival under fire is sufficient to claim endurance rather than capitulation. Reporting from Washington points in the same direction: the debate around the White House is increasingly about how to frame an exit, not how to engineer a clean strategic resolution. The resignation of the head of the US National Counterterrorism Centre — who stated that Iran posed “no imminent threat” — suggests the argument inside Washington is shifting from maximalist language to questions of justification and purpose.

READ: Israeli army claims Iran’s security chief Ali Larijani killed near Tehran

The belief that a ceasefire will restore the old regional balance may be the most consequential miscalculation. Gulf states spent years building a workable formula: outsource hard security to the United States, avoid direct entry into regional wars and keep trade, aviation and energy flowing. This war has exposed the fragility of that formula. Dubai’s airport is running at less than half capacity. Every major US ally asked to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz has declined. A drone has struck a diplomatic hotel in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Israel has launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. States that did not choose to become principal theatres have nevertheless become active surfaces of the war.

What the ceasefire will not repair

Even if the most intense phase ends soon, some of the deepest damage will outlast it. One part is regional: the old assumption that governments around the Gulf can remain politically outside a war while staying commercially insulated from it has been badly weakened. Another part is diplomatic.

The lesson of June 2025 and February 2026, taken together, is not that diplomacy is useless. It is that diplomacy conducted under a live military horizon becomes difficult to trust at the very moment it seems closest to relevance.

The lesson of June 2025 and February 2026, taken together, is not that diplomacy is useless. It is that diplomacy conducted under a live military horizon becomes difficult to trust at the very moment it seems closest to relevance.

That lesson will shape how Tehran approaches future talks, how mediators defend the value of negotiation and how other states weigh the risks of bargaining under pressure. Any non-proliferation order depends not only on inspections and technical supervision, but on the belief that movement toward a deal meaningfully lowers the risk of war. When that belief is damaged, the problem extends beyond a single file and a single ceasefire.

Wars end. What is harder to restore is the confidence that movement toward agreement still offers protection. If that confidence has now been weakened twice in nine months, the next crisis will not begin with a missile launch. It will begin the moment diplomacy once again approaches the threshold where it starts to matter — and no one at the table is certain that progress makes them safer.

OPINION: Tehran’s calculated wager

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